Monica Mazi spent the last 20 years working with NARI and is thankful that she has so many skills and knowledge in livestock husbandry practices.
Mrs Mazi was initially employed in early January, 2000, as a research technician.
She was the only technician overseeing most of the routine animal husbandry, tasks and practices in all sections of the livestock programme.
Though it was early days, this experience enabled her to gain and apply learn a lot of skills and experience in small livestock farming.
One of her key tasks was to maintain and conserve poultry genetic resources, mainly the four strains of true ducks; Khaki Campbell, White Campbell, Indian Runner and Roven ducks.
As her tasks extended into other areas of the livestock program, she continued to improve and gain more skills and knowledge on hatchery using a wooden incubator which was replaced with the steel automatic incubator.
Through her quiet achievement, she was assigned as the resource manager from 2006 to 2009, making her the only female manager at that time, as she remembers.
“I was the only female manager that time, the job was tough, challenging and stressful but I managed to perform to the best of my ability to meet NARI’s goal and objective”.
In recognition of her efforts, NARI rewarded her with an Excellency Award for Outstanding Work Performance in 2008.
Within the period of 2003-2009, Mrs Mazi participated in a number of donor-funded projects; the ACIAR Poultry Feeding Systems through AME Bio-Assay work, on-station and on-farm trials in a number of selected sites in PNG, mostly contributing towards the development of poultry to broiler layer concentrate technology.
The NARI and European Union Agricultural Research for Development (EU- ARD) partnership Project opened another learning opportunity in the export and import processes and procedures, enabling her to ship two tonnes of NARI Poultry-Broiler and Layer Concentrate and two egg incubators from New South Wales, Australia to Solomon Islands and New Caledonia.
She was offered short courses which included disease prevention technology funded by JICA in 2010, and a week’s course on bio-security at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, funded by Craw-ford Fund in 2015.
“Most importantly I was given the opportunity by NARI to undertake Bachelor Agriculture and Rural Development Program at UNITECH from 2014-2016, “ Mrs Mazi expressed.
I was engaged with the European Union supported climate change resilience project during my final year with NARI.
The activities ranged from poultry breeding stock management, hatching and distribution of foundation stocks and specific trainings on poultry farming systems. These activities gave me the opportunities to visit and work with several remote places of Morobe like Watut, Menyamya and Kabwum.
