Why don't you have children?

I just reread the message I sent you yesterday about Sinley and I started to laugh. So many grammatical errors that I had a difficult time understanding some parts and I am the one who wrote it! I hope this means my Spanish is getting better.... ;)
I have lost Mama. I let her go to forage yesterday because she seemed depressed. Canin, my fantastic project partner, told me that I could let her out and collect her at night. He did say that the first few times she would be difficult to catch but that I could do it. Totally apprehensive because I haven't had the best luck with husbandry I let her out and was pleasantly suprised at how close she stuck to the house. That is, how close she stuck to the house until Max and Tinuki realized she was out.... I can't even imagine how to describe this I am still laughing...okay so Max saw her first and leaped over Sinley who let out more of a scream than a bleat while Tinuki knocked over my mop bucket and flew out the side door. I tried to follow yelling NOOO! but tripped over the mop landing on Sinley who broke the chair she was attached to and then followed Tinuki out. By the time I got out the door there were feathers EVERYWHERE. Max was sitting calmly in the stream bed and Tinuki was snapping at Sinley who I am pretty sure was trying to nurse from her. I searched for Mama's body but to no avail. After I got all the animals back in the galleria I ventured outside and started asking everyone I saw if they had seen a terrified chicken fly by. No one had but they all had plenty of advice on how to take care of a chicken. This advice I would have normally appreciated but with a scraped up elbow and a lost chicken I was not my normal cheerful self. Gritting my teeth I thanked them and moved on.

Eventually I gave up and went home. A young man (how random strangers here find out about my business mere minutes after it happened I will never know) stopped by a little while later and quietly motioned me to the side of my house. There sitting on top of my neighbor's freshly painted door sat Mama. My neighbor came out of his house as I was attempting to shoo her off and told me that Mama was his and had been sleeping at his house for days. Sigh. I explained that I had a chicken the same color, size and age that had just escaped from my backyard but that I was glad that that chicken wasn't mine in case it shit all over his door. Now with Mama moving in with another neighhbor and my first rooster eaten by Martin I think I have accepted the fact that perhaps I wasn't meant to have chickens in this barrio. I went home to clean my scrapes and forget about it.

Tonight as I was writing the part above a group of ninos stopped by to stare at me typing and ask random questions like, "How do you say lion in English?" and "Why don't you have any kids?" Soon I had accumulated quite a crowd and one of the little ones asked what we did with all the tigers in the United States. I told him that the only tigers we had were in the zoo but that we had panthers and cougars. That opened a whole new string of questions about what is a panther and what did cougars eat. I answered accordingly, a panther is a large carnivrous cat and that cougars occasionally eat people who walk under them while they are sitting high up in the trees. I wish you could have seen their faces! After they heard about cougar attacks they wanted to know about every type of animal in the US that could kill a human. One boy swore that he knew that there were monkeys in the States that had eaten one of his dad's friends. This spawned another interesting conversation about baboons and their butts. Shortly after that conversation began of the moms yelled for her daughter and they all quickly yelled their goodbyes and headed home. It is moments like this that I love about the Peace Corps, sitting on my porch with a fresh glass of lemonade, an unexpected yet lovely conversation and now writing you.