About Austin Bailey

Austin Bailey is a writer and editor for Heifer's World Ark magazine.

Happy International Day of Families

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Austin Bailey

Teghenik, Armenia — Heifer beneficiary Tsovinar Davtyan prepares cheese, the sale of which supports her children and grandchildren. Photo by Geoff Oliver Bugbee

“Families hold societies together, and intergenerational relationships extend this legacy over time. This year’s International Day of Families is an occasion to celebrate connections among all members of the constellation that makes up a family. It is also an opportunity to reflect on how they are affected by social and economic trends – and what we can do to strengthen families in response.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for 2013

When Heifer International measures the impact of its projects and programs, it doesn’t just count individuals. Gender and Family Focus is one of Heifer’s Cornerstones for Just and Sustainable Development, and the family unit is central to our work. In fact, we count on strong family bonds and the cooperation that comes with them. Family members are invested in each others’ success, even when they know the fruits of that success won’t be reaped until they’re gone.

“I have seen whatever I would like to see in my life, I don’t need anything more for me. Everything is for my grandchildren,” explained Tsovinar Davtyan, 67, a grandmother of four in the Armenian village of Tekhenik. She cares for her family’s cows because she knows the benefits will last for generations.

May 15 is the United Nations International Day of Families, and this year’s focus is on fostering inter-generational solidarity. That’s a challenge for families in the Philippines, Bolivia and other places where job opportunities are few so young people set off to find opportunities elsewhere. This is where Heifer steps in, helping to build agricultural opportunities locally to keep families intact.

Click here to support a family in need through Heifer International.

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Malaria=Poverty=Malaria

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Austin Bailey

Today is World Malaria Day, which might have slipped your mind. That’s understandable. The United States eradicated malaria in 1951, and unless you’ve done much traveling it’s probably never topped your list of things to worry about. But for half the world’s population, the 3.3 billion people threatened by the deadly mosquito-borne illness every day, malaria isn’t so easy to forget.

Malaria symptoms include fever, headache, chills, vomiting, anemia and respiratory distress. Children infected with the disease are extremely vulnerable because they haven’t had time to develop any level of immunity.

Malaria is a mean disease that preys on the poor and the innocent. In 2010, 90 percent of all malaria deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, the region of our planet that’s home to the highest proportion of undernourished people. Poor people with limited resources and limited access to health care often can’t afford housing with screened windows and doors to protect them from infected mosquitoes. And once infected, people suffering from malaria lose work days and the paychecks that go along with them, deepening their poverty. This is a handicap faced by countless Heifer project participants who can find themselves incapacitated by malaria multiple times each year.

Most deaths from malaria claim children under the age of 5. That means that every single minute of the day, a child dies of malaria. Pregnant women also face heightened risk.These numbers will knock the breath out of you, but luckily they’re better than they used to be. Malaria mortality rates have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2000. And with continued use of mosquito nets and insecticides, the hope is that the disease will continue to loosen its grasp.

The theme for World Malaria Day 2013 is “Invest in the future. Defeat malaria.” The disease still kills 660,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization. But not everyone agrees on the numbers, and in fact, the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation puts the death toll at 1.2 million per year. I know that number will be stuck in my head for a while.

Happily, we know that bed nets, insecticides and improved housing can slow or stop the spread of malaria. We also know how to treat it. It’s just a question of resources. If, after reading this, you’re having a hard time getting malaria off your mind, visit the WHO’s World Malaria Day 2013 website to learn more.

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Celebrating Earth Day with Chocolate

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Austin Bailey

These treats are made with cacao collected and processed by participants in a Heifer-supported project that aims to boost incomes and protect forests. Photo by Dave Anderson

Among the zillions of reasons to be grateful for Mother Earth is this: she gives us chocolate! And since today is Earth Day, you have our permission to treat yourself.

But what kind of chocolate should you pick? Most of the chocolate we eat comes from cacao that’s cultivated, but the tastiest and most authentic tidbits come from the shadowy forests of South America where cacao trees grow wild. Caring for these forests so they can thrive and produce cacao for generations to come is a major component of a Heifer project spanning Bolivia’s remote Amazon regions. The project offers the dual benefit of nurturing the forests while helping families there use traditional crops and knowledge to boost their incomes.

Visitors flying into the bumpy field that serves as a landing strip for the northeastern Bolivian town of Baures are greeted with a modest wooden sign welcoming them to “The Chocolate Capitol.” The wild cacao on which the region pins its reputation grows in the forests that lie beyond the town and past the cow pastures.

