The Mechanical Cow

If I were the world's mightiest man, I would make peace on earth | The Mechanical Cow | Creating jobs and future: SOS Social Centre Sucre in Bolivia

A successful community project in Paraguay Children need milk. However, in the tropics, keeping dairy cattle and the transportation and refrigeration of fresh milk is a costly business. It is not just fresh milk that is expensive - milk powder is also an unaffordable luxury for the many poor, large families. How does this affect the campesino families? A fair supply of milk - Photo: A. Aldrian After all, surely they can keep cows on the land. That is true. But when the drought is so severe that a splinter of glass in the sun is enough to set their fields, pastures and huts on fire, a glass of milk becomes an unrealistic dream for the many campesino children. SOS Children's Villages in Paraguay has started something new with the help of a "mechanical cow" which uses relatively simple equipment to turn soya beans into milk. Two projects are currently up and running which employ this successful method of milk production. The SOS Children's Village in Asunción, which is surrounded by poverty-stricken areas, started by organising the women in the local community with the help of parents of the children at the SOS School and a social worker - not an easy task in a place where the sense of community is weak, and where the priority for each individual is their own daily fight for survival. Soya milk is distributed every day in the Viña Cue district in Asunción - Photo: A. Aldrian The soya milk from the mechanical cow forms a basis for trade and for meetings where health issues and women-specific topics as well as day-to-day problems and conflicts can be discussed. As a result, the provision of basic foodstuff has improved for 160 families who between them have a total of 700 children: the children drink the soya milk, and their mothers can prepare good and nutritional meals out of the protein-rich residue left after milk production. The second mechanical cow installed by SOS Children's Villages now provides milk for an entire village in north Paraguay. This particular area, situated close to the site of the SOS Children's Village in Belén, has been stricken by severe drought for the past two years. When the project started, SOS youth and SOS co-workers organised various activities and festivals as a kind of emergency relief effort for the campesinos in need. The village community formed a cooperative and between them, they managed to prevent the villagers from having to move out of the village into the poverty-stricken areas of the towns. They have now also started an irrigation project. Today, the soya harvest, which they need to feed their mechanical cow, is available in abundance in the fields.