There's a Swahili phrase we heard a lot that basically translates as, "Seeing is believing." We heard from a couple of families that they'd be interested in Heifer's East Africa Dairy as soon as they could see it working well for another family. But given the distances involved, that isn't so easy. If they don't have a farm that's within walking distance of another farm that's in the East Africa Dairy Program, it's really hard for them to imagine. And Heifer didn't have before and after pictures of what cows look like when you feed them better, or how much more milk they produced. It's as basic as can be that if you want to show somebody how successful something is, you show them a picture. But Heifer doesn't have that. So we are thinking in terms of a traditional awareness campaign, but we're also trying to think how that awareness campaign could be distributed in ways where it provides more function. For example, one of the things that we saw was that Heifer was distributing what might be called a ledger to these farmers. It's a blank ledger and pen so that they can start writing down the increased yields, what they're feeding, what's working, what's not working. So we started to think, if a ledger book serves a really great function for these farmers, is that a place that we can start to include materials that show the success of other Heifer families? Also, there are ways to embed seeds in paper, and so maybe even the pages of these ledgers could contain sorghum seeds embedded in them. So it's not just a ledger that they can use, but if they want, they can tear the pages out and plant them to grow the nutrients that they need. Those are the kinds of ideas that we're trying to think of. Is there something that we can do that goes beyond the awareness campaign, that somehow provides a value added tool?

Once you see a family lift themselves out of poverty, you want to follow their example, and so that's one of the things that we're going to try to accomplish, trying to bring some of these success stories to life via either video, or with materials that we'll build for the field personnel on the ground with Heifer. We wanted to speak to the farmers directly and hear how their lives have changed for the better.