PTC’s Pace helps AIDS orphans in Africa by sending cows

In a bid to help starving children in Africa, Jim Pace of Peachtree City is lobbying for support to help buy milk-producing cows for families and a large orphanage of children whose parents have died of AIDS.

Pace visited the rural Bungoma area in west Kenya in December 2006 on a visit to his daughter Kim, who’s a missionary there. She introduced him to Jane, a villager there who invited the Paces into her modest mud hut home, apologizing that she had no food to offer her visitors.

Jane and her four children were starving.

“She told me not to worry about her because God’s going to take care of her,” Pace recalled.

Jim wanted desperately to help the family; but digging into his wallet wouldn’t do, as the lack of a banking system left him no way to provide funds on a consistent basis.

So instead he bought them a cow, whose daily milk output could not only nourish the family but also give them a way to earn a little extra money for other necessities.

From that gesture grew the Cows for Christ program, operated from the Paces’ home in Peachtree City. All funds raised go directly toward the purchase of cows, and so far more than 30 have been bought and presented to villagers in Bungoma, Pace said. When the cows are presented the recipients are taught to care for them, he added.

Each cow provides enough milk each day to nourish 30-40 people on a routine basis, Pace said. Typically once a year, those cows produce other cattle, the first two of which go back to Cows for Christ to be given to other families.

Pace is a partner in Group VI, an active builder and developer of commercial properties in this area. He has served on the Peachtree City Council and as president of the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce.

Among those who have stepped up and given to the program is Chick-fil-A’s chief executive, Dan Cathy, who bought 10 cows for the relief effort. A woman in north Atlanta, Wanda Riggs, bought two bulls that are used for mating, which cost roughly $500 each and are bought in Africa at the area market.

People in Fayette County have responded too, even accompanying Pace on subsequent trips to meet the people of Bungoma.

Among those villagers are 1,600 orphans under the care of the Rev. Edwin Wanyama in his Rehema Academy, a network of churches and homes in the rural west Africa area. All the orphans’ parents had died of AIDS, which is ravaging the continent.

The network of orphanages and families is spread far and wide around rural Bungoma, and with no autos to speak of, it can take some time to travel on foot ... or on bicycle if one is fortunate, Pace said.

Cows for Christ puts the cows directly where they’re needed: outside the orphanages’ homes.

Pace’s wife Mary keeps Cows for Christ’s books and works full-time “facilitating” in the family’s home. That way there’s no overhead, and each dollar donated goes toward providing a cow for starving children in Bungoma, he said.

Although Cows for Christ is his passion, Pace is working in other ways to improve conditions in Bungoma. He has worked with villagers to set up gardens where they grow cucumbers, tomatoes and carrots to add variety to the kids’ diets. Until then they had no knowledge of how to work the land and diets consisted mostly of corn, which is plentiful in Kenya, Pace said.

The villagers also use the cow patties left behind by the cattle to create organic fertilizer for the gardens.

Pace is using Cows for Christ to recruit others not just from his church, Southside, but also from other local churches, including First Presbyterian in Peachtree City and Dogwood Church. Representatives of all three churches will be flying to Kenya next month to visit the area.

Pace hopes the trip will speak to their hearts so they, too, can get the word out about Cows for Christ. Ultimately he hopes to get even more Fayette churches involved in the program.

“We’re just beginning. It’s amazing to see how people are stepping forward,” Pace said. “It’s an opportunity for the rest of us who have the means to step forward and do something.”

Cows for Christ, Pace says, has changed his life.

“Before, I was just too busy to care,” Pace said. “... I knew people in Africa were starving but it didn’t mean much to me.”

Now having met them in person, traveling on bumpy dirt roads and seeing their mud hut homes and churches, Pace says he views things differently.

“Being there and seeing them ... you can’t just leave and say, ‘Have a nice life.’ It changes you. I will never be the same.”

Since then Pace has dedicated a chunk of his every living day toward helping the people of Bungoma.

He is hoping to get local residents thinking about helping families halfway across the globe whose mere existence in the face of poverty and hunger is a testament to human strength.

On a recent morning, Pace thumbed through stacks of photos he and others have taken in Bungoma. He knows many of the villagers by their first name, pointing them out in the pictures. Most all of the villagers are posing in their Sunday best behind the cows donated through Cows for Christ.

While buying the first cow was transformative for Pace, it didn’t start out as as large initiative. It wasn’t until a later trip to New York and a conversation with a stranger that he got the idea it could become contagious for others. There to support a friend undergoing surgery, he flew in late and went to “the last place open,” an Irish restaurant and pub.

A woman at the bar tried to strike up a conversation, asking about him, and he admittedly wasn’t in much of a mood to chat. Then she asked the right question: “What was the most important thing you did this week?”

“I bought a cow for a woman in Kenya so her family wouldn’t go hungry,” Pace replied.

She didn’t believe Pace at first until he pulled out his Blackberry and showed her an email with a photo of the family and their cow.

He walked out of that restaurant with a check from that woman, who worked for Merrill Lynch. He also got a grand idea.

“I started to think ‘maybe it is bigger than just one cow,’” Pace said.

[For more information about Cows for Christ, contact Brackenhurst Ministries at 404-543-6301 or go online at www.brackenhurstministries.org.]