After the Animals

By Austin Bailey, World Ark senior editor

Christine Aanyu remains relatively healthy despite being HIV positive. Oxen from Heifer help her cultivate nutritious food to eat and sell.

KAMPALA, UGANDA — Heifer animals first came to Uganda 27 years ago, and success stories of farmers here pulling themselves from subsistence to abundance are easy to come by. In fact, Uganda sets the stage for the most famous Heifer success story of all. This is the homeland of Beatrice Biira, the girl from a village called Kisinga who earned enough money for school by selling milk from her goat, then went on to graduate from college in the United States. Heifer still gives goats, bees, pigs and cows in this country working hard to right itself after decades of deadly civil wars that decimated crops and livestock and chased people from their homes.

But once bellies are full and school fees are paid, once families have a bit of savings to fall back on, they begin to look ahead to see how life can be even better. Armed with newfound confidence and even a sliver of security, mothers embarrassed when they can’t understand their children’s textbooks decide it’s time to learn to read and write. Families who sell their milk cup-by-cup to neighbors realize they can make more money more quickly by teaming up with other farmers to sell milk in bulk. Heifer International is moving beyond cows, goats and chickens to help these people achieve more. This is the story about what comes after the animals.

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After the Animals

Ankole (an-KOHL-ee) cattle, the long-horned, local breed, are renowned for their meat but produce much less milk than Holsteins. Heifer is helping project participants crossbreed their animals to boost production.

MORE MILK, BETTER PRICES

It was only 11 a.m., but 18-year-old James Ankare was bone tired. He woke up at 5 to milk his cow, then set out to collect more milk from his neighbors. An hour later he was pushing the bike, its seat and baskets piled with 24 gallons of milk sloshing in yellow jerry cans, over the rutted dirt roads leading to the new chilling plant of the Kiboga West Livestock Cooperative.

“I must leave by 6 to get here in time,” he said through a translator. The 18-mile trek over hills and through the grassy pastures of the rural Kiboga region in central Uganda takes five hours, and Ankare does it every single day.

A cement building housing a gleaming, pot-bellied cooler the size of a hippopotamus, the chilling plant was the most popular spot in Kyankwanzi village when Ankare wheeled up. A pack of children, barefoot and dusty, laughed and chased each other in the street out front. A dozen men, each hoisting their own jerry cans and repurposed motor oil bottles full of milk, waited their turn in line. Like Ankare, these farmers are members of the cooperative and bring their milk every day so it can be chilled and sold in bulk to a processor who will pasteurize and package it for sale.

When Ankare got to the head of the line, the plant manager poured samples from each of the cans and dropped them in test tubes. Ankare’s milk had always been fine in the past, but on this day two containers of a neighbor’s milk were rejected, most likely because the jerry cans weren’t cleaned well enough from the day before.

So Ankare loaded the spoiled milk back on his bicycle in preparation for the long trip home. As pay for the job of toting his neighbors’ milk to the plant each day, Ankare keeps the milk money earned on Saturdays and Sundays. Lucky for him, he delivered the spoiled milk on a Tuesday, so his pay wouldn’t be short.

The Kiboga chilling plant opened in March, part of the East Africa Dairy Development project funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and organized by a conglomeration of nonprofits including Heifer International. The goal of these cooperatives is to help farmers boost production and find a ready market for their milk.

The plant was bustling in May even though the co-op had signed on only 496 members, roughly half the membership goal. Members were enthusiastic despite the lower-than-expected prices they were earning from the processor. The hope is that as more farmers join and the co-op can offer a greater quantity of milk, processors will begin to compete for their product by offering them more money per gallon.

“If we fill this one up, I’ll get another one,” plant manager Isaac Ibanda Kyemba said of the cooler. Kyemba was confident the quality of the milk was high, since he checked every batch for spoilage and ran it through a double cheesecloth sieve before adding it into the cooler. He was fastidious about taking steps to keep the milk fresh, and even more fastidious about keeping the cooling plant clean. “We wash and wash and wash,” he said.

Nora Kanyana, headmistress of the local primary school and chairperson of the Kiboga West co-op board, often supervises those cleanings. Her goal with both of her jobs is to end the suffering brought on by poverty, and she attacks each role with patience, knowing the rewards may not come for many years. Kanyana took on the school after its founder, her brother, died while the mud walls of the first school building were going up. The school grew under her leadership and now serves 320 local students who crowd the benches every school day. The students do their best to concentrate on their lessons even when cow dung is spread on the dirt floors to keep the dust down, and rain pours in through the rusted holes in the metal roof.

