300 - A Cow Named Faith

A Cow Named Faith
By Leo R. Ward

DAN WEST was born in Ohio in 1893 and died a little over a decade ago. He was a deeply committed Brethren Christian, and he made a career of perpetually asking questions. He looked like a preacher, was always moralizing, and his four sons and at times his wife and daughter, all of them proud of him, wished he would occasionally come down off his "moralistic high horse." He never did.

West's way of finding answers and of getting educated was to keep asking questions, especially asking how to square faith with action. The Spanish Civil War, repudiated point-blank by the peace churches Brethren, Quaker, and Mennonite-challenged those churches to find a way to serve suffering people. Dan himself was named Director of the joint three-faith relief program in Spain (1937-38), and it did him good to live and suffer with people at war, where everything, the people, the war, and the genuflecting were so foreign to him.

He provided children with quite nourishing food, mostly powdered milk from Holland with cod liver oil supplement. So far, so good. But the three churches, even when aided by various individuals, faiths, and nations, could scarcely go on and on furnishing relief to poverty-stricken peoples. Could not a better way be found? That is what Dan West, doling out milk and shoes and underwear in Spain, kept asking himself and others.

He came up with the Heifer Project which has Dan West written all over it. At first he called the Project a dream. "An impossible dream," said his wife Lucy. Where people already have cows and goats, as in Greece and Italy, it would not be difficult to help them to have better cows and goats. But what could be done where people had no animals that produce milk or meat? Dan West's answer was to try giving dairy heifers, each of them bred and due to calve in a few months. The heifer would give milk for several years and surely be a benefaction for children who never before had milk. Her heifer calves would also furnish milk, and her bull calves could be butchered to furnish protein.

Who would donate such a beneficent beast? Dan explained his "dream" plan in his parish church, and at once several farmers offered heifers, cattle feed, and cattle care; the first gift heifer was christened Faith and the next two Hope and Charity. The only stipulation was that the poor family receiving a heifer would donate her first heifer calf to another poor family, passing the gift along, This, plus providing some

Leo R. Ward, CSC, has served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame. A translator of Etienne Gilson, he is the author of Catholic Life (1959) and God and World Order (1961). This warm, nostalgic tribute to a modest Christian gesture that expanded far beyond the founder's dreams is reprinted with permission from Commonweal (June 4, 1982, pp. 324f.)

301 - A Cow Named Faith

temporary expertise to help a family make the most of a cow, a goat, or a pig, was the essence of the Heifer Project International.

Don't give cash or powdered milk, either of which is gone in one round. Cash and powdered milk today, and the family needs a refill tomorrow. Give a heifer, a continuing source of milk and meat. After eleven years, two of the first nineteen heifers, shipped in 1944 to Puerto Rico, were still producing milk; all had produced meat and milk, but the cow named Faith never produced a heifer; she produced milk and nine bull calves.

The whole enterprise, expanding far beyond Dan West's dreams, now helps poor rural families to help themselves in scores of countries and areas, including, at one time or another, many areas in the U.S.

The Project's present stated purpose would please Dan: "To help people produce food and income for themselves, and to expand livestock production to help overcome worldwide protein deficiency." Gifts must be tailored to the situation; perhaps the need is for a beef breed, or for chickens or hogs or sheep, or even for a mill. Many faiths, organizations, and persons now contribute.

A letter, dated Feb. 16, 1981, from the Project's Center (825 W. 3rd, Little Rock, Ark. 72203), states: "We estimate upwards of 70,000 head of livestock have been sent since HPI's inception (larger animals: heifers, bulls, goats, sheep, swine) and hundreds of thousands of small domestic stock (chickens, rabbits, honey bees)."

And at an international gathering, West's daughter said, "How beautiful is this idea of giving the first offspring to another in need. What a simple and loving way."