Tag Archives: Tanzania

Kilimanjaro Quest Becomes Heifer Fundraiser

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Of all the goals I had on my bucket list, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro was at the very top.
Mount Kilimanjaro

Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa

How could I have dreamed I’d get the chance to make the climb as part of the job I love?

Next week, I’ll travel to Tanzania and begin scaling the 19,000-foot peak, documenting the fundraising journey of several special Heifer supporters. I’ll be doing my best to keep up with them, and you can keep up with me via Twitter and Facebook.

Kilimanjaro climbers Brendan and Randy Bagg
Kilimanjaro climbers Brendan and Randy Bagg

The climbers are employees of Elanco Animal Health, one of Heifer’s most loyal corporate backers. Heifer gets strong support from Elanco (funding projects that help thousands of families globally) as well as from its big-hearted individual employees. They must be dedicated, if they’re climbing the tallest peak on the African continent.

Mt. Kilimanjaro was on Randy Bagg’s bucket list, too. He’s a veterinarian and regulatory manager with Elanco in Canada, and seems thrilled to be climbing with his son, Brendan. I’ll tell you more about my fellow climbers in updates from Tanzania.

I fully expect the climb to be extremely difficult. It’s not so much the physical exertion as the altitude: it can turn an extremely fit person into a nauseated, hyperventilating mess, even at rest. Harrowing accounts of other people’s climbs aren’t helping me psychologically.

Kilimanjaro fundraiser supplies

My ever-growing pile of supplies for Kilimanjaro

Kilimanjaro is a grand and gorgeous mountain. The first documented summit occurred in 1889. Its highest peak, dubbed “Kaiser Wilhelm Peak” by Westerners, was re-named “Uhuru Peak” after the Swahili word for freedom in 1961 when Tanzania gained independence. The top of the mountain features a broad caldera, which was once covered by ice. But in the last 100 years, 80 percent of the ice cover has disappeared from Kilimanjaro.

My packing is underway, and fundraising for Heifer is progressing, too. If all goes well, we’ll be standing at the top of a continent on October 1st.

World Humanitarian Day 2012 at Heifer International

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Today is World Humanitarian Day, and in honor of today, we at Heifer International celebrate the ordinary and extraordinary works of humanitarianism being conducted by its project participants, supporters and employees every day. With a mission to end hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth, Heifer thrives on the humanitarian spirit that is awakened with our Pass On the Gift concept.

Passing on the Gift Makes Everyone a Humanitarian

On Humanitarian Day, the world honors individuals who have shared their time and resources, and even braved danger and adversity, to help their fellow human beings. Heifer enables the poor and hungry to become humanitarians themselves with our model that capitalizes on the ability of livestock to reproduce. Each project participant passes on the gift of its animal’s first-born female offspring, along with training, to another family in the community.

Passing on the Gift in Nepal
Passing on the Gift ceremony in Nepal. Photo by Geoff Oliver Bugbee, courtesy of Heifer International.

Donating Through Heifer Makes YOU a Humanitarian

Heifer also allows people who enjoy material security to become part of the humanitarian process when they donate an animal from Heifer’s catalog, and allows them to spread the joy of humanitarian action further by giving an animal gift in someone else’s honor.

Tanzanian Participant Jailed for Helping Community

In addition to its many humanitarian projects designed to bring families into self-reliance, Heifer International has seen remarkable examples of participants and workers who risk their own wellbeing to bring prosperity to others. For example, fish farmer Nicholas Mwakabelele was jailed for a period in Tanzania over his efforts to create fish hatcheries for his community. He took special time to help a blind man, Wailso Nzalayaluma, to create his own fish pond so that he would no longer have to beg for food.

Nicholas Mwakabelele in front of his tilapia pond.

Nicholas Mwakabelele in front of his tilapia pond. Photo by Dave Anderson, courtesy of Heifer International.