Like any good headmistress, Kanyana commands hard work and good manners from her students, who snap to attention when she steps into their classroom or passes them on the street. She earns the same respect from co-op board members for her ideas to boost productivity among member farmers and make their milk more marketable. Kanyana is pushing for a well to be dug behind the co-op building so members can have fresh water for cleaning the cooling plant and won’t have to pay a truck to haul the water in once a week. She ordered metal milk cans to distribute to co-op farmers. The metal cans will be easier to clean and will keep the milk fresh longer than the plastic ones, she explained. And she’s working on a plan to open satellite milk collection locations, so farmers like Ankare won’t have to travel so far each day.

Members were already taking advantage of an artificial insemination program aimed at improving milk production. Ankole [an-KOHL-ee] cattle, the long-horned local breed, are renowned for delicious meat, but they produce only about half as much milk as Holsteins. Farmers here are trying to marry the Ankole’s immunities to local diseases and fitness to the Ugandan environment to the productivity of Western breeds.

Kanyana said perks like these would entice more people to join the co-op, even though some are leery after earlier promises of help from other groups turned out to be failures or shams. “It is very difficult for us to convince some farmers because of some of the people who came before us and embezzled the farmers’ money,” she said.

After the Animals

Children watch as members bring their milk to the cooperative. The milk will be tested, chilled and sold in bulk to processors.

TOO MUCH WORK

In Uganda, you can tell the wealth of a household by looking at the roof. Shiny corrugated metal is proof of prosperity; dull or rusty metal hints at better times gone by. Weathered metal scraps patched together mark industry driven by necessity. Grass, the traditional topping to the wattle-and-daub homes most rural Ugandans live in, can be gotten for free. Collecting it and hauling it home is an itchy job, and the grass has to be replaced every two years or so. But often, the price makes grass the only choice.

Twenty-year-old Benjamin Tukei lives in a round, grass-thatched hut in Abokakwap village in the Bukedea region, in a family compound shared by a dozen people. As the oldest of eight children, he gets a hut to himself. This is where he sleeps when he’s home from school, which is far more often than he’d like. He studies at a boarding school in Mbale where he’s in “Senior Four,” roughly the equivalent of 10th grade. Tukei is a strong student, but he has to drop out often when his parents run out of money to pay tuition and fees. “Sometimes when they fail to pay my school fees, I’ll chill at home, read my books,” he said in perfect English, complete with slang. His Ateso-speaking parents know no English, but Tukei mastered it as part of his studies. He wants to be a doctor after going to medical school in the United States or Europe, so he takes school very seriously. When the money runs low and Tukei is called home, he gets his friends to bring him books and lessons so he can stay up-to-date and still pass his exams.

His home village of Abokakwap, on fl at land in the shadow of Mount Elgon, is a collection of grass-topped houses and fields laid out in tidy, oxen-plowed rows, or shaped by hoes into mounds of soil arranged like upside-down egg cartons. Heifer first started work here in 2005, with projects designed to help the unusually high number of families in Abokakwap affected by HIV and AIDS. Tukei’s own family includes four AIDS orphans, his uncle’s children who came to live with them when their father died of the disease in 1997. One of the children is HIV positive.

In mid-May, Tukei was home on holiday, working in the family fields to bring in the crops that will help fund his education. He spent the morning of our visit digging the sweet potatoes and cassava that make up the bulk of the family’s twice-daily meals. “I’m trying to work very hard so I can make my future,” he said. “I’m tired of this work.”

Oxen the family received from Heifer International in 2007 make running the family farm much easier, and they help keep the family together. Before the oxen came, resources were tighter and Tukei had to stay with his aunt. Heifer training taught the family how to plant a kitchen garden of cabbage, peppers, onions, tomatoes and spinach. Neither Tukei’s mother nor his stepmother went to school, so they’re both taking Heifer-sponsored literacy classes. It’s common in this region of Uganda for men to have more than one wife.

The oxen make the biggest difference, Tukei said. “Before, we used a hoe. It was very hard. The work is very easy now.” And the family can rent the oxen out to neighbors, although they often lend them for free to people who can’t pay.

While the oxen are certainly helpful, they didn’t solve all of the family’s problems. Tilling the fields is easier now, but harvesting is still a big chore. The family’s well went dry long ago, so family members take turns fetching water from a well more than half a mile away. Without a proper place to store the harvest, many of the vegetables they cultivate go bad before the family can eat or sell them.

“My father is growing old because of too much work,” Tukei said. He believes education is his best hope. When he gets a good job, he will be able to send money home to his father. “I want to help him,” he said.

After the Animals

Oxen received from Heifer in 2007 are used to prepare a plot for a kitchen garden.

LATE TO SCHOOL

Beatrice Egolet squeezed onto a bench under the shade of a mango tree, angling to get a good view of the blackboard propped against the trunk. It was the rainy season in Amus village near the Kenya border, prime time for planting and tending the fields. And of course Egolet’s animals and eight children needed tending, too. But Egolet makes literacy classes a priority and always comes for two hours, twice a week.

