Moo

One night in September of 2010, my best friend in Tanzania had a secret. I was over at his house for dinner, and he was being...well...insufferable. There was this big, important, game-changing thing that he wanted to tell me...but not tonight. Why not tonight? Because it’s late, and you’re tired, he said. I asked politely. He refused. I entreated. He denied. I threatened violence. He acquiesced. Turns out that in the village he originally comes from (about 30 miles north, not far from the booming metropolis of Mafinga, from whence comes the name of this blog), there are cows. Of the milking variety. The next week we went to look. The cows were real. They mooed at me.

This would be a good point to mention that there are hundreds of cows already in my village. They are a local, sturdier, hardier (read: uglier) breed of cows than the breeds we are accustomed to. They are Brahman cows, so at the base of their neck they each have a large hump, which wiggles and jiggles and giggles as they walk (I’m not sure it actually giggles. But it does look amused). Generally speaking they are used for plow duties, but they also make a tasty meal from time to time. They give out very little milk, when they give any. If you can get two liters a day from a local cow, she’s a gold mine.

The cows in my friend’s home village gave out considerably more than that: as much as 20 liters per day. For a quick idea of the economic boon that signifies, remember that the vast majority of Tanzanians live on less than $2 a day, and often much less. 20 liters of milk can be sold for about $10, and it can be sold every day, ten months out of the year. That’s not mentioning the other benefits: manure, biogas, and heifers to sell. Ah yes, heifers. These cows, you see, were part of a project funded by Heifer International. Some of you may have heard of it, but if you haven’t, it is an American organization that gives out livestock loans (and accompanying training) to impoverished villagers in developing countries. It generally works like this: you get a cow. That cow has a baby cow, and you give the baby cow to another villager. The second baby cow is yours, to keep and cuddle. The third baby cow goes back to Heifer International, and your loan has been repaid. It is an effective and brilliant system, and there are villages in Tanzania with Heifer International projects that have been running for 20 years and have spread to almost every household. A project like this can completely transform a village within a generation. We wanted one. We asked for one. We were denied.

When I say we, I’m no longer just talking about Nziku (my best friend here, and a frequent guest star in this blog) and myself. By the time we delivered our official request to Heifer International, my nearest Peace Corps neighbor had come on board, Miss Kenzie Payne. I’ll talk more about her near the end, but she’s from Wisconsin, she worked in a cheese shop, and she kicks ass. We decided to do this project as a team, requesting a Heifer project for each of our villages, combining meetings, sharing ideas, commiserating, and spending a lot of time together on cramped, unsafe buses. She brought with her an elderly sage, the leader of her cow group, named Mlonganile. He is one of the more amazing men I’ve ever met. He exudes wisdom from his pores, and without him none of this would have been possible.
Kenzie and I each formed a group of ready, willing farmers in our villages. Each group wrote up a constitution, elected officers, and filled out the Heifer applications. All of this took until the end of March, last year (so about six months). Finally, applications completed, villagers excited, we traveled to the Heifer regional offices, in Mbeya, a nearby city. We met with officials there. They told us to go to Iringa. We went to Iringa. They told us to go to Mbeya. Little did I know that I had entered into the most drawn-out rejection of my life that did not involve the Israeli army.

Here’s the thing about Tanzanians. They really, really, really strongly hate to disappoint people, especially guests. So when confronted with a sticky situation, they choose what is to them the most obvious route: tell me whatever it is that I want to hear. This is true of many things. In the bar the other night, before Liverpool played for the Carling Cup Final, a Tanzanian told me that there was an absolute certainty that The Reds would lift the cup. It wouldn’t even take 90 minutes to put the outcome beyond doubt. Well, the match went into extra time and penalties, and when Liverpool was down 2-1 in penalties I wanted to throttle him (we did win. Yay). Similarly, when I was working on the well project, people would tell me that wells were dug, that contributions had already been collected, that water was gushing out of the ground: clean, clear, and tasting of champagne. Nothing had actually been done yet, but they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Or, finally, when I approached the road yesterday looking for a bus, and saw one coming, the guy next to me told me that this was a great bus that would absolutely stop and take us wherever we wanted to go. As the bus zoomed by, the driver signaling that it was overfilled, I just looked at the man next to me, and sighed.

Back to the cows. It took Kenzie and I until the end of July to realize that Heifer was never going to give us a project (it appears that the recession really did a number on their donations. That, or they thought I looked shifty). People were dropping out of each of our groups every other week. We had two choices: abandon the project, or try to fund it with Peace Corps money. Given that the first choice would have made a poor blog post, you can guess where that went. From that point on, we were in overdrive: visiting potential ranches, wrangling district support for our project, doing a cow-shed construction training, building 8 cowsheds, buying pasture seed, planting it, and finally planning a weeklong training on all things bovine (feed, care and treatment, milking, cow dips, yogurt-making, you name it).