Heifer Cambodia Director Persevered to Become Humanitarian Leader

Heifer Cambodia Director Keo KeangHeifer Cambodia Country Director Keo Keang grew up under the Khmer Rouge regime, and her family struggled to send her to school without money for books, supplies and uniforms. She strived to become a leader and now works every day to bring basic resources to families, especially women, who are struggling to emerge from oppressive poverty.

Heifer Haiti Staff Aided Earthquake Victims

In the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, Heifer employees who had seen damage to their own homes and families nonetheless worked tirelessly to help other distressed victims. As he worried about the fate of his missing sister, trapped under rubble for a week, Heifer employee Junior Lozama worked to aid other victims of the quake, thinking, “Maybe some stranger is helping my sister right now.”

It’s that spirit of generosity and common humanity that gives Heifer International hope that an end to hunger and poverty is truly possible. Heifer is proud to stand with the United Nations in its call for celebrants of World Humanitarian Day to help improve our world by doing something good for someone else.

World Humanitarian DayWhat Makes You a Humanitarian?

Tell us in the comments section below.

Around the Web: Red Cross Partners With Heifer in this Inspiring Story of a Tanzanian Teen

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Every Sunday we will highlight some of the people who are funding our work creatively or helping us spread the word of our mission online. If you spot Heifer International while you’re surfing the web or know of a fun or creative fundraising effort, please share it with us here in the comments.

Aquatic Safety

Photo credit: redcross.org

The Red Cross website features a story of impact that programs and partnerships have on people living with HIV and their families. The story is about Daoud, and 18-year-old from Kanembwa, Tanzania, he is participating in the Tanzania Red Cross Society’s Integrated HIV program, which has partnered with Heifer International’s livestock experts to teach vulnerable children like Daoud to raise chickens for food and to sell. He is the oldest of five siblings who lost their parents years ago. A very inspiring story.

Fundraisers can be simple and fun, like this one in Madbury, NH. Guests enjoyed dinner and a movie Thursday night and benefited Heifer International at the same time at Union Congregational Church. After enjoying an Italian Dinner, guests watched “Hoot,” and learned a little bit more about the work we do at Heifer International.

Photo credit: presidiosentinel.com

University Christian Church in San Diego yearly rummage sale has become one of the city’s oldest and biggest sales, and has supported many non-profits including Heifer International. This year it was held August 2 – 4.

The Church of the Holy Nativity’s parking lot was turned into a suburban farm for Family Farm Fest, a day of family fun while raising money and awareness for Heifer International.

Capturing the Faces of Heifer

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It would be impossible to tell the real stories of Heifer participants’ lives without our freelance photographers, a point highlighted by a recent blog post celebrating the work of Dave Anderson, who has traveled to Haiti, Ecuador, Peru, Tanzania and Romania to document the lives of Heifer participants.

I was lucky enough to accompany Dave to Tanzania to visit a Maasai camel project for the Holiday 2010 issue of World Ark magazine. The country director at the time asked us to set aside at least 10 days so he could show us the real work. Visitors are always in such a hurry, he said. They want to see the real work, but they never want to travel more than a couple of hours from the airport!

Dave and I had no such problem. Our itinerary took us from our arrival in Arusha in the northern part of the country, all the way to the south-central plains and then back to Dar es Salaam for departure, nearly 2,000 miles on the road by the time we boarded the plane headed for home. We collected dozens of stories of Heifer work all over the country, best highlighted by this video that Dave captured while on the trip.

We got pulled over for speeding at least four times and stuck once trying to cross a handmade bridge made of large sticks roped together on the way to a blind fish farmer’s house. We walked the last mile or so to the house, with a neighbor woman offering to carry large photography equipment on her head. One hostel we stayed at out in the boonies of Tanzania had cockroaches the size of a child’s tennis shoe that would not be cowed by the waving of an adult-sized flip-flop.

We saw herds of buffalo, giraffes and baboons as well as elephants and other wild critters from the road and had logistical challenges of the amusing variety such as a fire ant attack at a farm built on the steep slopes of Mount Meru and a motel that forgot to dry our laundry so we had to haul a pile of wet clothes around in the car for days after.

