Jan 18 2017
January 18
Today was our first day working on our chicken project. We are building a chicken coop for two women who plan on raising chickens to sell the meat. We started the day with an early breakfast before making our way to the house of the family who we are building the coop for. While most of the materials were delivered directly to the house, we still had to haul some of the materials ourselves. In order to get to the house, we had to take a quick boat ride then take a bus to the house. While waiting for the bus, we had a riff-off singing competition, which, with this group, was pretty entertaining.
When we got to the house, we got right to work. We started off splitting into groups and dividing up the different tasks. The jobs that needed to be completed are cleaning, washing, and painting of the roof, painting a sign to promote the new business and, of course, building the structure of the coop. While there was a lot to be done, the work day started out slowly since only so many people could work on the tasks at once but once the project got going, we made lots of progress on our first day of this 3 day project.
At the end of the day in the sun, we were all physically exhausted and ready for bed before dinner even began! We enjoyed a nice cup of Costa Rican coffee in order to stay functional through dinner and class. During our class session some concerns were brought up about the work that we wanted to do versus the work that the recipients wanted. We did not realize that the chickens were being raised for their meat and not their eggs and this went against some of our morals. We were also concerned about the size of the chicken coop and how many chicks the family would be receiving. We all agreed that we need to put our best efforts into this project but that, ethically, we were concerned about the health and living situation of the chickens. The outcome of our discussion was that we would talk to the two women who are starting this business and educate them about how these chicks need to be treated and hear about their business plan.
Overall, it was an exhausting but productive day and we are eager to see the outcome of our efforts.
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