We saw other organizations doing animal projects to help
those in poverty. The idea is that you give an animal instead of money to a
person in poverty to help them not spend the money right away. This is a great
idea in theory, but what I’m learning from living in Africa with the very poor
is that people don’t live in poverty because they lack things. Poverty is deeper
than just a lack of items, it’s a mindset. The cure for poverty isn’t just
giving items or money, the cure for poverty is quite complex and seems to be
different for each person within poverty.
What I’ve seen is that in every community, rich, poor,
middle class, there are go getters, there are people who when given a little
make it more. Monica is just such woman.
Monica and her husband had 4 children and as the story with
many women in her village goes Monica’s husband died. She digs
her land to provide food for her family. Any extra food that is left Monica
sells to the locals in her community so she can buy things she can’t grow like
oil, soap, clothes, and candles.
When we met Monica she had a few chickens and a goat. The
problem with keeping animals is that when you are hungry your animals get eaten
and are no longer kept. Monica understood this but she also understood that
animals give birth to more animals. She had a proposal for us. She asked us if
we would front the money and purchase a goat for her, this way she would have
two…you understand where I’m going with this. Her proposal didn’t end there.
Monica has a business mind and knew that a gift of a goat was a bad idea for
the investor. She proposed that the goat we bought for her would remain our
goat and the first baby would belong to her as payment for keeping our goat.
Then the second baby would be ours and so on every other kid belonging to each
other.
You can see where this idea of running an animal project
would be beneficial but also take a lot of supervision. Living in the capital
city and monitoring the birth of goats 5 hours away in village got overwhelming
to us. (we might pick up the concept when we move into the village).
Now on to the title of my post where the goat has a cow.
Monica gave it time and her two goats and a few chickens turned into quite a
number of goats and chickens. With each batch of chicken Monica would trade
them in for a goat. Monica called us with a new proposition. She wanted to take
her now herd of goats (who were eating her out of house and home and driving
her crazy) and trade them in for a cow. We gave her permission to use our goat
to help in the “purchase” to a cow.
When we went last weekend to check on Monica’s cow we found
that it wasn’t a cow but a bull. Monica explained to us that there is enough
milk in the village but cows needed to give birth to give more milk. Not many
people want to keep bulls because there isn’t the instant payoff with milk and calving.
So Monica bought a bull for stud. With time she will rent out her bull to all
those with milk cows.
This is why I say that poverty is complex because even with
all that Monica is capable of doing she still lives in poverty. She is still
stuck in the system that permeates her community. Poverty is something that
needs to be tackled holistically. But improving one’s situation and in turn
changing the community, slowly, slowly. That can help. Jesus said, “there will
always be the poor among you”. But removing obstacles for the poor is going in
the right direction.