Click here for a few behind-the-scenes shots from a blog on the road I posted that shows just how “involved” photographers can be. Just after the first photo in the zero-grazing pen, Dave tipped backwards into the fragrant muck, illustrating just how important efficient laundry services can be.

Do you have any favorite photos from recent World Arks or blog posts? Email us or comment here to let us know what you’d like to see in future World Ark photos.

Heifer’s Superwoman Going Strong in Tanzania

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Editor’s Note: Acommitment to empower women is embedded in Heifer International’score values for sustainable development. In honor of International Women’s Dayon March 8, this week we’re sharing the stories of Heifer participants who takethe gifts of animals and training and run with them to extraordinary resultsfor themselves and their communities. Through hard work and innovations, eachwoman secures her rightful place in the family, the marketplace and the world.

Photos by Dave Anderson
In my first blog post about Huruma Mhapa while still on thetrip in Tanzania in 2010, I dubbed her “Heifer’s Superwoman” with this introduction:
I dare you to find a Heifer participant who has done morefor her family, her village, her Heifer dairy cows and farm educationthroughout her country and Africa than Huruma Mhapa of Ibumila village in theNjombe district of Tanzania.
In July 1993, after living in poverty in a small mud hutwith her family, she received one dairy cow from Heifer International and itspartner, the Anglican Church of Tanzania, and was trained in the zero-grazingmethod. Today, she’s a regular lecturer at the Sokoine University ofAgriculture in Morogoro, farms 11 acres and cares for four dairy cows, alldescendants of that first cow.
From 2002 to the present, she has trained more than 4,000farmers directly, including those from Heifer projects in other countriesincluding Malawi and Kenya. Many thousands continue to visit her farm to learnabout zero grazing and organic farming.
In 2011, Mhapa won Heifer’s top honor for Women in LivestockDevelopment for all of Africa and was profiled with all the other globalwinners in World Ark magazine.
“The cattle project brought love in our family, improved ourlivelihoods and allowed our three children to go to school. If the cows alsocherish their lives in their new shed I will be very grateful,” Mhapa said. “Iconsider these cows as part of my family. I wake up at 4 a.m. At that time, mychildren are not yet awake, so the first ones to be greeted by me in themorning are the cows.”
Mhapa is a leader, a technical expert in the zero-grazingmethod of dairy farming and organic crop production, and an innovator and communitychange agent. “I can say that the way the men in this village perceive womenhas changed,” Mhapa said. “They see us, the women, as very important and theynow cooperate in increasing the income of our households.”
Her story is not about the one gift of the single cow she received in1993. Instead, it is about what she has done since with her own hard work and business savvy to make the most of that smallopportunity.

Yes! Invest in Agricultural Research to Feed the World

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Photo by Dave Anderson
Isaya and Restituta Mlewa at their Tanzanian organic farm.

Bill Gates’ 2012 annual letter “is an argument for making the choice to keep on helping extremely poor people build self-sufficiency.”

In an interview with the U.K.’s MSN news, Gates explains that his hope for the letter is that it “helps people connect to the choice we all have to make. Relatively small investments changed the future for hundreds of millions of small farm families. The choice now is this: Do we continue those investments so that the 1 billion people who remain poor benefit? Or do we tolerate a world in which one in seven people is undernourished, stunted and in danger of starving to death?

“In times of tight budgets, we have to pick our priorities,” Gates continues. “It’s clear that in this particular time, we’re in danger of deciding that aid to the poorest is not one of them. I am confident, however, that if people understand what their aid has already accomplished—and its potential to accomplish so much more—they’ll insist on doing more, not less. That is why I wrote my letter.”

At Heifer, our supporters, donors, staff members and participants around the world say Amen! and pass the tomatoes to spreading the gospel on how small investments (in our case heifers, goats, bees or tree seedlings), can stop hunger in the short-term and create sustainable income in the long-term. Every day we see investments in small farm families empower them beyond subsistence to create a chain of self-sufficiency that lifts up entire communities.