These forests, twisted with vines and shaded by a tall and thick canopy of trees, are vibrant and productive. Home to birds, monkeys, butterflies and probably an anaconda or two, these forests provide sustenance and a livelihood for the people of Jasiaquiri, a village just outside of Baures. Many of the residents here are working with Heifer International and partner organization CIPCA, a Bolivian NGO that helps small farmers, to capitalize on the rich, healthy stock of wild cacao growing in the more than 12,000 acres of forests in the region.

Juan Antonio Atiares Omiregi inspects cacao trees for harmful fungus. Photo by Dave Anderson

The most important thing the Jasiaquiri Chocolate Growers’ Associate gets from this partnership is training in how to keep the forest healthy, association Vice President Juan Antonio Atiares Omireji said. Omireji and others are learning how to ward off witch’s broom, a fungus that can damage cacao trees. Now that they know how to spot it, cacao harvesters bury or burn diseased tree limbs to keep the fungus from spreading. Trainings also showed them how to fertilize cacao trees organically to make them more productive, and how to raise trees in nurseries so they can replant whenever a tree is lost in the forest.

“A managed area will increase its yield,” explained Vanessa Mendoza, an agronomist for CIPCA. So although the cacao harvest happens only in January and February, people work year-round to clear vines and any trees that could inhibit cacao production. They also keep trails clear for easy access and dig fire troughs between the forests and grazing land so that when pastures are burned, the forests will still be safe, she said.

Caring for the Earth is a big part of any Heifer project, but are the results always this sweet? To find out more about how Heifer cares for the Earth, see our Cornerstone: Improving the Environment.

Happy Earth Day!

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Container Gardens From Malawi

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Austin Bailey

Here’s a clever idea from the industrious women of Gideon village in Malawi, who grow heaps of healthy greens right beside their front doors.

Grace Banda, a 28-year-old mother of four, keeps a line of burlap sack gardens planted with cabbage in front of her house. It saves her from trekking to her garden when she needs something green for cooking, and it could save you a trip to the grocery store.

To make your own container gardens using Banda’s method, you’ll need a large burlap sack, gravel, a tin can with both ends cut out, potting soil and goat berries. If you’re plum out of goat manure, compost works fine, too.

Step 1: Put the can in the bottom of the sack and fill it with gravel. Pour equal parts soil and compost around it, up to the top of the can.

Step 2: Slide the can up to the surface of the dirt, refill it with rocks and fill the area around the can with the soil and compost mix.

Step 3: Repeat step 2 until the sack is full.

Step 4: Cut staggered openings about 6 inches long along the sides, and plant seeds in the holes.

The cylinder of gravel inside the sack helps distribute and drain the water, ensuring that none of the plantings get too wet or too dry.

If you try your hand at sack gardening yourself, please send us a photo. Thanks!

Photos by Russell Powell

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Water-logged: A Water Use Infographic

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Austin Bailey

Water is a vital resource for agriculture, sanitation and for all human existence. Yet 780 million people do not have access to clean water. In recognition of World Water Day on March 22, Heifer International is highlighting the need for those struggling to emerge from poverty to have reliable access to water.

If you already turn the faucet off while you brush your teeth, thanks. Every little bit counts when it comes to respecting and preserving our planet’s supply of clean water. But there are plenty of other choices we all make each day about what we eat, buy and wear that affect our water supply even more.

Graphic by John Houser

This World Water Day, take a moment to consider everything that water makes possible. Tell us in the comments what steps you have taken to make sure there’s enough clean water for everyone.

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A Sweet Role Model

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Austin Bailey

Agronomist Vanessa Mendoza is a role model for many of the girls she works with in chocolate-harvesting communities. Photo by Dave Anderson

Editor’s note: Empowering women is at the core of Heifer International’s model for sustainable development. In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, this week we are sharing stories of the women with whom Heifer works, who take the gifts of livestock and education to produce extraordinary results for themselves, their families and their communities.

It’s not the most glamorous or lucrative profession one could choose, but lots of the girls in Jasiaquiri village in northeastern Bolivia have made up their minds. They want to be agronomists, just like Vanessa.

Vanessa Mendoza is a frequent visitor to Jasiaquiri, which she reaches by flying from her home base of Trinidad on a prop plane, then driving over bumpy dirt roads in a pickup. She works for the Bolivian NGO CIPCA, the Centre for Research and Promotion of Farmers, which is teaming up with Heifer to help people in Jasiaquiri and surrounding villages protect and capitalize on the rich supply of wild cacao growing in the forests. The unique cacao that grows here is part of traditional regional cuisine, and it also makes one of the most delicious chocolate bars on the planet.