Along the way we encountered the usual problems: meetings starting two hours late, people dropping out, people not building their cowsheds on time, and the chosen ranch informing us (after the grant was in) that they could not, in fact, sell us our cows (this particular problem prompted an emergency meeting wherein our district superiors very kindly reached through the phone lines and slapped the ranch manager upside his large, balding head). We cajoled, we yelled, we tried to make people laugh, we threw our weight around, and from time to time we lied through our teeth. We finally got a date: on February 29th we could get our cows. The anniversary may not be easy to celebrate, but what you gonna do?

Two weeks ago we conducted our training at a local convent. I always feel nervous when I set foot in the convent, as if the sisters know if I’ve been naughty or know if I’ve been nice. Once I got past my latent guilt, however, the training was a smashing success. We milked cows, made hay (hehe), washed cows with a spray pump, and spent hours in the classroom going through every conceivable scenario. Oh, and we were fed 5 times a day by the sisters. It got a bit excessive. Then, when night fell, Kenzie and I had to wrangle up some entertainment. We decided to show our villagers some movies on my laptop, movies that were not too talky and that they might conceivably enjoy. The ones we chose: The Adam West Batman Movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Lion King, and Ghostbusters. And our villagers loved them! But there was a problem: they had no idea what was going on. So after they told me this, I spent all of Lion King and Ghostbusters narrating. If you really want to get a good glimpse at the cultural divide, just try explaining the Stay Puft Marshmallow man to a group of African villagers. You begin to question things about your own society, things you once held dear. But we made it through that obstacle, and finished the training, with speeches and certificates for all. Only one step left.

On February 29th, Kenzie and I woke up in Mafinga. On big days I always wake up thinking the same thing: in 16 hours this is all going to be over, one way or another. Make what you can of it. And so we did. We showed up at the district office. We got into the truck we would be using, which the driver proudly told me had arrived, brand-spanking-new, in 1984. We made our way out to the ranch (we’d paid the day before. Imagine paying $3000 for cows, in $7 denominations. Good times). We forced the cows onto the truck, then flipped a coin for the bull. Kenzie won. My bull is black and white and adorable. He is named Uncle Louie (that's right. In Africa there is a cow named after Matt Nied) We got a ride back to Mafinga, then Kenzie and I got into the cow truck, and rode off into the sunset, at about 15 miles per hour. An hour and change later, we arrived in my village. Nziku was standing by the side of the road, waiting. When he saw us, a slow, sly grin spread across his face.

It’s a funny thing to get what you’ve wanted. I’m not sure what to do with it. Part of me wants to believe that this project is going to change everything, but I’ve lived here too long to believe that. Tanzanians, for all their sure and certain words, know as well as I do that there is no certainty in any of this. All of these cows could drop dead one day, and that day could be tomorrow. There are a million things that could go wrong with this project, and in five short months I won’t be around to handle any of them. I wish I was confident about the future. I wish I could tell you that this is a no-doubt home run. But I don’t like to lie to all of you.

In the end, this project, my service, and development in general are as much about the process as the results. They have to be. Because you can’t make people change. You can just give them the options, then you have to respect their right as self-determining adults: to succeed or fail, to change or stay the same. And as we pulled into my village, and Nziku started running ahead of the truck, that’s what I thought about: the days we built cowsheds, the nights spent at Nziku’s discussing every idea, the long busrides with Kenzie, stupid jokes and rice and beans. I used to think that the day the cows came, I would consider my service a success. But I was wrong. These two years can’t just be about the production of things; of pushing at the ocean. My service here is more than milk and money. It’s almost as if all of this, all of the projects and the proposals and the meetings, were just a façade, an excuse for the real work to happen: people. These are my friends and my family, and if I’ve helped them acquire something that they’ll treasure and use to improve their lives, then they’ve done the same for me a hundred-fold. As Nziku jogged his way in front of our slowly moving cow-mobile, leading us downhill, a grin began to spread across my face. For as we turned the corner and came to the loading spot, I saw everyone I cared about standing there, waiting. And the grin on my face was beaming back at me from two dozen friends who were once strangers, who I hadn’t let down. That’s the victory, I think. An affirmation of the faith that these few people had put in me, the crazy white man. Today they know that they weren’t wrong, and I know that two years in Africa weren’t spent in vain. Where we go from here, who knows? But I know that on February 29th, 2012, the cows came home.

Very, very soon, so will I.