Haiti, goats and me By Jona Fletcher
During my sophomore year of undergrad at the University of Saint Francis, I had the opportunity to travel to Haiti as part of a med- ical mission trip. This was the first year a veterinary component was included. In years previous, the trip had been limited to pre-medicine, pre-physician’s assistant, and nursing students.
There were several reasons that pre-veterinary students were included in this trip, but the most important reason for me, and the reason I was chosen, was due to a grant that Our Lady of Perpetual Help Orphanage received to purchase a herd of goats. This was one of those rare times in life where I happened to be the right person in the right place, at the right time.
I had grand plans for my trip — I wanted to perform fecal egg flotations on the feces of the goats to determine total egg count, check level of Barberpole worm infection by using the FAMACHA method of examining eyelid color, and help build a breeding plan for the or- phanage’s goats. There was not a veterinarian with us on this trip and only two veterinary students, including me. This did not concern me, until the plane landed and I got my first glimpse of the country. It is one thing to be told about Haiti, it is another to experience it. During the hour’s ride from the airport, I began to understand the challenges I would face. I saw, for the first time in my life, what ab- ject poverty looked like. Many houses in Cap-Haitian were stone and looked like they had been standing since the French colonized Haiti. Haitian street vendors were selling food and other items to the few
Jona Fletcher of Martinsville, Ind., just finished her first year as a veterinary student at Ohio State University. Jona raises Boer goats and she is working as an intern at the American Goat Federation. In this photo she is demon- strating to a Haitian farmer how to age a goat by its teeth.
18 Goat Rancher | October 2021
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