A Guide to Hopebuilding Stories

Categorizing these stories (362 as of Oct. 10, 2008) is often challenging, because many of them talk about people's or community activities that addressed a number of issues at once, or grew from one small project into something much larger. Reflecting this, some stories appear in several categories. Clicking on the links highlighted in blue will take you to that page. Please do read my GuidelinesForSharing before you post.

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Village womens' 1992 request to Heifer International brought gift that keeps giving

As Beatrice Biira was celebrating her graduation from a select US liberal arts college in May 2008 with a degree in international development and gender studies, others were celebrating as well – most especially, 240 families living in Kisinga, a small and remote village in southwestern Uganda, near the border of Zaire and Rwanda. They held a special Mass and feast to celebrate their first college graduate.

In 1992, nine-year-old Beatrice’s wish for even primary schooling seemed unlikely to be met because her family, with a yearly income of less than $1,000, could not afford education for any of their six children. But two events that year helped make her dream a reality. Economist Jeffrey Sachs calls it the “Beatrice theorem” of development economics: small inputs can lead to large outcomes.

First, the women in her village took action to improve life for their children, sending a request for goats to Heifer International, an Arkansas group that has been providing poor families with livestock that will produce income and food since 1944. And, second, in a small Connecticut village only seven miles from Beatrice’s university, children attending Niantic Community Church raised $1,673 to pay for a herd of 12 dairy goats from Heifer’s on-line gifts catalogue to be given to African villagers.

When the goats arrived in Kisinga in 1993, Beatrice’s mother, Evelyn Baluku, received a pregnant goat the family called Mugisa, meaning “Luck” in the Okonzo language. Mugisa soon lived up to her name, producing twins and lots of milk – so much that Beatrice’s family could afford the $60 to send her to school. She was much older than the other first grade students but eager to learn. "Even when I got there, I made sure that I did extra work, extra homework, extra help, how to read, how to write. And I made it pretty quick." Beatrice breezed through first, second and third grades in three months each, and she and her goat soon became famous.

Filmmaker Dick Young’s video to celebrate Heifer International’s 50th anniversary featured a beaming Beatrice, in a red dress with the back torn open so it would continue to fit as she grew, tilling fields, cutting and hauling bananas, and tending Mugisa. Inspired by the video, Connecticut neighbours Page McBrier and Lori Lohstoeter, during a Heifer study tour to Uganda in 1995, decided to collaborate on a children’s book, entitled “Beatrice’s Goat. By the time the book was published in 2000 and became a best-seller (now in its 12th hardcover printing and third printing of the paperback version published in 2008), Beatrice was a top student at Uganda’s best girls’ high school in Kampala, with filmmaker Young helping with the costs.

Beatrice came to the USA for a book tour, during which she was accompanied by Rosalee Sinn, Heifer’s northeast regional director, who became a mentor. Then she won a full scholarship for a preparatory year at a Massachusetts boarding school, and then four years at Connecticut College, with incidentals covered through a “Friends of Beatrice” fund created by 20 Heifer donors. (Heifer does not pay for education as that is not its mandate).

Part of the book’s proceeds go to Heifer to support its programs, emulating Heifer’s approach of “passing on the gift”- each recipient of a Heifer animal must give the first female offspring to someone else in need. ''It becomes a chain,'' as Beatrice explained in a 2004 interview. ''Almost everyone in my village now has a goat.'' Her family has four goats, including Mugisa’s first offspring, a male named Mulindwa; Mugisa died in 2006.

Beatrice herself has continued to pass on the gift by sharing her story widely so people will understand and support Heifer's work. (Heifer International currently supports projects in 50 countries, including the United States, that create sustainable small-scale farm enterprises to improve nutrition and supplement income.) As Beatrice explained in thanking actress Susan Sarandon, a Heifer donor, during an appearance on the Oprah Show in 2002: “Because of people like you, my mother is able to provide for our family - she is now the kind of mother she always wanted to be. I have been able to go to school and dream of a future for myself. I have confidence, self-esteem and hope that I never had before.” (The Oprah Show donated 50 goats to Beatrice's village and other villages in Uganda.) In 2005, the CBS program “60 Minutes” aired a report on Beatrice's trip home to her village which featured a sharing of the gift of offspring from the descendants of the original dozen goats.

In 2004, Beatrice was a summer intern in the office of U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wrote the afterword to “Beatrice’s Goat”, and in 2007, interned with the Clinton Foundation in Massachusetts. Starting in the fall of 2008, she will be working on a master’s degree at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the dream of working on projects in Africa that will help rural women earn and manage money so that more children can be educated.

This story was compiled from a variety of sources: The Story of Beatrice Biira on the Heifer International website; The road from Kisinga, by Steven Slosberg, in the Connecticut College Magazine Spring 2008; Heifer International featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, by Eileen Dolbeare; information on Suzi Zeftung-Kuhn’s website; The Luckiest Girl, column by Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times July 3, 2008; How a Goat Led a Girl Up the Path to an Education, by Stephanie Strom, New York Times, Jan. 25, 2004; "60 Minutes Tells the Story of One Girl, One Goat"; and Beatrice's Goat Fed A Dream, Jan. 12, 2005, CBS News. The 2006 picture at the top shows Beatrice at East Congregational Church in Milton, Massachusetts, with children who had been inspired to fundraise for Heifer programs after reading "Beatrice's Goat" and who were thrilled to learn that not only was Beatrice a real person, but she was attending university not far away; it accompanies the article entitled Beatrice Biira visits East Church Children.