The goat project

There are lots of goats here in Takaungu and you can't walk down a path without practically tripping on one.  The goats are used as collateral for loans and as a sign of wealth, but not, surprisingly, for meat or milk.  The goats are "local goats" as opposed to dairy goats and don't produce drinkable milk.  It makes sense then that if dairy goats could be provided to the existent goat owners, a new source of cheap calcium and other nutrients would be available in the community. 

The EAC has taken on this project and begun procuring goats. They also brought in dairy goat experts and are creating an instruction manual for anyone interested in owning and caring for a dairy goat. Another volunteer here, Nick, is in charge of taking the current text of the instruction manual, what he describes as "Swahili translated to English back to Swahili and then back to English with other random stops along the way" and turning it into a readable document.  We were all sitting in the office one afternoon as he toiled away and he said "what should I do with this?  'Leave a goat tethered and it cannot get away but someone make come to make sex with it.'"  My first thought was that this goat manual probably wouldn't want to go into local bestiality rumors, change it to "the goats may be harmed."But another volunteer pointed out, rightly, that perhaps this is a very big problem here, we have no idea, and perhaps the goat manual needs to have very explicit warnings about people having sex with goats. 

I'm not sure what was decided in the end....this is just another great example of a roomful of college educated mzungus with the best intentions and absolutely no cultural context.