Visiting Jasiaquiri with Vanessa Mendoza is like visiting Costco with Joe Biden. There’s always going to be an entourage. That her most ardent fans are young girls makes sense. Vanessa has an education and career that allow her to offer real help in rural areas where paying jobs are scarce. She’s also pretty and friendly, and she paints her fingernails to look like ladybugs.

On an overcast day in January, Vanessa sat at a table at the home of Susana Abalos Dorado, an enterprising schoolteacher in Jasiaquiri. Besides teaching school, Dorado also raises chickens and ducks, runs a snack shop out of her front yard and maintains a solar-powered telephone for neighbors to use. The camaraderie between these two professional women was clear as Dorado explained the economics of her home village and Mendoza nodded along. The village of roughly 65 families is more prosperous than most, Dorado explained, because it’s on the road to the small town of Baures. Most of the young people here would like to stay, but opportunities are few.

Mendoza is helping the community protect the chocolate forests so they can continue producing for generations, providing food and livelihoods for families here. Mendoza is also helping local chocolate harvesters improve quality and get the best prices. Her job is a big one, but she does it with such warmth and grace that she has plenty of young women ready to follow her lead.

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Heifers on the Red Carpet

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Austin Bailey

The awards season is here, and we at Heifer International are beyond delighted to accept this nomination!

This week we learned that we’re finalists for a min Best of the Web Award for work on our brand new tablet edition of World Ark magazine. min, short for Media Industry News, is a resource for magazine and media professionals to learn about the latest trends in the field. Heifer is a finalist in the digital magazine category, competing against the likes of dash magazine, EBONY.com, EE Times, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Popular Science and WIRED.

World Ark, the quarterly print magazine for Heifer donors and anyone interested in hunger and poverty, has had an online presence for years. But in December of 2012 we launched an interactive tablet edition for iPads and Androids that incorporates news from the field, facts about development work around the world and ways readers can get involved, along with dynamic, gorgeous design by the talented screen wizards at Bates Creative. This tablet version is free and available on the App Store or on Google Play. The Spring 2013 edition should be available within the week.

Here’s a sneak peek of the cover of the Spring tablet edition.

Sure, we’re new to this scene and just beginning to get a handle on the amazing new ways we can reach, inform and inspire readers via a tablet format. But we’re hopeful this nomination will help us spread the word about the brilliant and hardworking Heifer project partners that we feature in each issue.

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An Ode to Bolivia

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Austin Bailey

This monkey named Boris chased chickens and stole sun-dried beef in the village of San Jose del Cavitu, so the locals now keep him as a pet. Boris is well cared for, but will happily pickpocket strangers given the chance. Photo by Jason Woods

I’ll hedge and say that it could have something to do with jet lag, or changes in altitude, or even something in the water, but anytime I visit a new country where Heifer works, auspices of magic immediately distract and I spend much of my trip wondering if, perhaps, I’m hallucinating. It’s never anything ghostly or alarming, just sights so surreal that I’m bewitched, amazed, delighted. Is there such thing as a traveler’s high?

My first surprise, upon landing in Santa Cruz, was the flurry of kisses that didn’t let up the entire 9-day trip. The customary Bolivian greeting between two women or a man and a woman is a kiss on the cheek. It’s a bit awkward at first, but who can quibble with such a charming welcome? Far superior to a handshake, in my book.

Clusters of butterflies gather on roadsides and on trails in the Amazon region of Bolivia. Photo by Jason Woods

And then, consider the capybara. These squee-worthy creatures populate the roadsides and riverbanks of the Bolivian Amazon. The world’s largest rodent, capybaras look like sleek, super-sized guinea pigs and can grow up to 100 pounds. When startled, capybaras emit kazoo-like sounds and immediately belly flop into the nearest body of water. Seriously! Neither I nor my travel companions managed to snap any capybara photos, leaving me to question, in retrospect, whether such an adorable creature actually exists.

We were further enchanted by the pink dolphins splashing in the rivers and the parrots and toucans flying overhead. “Is that an emu?” I asked our driver as we zipped down a muddy road. Turns out it was a rhea, a giant bird native to South America that can reach up to 90 pounds and nearly six feet tall.

Monkeys whooped at us from the trees as we sped by on motorbikes, headed to the shadowy chocolate forest where giant blue butterflies looped through the trees. Did you know that the juicy white fruits inside chocolate pods turn a bright purple when you chew them? I must report, however, that the charm of the chocolate forest ebbed under attack from the clouds of mosquitoes that nibbled our faces and left bloody specks on our clothes. We were also under siege from chiggers, although we didn’t realize that until hours later when we peeled off our socks.