A cluster of children stood off to the side, hands on hips, as more women dressed in bright, puff-sleeved gomesi dresses took their places on the wooden benches set in the dust. The women settled into their chairs, a couple of them hoisting nursing babies to their chests, as the teacher picked up his chalk. For today he planned a lesson on spelling and nutrition.

The women pulled out battered notebooks and pencils, and the teacher asked them to make a list of the crops they grew in their gardens. Taking turns, the women came up to the board to write down the Luganda words for cassava, sweet potatoes, millet, beans, maize and potatoes. The spelling for matooke, the Luganda word for banana, proved difficult, and two women misspelled it at the board. The teacher corrected them, the women giggled at their mistakes, then the class spelled the word aloud together.

These literacy classes offered the first chance Egolet and many of her classmates ever had for an education. Egolet’s four brothers went to school, but she and her sisters stayed home to learn how to tend the house and fields. Until recently, it was common for parents to educate only their boys and invest in their girls by giving them the skills to make them good wives. Egolet’s parents earned a payment of cows from her suitor’s family when they married her off at age 15.

Egolet got a cow through a Heifer project a few years ago. The cow, named Peace, lives with its calf in a pristine enclosure shaded by a grass roof. The pen is divided into different compartments neatly labeled for feeding, resting and exercise. The family always took good care of Peace, but Egolet struggled at first. Because she couldn’t read or write, Egolet worried she wasn’t getting all she could from the trainings Heifer offered on caring for her new animal. And while she knew it was important to keep logs of how much milk Peace produced each day, Egolet wasn’t able to.

She wasn’t the only project participant struggling with illiteracy, and the Heifer fi eld staff took note. “In these markets, if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to write, it is very easy to be cheated,” project coordinator Silas Amugoll said. Egolet struggled with illiteracy outside the markets, too. “I would travel and couldn’t read the road signs, so I would get lost,” she said through a translator.

So the women in the Bukedea district who benefited from the previous Heifer project initiated a three-year literacy project that would teach them to count, read and write. The project was designed for 200 students, but 232 people signed up. “We don’t turn anyone away,” Amugoll said. Some men signed up, but roughly 80 percent of the students are women. The project encompasses 10 classes offered at different locations in the district so students don’t have to travel too far.

Egolet started taking the literacy classes when they first started two years ago, and the meticulous record book of Peace’s milk production is proof of how much she’s learned. Peace produces five gallons of milk a day, and the family uses only one of those. What’s left after the calf gets its share goes to market. The proceeds pay for school for all eight of Egolet’s children, girls and boys alike.

After the Animals

Regina Nasungu nibbles on her pen during a lesson on spelling and nutrition, while her 9-month-old son Akimu Nasungu plays by her feet.

COPING WITH AIDS EVERY DAY

Uganda was among the first sub-Saharan countries to fall victim to the AIDS epidemic. The country’s first case was diagnosed in 1982, and by 1992 the prevalence rate climbed to 18 percent. That number is down to roughly 5.4 percent among adults in Uganda now. It’s progress, but it still seems high compared with the United States’ 0.6 percent rate of adult HIV/AIDS infections.

In Abokakwap, a village hit especially hard by the AIDS epidemic, people are hopeful. Because the Ugandan government and nonprofit groups subsidize anti-retroviral treatments, and because infection rates are dropping, the sickness is not the menace it once was. Still, the villagers of Abokakwap deal with HIV and AIDS daily. When the epidemic was new, people were afraid to admit they were infected or even seek treatment because of the stigma that was attached. Today, that stigma is largely gone, especially in places like Abokakwap where just about every family is affected. Most households include at least one orphan taken in when the parents died of AIDS.

Christine Aanyu, 37, is both lucky and unlucky when it comes to AIDS. She’s unlucky because both she and her husband are HIV positive. She’s lucky because she remains in good health for the most part, despite some joint pain and aches in her chest. She’s also lucky that none of her eight children, ages 20 months to 17 years, have tested positive for HIV. Last year Aanyu’s family received oxen as part of a Heifer project. They use them to cultivate cabbages, cowpeas and peanuts so they can eat healthfully and make some extra money at the markets.

Aanyu isn’t shy about revealing her status, and she’s hopeful enough to make plans for herself and her family for years down the road. Like many of the women of Abokakwap village, Aanyu carves out four hours a week for a literacy class. She enrolled because she couldn’t understand her children’s schoolbooks, and she wanted to one day be able to read the Bible for herself.

Aanyu is a strong student, as are most of her classmates, teacher Harriet Adong reported. “They are good learners, and they are so much united. When they are digging, they are working in one garden. They are always together,” she said.

The students help each other as much as they can, but sometimes it’s not enough. Aanyu asked to send a message to people in the United States in hopes of helping them understand a bit more about what her life is like.

“Please tell them that people in Africa try their best, but we don’t have every resource we need,” she said through a translator. “If you can help, then I would appreciate it very much.”