Our Goat Project

We work with an NGO called Love For People. One of our main projects is a Goat Project. We buy goats & give them to widows. Most of the widows that we work with have young children at home. Our hope is that the goats will provide milk for their family. We also hope that as the goats reproduce they will provide a small income for the family. We breed local goats with Western male goats. We are breeding them this way because they produce more milk than an average local goat. A domestic cow in our area produces a liter and a half of milk a day. An “improved” goat will produce a liter of milk in one day. A goat eats less & is much easier to take care of than a cow, so the women are very excited about participating in the project.
Our goat project is located about an hour away from where we live. It is 17 kilometers off the beaten path, so it’s not really all that far as the crow flies, but it’s on a rough road so it takes a while to get out there. At our project site, we’ve built a goat house, an office, a small guesthouse and we’ve planted some alfalfa for the goats.
This is the road that takes us out to the project site.	This is one of our favorite past times on this road
May 2008, we started working with 24 new widows. They came out to our project site for a day of training. Here they are signing in.	Here are several of the women waiting for the meeting to start. Several of the women have young babies that they brought with them.
One of the older ladies who is in our project. She has 7 children & is excited to be in our program.	Andy spends a lot of time working at our project site. Here he is working on a water tank.
This is our office / guest house out at the project site	Here are a few of the female goats. These goats are Somali goats. We started out using female Somali goats, but they were hard to come by. So, we’ve started using local female goats instead. We still have 20 or so Somali goats out at our project site.
One of our newest baby goats	Some of our baby Somali goats
One of our Western Male Goats	Isn’t she cute?
This is our goat house. We left the top part unfinished so it can be an open-air house. The tanks on the left collect rain water off the roof.	This is the milking room. We now have a kerosene fridge & a stove in this room. I’ll get a new picture for you next time I go out to the site.
This is the inside of the goat house	One of the pens in the goat house
This is an underground water storage container	Here’s the water. It’s 6 feet deep.
This is a view of all of the buildings on our goat project site	Looking at the guesthouse from the goat house
There isn’t any water or electricity at our project site, so we have to pump water up from the river. This is the trail Andy and some other guys cut through the brush so we can run water to the site from the river.	This is our pump pumping water up to the site from the river.
This is the fence around our goat project site.	Alfalfa Field
Goats enjoying the Alfalfa	More pictures of the Alfalfa