Ten years later

One of the neat things about young children is that they are usually fairly easy to bribe.  As I’m writing this blog from Kenya I wouldn’t want anybody to take that the wrong way. It might be better to say they are quite amenable to being incentivised. When we moved to Kenya for a year with our family in 2002 to start the work in Kosele it was important to my wife Judi and I to make sure our children Tom and Ellie, (then aged 11 and 8 respectively), were happy to make the journey, Judi paid a short visit to Kenya during Easter 2002 to finalise the details of our longer trip from July. She brought back a lot of photos, among them pictures including donkey carts and goats. Ellie developed a real fancy to having a goat. As most good parents would Judi and I encouraged her and said that we were sure it would be possible to have a goat. Like most parents do at some stage in their children’s lives it turns out we were being a bit overambitious. We didn’t exactly lie, (as we did have every intention of getting a goat), but for one reason or another it just didn’t happen. Ellie has reminded us about this every once in a while. I don’t think it has exactly left her scarred for life but somewhere in her subconscious a deep seated sense of goat deprivation has developed.

Today, two weeks short of ten years to the day that we first came to Kosele, Ellie’s childhood disappointment has been made good. This afternoon we welcomed two new residents to the project – Oink and Annabel the goats. Just before lunch time Mary, our manager, told me that a local guy who breeds quality goats had some young ones for sale. She rushed off with Duncan, our farm manager, to find out more. Mid-afternoon Duncan called me to say that I should come down to the goat enclosure to see the new goats. Sure enough, in the pen, there were three goats, our two does and a young billy goat. Mary had bought the male for herself and the two females were for us. They have settled into the enclosure we have built very well. We will keep them penned, rather than letting them graze as our neighbours do. We have a good supply of fodder crops for them and they seem to have good appetites.

Ellie was very excited and has now, I hope, forgiven us for letting her down when she was eight. She has fallen in love with the goats and is already very good at handling them. They are very cute animals. I would not normally associate the word cute with goats as most of the goats I have come across have been anything but. I tend think of goats as grouchy and smelly. Oink and Annabel are beautiful animals. Dark tan with a darker stripe down their backs. They are certainly from quality stock and we are hoping to successfully breed from them in about four months time. Ten years on I sometimes find it hard to believe how much our work here in Kosele has grown and thank God for it. The arrival of the goats today has been wonderful. The look on Ellie’s face when she first saw them was priceless.  All the money in the world could not buy a moment like that.