on the Road with the Rambos: Chicken!

So, our story begins with a small church in Nebbi District. We were visiting the congregation of Akaba Africa Gospel Church to encourage them and Scott was the guest speaker. As a thank you gift, they gave us a rooster. And so begins our chicken adventures.

We kept the rooster, and named him Rocky. We decided to embrace this idea. Scott built a chicken coop. Tim and Ben enjoyed helping in the process. And start to finish, it was a process. Going to the market to buy nails, buying wood in one place and having it carried across town to be cut to size, and finally trying to explain a hook and eye latch to people who do not have such a thing. It worked out and he found everything he needed and built a chicken house.

Next we had our watchman get us two hens. We named them 'Chicken Big' and 'Chicken Little.' We waited and waited for them to begin laying eggs. We expected Chicken Big to be the first to lay, but it was Chicken Little, who laid first.
Meanwhile, we received another rooster as a gift. This one was from the church of Okollo but it was sick. We did not want it to get our other chickens sick so we ate it the next day. Our watchmen and house worker were quite helpful in the process of getting it ready to cook.

After some time, Chicken Little began to lay eggs. We heard a loud comotion in the window. When we went to check, both hens and the rooster were trying to sit on the windowsill. About half an hour later we found an egg on the ground next to the window that had decided to play Humpty-Dumpty. Similar thing happened the next day but we got the egg before it jumped. We then taught the hen to lay in the house.

She was laying eggs well, and we let her sit on them while we went to Kampala for Thanksgiving. Not long after we got back we had three chicks. Tim and Ben loved chasing the chicks around. Wilmore, our dog, did not seem to care about the chicks until one day when her previous watchmen came by. She caught and killed one as a trophy for them. We, especially Tim, were crushed. That day we went from three chicks to one. We decided to build a new chicken house that could keep the chicks inside. We also decided to keep the rooster. By this time we had another rooster who we named Rambo. The plan was to give Rocky and Rambo away as Christmas gifts, but now we needed to keep Rocky to get more chicks, so plans changed.

We had the Hallahan's up from Kampala for Christmas. We had our other rooster for dinner one evening while they were here. So now, we have one rooster, two hens and a chick. The hens have been renamed; Chicken Little is now bigger than Chicken Big so it did not seem to fit. We now have Rachel and Leah. Rachel is more beautiful, but Leah is the one who is laying eggs. I thought it seemed to fit. Tim has named the chick Jacob after reading the bible story of Rachel and Leah. I tried to explain that Jacob was the dad but... we now have a chick, whose gender is not yet known, named Jacob.