My Job

Well, I promised to write about my work here before putting anything else up. Yes, that was a while ago. And I’m sorry it has taken this long. I never was good at keeping a journal. I used to be good at writing real letters, but we all know how rare they have become these days…

Anyway, back to “fighting” bird flu. Riiiiiight! Unlike most other countries in the world that have had cases of the H5N1 avian influenza (with the exceptions of Egypt, Bangladesh, and maybe Viet Nam), bird flu is endemic in Indonesia. This means that the disease is continuously present and widespread in this country. While there may be outbreaks of disease on a local level, the country as a whole doesn’t have ‘outbreaks’ because disease is happening somewhere nearly every day. FAO has created a Participatory Disease Surveillance and Response (PDSR) program to detect and deal with disease in village poultry. We have trained more than 2000 officers – most already working for district animal health departments – under the PDSR system. Right now, nearly all the funding to support the PDSR program comes from international donors. You can be sure that the funding will not continue at its present levels, and the Indonesian government will be asked to take over PDSR, resulting in a decline from its present level of activity.

I was hired as a Field Program Facilitator (FPF). My intended job was to go out in the field (I was assigned to western Java and southern Sumatra) to visit with and observe the operations of PDSR officers in the field. I got out on 2 field visits – last September and early last December – before the role of FPFs was, for all intents and purposes, abolished in January of 2008. A full six months after I arrived. But we won’t talk about that. Field visits were lots of fun. Sitting behind my desk at Deptan for months was not.

So, we FPFs had to find something else to do with ourselves. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is our primary source of funding and wanted us to plan to intensify our prevention and control program in western Java for the coming project year, specifically to include small commercial farms and using vaccination. My response to that was to suggest that we map and catalog the farms in the areas where we planned to intensify our campaign, at least so we would know how much vaccine we would need and how to plan such an intensified campaign. PDSR operates at the village level. However, somewhere in the neighborhood of 70-80% of the poultry on Java are reared in commercial farms. Although FAO had started a dialog with the commercial poultry industry at a higher level, we know virtually nothing about commercial poultry farming in Indonesia. The government has next to no regulatory authority over commercial farms (or certainly no effective regulation). Thus, the “Western Java Commercial Poultry Profiling” project was born.

Nearly six months after its inception, the project is almost complete. We partnered with a FANTASTIC local NGO, CREATE, to execute the data collection. CREATE is based in Bogor and headed by Widiyanto Surya. Widi is, without a doubt, the most effective Indonesian I have worked with. He is a veterinarian, on the faculty at the local veterinary school, and has a PhD in communications. He can get done in a few hours what FAO would need probably weeks to do. He is also wonderfully sweet and very patient with all the frustrations of dealing with FAO and this project. We chose to work with CREATE because of their knowledge of and contacts in the commercial poultry industry.

The first step of our project has been to take a census of all commercial poultry operations in the selected districts. (USAID and FAO ‘senior’ staff selected the 13 districts for this project.) This process is executed by teaming up with the district animal health agency and sending their officers (some of who are trained in PDSR) with GPS units to all of the poultry farms in their district. Basic information about the farm owner, location, and number and type of birds is collected. Once we have all this information, we select a representative subset of producers in the district for further surveying. Teams of enumerators from the district and CREATE administer a questionnaire to the selected farmers. The questionnaire asks about management practices, poultry species kept on the premises, perceptions about poultry disease, contact with other farms, and other factors that can affect disease transmission as well as poultry and business management. Once we have all of this information, we will analyze the data to see if we can group producers by common characteristics and identify groups with higher risks for poultry disease than others. We also hope to use the data to identify opportunities for dialog with these poultry producers.

So, that’s what I’ve found to do with myself here in the past few months. The start of the profiling project was delayed and has taken longer than expected. Although we will do as much as we can with the data as quickly as we can, many of the analyses will probably take place after I have finished my term here. My personal victory out of all of this is that the local authorities will receive the maps and information about the commercial poultry farms in their respective districts at the conclusion of the project. In Indonesia, the decisions made locally seem to have, in my opinion, the greatest effect and, therefore, the greatest chance for success. Clearly, a nationally-coordinated program for HPAI prevention and control is needed. But this is a big country, and if a few districts can start to get a handle on the disease, so be it. I have heard time and again from district authorities that other groups come in to collect information and never give the districts the info back. Well, with this profiling project each district will get all their own info back, including electronic maps, to use as they see fit. I only wish we could do this exercise for more districts!

There, now. I’ve talked about my work. Good stuff, too…

Next up - getting glamor in Yogya and dive certification!

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