Double amputee Cara Moore now has plans to expand her fledgling chicken-rearing business to a 500-bird capacity enterprise that she started after losing her legs to diabetes in 2016 and 2020.
The 36-year-old graduate of the College of Agriculture, Science and Education, who is a single mother of two boys, aged 14 and 10, and a teenage daughter, was ecstatic on the weekend about her change in fortunes.
The small farm whose capacity she had managed to increase to 100 chickens, with assistance from a friend abroad, suffered a major setback when she lost 68 of them during Hurricane Ida last summer, from which she has struggled to recover.
Moore, a St Thomas resident, now has two legs to stand on having received state-of-the-art artificial limbs.
BIG DREAMS
“Now that I am able to move around more freely, I can achieve my objective of establishing a big chicken farm so I can take care of my children,” Moore told The Gleaner on Saturday.
“My motivation comes from within, and this gift of 200 baby chicks will go a far way to help me in realising my dreams,” Moore said after she was presented with 100 chicks and 20 bags of feed by Hi-Pro Business Development Manager Dayne Patterson. Surgix Jamaica CEO Winfield Boban pledged 100 more chicks at Saturday’s handover exercise at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel on Saturday.
“The chicken business brings in the income. It is not much, but it gives me a sense of independence.
“… I am in a better position to do this because I can move again and a lot of the work will now come off my children,” Moore disclosed.
Moore, whose situation was made public in The Gleaner‘s sister paper, THE STAR, disclosed that her chicken coop can accommodate 300 chicks, and she intends to formalise the business with the Companies Office of Jamaica.
Hitting the target of 500 birds would be difficult, Moore conceded, but she said she was in the chicken business for the long haul.
Zion Care International director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Camille Wilson, partnered with the Medical Foundation of Jamaica and IFit distributor for the Caribbean, Suzanne Watt of Barbados, to present Moore with the prosthetic legs.
Watt said the prostheses were comfortable and offered the benefit of being waterproof, thus enabling persons to swim freely.
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