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Wamena: in local language there is no name for this place.
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'Wam' means pig
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'Ena' is tame
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When the Dutch first arrived here, they saw Father Enda's wife in a field.
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She was carrying a piglet
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in her hands.
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Then the Dutch asked, "What is it?"
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People here replied, "Oh that's Wamena".
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The Dutch then said, "So this area is called Wamena".
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We can't separate the pig from human activities.
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It's not that pigs are equal to humans.
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No, 'Wam' is still 'Wam'. They are pigs.
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But the role of pigs and humans is tied together; they are related to one another.
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Humans have used pigs in almost every ritual they have.
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During the human life cycle, from when they are still inside the uterus as a fetus
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until their death, they'll use pigs.
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In times of marriage, death, adat (indigenous ceremony), and illness
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When people got sick, they would kill pigs.
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everything
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Many pigs began to die from 1995.
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That's when many pigs started dying.
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I had 27 pigs.
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Twenty died and I have only seven left now..
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When we found out the pigs had Kondoyu disease, we felt hopeless
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All in all, 40 pigs died.
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See that long house? It’s all empty – all dead.
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I have only one pig left. We tried to nurture it until it gave birth to many other pigs.
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We shared its kids with other neighbors, so now we have got plenty.
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They are just piglets and newly born.
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A virus is the cause of this disease.
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When the virus infects the pigs, it multiplies itself through the feces.
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From feces and every secretion – from saliva – the virus infects other animals.
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The transmission period is fast.
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I tried really hard to save my animals.
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I thought and prayed; I went to get some medicine from the government
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They gave me this tiny bottle for injection.
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But I gave an injection to all the animals, including the piglets. Usually we don't do this
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The first step to handle this virus is to vaccinate your pigs
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The second step is to gather all your animals in one stall,
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so you can contain this disease. So, even if one gets infected, it does not spread to the other pigs.
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Thirdly, if animals in one stall are infected with this cholera disease,
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we can reduce the effect by spraying disinfectant.
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I bought a syringe. I bought it myself at the drug store
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Whenever we took our animals to the government clinic, they gave our animals an injection, but we had to pay.
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We thought that the government would help us for free.
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After doing that for several time, we finally started doing it ourselves.
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But still the pigs died.
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So, we tried other options.
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We bought penicillin and other drugs at the drug store and we injected the animals.
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After that the pigs were fine.
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So, we thought maybe this government help didn’t suit our animals
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If many members of society do the vaccination, I'm confident that we can control this cholera disease
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The government never comes to the villages to conduct surveys about who owns animals.
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They have never done that.
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So, they don’t have any information about this.
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If they start consulting, maybe they can help us. They have never done that in my village,
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so they don't really know, actually
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When their animals get sick, people often look to adat ways. They don’t look for modern medicine
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The most that they will do is give tetra (an antibiotic for human) to their pigs.
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Is that helping? It creates more disease.
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So, I think the government pays very little attention to us