Heifer works with the Gates Foundation on the East Africa Dairy Development project that not only connects dairy farmers to markets, but links public and private interests including banks and investors, to create a growing local economy based on agriculture.

In his letter, Gates emphasizes not only innovations in agricultural production, but also in creative partnerships to better feed the world. “I am excited because innovative partnerships that capitalize on the comparative advantages of all these players can accelerate progress, speeding the transition beyond aid for many poor countries.”

Heifer shares similar goals with the Gates Foundation, including a focus on investing in women, preserving land for future generations and developing innovations in the field that engage the people we are trying to help in making the best decisions for their land, culture, sustainability and environment.

Isaya and Restituta Mlewa, shown above, and featured in this World Ark magazine article, are proof that participants have innovations of their own to add. From the gift of one dairy cow and Heifer training in dairy and organic farming, the couple came up with their own systems using animal and plant waste that are now an example for the thousands of farmers they have trained across Africa.

In Nepal, the Heifer project community of Shaktikhor, through a Farmer Field School, did their own research into feed varieties and care that improved the health and increased the weight of goats throughout the community. Their innovations were shared and picked up by other Heifer project communities in Nepal.

At a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland today, Gates said “innovations in crop science, access to information for farmers and new models of cooperation between governments and private enterprises are some of the developments that can improve global food security,” he said. “I believe the opportunity to double or even triple (food) productivity is there.”

Join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Heifer International in promoting the value of investments in agriculture around the world to end hunger and poverty.

Give a Camel: A Gift that’s in it for the Long Haul

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At home in arid environments, camels provide plenty to needy families who have few resources. Aside from the nutritious milk and transportation they provide, camels are easy on the environment. They eat leaves and trees and not precious grasses that need to be saved for other livestock.

Isaya Shakwet. Photos by Jake Lyell for Heifer International.

Sabina and Isaya Shakwet live in the rural Maasai village of Mkuru, Tanzania, where 12 camels donated by Heifer supporters were sent. At first, the camels mostly provided families with much needed milk (which has three times the vitamin C as cow’s milk) and transportation. But through Passing on the Gift, there were soon 26 camels in the community. And that’s when they had the idea to team up and start the Mkuru Camel Safari Cultural Tourist Program. “Through camels we get a lot of income,” said Isaya gratefully. “It helps children with education fees. We pay doctors once a month to come out and give medical care to pregnant and nursing women.”


Transportation
For nomadic people like the Maasai in Tanzania, camels have lightened the load. Families have trained camels to plow and haul firewood, as well as crops to be sold at markets.

Shelter
Income from the sale of surplus milk can help pay school and doctor fees. But families can also take the money to make improvements to their homes–including solid roofing.

Microenterprise
Recipients of Heifer camels are recognizing the business opportunities that their camels provide. Extra income has allowed one group to launch a cultural program for tourists. The camels provide the transportation for the safari through rural Tanzania.

This holiday season, give the gift of a camel to your daughter, who repeatedly made you sing the song, “Sally the Camel (has five humps” when she was 2. And read more about Heifer’s work with camels.

Adapting to Drought in Tanzania

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Photos by Dave Anderson


We visited a Maasai community in northern Tanzania in the rainy season, in April of last spring, when trees were lush with leaves that Heifer camels nibbled on happily throughout the day. Yet at the sandaled feet of the young men who led the animals to graze was a deep sand left in the wake of a terrible, persistent drought that continues to change the lives and parts of the culture of this community forever.

It’s hard to imagine enough grass ever grew here to sustain the large cattle herds the Maasai traditionally raised in this area for centuries. From the mid-1990s to about 2007, the land shriveled and baked in the hot sun, with no relief. Grasses and water sources dried up, as did the Maasai primary income from cattle. They began selling their gaunt animals for as little as $5 each. Those not sold perished.
It is part of the Maasai culture that meat is only eaten on rare occasions: When a baby is born to give the mother strength, to honor a special guest, to help heal the very ill or for ceremonial reasons. They got protein from the milk or from a milk/blood mixture. So many animals were left where they fell to return to the earth.
As the drought stretched on, almost every cow in herds of hundreds died. “When their cows died they went back to square one, to poverty,” said Peter Mwakabwale, then Heifer Tanzania’s country director. A small amount of grains from government assistance is all they had to eat for much of the year.

