Gallus Gallus Domesticus

One of the good things about living in Sierra Leone is that I can keep Chickens, something I am sure I would not be able to do living in a flat in London, without breaching my tenancy agreement anyway!

I started about two months ago with 1 cockerel, Buddy and 5 hens.  Then hens have no names, I was under strict instructions that the chickens are for eating so not to get too attached so they are nameless.  Our compound is perfect for keeping chickens, we have a large area at the back of the house for them to forage and as the compound is fenced people cannot steal them, as they would if they got half the chance!  We had a little chicken house made for them which they all go into of their own accord at 6.30pm every night.

Our little chicken colony has now expanded and until yesterday morning we had 22 chickens in total but unfortunately the hawk swooped down and stole one of the chicks!  We plan to make a trap to catch the hawk but judging by our failure to catch the ground pig I don't know how successful that will be.  Further I don't know what we would do with the hawk should we catch it.  Everyone here will say eat it, eat it, but it just wouldn't seem right. I suppose in the UK hawks and such birds of prey are so rare it would seem like a crime to eat one.  The other option would be to keep the bird as a pet, but even then tying up a bird feels so very wrong!

It is quite therapeutic to watch the chickens. They have very distinct personalities and you can really see where the expression 'pecking order' comes from. There is a definite hierarchy.

This is Buddy, our cockerel.  He is neurotic and you will often hear his high pitched warning calls which makes all the other chickens freeze, it's like chicken musical statues!

This is my least favorite hen, she has a hold over Buddy though, he loves her and follows her everywhere.  She even led them into the house the other day sqwarking and flapping their wings, Thea got very excited!  I have voted we eat her, she leads Buddy astray and is clearly at the top of the pecking order, she pecks at the other hens and chicks!

This is my favoruite hen, when we got the chickens this one wasn't old enough to lay but even up to today she hasn't!  I couldn't understand why, I asked Mama (Winston's mum) so she showed me. We caught the hen and on her back, near her tail she had a spike (sorry no photo) almost like a feather that didn't grow properly.  This had prevented Buddy from mounting her.  We removed the spike but it must have really put him off, he won't go near her.



This was the latest hen to lay, she hatched five but only has four, it was her chick that the hawk took.

These two hens came together and are very close, the white one has two chicks and the grey speckled hen has four.  They seem to help each other in looking after their chicks.  The grey one refused to sit on her egges once they had begun to hatch so Hadja (Winston's sister, who lives with us) put her under an upturned basket with the eggs, showed her the kitchen knife and told her in Mende (their Tribal language) that if she didn't sit on the eggs she would be killed with that knife and eaten, she put the knife next to the hen.  I don't know if these chickens understand Mende but the hen sat down on the eggs until they all hatched!

These are the teenagers, they make the most noise.  There are four cockerels and two hens, the children from the 'bad' hen.

I feed the chickens rice twice a day, anything left over is eaten by these lovely  and tiny little birds.  Hadja says she wishes she could catch them all - they come at least a hundred at a time - so she could roast them, she says they're very sweet! I say no!

Thea feeding the chickens.

We have great fun with the chickens and I have to admit that sometimes they keep me sane in this crazy place.  They help me keep perspective.

Driver Troubles

Right now we own two tipper trucks (1 Scania P93 1995 & 1 Scania P94c 2000 - for those who are interested) this is our business, we hire the trucks out to people doing construction work.  For convenience the trucks are named Benedict-George and Benedict-John i.e we need a tyre for Ben-John.....  Both tippers are currently hired by a South African company,  they are growing sugar to make bio-ethanol in Makeni, a town four hours north of where we live (controversial I know, but a country's got to create revenue where it can!)

I want to tell you about our drivers, this might seem benign but I can tell you straight off we have gone through six drivers in the last three months!  Now I debated over this but have decided to change their names - despite their criminality and the fact that there is very little likelyhood that they would use the internet / know I had written about them, fair's fair and you never know I might get sued.

