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need, thus multiplying the impact of all donated animals and making their recipients partners in the struggle against hunger and poverty. Since 1944, Heifer has given animals to 10 million people, but through the ritual of “Passing on the Gift,” it has helped more than 45 million people in 128 countries around the world, with plans to reach 23 million more by the end of the decade. Heifer’s message and methods go out to millions of others every year through the media, its own publications, and its three learning centers in the United States, where fifty thousand people annually are taught how to serve small farmers through teaching sustainable practices like organic gardening and alternative marketing methods.

In 2006, Heifer had 726 projects in twenty-nine states in the United States and fifty-seven countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, central and eastern Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Canada, and Mexico. In addition to its gifts of cows, goats, sheep, turkeys, pigs, and fish, the animals it supplies include agouti, alpacas, bees, camels, ducks, earthworms, elephants, geese, guinea fowl, guinea pigs, horses, llamas, mules, oxen, rabbits, silkworms, snails, water buffalo, and yaks.

Heifer’s animals dramatically improve the lives of poor people. Elmfus Lembusha, a Tanzanian farmer, was trying to support an extended family of sixteen on an acre of farmland when Heifer sent him goats to produce milk and manure to make the land more productive, improve the family’s nutrition, and provide them with a steady cash income. A river village in the Dominican Republic forced to relocate by a dam construction project survived and prospered when Heifer gave the villagers goats and trained them in how to care for the animals and how to make the soil fertile for growing livestock feed. A Kenyan widow with three children received a cow that restored her family’s health and income. In northern Peru, Heifer provided families not only with animals but also with fuel-efficient kitchen stoves that are safer than open fires and don’t require cutting trees for firewood.

When I spoke at the dedication of the Heifer World Headquarters in 2006, one of the beneficiaries in the audience was Beatrice Biira of Kisinga, a small village on the equator in western Uganda. In the early 1990s, Beatrice, her parents, and five brothers and sisters were struggling to survive when they received one of twelve goats Heifer donated to Kisinga. Beatrice had always wanted to go to school, but her family was too poor to afford the school fees. Within a year her mother had earned enough money selling goat’s milk to pay the fees. Eventually, she was able to send all the rest of her children to school with her earnings from selling milk and the goat’s offspring (after passing on the gift of the first one).

Beatrice completed the first three grades in three months each, showing such promise that Dick Young, producer of a Heifer documentary film that featured her village, helped pay for her enrollment at a more advanced school in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. From there she went for a year to a prestigious American prep school, Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts, then on to Connecticut College on a scholarship. While there, Beatrice served as an intern in Hillary’s Senate office. She has been featured on 60 Minutes and by Oprah Winfrey, a Heifer supporter. Her remarkable story is chronicled in Beatrice’s Goat, an engaging children’s book written by Page McBrier and illustrated by Lori Lohstoeter. Beatrice wants to go home and use her education to benefit her people by forming a school for poor kids, taking care of AIDS orphans, or running a farm that helps other children the way Heifer helped her and her family.

It all started with a goat named Mugisa (which means “Luck”). But it didn’t end there, because Beatrice’s family and the other eleven families completed their obligation to pass on the gift, putting twelve more families on the path to working themselves out of poverty.

Passing on the gift turns every Heifer recipient into a better citizen