Yes, we have a responsibility to help those in most immediate need, like the
refugees arriving on Kenya's doorstep with starving children. Heifer's work, however, is to try to
catch families and individuals upstream, so to speak, from these catastrophes. To help communities become strong enough that, when disaster strikes (be it environmental or man-made),
they are resilient. We do this by helping them build water cisterns for collecting rain when it does fall, providing them with especially hardy livestock species, teaching them how to grow drought-resistent varieties of forage to feed their animals, and helping them plant trees and improve the soil naturally.