LINDON — Employees at Corda Technologies are already looking forward to Christmas 2002.
They're pretty sure they can raise enough money to repeat what they did this past December — buy a water buffalo to give a needy family in Kathmandu, Nepal.
"Water buffalo don't bog down in rice paddies," said Richard Lambert, director of marketing for Corda Technologies. Corda designs graphing and charting software for the Internet.
Unlike a tractor, a water buffalo can plow flooded rice paddies and mud as well as pull cartloads of crops to market, Lambert said. They take narrow terraces on steep mountains in stride. They feed on crop residue and yet yield milk and manure.
Lambert, along with the CEO of Corda Technologies, Neal Williams, served missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a country where something like the gift of a water buffalo is truly appreciated.
When another Corda employee suggested the company skip giving gifts to one another and instead work through Heifer International to buy and donate an animal to a needy family, Lambert and Williams signed on quickly.
"We know what a water buffalo means," Lambert said.
The 25 Corda employees raised over $300, enough to throw in a pig as well as the water buffalo. And they plan to do it again, probably every year.
"People have needs all over but this is unique," Lambert said. "This is lasting."
Christine Volkmer, a public relations spokesman for Heifer International, said the charity — which has been operating since 1944 — works on the same philosophy as the Peace Corps; that a man taught to fish will do better in the long run than a man given a fish.
"It's like a project participant said," Volkmer said, '"if I die, my family will weep for me. If my buffalo dies, my family will starve,"'
Heifer works in 115 countries and has helped more than 4 million families by getting them any of 25 kinds of livestock. The families who are to receive a buffalo or a goat or a pig or a llama spend up to a year being trained to care properly for their precious gift.
They are then asked to agree to pass on the firstborn female of that animal to another family.
"That way, the good just keeps going," said Volkmer. "It's self-perpetuating."
Those who chip in to donate an animal are sent a gift card and material explaining the value of their gift and the project involved, Volkmer said.
Every dollar donated goes directly to the family in a particular country, she said, unless the quota for a certain province or village has been met. Then the animal will go to the next project on the list.
Heifer International was named in December 2001 as one of the 100 best charities in America by Worth magazine after Worth investigated 819,000 charities and their missions.
"They focus tightly on their missions and don't venture into areas in which they lack expertise," said the writers of the Worth article. "And they involve local leaders in program design and implementation, which helps ensure lasting results after they move on."
Lambert isn't sure exactly where Corda's buffalo ended up, but he has received a communication from one of the veterinarians in Nepal who works with the Nepali and Indonesian water buffalo.
"We are acquainted with many families who have become self-reliant because of a water buffalo," said Judy Wollen of Heifer. "Many of our field offices are finding that former program participants — those who were so poor they qualified for Heifer's assistance — are now able and willing to make donations so that other desperately poor families can benefit from Heifer's values-based development model.
"We and our many colleagues here in Southeast Asia say thank you from the bottom of our hearts," Wollen said.
Heifer International can be reached through its Web site: www.heifer.org.
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