But back to the kisses. The best part of the trip, of course, was the people we met. The purpose of our visit was to chronicle the work and progress of Heifer project participants who are amping up chocolate harvests, protecting the forests and working together to process cocoa at high quality and large quantities to secure good prices. They’re doing a pretty phenomenal job of it. This success story will appear in World Ark magazine later this year, although I may give a few glimpses of their work on this blog before then.

Hilaria Moye of San Jose Del Cavitu displays the skull of a jaguar her husband killed while out hunting. Photo by Jason Woods

Pastel dolphins and snuggly rodents aside, Bolivia is a real place with real challenges. Our visit was limited to the lowlands of Bolivia, where wild fruit is abundant and starchy crops like corn, yucca and rice grow easily, but malnutrition is still a problem because protein and nutrient-rich vegetables are harder to secure. Jobs outside the agriculture sector are rare, so incomes are low to non-existent. Some of the project participants are prosperous enough to live in houses made of bricks, but others live under palm thatch roofs held up by sticks.

The tools Bolivians have to overcome these hardships are a culture built on community and a fruitful ecosystem that can provide ample food and incomes if it’s well protected.

Elizabeth Franco Rodriguez, the president of the chocolate gatherer’s group in northeastern Bolivia’s Jasiaquiri village, is well aware of both her country’s charms and challenges. The hot, hard work of chocolate harvesting isn’t so great when you come home covered in ticks, or when the mosquitoes infect you with dengue fever, she said. But it’s a family event, and she usually brings children, nieces and nephews along. At her home, shared with extended family, everyone stays busy. Chocolate seeds ferment in the sun, children grind yucca to make starch, and Rodriguez’s sister-in-law makes cheese in the breezeway. But that evening, when the work is done, the whole family will go into the nearby town of Baures to spend a couple of hours mingling and resting in the plaza, along with hundreds of others. It’s back to the forest to harvest chocolate again the next day, and the mosquitoes would no doubt be waiting. Rodriguez never complained.

“I just find it so exotic and beautiful,” I told her as we tromped through vines and underbrush. The translator conferred with Rodriguez, and she nodded. “She says yes, it’s that way for us, too.”

Check out this tree trunk covered in thorns. Amazing! Photo by Jason Woods

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The Cost of Inequality in India

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Austin Bailey

The horrifying story of a young woman who died after being brutally gang raped in New Delhi is putting inequality in India in the international spotlight. The murder of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey is spawning widespread protests and a push for major change to the chauvinism and oppression Indian women face.

The need for change became even clearer this week, as political and spiritual leaders continued to openly blame women for inviting assault by being out in public after dark or wearing skirts. And on Wednesday, a lawyer for three of the five men accused of raping and torturing Jyoti Pandey said Pandey and her companion were solely responsible because they were out together after dark, but were not married. Wow.

The moral argument for addressing gender inequality in India is clear. And surprisingly, the economic argument is clear, as well. A survey of 2,500 women in several Indian cities revealed that nearly 82 percent of the women are leaving work earlier since the infamous Dec. 16 attack to avoid being away from home after sunset. The survey indicates that one in three women in Delhi reduced their work hours or quit their jobs altogether to avoid making themselves vulnerable to attacks. This drop in productivity will only add to India’s poverty.

India is one of the world’s poorest countries when measured by per-capita income, and the country’s failure to invite women into the workplace and support them there is a major factor. Only 35 percent of Indian women work. Just think of the potential forfeited when millions of women opt out of the workplace.

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Snapshots of the Damage

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Austin Bailey

Family and neighbors of Heifer partner Jocelyn Seco cluster at the door of a makeshift cabin. Seco's house, in the background, was destroyed. Photos by Nacho Hernandez

Survivors in the Philippines are starting to rebuild in the wake of Typhoon Bopha. The powerful storm crashed into the island of Mindanao earlier this month, washing away entire villages and killing more than 900 people.

Heifer works on a number of projects in Mindanao, and Bopha left at least 366 Heifer families with homes that were either heavily damaged or entirely destroyed. Many families also lost the pigs and goats they rely on for food and income.

Manila-based photographer Nacho Hernandez set out to capture images of the damage this week. He will return in January, along with Heifer’s World Ark writer Annie Bergman, to gauge the progress in the rebuilding effort and explore the challenges of reestablishing homes and livelihoods in the aftermath of disaster.

Below is a short video and more photos by Hernandez of Heifer International project sites in Santa Josefa, Philippines. In the video, Elmer Negros and his son work to build a makeshift cabin in the place where their house used to stand. Their house, like that of their neighbor Noel Apan, was totally uprooted by Typhoon Bopha and sent flying tens of meters away. Most of the damage to homes and crops in this area of the southern Philippines was caused by the high winds from the storm.