Woman volunteer for animal health? When he heared this, Camat [Head of Sub-District] did not believe that women could handle large animal as cattle, for the purpose of treating their illness. In one of his visit to the village where Mrs. Af lived, Camat tried to test this animal health volunteer from LP2M. “Can you make the cattle lie down,” asked Camat. Camat thought, a woman could not push a cattle. Mrs. Af, along with three other animal health volunteers [all were women], swiftly tied a rope up around the cattle neck and its body. Then, she pulled the rope, slowly. The cattle started to bend and fold its knees. Pulling the rope to the left, the cattle lied down – ready for treatment, if necessary. All those who witnessed this applauded her, including Camat. In fact, she did not rely on the strength of her muscles, but her skills. Where did Mrs. Af acquired all those skills? This is her story.

In 1989, the wife of Neighborhood Head [Ketua RT] told Mrs. Af that she wanted to go to Kelurahan Office [a political administration area consisted of several villages, below sub-district] to participate in a meeting of forming a group, facilitated by an NGO. Mrs. Af was interested to know more about the activity. Her friend [the wife of Neighborhood Head] asked her to join the meeting. Apparently, there was special appearance of PIPSP [Information Center for Rural Resources Development] in the meeting. They explained purpose of forming the group – to execute ‘family’s welfare improvement program.’ Mrs. Af noticed, the participating group members were those who lived around Lurah Office. Mrs. Af raised her hand and inquired if people from her area could also form similar group. At that time, it was an unusual sight to see women put their opinion forward in an official forum, but Mrs. Af saw the opportunity to improve her life and successfully gained courage to speak up.

It turned out, by joining the group, Mrs. Af and her family obtained many advantages. She first participated in family health program, then she became a cadre for posyandu [integrated health service post], and joined various trainings – including trainings on hatchery [eggs], merang [edible mushroom grown out of rice straw], and bookkeeping. Besides the group, Mrs. Af was also fond of reading and tried to practice simple technologies, such as rice huller, based on directions she read from newspaper. Recently, when she was doing broiler poultry, she made the hatching machine and the poultry feed herself. In addition, learning from her mother – a village medicine woman – she tested many traditional medicines for human on animals, and apparently they worked succesfully.

“I need to be independent. If i need chicks, I know how to hatch them myself. If my poultry need the feed, I should be able to prepare it myself – I don’t have to buy it. If my poultry contract a disease, I want to be able to cure it myself.” Those were her principles. As a result, her skills were always increasing, and she managed to reduce production cost.

All this helped boost her family business. Following the poultry, Mrs. Af ventured on raising goats, buffaloes, and eventually settled on cattle. In the mean time, group activities went on as usual, but this time under the guidance of LP2M [Community Research and Empowerment Institute], when PIPSP was no more active. In 2002, LP2M offered her to join the selection of becoming volunteer for animal health, a program of Heifer Indonesia. Mrs. Af passed the selection and participated in an 8-day training in Solok [April 2002]. It took her two hours to reach the training site. At that time, her youngest child was only six-month-old, but it was not a problem to her. She brought along her older daughter to look after the infant during the training. She breastfed the baby at training breaks. Support from her family was tremendously helpful for her activities. In 1992, Mrs. Af received a gender training. She exercised knowledge from the training in her family. Her husband was supportive towards his wife’s activities. He helped her with household chores whenever she could not perform them – an unusual sight in her community. But both believed that the important thing was they would benefit from all those activities. All her skills helped improving the family’s welfare.

As animal health volunteer, Mrs. Af was to serve the group members and surrounding community members. Using thermometer, scissors, scalpel, meter, and medicine for deworming, she treated animal diseases traditionally. Most of the materials for concoction derived from local plants. In order of frequency, animals she treated were goats, cattles, and poultry. “The most difficult time is when people come to you late at night asking you to check or treat their animals,”, she remarked the downside of being animal health volunteer. What was the rewarding side? “My knowledge increases. I love to learn about everything. Furthermore, the numbers of my cattles are increasing because I know how to treat them when they are sick.”

Once every three months, Mrs. Af attended an internal meeting of animal health volunteers in West Sumatra. During the meeting, she had opportunity to exchange information with other volunteers. She succesfully proved that being a woman, housewife, and mother to four kids, did not stop her from performing many helpful activities for her family and community. She believed, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Hopefully, we have many more woman volunteers for animal health in the future.

This story is from the  Strengthening the Values of Caring and Social Responsibility through Livestock Activities (West Sumatra)

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