I am told that Sierra Leone's first president said (my written Krio is not good) "which si u dae ti cow, na dae u de eat" this translates as "where you tie your cow is where you eat."  This means that you must get what you can by any means from the place where you work because that is where you make your living.  This makes legitimate sense if you have a farm in the bush, you must try to get what you can through your own hard work.  However, this small saying seems to have legitimised workplace pilfering and is the driver behind our big driver problem.

We started out with one truck and one driver 'James,' and before we had the tipper we had a box van which he had been driving and seemed to do a good job, also we felt we had an understanding that we would pay him well and as we expanded he would benefit i.e we would pay him more.  All was well until we found out about more and more incidents in which he had lied to get extra money from us.  Further, as we spoke about the new truck coming he began to shout the odds: "I want to drive the new truck, I want a louder horn on my truck, I will be the boss of all the drivers, you should fire who I say you should fire...it became clear that power was very important to James and after the straw broke the camel's back we fired him.  The next couple of days there was a tirade of people begging for us to give James his job back which was horrible but unfortunately we had decided and we didn't fire him lightly.  It is a strange part of the culture but people do things wrong and once it is done other people come and beg for them and they 'arrange' until the person is forgiven, rehired or reinstated.  Where I come from if you do wrong and you're fired unless you go to a tribunal that's it!

In the mean time we had got our second truck and found a driver for that (Ben) who still works for us and whilst he is a bit slow he has been more honest than any of the others - well at least we haven't caught him yet!  Anyway, we also found another driver for the P93 (or Ben-George), a Mr Smith, who was recommended to us by a cousin of Winston, whom we trust.  Mr Smith was a good driver, honest and hard working but he only lasted three days....James, thwarted at having lost his job went back to Makeni where the trucks were working and began to intimate that he had 'done something' to the truck (here this means that he has done some witch craft on the vehicle.)  Mr Smith was petrified, he called us as he was leaving to  return to his home in Freetown (about 4 hours away again) to tell us he couldn't work on that truck, that we might not be 'ordinary' (by this he means that we may have protected ourselves using witchcraft) but he was a soldier in the government forces during the war and he had seen what witch craft could do, and beseides he is 'ordinary'.  He said he was afraid for his life.  So, that was that!

James continued to threaten us indirectly and directly but neither of us have suffered any ill fate yet!

After much searching and many interviews we found another driver, Spencer, Winston found him to be very eager and he was keen to start straight away.  So off he went....after about two weeks the truck had had some shaft problems (for those who are alien to trucks this is a pole that attaches the axel to the gearbox on the undercarrier - or underneath the truck) which had been remedied with the purchase of a new one..grrr very expensive!  It was Spencer and his apprentices' job to make sure that the thing was on securely, something which they failed miserably to do because it fell off in the middle of a busy town called Masiaka. This not only damaged our new shaft but caused another car to have an accident and burst it's tyre!  Following this Spencer was seen in the town by someone to whom he owed some money, he was subsequently arrested and gave the keys of our truck to the police telling them that if they called his boss (us) we would pay the money to get our truck back!!!  Well the police then held our tipper to ransom..we managed to negotiate it back by give the guys wages for the month he had worked (this was about half of the owed money.)  I know, I know, it is absolutely outrageous that the police would hold our truck for someone elses debt!  I cannot tell you how many times I have wanted to tear out my hair at the injustice of situations like this but believe me there is no point....that is the way it is here and there is no point having a heart attack about it, the longer our tipper was off the road the more money we were losing.  So anyway, we got the keys back and the truck was back on the road afer some repairs.  Needless to say Spencer no longer had a job and it further transpired that he owed money to several people in the town where he was working.  He had also been plotting to steal fuel from the vehicle (the company using the tippers fuel them) someone that worked at the local petrol station came looking for him because he promised them 450 000 Leones worth of fuel, he took the money from them and obviously did not deliver!

Next was 'Henry' he only lasted a day, he was caught by one of the employees of the SA comapny with a hose and a funnel by the truck (a clear sign he was stealing fuel) and he was promptly arrested.

Now we have another driver who has not proven troublesome ...yet

 Thea, Benedict John and Me.