Goats for Girls
Working to reverse a generational curse among poor women in Nepal
Dear Friends,
Some children face the ugliest side of humanity from the moment they’re born. So it was for Sima (her name changed for her protection), a 13-year-old girl from rural Nepal.
Sima’s mother grew up in poverty because, as a member of Nepal’s lowest Hindu caste, no employers would offer employment to her parents. To survive, they often had to scrounge for food in the jungle surrounding their village.
As low-caste Hindus, the family suffered in other ways besides poverty. As a child, Sima’s mother was forbidden to enter the homes of her higher-caste friends. In public, they would not even acknowledge that they knew her.
Then came a rape at the age of 12. Her virtue now considered lost, Sima’s mother resorted to prostitution—the only work open to her—even before she reached her teen years.
A few years later, after a failed marriage involving a move to neighboring India, Sima’s mother returned to live with her parents in Nepal. That’s when Sima was born.
As a daughter of a prostitute from the lowest caste in Nepalese society, Sima faced inevitable social and economic pressures that threatened to wash her down the same polluted river of bondage and degradation that had engulfed her mother.
Thankfully, however, a recent lifeline has been cast to Sima. A partner of Heaven’s Family’s Human Trafficking & Slavery Ministry has chosen Sima to be a part of their Goats for Girls program. Our partner knew of many girls in Sima’s predicament and sought a solution that would not only prevent them from entering the sex trade, but also lead to self-sufficiency. Goats were the answer!
In phase one of the program, the girls received training in how to care for goats and are paid a small salary each month to perform this work (providing them with jobs). In phase two, the girls are taught how to breed the goats, raise the young ones, and start a herd of their own that they can then use to supply their own needs for milk and meat and have some to sell for income (providing them with their own businesses).
A hard-working seventh-grader in school, Sima has no interest in doing sex work like her mother, and neither do the vast majority of girls who face such circumstances. Sima wants to study hard and dreams of one day becoming a nurse; and the Goats for Girls program—which also provides support through counseling and other training, including teaching them about the love of Christ—will help her achieve her goals.
Sima already loves taking care of her goats—funded by Heaven’s Family—after school each day. And by cleaning their pens and treating them when they are sick, she is already learning valuable skills that will one day help her be a better nurse.
But Sima isn’t the only girl being protected from sex trafficking through the Human Trafficking & Slavery Ministry. (Donations for this project came from Heaven’s Family’s Compassion Club members.)
Maya (also a fictitious name) is another beneficiary of the Goats for Girls project. Maya’s mother has successfully escaped a life of prostitution, and wants desperately to keep her daughter from suffering the same fate. Like Sima, Maya also attends the seventh grade, and hopes one day to help those oppressed in life by providing health services to them. She loves school, in part because her classmates are her only friends. She and her mom are grateful to the Goats for Girls program because it helps Maya stay in school and dream of a better, now achievable future.
We’re so happy that Sima and Maya now have brighter futures ahead of them—ones in which their dreams, not their nightmares, are now possible. They now have hope because they’re connected to heaven’s true family around the world because of our caring God.
Together with Him,
Jeff and Karin Trotter
Directors, Human Trafficking & Slavery Ministry