Samaritan’s Purse is providing families in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with dairy goats to enrich their diets with delicious, nutritious milk.
Sister Guylaine’s goats bleat loudly as she walks among them pointing out how many there are now. They started with 25 goats last year, a gift from Samaritan’s Purse, and now there are ten more.
The goats are able to roam free during the day, feeding on grass and fertilizing the land.
She is one of the sisters who serve the community through Little Sisters of Evangelization church in Babonde, a community in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Sister Guylaine also runs the Talita Kumi Nutritional Center, which gets its name from the words of Jesus—the Aramaic phrase he spoke to the girl in Mark 5.
“Little girl. Arise.”
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Surrounding villages and churches from many miles around send malnourished children to Talita Kumi for nutritional therapy. Many of the parents come, too. Years without variety in their diets leaves their bodies sick and underdeveloped.
Now they are learning how to raise livestock through our Faith and Goats program. They are learning how to feed and care for the goats. They are milking them to add the protein-rich ingredient to their diets.
The goats have multiplied into 35 from the handful given by Samaritan’s Purse.
“As soon as we receive this milk, the children are happy and even the adults appreciate it,” Sister Guylaine says. She hopes that the 35 goats they have produce enough offspring so that many other communities throughout Babonde will be able to have goats as well.
Samaritan’s Purse has also partnered with Talita Kumi in recent years to increase the center’s crop varieties and yields. “We had food difficulties, that’s what I can say,” Sister Guylaine said. “The children were fed manioc, beans, cassava leaves, and bananas, but since Samaritan’s Purse came, we’ve got sweet potatoes, we’ve got vegetable gardening.”
Men and women from the surrounding area learn how to keep and milk the goats.
Since they started cultivating the ground with the seeds, tools, and growing techniques provided by Samaritan’s Purse, the families have added bitter eggplants, amaranths, cabbages, sweet eggplants, and carrots to their diets. During their time at Talita Kumi, the families themselves learn how to cultivate these varieties while also eating from them as part of their new, enriched diets.
“Our whole province has a nutrition problem,” she said. “Samaritan’s Purse has intervened and because of them we have grown from strength to strength—because Samaritan’s Purse sees the poor with the eye of the Good Samaritan. May God help us to care for what we have received. We thank the Samaritan’s Purse team for thinking of us.”
Many of the families are provided goats to bring home to their villages to add to their diets.
