Maybe...

The December 24 issue of The Independent (UK) reminds us how much can be done with how little. The place of this particular example is rural Rwanda, a place where the scars of the horrendous genocide of 1994 can still be seen.

The word imalarungu means "companion after great loneliness" and Jane Nzamugurunyana barely whispered it as she greeted the salvation she had waited a decade of grief and poverty to see. Standing in front of her, pulling at fronds of elephant grass in a central African banana grove, was cow 208322, a heavily pregnant Fresian heifer.

That one cow, which would cost more than she could hope to amass in a lifetime of labor, was celebrated by her village. Crossbred with native Rwandan stock to withstand the climate, the beast will produce about 20 liters of milk a day - 10 to 20 times the amount produced by local breeds. It will provide

manure to feed frail crops and fodder grass and the cow's urine mixed with chillies or ash to make an effective pesticide that will help protect the crops. And the cow will add hitherto unaffordable milk and a little butter to her children's diet, with money to be made from selling her surplus vegetables, fruit and milk.

Money that can provide "other food, salt and sugar, even medicines." And money obtained from the sale of milk and produce that otherwise might not be available to her follow villagers who buy them.

One cow: a minor economic revolution.

The beast came to Nzamugurunyana through a program run by a British charity called Send a Cow, which works in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Zambia, and Tanzania to help

subsistence-level economies by buying and delivering livestock from goats to cattle to impoverished households.

In Rwanda, it runs a program that also teaches villagers such practical information as how to recycle some of the manure and urine to produce methane, which they can use to cook, slowing deforestation. And the group goes out of its way to erase the notion of the people as Tutsi and Hutu as opposed to village neighbors. The particular cows are distributed by lot among those selected by their fellow villagers as deserving as a result of the suffering and grief they have experienced, regardless of the cause or who inflicted it.

One cow: a minor economic revolution. The means of delivering one cow: a minor social revolution.

Damn, maybe I do still have hope.

Significant Footnote: The Independent notes that the cow cost £600 ($1150). Another story in the same issue says that average spending per adult on celebrating Christmas in the UK this year was £813 ($1560). Meanwhile, according to ABCNews, the average American family will spend about $775 (£404) on gifts alone this year - which is obviously only part of the total cost of seasonal celebrations.