Their women’s group sought help from Heifer, and the community received 31 Dromedary camels in 2008, which were much more adaptable to the new climate reality in Eastern Africa. They provide not only a sweet, nutritious milk, even in times of drought, but also help with transportation of water and firewood.


It wasn’t necessarily an easy transition, and there are still some hitches. The women, responsible for milking and caring for the animals, are frightened by the large, sometimes unpredictable creatures, prone to fits of bucking, kicking or spitting when they’re stressed out. Other nearby communities accustomed to cow milk are reluctant at first to try or buy camel milk.

However, the camels also brought many welcome changes to the Maasai culture. Because of the size of the animals, the men help out more and accompany women to gather firewood and water. They produce milk even during the dry season, getting enough water and nutrition from trees and bushes well out of the reach of traditional cattle.
To me as a visitor to the culture and the country, the picture is a beautiful one. I never saw the area before the drought, but today the community is thriving with life and celebration. Athletic young men and women in bright blues, reds and purples mingle among the camels, with views of distant mountains set against a clear, blue sky. The children make happy slurping noises and giggle as they tip back their milk mugs for every last drop. As an editor for Heifer’s World Ark magazine, I’m amazed more with every visit by the careful planning and attention to culture, climate and sustainability our organization invests in each project.
Read more about Heifer’s camel projects in Tanzania and stay tuned for an insider’s look in a coming World Ark at how Heifer participants and country staff help choose appropriate animals for each community served. Click here to order a camel or share of a camel to continue to help participants in Eastern Africa adapt to the extended drought.

Kids Can Make a Difference

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Photo by Dave Anderson

Check out the fantastic online Finding Solutions Newsletter by Jane and Larry Levine. The newsletter is published quarterly by the nonprofit program Kids Can Make a Difference (KIDS).
Their Winter 2011 issue focuses on Food and Sustainability, and includes my story about 7-year-old Sifa, daughter of Timothy Sheghere Mgonja, a Heifer International camel project participant.
Sifa is a bit shy when the towering adult camels get too close, but she’s all smiles when the young calves start nosing around (as seen in the above photo.)
She’s also able to attend English primary school and has an improved brick home and better nutrition, all thanks to the Heifer camel project. Let us know what you think and please share the newsletter with others who might be interested.
If you didn’t catch it in the Holiday 2010 issue, read a related World Ark article on a Maasai camel project here.

Unique Gifts: You Got Me a What?!

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There is no box or gift bag in the world that could cover the dramatic lumps and bumps of a dromedary camel long enough to surprise anyone.

So let Heifer handle the details and be a part of helping a struggling family overseas. To order a camel or a share of one in honor of a family member or friend, follow this link.
Why give a camel?
No. 1 reason: Camels supply nutritious milk rich in vitamin C to families in drought-prone areas where other livestock can’t survive. The milk provides food and income to help with other necessities.
No. 2: A camel is a quirky gift of optimism and joy and reflects a wish to play a small part in a better world.
Some fun camel facts courtesy World Book Encyclopedia:
Deep in deserts, camels serve as almost the only source of transportation, food, clothing and shelter.
They can carry loads of up to 330 pounds for eight hours. They can run 10 miles per hour and travel as far as 100 miles in one day.
A camel can hear well but like a donkey it often pays no attention to commands unless there’s something in it for him.
Long, curly eyelashes protect their eyes from blowing sand. Thick eyebrows shield them from the sun.
The hump of a camel is mostly fat. If food becomes scarce, the animal can use fat in the hump to provide energy. It isn’t a storage place for water as many people believe.
Camels are sometimes called the “ship of the desert” for their medium-speed pacing. Both legs on the same side lift together and come down together, providing the swaying motion.
To read World Ark‘s article how Heifer camels continue to help a Maasai community in Tanzania, go here.