Everybody's Got a Water Buffalo

So I got this catalog in the mail. And before I even get this blog underway, I want to plug Heifer International with great enthusiasm. It is a great charity, a worthy charity, one of the most fantastic charitable endeavors I know of. You should ante up for Heifer I. this very minute via their web site, http://www.heifer.org. My church youth group once solicited funds to buy a cow to send to an impoverished family in the developing world, and I ponied up $50, which bought a shank of cow or maybe even a hindquarter. Or maybe it was a pair of goats we sponsored, in which case I supplied at least a third of a goat. With any luck, it was the front third.

I’m telling you, Heifer International is the bees’ knees. Actually the entire bees, because they send swarms of bees to poor folks too, so that they can sell honey and make candles and sweeten their gruel and get stung and whatnot.

But anyway, upon finding the Heifer catalog in the mail pile, I seized upon the opportunity to make my ordinarily greedy-grub children see the Light of Generosity at Christmastime. I showed the pages to my teenaged sons, who are preoccupied with Ipods and American Eagle hoodies and other spawn of capitalistic excess as Christ’s birthday approaches, instead of slopping over with love and charity and the milk of humankindness like they oughtta be.

“Look,” I appealed. Their eyelids drooped in my general direction. “This charity provides animals to the needy. Llamas, geese, sheep, pigs—just look at this little girl in Mozambique with her flock of chicks. Her diet now contains vital omega-3 and iron and she can buy schoolbooks.”

The boys shot looks at each other. Ohmigawd, Mom is on another geek hippie crusade.

I flipped through the pages in search of something, anything, that would pique their interest and spark compassion in their steely hearts.

“Look, guys, at the poor children with their water buffalo. For only $250, children in Thailand can have a water buffalo, which supplies, quote, protein-rich milk, organic fertilizer and draft power for planting rice.”

My fourteen-year-old burst into song:
Everybody’s got a water buffalo,
Yours is fast and mine is slow.
Oh, where’d we get them, I don’t know,
But everybody’s got a water buffalo.

(http://www.mp3lyrics.org/v/veggie-tales/the-water-buffalo-song/)

His older brother tried hard not to laugh. I made one final appeal. “But just think, not only can they plant their rice, but they can haul it to market on the buffalo’s back. Look at the happy Thai boys washing their water buffalo.”

My callous offspring began a mock argument with each other:

“I’m not milking the water buffalo, you milk the water buffalo."

“She’ll kick me into the middle of next week. You milk the water buffalo.”

Their six-year-old sister, still stuck on the catchy tune from VeggieTales, added another line in the spirit of the season:

Ho, ho, the mistletoe, everybody’s got a water buffalo.

After deflating my yuletide spirit with comedy, the teens began challenging the idea in earnest. Why, my tuneful teen wanted to know, wouldn’t the starving Thai villagers simply eat the water buffalo? Rice, schmice; fertilizer, schmertilizer. A whole ton of meat was just delivered right to your door and you haven’t had a square meal since birth. Starving kids in Thailand, he insisted, would adopt Samwise Gamgee’s approach to potatoes, given a water buffalo from the rich Americans: “Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew.” And if they wouldn’t delay gratification, and have a big buffalo feast fit for a king and invite the whole village, my son seriously questioned their sanity.

His older brother, who is fifteen, questioned how people who cannot feed themselves are going to feed a two-thousand-pound water buffalo.

I was going to read them the Christmas poem in the back of the catalog by Maya Angelou, but I think I’ll just stow it.