This is a third blog about First Seriuos Overseas Business trip
The boss arrived 7AM at the hotel and I was ready to go. The temperature was very warm already but the newness of everything made incidental stuff seem very small. The building was a cement block building nearly 200 feet long by 40 wide. The entry way was piled up with open boxes and parts all over.
The entry to the chickens was ajar and we went in. I saw workers manually feeding the chickens and this was to be automatic. The owner could speak very little English and struggled to tell me of his problems, but I was familiar with the equipment and he seemed happy I could see some difficulties.
The cage laying systems were designed for ease of operations and having to feed, water, and pick eggs manually made this building harder than the floor system. There were eggs falling off the conveyors. There were piles of feed on the floor. The birds in the top deck were panting already suffering from lack of water. The system was design to have gravity water pressure enough to work the water spigots. The bottom rows seemed all right so I raised the corresponding supply tanks for row two and the top row to the same distance above the row as the bottom row and that solved that problem. The lack of water had caused a good amount of top row chickens to die and I tried to tell the owner he needed to remove the birds and he didn’t understand my direction. I decided I needed to explain by doing and the workers caught on right away and stepped in to do the removal of birds. It was then I noticed that the cage partitions were set up in erratic sizes with 3 birds in one cage and 10 plus in others.
I went to the entry way and looked through the supply of boxes and found partitions that had not been installed. I showed a couple of workers how to do this and they seemed so eager to be of help that I turned them loose to go through the whole building and be sure all cages were the correct size and each one had only three birds in each cage. Over half of the partitions were missing and having found several unopened boxes of them buried under piles of stuff we knew what we had to do.
The owner recruited several more workers to help. He also had his daughter from the hotel come to help with the language barrier. She had taken several English classes at the university and enjoyed a chance to use her skills. The process was slow but helped anyway.
The electrical system is 60 cycle in the Middle East and they installed USA 110 cycle motors and the system didn’t work. The owner brought in a local contractor with some correct motors. When they were ready we started the system up and it ran but what a mess we created as this is when we found out that the rats had invaded the drive boxes. The workers shut off the system and came running to me to come and look what was happening. I immediately opened the drive box cover and that is when I was confronted with the rats. Rats came out like scared birds jumping all over and I was jumping all over too. The workers thought that I was the funniest thing they had seen.
They tried to trick me into opening another gear box because they thought my being scared of rats was so funny. I calmly as I could explain that I was not going to be able to work on the gear boxes until they got the rats out of the barn. We had run the system long enough that I saw some other major problems. The level of the cages was uneven and the augers didn’t ride correctly in the feeds through. When we found this out we had to make shims and add to the support legs in several places in each row to make things work. The rows were 150’ long and had many ups and downs in each row. This was a major task as we had to loosen the whole system up in order to level the trouble spots. We tied an end of a roll of twine to a starting point and tied the other end to a hook strategically placed at the end of the building and leveled every thing to that string. The owner continued to watch and bring me more workers as he saw the need.
The work schedule in Tunis was very different for me. I was working away the first day and didn’t notice that all of the workers had left the barn until the owner arrived and ask me to come with him and he brought me back to the hotel and it was noon. He said he would be back at 3 PM for me. Also during the mid morning I did notice two workers leave but since I was new I didn’t say anything. In about a half hour they were coming back in the barn carrying a paper feed sack. The rest of the workers all came together and they had the long roll of bread ( long loaf ) and each broke off a piece and dipped it in butter and some brown paste stuff. I originally thought it was peanut butter but soon found out it wasn’t. We also had some American Coke. This was our mid morning break. They also did this around 6 PM but when they came back the butter had completely melted and they scraped their bread on the paper bag to get the butter on the bread. I believe the temperature where nearly 120 degrees those days. We finished around 9PM every night and I was brought back to the hotel.
I almost lost it the first couple of days at these breaks when most of the workers would go to the cages and grab an egg and crack it open and eat it directly from the shell. We had the system running real smooth during the second week. It took most of the first week to get the partitions in correctly all the while doing this with birds in the cages and taking care of the birds. It was amazing that they had any birds alive by the time I got there. It showed the workers where very diligent in caring for the birds. The excitement in seeing the system work better each day even brought area visitors to watch.
The pressure of strangers watching was not bad but the daily visit of the police going through my stuff was worrisome. This was in the late seventies and American relations in the Mid East were strained to say the least.
Written by Conrad Larson as third blog of the First Business Trip 7/18/09 www.loveforbookwriting.com ; www.myovercoat.com ; Boomertweet on Twitter
The fourth blog to follow. If you like this blog you can find the other blogs here or in the Archives about my First business Trip. This trip takes place in 1979 for your reference.
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