Northwich Church - on the grapevine

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"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: ....
Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter - when you see the naked to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?"

from Isaiah 58: 6-7

In 1987, a group of Christian dairy farmers came up with what seemed to some like a crazy idea. At the time, EU dairy quotas were forcing them to throw milk away. Rather than slaughter cows, why not give them to malnourished families in Africa?

Over the next year, those founders set about making that idea a reality: visiting Uganda, forging contacts there, persuading UK farmers to donate cows and the public to donate cash. Finally, on 4 July 1988, 25 pregnant cows were flown to Uganda, to be distributed through church groups to poor families. Send a Cow was underway.

Over the coming years, it kept growing. All families pledged to pass on the first female calf to another family, so the gifts multiplied. Send A Cow formalised its partnership with the NGO Heifer International, and employed extension workers. By 1996, it had flown more than 300 cows to Uganda.

Then the BSE crisis in the UK led to a ban on livestock exports. So Send a Cow started buying animals in Africa – a more cost-effective system. In the years that followed, Send A Cow has expanded into education and social development, and is tackling environmental problems. From Uganda the work spread to Ethiopia and beyond.

Now, in 2008, Send a Cow has worked with more than 100,000 people in 13,000 households. It has offices in Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Lesotho, and works in Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Cameroon, Ghana and Mozambique through Heifer International. Send A Cow these days also supplies goats, bees, fruit trees, donkeys, bulls, poultry, and oxen, among other gifts.

Send A Cow UK is based near Bath, but has also a country-wide network of 130 volunteers. As for the next 20 years? “We want to ensure that even more families are given the means and the skills to work their way out of poverty for good.”

For more info, contact: Send a Cow, The Old Estate Yard, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BR 0 1225 874222 or go to

www.sendacow.org.uk

In the UK, 300,000 elderly people can go for an entire month without speaking to a family member or even neighbour. For some, their only form of human contact these days in the postman or milkman.

It is estimated that more than 1.2 million elderly people are living lonely and isolated lives, say the charity Counsel and Care. In a recent report to the government, the charity puts the reason down to the growing fragmentation of families, age discrimination, and a decline in support services.