Indonesia

Anglican Priests. The elder one said that he carried his mother's ashes back to England for burial. We had serious doubts about their authenticity, but their stories were very good, particularly their ghost stories, and we had a lot of fun with them. At the devotions we challenged them to offer some prayers for us, but they graciously declined. We felt then that our suspicions were confirmed, but we let them stay at our place for a couple of nights anyhow. They boarded a ship from Tenau to Hong Kong, and I believe the captain was also conned with their story of their mother's ashes, as he let them travel for free.

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Before we came to Timor, I had attended a talk in Sydney by a Canadian, who had introduced a simple method of chicken raising in Africa. I had never forgotten this, and at the appropriate time I discussed this with the students in Tarus. I offered to purchase some one-day old chicks of a proper breed, keep them at our home until they were big enough, and then sell them to the students. They would have to build cages or pens for them according to a specific design. The Canadian had called it appropriate technology for the tropics The material was to be bamboo, which we would cut in the bush at no cost, and palm leaves as a roof. They would have to buy the feed through me, and I promised them to help with the selling of the eggs. The village eggs from the market were about half the size of our normal eggs, and there was a risk that about half of them could be bad. The normal sized eggs were, therefore, in great demand, especially by all the foreigners. After everything was explained to them, about ten students decided to participate in this chicken project.

I contacted John Rossner, an American missionary from Church World Service overseeing food for works projects. He lived in Surabaya. Through him I ordered about 100 one-day old chicks to be delivered by plane. I had prepared a box for them with a kerosene lamp as a mother-hen substitute, and when they arrived, I went to the airport to pick them up. Those chicks had caused quite a stir. I had to push my way through a bunch of people, all looking and marvelling at the chirping and quite lively chicks. They had never seen live chicks parcelled up and being forwarded by air. They just shook their heads and mumbled: "No doubt about those foreigners. Whatever next?"

When I told the students in Tarus that the chicks had arrived, they began to build their chicken pens in ernest. I helped with the transport of the bamboo, and the students built the pens according to the plan I gave them. The floor had to be at least one metre above ground level, spaced wide enough to let the droppings through, but nothing else. A box for the eggs, and troughs for feed and water. I had to stress that under no circumstances were they allowed to let the chickens run around on the

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