SOUTH JORDAN — In 95-degree heat and separated from his friends, Little Willy did what you might expect. He dropped to the arena floor and bleated.
But his handler, 12-year-old William Baraka, kept his cool, competing for the first time in the Salt Lake County Fair's junior livestock showmanship contest Friday.
"They cooperate better when they're with their friends. They don't like to be forced," William said.
His experience is one of many life lessons youths learn raising and showing livestock, said Sonja Ferrufino, leader of the Burton Family 4-H group that William and his younger brothers, Malindo Mursal and Edison Gustave, joined this year.
"There are a lot of life lessons here, good sportsmanship being just one of them," said Ferrufino, a high school agriculture teacher who taught the boys the finer points of caring for and showing their Boer goats in competition.
Boers, which are native to Africa, were imported to the United States in the mid-1980s. They are meat goats that have a high resistance to disease.
The boys' goats are stock of the East African Refugee Goat Project of Utah, a herd started with about a dozen goats two years ago. The herd now numbers in the hundreds. The goal of the microenterprise is to grow the herd to the point the goats can be leased to graze land to curb wildfire risk, to provide meat for the participating East African refugee communities, and to raise money for scholarships.
The boys' father, Gustave Deogratiasi, is coordinator of the goat project, but his sons took ownership and responsibility for goats they showed at the fair. The project was launched by the state Refugee Services Office with Somali Bantu, Burundi and Somali Bajuni leaders. It has several nonprofit, church and corporate partners.
Ferrufino's daughter, Miranda, has shown goats at the fair since she was 5. Now 10, she showed two lambs and two goats at this year's fair and won top honors in some classes.
She, too, has shared the finer points of goat showmanship with Deogratiasi's sons.
"You have to have eye contact with the judge. You always want your goat between you and the judge," she said.
The brothers have come a long way in a short period of time, she said.
"They've done a really good job for their first year. They do have a chance to win," she said.
Each of the boys walked away with blue ribbons, and Malindo's goat made it to the star class in the market goat contest.
All in all, it was a good showing for the boy's first competition, said Steve Burton, a sheep and goat rancher who is a volunteer adviser to the goat project and Sonja Ferrufino's father.
"These boys don't even know what's going to happen next," Burton said, referring to the junior livestock auction on Saturday.
"They should be able to put $300 in their pockets each. They've never seen $300 in their lives."
The boys will have to reimburse International Rescue of Salt Lake City, which oversees the project, for the cost of feed, but the rest will be theirs to keep.
Deogratiasi said his sons were new to raising goats, so they had to learn a lot about raising them and showmanship within a matter of months.
"Hopefully next year, they will have more experience how to deal with the goats," he said.
Ferrufino said she considered the boys' first competition a success, too.
Just as in her family, agriculture has become a family affair for Deogratiasi's sons.
"Everybody needs a little piece of agriculture in their lives," she said.
Email: marjorie@deseretnews.com