Chicken coop, cooperation fight hunger

Paul Rahill is the most intuitive businessman I've ever met.

He was a welder who bought out his company with a partner, built up the business, then sold it and made a nice enough profit that at age 45, he never has to work again.

I've never met Stephen Keel, but on the phone he sounds like a 1960s-era hippie, one of those free thinkers always coming up with grandiose ideas. After spending 15 years working on computers, he decided he was throwing time into a black hole.

He prayed for guidance and now, at age 57, has invented a backyard chicken coop. He calls it the Henspa.

Paul recently discovered it on the Internet.

Now the two men have joined up in an experiment to feed a starving community.

Paul is a devout Christian whose wealth never erased his blue-collar roots. He travels to impoverished regions, working as a handyman to set up medical clinics and building homes. His good works recently led him to a mountainous village in the Dominican Republic.

The Catholic Diocese of Orlando Mission Office has been working with the 450 villagers, bringing them clean water, food and medical care. Paul isn't Catholic. He attends Northland, A Church Distributed. He is very much nondenominational when it comes to good causes.

Paul noticed village children with light brown hair and blond streaks. "It reminded you of kids who spend time at the beach. It looked kind of cute."

Then the doctor told him it was a sign of acute malnutrition.

The diocese is bringing in food, but the eventual goal is to make the village self-sufficient.

Paul thought about the problem. He thought about eggs. He searched the Internet and found a small, mobile, low-maintenance chicken coop. Paul called the number and got Stephen Keel in Virginia, maker of the Henspa.

Paul told him about the village.

"I didn't think he was serious," Stephen said. "But he actually ordered one."

Paul does his research. He found a woman in Geneva willing to participate in the experiment and set up the Henspa there. He then raised several chicks in his garage and took them to the coop to test it. Modifications were made. The biggest was the addition of pigs. The Henspa became a food spa.

Here is the theory: Put a thick mat of plant material on the ground and put the food spa on top of it. Add 10 hens and two small pigs.

The animals poop, scratch and root in the vegetation, creating compost. This can be used to grow vegetables in poor-quality mountain soil.

The surplus pigs and chickens can be sold to buy more piglets, chicks and feed, creating self-sufficiency.

Paul and Stephen went to the village last month to do research. Paul tromped up and down the slopes as if training for one of his marathons, and Stephen did his best to keep up.

The two men bonded in the village -- the creative, old Christian hippie who set out to build the perfect chicken coop and the disciplined Christian conservative with an uncanny ability to analyze problems and devise solutions.

Throw in a lot of devoted Catholics from Orlando and you pretty much have the best of Christianity working on the problem.

Like any good businessman, Paul is moving cautiously. He plans to set up five test coops in the village to see if this works.

If it does, the food spa may well find its way into a lot more villages one day and feed a lot more people.

Mike Thomas can be reached at 407-420-5525