Tag Archives: World Ark

Coming To A Mailbox Near You

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It’s that time again. The latest edition of World Ark should be hitting mailboxes around the country.

The August issue is chock-full of interesting facts and figures, gorgeous photography and an article all about grasscutters. Don’t know what a grasscutter is? Check out the story about the new livestock that is making farmers in Ghana very successful.

Or dive into one of our Heifergraphics on water usage. You might be surprised to know that it takes A LOT more water to brew a gallon of coffee than it does to brew a gallon of tea, for example.

You can also visit the highlands of Peru through this issue. Writer Brooke Edwards tells how Heifer has helped diversify the alpaca population in the Andean mountains aided by some stunning photography by Dave Anderson.

So be on the lookout for your copy. If you don’t get World Ark in the mail, never fear! Our online page-turner edition can be accessed with the click of your mouse.

Happy reading!

Help Megan Move Mountains in Haiti with Colorado Climb

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Megan Bean is an 11-year-old fundraising dynamo. Her father is Rob Bean, head honcho for The Big Moo Canoe for Heifer International. He just organized and led a marathon canoe trip in May to raise money for Heifer Haiti’s REACH program. Stay tuned for more about the Bean family in an upcoming issue of Heifer’s World Ark magazine.

Together they’ve raised more than $25,000 in donations. Dad describes Megan as a “fireball of energy and creativity” and said she has been an integral part of Big Moo Canoe since the first efforts back in 2007. “She was adamant to do something of her own this year and thought a hike might be a fun way to raise awareness for Heifer.”

In just a few weeks, Megan will hike Mount Grays and Mount Torreys in Colorado, two 14,000-footers. She plans to take the adventure in early August and will choose the actual day based on weather forecasts for the area.

World Ark: Your fundraising project is very ambitions for an 11-year old, what inspires you to work so hard to help others? 

Megan: Well, it’s pretty simple. I have been raised in an environment where I learned to give generously and care for others graciously. I have wanted to do a 14-er for a while. I really love camping and hiking, and I had heard lots of stories from my parents’ climbing mountains and wanted to make my own project. I had heard a lot about Haiti’s disaster, and a little, but just enough, about Heifer’s REACH program through my dad’s project. I decided to turn my ambition to the aid of others. In the future, I would like to have a Horsetooth for Haiti climb where people could come to the base of Horsetooth Rock, get outside, and hike up the mountain with me in support of Heifer. But I’ll decide that next year. (Horsetooth Rock is just outside of Fort Collins).

Who do you want to help with your fundraising adventure?

My project will help Haiti. I hope to help small towns where aid is less often sent. This might sound a little weird, but I was watching “Oprah’s Next Chapter” and she was with Sean Penn in Haiti. Granted, I’m not sure who he is, but it showed how hard peoples’ lives were even two years later. I hope to help make sustainable living for the people of Haiti so life can get back to maybe a little better than normal. One of my favorite quotes is “Your life is a message, make sure it’s inspiring.”

Please help Megan in her efforts to help the people of Haiti through Heifer gifts of livestock and training. Go to her home page to donate now. We’ll keep you posted here on when she summits and how much she’s raised. Or, follow updates on The Big Moo Canoe’s Facebook page.

 

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.

Have You Checked out World Ark?

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The latest issue of Heifer’s magazine World Ark came out a few weeks ago, but we’ve had so many other things going on with Social Justice Day, our International Women’s Day series, and updating you about our history of working in Uganda, that we forgot to tell you about the other great stories we have. Donna featured Roseline Jean Pierre last week, but Katya Cengel’s article on Haiti takes a closer look at our work there in villages around the island country, particularly with the coastal village of La Savane where Heifer has provided fishermen with boat motors so that Haitian fishermen can reach the fish populations outside the bay that has fallen victim to pollution and overfishing.Frank Bures also takes a look at how Kenyans are coping with the rising cost of living, while Dr. Stephen Smith also tackles what is driving the cost of food prices up, and the subsequent effects on the poor.

Take a look at our online edition for all other features like book reviews and donor stories, too. And be on the look out for our next issue, due out in May.

Women Taking the Floor

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Editor’s Note: A commitment to empower women is embedded in Heifer International’s core values for sustainable development. In honor of International Women’s Day on Thursday, March 8, this week we’re sharing the stories of Heifer participants who take the gifts of animals and training and run with them to extraordinary results for themselves and their communities. Through hard work and innovations, each woman secures her rightful place in the family, the marketplace and the world.

The seating arrangement at a Heifer training session in Fandene on a hot May day in 2010 was fairly typical for this rural region of a strongly Muslim country: men in the front, women in the back. Mame Penda Ndong, though, scooted her chair forward and sat boldly in the front row, keeping her eyes straight ahead so she doesn’t catch any of the disapproving glances cast her way.

“In Senegal, we don’t like women sitting in the front row, displaying themselves,” a male translator explained.

There were other things about Ndong that set her apart, too. Unlike the other women, Ndong left her head uncovered, and she embellished her short hair with shiny synthetic coils. In her lap she clutched a hot-pink leather purse, and a sassy purple bra strap peeked out from the neck of her anango, a traditional dress.

Ndong grew up in Fandene, and was lucky to get a much better education than most of her peers. She nearly finished high school, and her schooling earned her a job in the nearby city of Tataguine, away from the hot and sandy days of sun-up to sundown manual work, which the women who stayed in Fandene take on.

But Ndong clearly didn’t flee to the city, never to return. She comes home almost every weekend to help monitor the Heifer project she helped start. She brings along her two sons and one daughter, but her husband is far away, working in the United States. She’d like to bring the entire family home to Diarrere to stay if the Heifer sheep thrive, the improved seeds produce healthier yields and the project becomes successful enough to support more people.

After living in a city for years, miles away from the rigid gender roles that dominate village life, Ndong doesn’t hesitate to speak up or claim a chair for herself while the other women sit on the ground to leave the better seats for the men. Do the men deserve such respect and special treatment? It’s part of the Senegalese culture, but it’s a part that might be changing, she said. Encouraging other women to sit in the front row and take on leadership positions is taking some time, but Ndong said she’ll press on.

“Men speak a lot, but they don’t act much,” she said, nodding toward a cluster of men smoking and drinking tea nearby. Women are different. “You don’t see them speaking a lot, but you see them working a lot. If you look at the project here, you’ll see the women do more. If they don’t take the floor, they’ll be working on things they don’t decide.”

Link: http://www.heifer.org/media/world-ark/archives/2011/summer/women-taking-the-floor

Who’s Hungry?

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As if the estimate that 1 billion people in the world are hungry wasn’t hard enough to fathom, a new survey developed by researchers in the United States, Colombia and Brazil suggests the number could actually be twice that.

The new survey, which requires people to report on their food consumption over a period of three months, is a departure from the facts and figures-based method the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization used to come up with the 1 billion figure. The FAO made their estimate by comparing how much food is available, divided by the population. If the number of calories available for each person is too low, those numbers were used to estimate how many people are food insecure.

The new survey, called ELCSA (for Escala Latinoamericana y Caribena de Seguridad Alimentaria), takes a more personal approach. Based on the U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module used by the Department of Agriculture, ELCSA yields more nuanced information. Results show where in a country hunger is most pernicious, which groups are hungry at greater rates and whose diets are adequate in calories but not nutrients.

Initial results from surveys conducted in Brazil and Colombia suggest hunger is a much larger issue than we knew. The survey is already being adopted in other Central and South American countries.