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On importance of cows
Aug. 17th, 2016 10:49 pmYesterday a family from the village I visited a while ago was in the news here in Moldova.
http://24news.md/ro/article/bucurie-mare-pentru-familia-cu-opt-copii-din-dascova-au-primit-in-dar-o-vaca.html (it is in Romanian so I had the locals tell me what it was about, I am tired of GTing, I have been doing too much of it lately).
The family was a single woman raising nine of her children and grandchildren alone. Grandmothers raising a whole bunch of their grandkids alone is not that unusual here because of the catastrophic scale of work migration out of Moldova. Most of the people who can work seem to have left to work at construction sites in Moscow or the EU, leaving their parents to care for their kids. They send money back to Moldova every month and these transfers are the backbone of Moldova's budget. More about Moldova's left-behind kids can be found here in FT for example:
https://www.ft.com/content/bf5d6278-152f-11e5-a587-00144feabdc0
So the news was that the family's cow died and the (grand)mother issued a plea for help saying that she would not be able to feed the kids without a cow. The story had a happy end, one of the companies in the capital ran a fundraising campaign among its employees on the same day and they bought and delivered a new cow to the woman on the next day. One cow here gives between 15 and 25 litters of milk a day. It is about 35 UK pints or about 90 glasses of milk a day. The kids drink it, they use it to make porridge, yogurt, cottage cheese, butter and sour cream. They also sell the excess of dairy products and use the money to buy other stuff. And they sell the calfs once a year or so. Cows are very important to many families in the villages here, especially in the villages with plenty of common pastures around them. But man, one cow can keep you busy, in addition to looking after it and milking it twice a day you have to find a way to process twenty litters of milk every day.
http://24news.md/ro/article/bucurie-mare-pentru-familia-cu-opt-copii-din-dascova-au-primit-in-dar-o-vaca.html (it is in Romanian so I had the locals tell me what it was about, I am tired of GTing, I have been doing too much of it lately).
The family was a single woman raising nine of her children and grandchildren alone. Grandmothers raising a whole bunch of their grandkids alone is not that unusual here because of the catastrophic scale of work migration out of Moldova. Most of the people who can work seem to have left to work at construction sites in Moscow or the EU, leaving their parents to care for their kids. They send money back to Moldova every month and these transfers are the backbone of Moldova's budget. More about Moldova's left-behind kids can be found here in FT for example:
https://www.ft.com/content/bf5d6278-152f-11e5-a587-00144feabdc0
So the news was that the family's cow died and the (grand)mother issued a plea for help saying that she would not be able to feed the kids without a cow. The story had a happy end, one of the companies in the capital ran a fundraising campaign among its employees on the same day and they bought and delivered a new cow to the woman on the next day. One cow here gives between 15 and 25 litters of milk a day. It is about 35 UK pints or about 90 glasses of milk a day. The kids drink it, they use it to make porridge, yogurt, cottage cheese, butter and sour cream. They also sell the excess of dairy products and use the money to buy other stuff. And they sell the calfs once a year or so. Cows are very important to many families in the villages here, especially in the villages with plenty of common pastures around them. But man, one cow can keep you busy, in addition to looking after it and milking it twice a day you have to find a way to process twenty litters of milk every day.
