by Joanna Howard

Created on: May 21, 2007   Last Updated: September 21, 2011

Hen Woman

I used to sit with my hens. It was when we were living in Gilo - a wild place in the Imatong mountains in Southern Sudan. Our companions were a village-full of local forestry workers, a group of six disgruntled British expatriates, and various drifters hitching around east Africa. Most of the expats had only taken the job because there wasn't much international work around at the time. Their wives had come too, and found the place hard: too remote, too empty, with nothing to do. They were used to tropical cities with shops and clubs and sophisticated servants. Gilo was a place and an idea too far: even the local market at Katire was 2000' below us down a perilous dirt road. Their mood and conversation was generally peevish.

For us, Jack and me, it was different. Certainly we had our own discontents: for me the loss of the children, condemned as teenagers to boarding school, and for him the lack of proper resources to carry out the project - the refurbishment of a pre-war sawmill and the setting up of a sustainable sawmilling project. The project was his darling, though, the culmination of his different forestry experiences; and I was used to remote places by then and loved this high montane forest for its coolness.

We grew our own food as far as we could, and of course we kept hens. To keep myself occupied, I wrote letters, gardened, chatted to the one sympathetic wife (a young ex-Peace Corps girl who was studying for a degree while she was there), and taught a few of the local children to read English. I watched the Colobus monkeys flinging their lithe black and white bodies across the gaps between the tree-crowns, silhouetted against the view across the valley to distant mountains. As well as that I sat in the hen-run, watching.

The hens were fascinating; the pecking order, the way the cock found them grubs in the ground and called them over to eat, keeping them in a little flock as far as he could. I was intrigued by their preening and fluffing and the dust-baths. One hen was my favourite; plump and self-satisfied, she kept her deep brown feathers gleaming, and laid an egg every day. She seemed to be the chief hen in the group, always in the midst of things, and had an air of bossiness, of "I know best" - but in the pleasantest of ways. I called her Biddy. When I was desolate with the children so far away, bored by the chatter of the other wives, irritated by Jack's obsession with the sawmill, I would go up to the hen-run and watch the hens in

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