Of Compassion and Chickens

Mom teaching PipSqueak how to make ginger tarts
for Grammie and Boboo's anniversary, via video Skype.

Last week, 12 eggs in my chicken coop turned into little puffballs on toothpicks that peeped, three turned into messes of cracked eggs and underdeveloped chicks, and one turned into a sweet corn yellow chick with only one working leg - Pip Squeak.

Pip Squeak died yesterday, at the request that our guards kill him quickly before any of us got too attached. For nearly a week we hand fed him, changed the hot water in his bottle every four hours through the night, cuddled him in our hands and it became more and more clear he would never be able to walk and that we could not keep caring for him at that pace.

At one point, holding his little body in my hand, I realized that I felt more for this little chick than I have been lately for the people around me who are, arguably, suffering much more.

Why is that? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it necessary? Is it the beginning of the end? is it a shift in perspective of life and death? Is it all of these things? I do not know. Maybe. I do not know.

A professor of mine used to talk of Compassion Fatigue, a state of being numb in the world a a result of the excess of information available to us at our finger tips. We do not know our neighbors, we dislike it when the news is always bringing us bad news, we eat dinner while watching documentaries on famine... blah blah blah

One human only has so much capacity for compassion. It works out alright when we have about 150 people in our lives (got that number form an NPR report recently), but after that, feeling for people just goes beyond what we've got in us.

What does this mean when when you live with some of the most vulnerable people in one of the most isolated places on the planet?

                             I don't know.

Perhaps, though, one form it can take is that I can come to near tears over a crippled chick when I know we have to kill it because I have to focus on the humans around me, pulling them up, working for them and if the tears do not come as often, perhaps that is for the better, I can do more work and I can let it all out the next time a chick dies, pull myself together and press forward.

Just turning it over and over in my mind and heart, because I really just do not know.