Camel-Friendly Farmer Makes Polite Innovation

By Donna Stokes, World Ark managing editor
Photos by Dave Anderson

SAME, Tanzania—Timothy Sheghere Mgonja and his camels have an understanding. They take care of each other.

Timothy Sheghere Mgonja and his wife Hanaeli Mshana say the camels helped them send their daughter Sifa, age 7, to English primary school.

A Heifer Tanzania camel farmer since 2003, Mgonja notes that although the animals’ individual personalities are quite evident, some of their quirks are universal. For example, he explained how little camels enjoy working in front of a crowd. “When you try to load up a camel, or work with a camel with other camels and a crowd around, the camels protest,” he said.

“They make noise and get skittery. They imagine the others looking at them and they feel put upon because they’re being asked to work and the others aren’t. They feel oppressed.”

So when it’s time to load a camel to carry water, Mgonja pulls the worker aside so the others can’t watch. “Then there’s no problem; they don’t protest,” he said.

He also came up with an ingenious method for loading and unloading the tall, muscular animals. Trainers teach farmers to tap the camels gently on the knees with a stick so they know to sit for a load. Yet Mgonja spent three to four days with several camels, teaching them to kneel and to stand back up with the clapping of his hands. He applauds; they bow to accept.

“I am a creative man and I’m wondering why do people use a stick to instruct the camel to kneel? What does it mean to the camel? It’s a sign he should sit. Why don’t we try something different?” he asked.

“I developed my own method of clapping. I tried it and it worked out, so now I use it on the camels trained that way. It’s nicer for the camels, I think. To me a stick is a sign of forcing or scaring, but clapping is a friendly way to work with them.”

Timothy Sheghere Mgonja is surrounded by his family in the new home he built with income from the Heifer camel project. It took him three years to build the house, forming and baking each clay brick by hand.

He asked Heifer to provide camels for his community farm group after watching delighted children ride camels at a tourist park in Arusha. He asked the park workers how much money camels make them on each ride. He was pleasantly surprised. When he learned of the other extraordinary benefits of camels including milk production and their ability to haul water and firewood and even to pull a plow, he was completely sold.

“I left with a dream about camels,” Mgonja said. “I was eager to get them.” The group near the town of Same now shares profits from 14 camels and will soon pass on the gift of five females and one bull to a neighboring community.

“We came up with this idea of getting camels because we were in trouble. The children could not go to school. Also, our shelters were so poor; we wanted to improve our shelters. The indigenous cattle and goats we kept before were not providing our necessary needs.”

The lives of those in the camel group changed quickly after they received the camels. “When we started selling the milk, we started sending children to school right away,” Mgonja said. “My last-born daughter Sifa is attending an English primary school— it’s expensive— not many people can do that. She started in kindergarten, and is now in second grade.” Her favorite subject is math.

Mgonja moved his family from their old two-bedroom home to a new one with four bedrooms, a sitting room, kitchen and dining room. He hopes his farm group can buy more land to expand its camel business. He would also like to add a bathroom to his new home “to honor the girls.”

“From all activities I’ve been doing since I became an adult, I came to realize this is the best job to do, that is to take care of camels,” he said. “I feel like I am very much gifted to learn ways of taking care of camels in a friendly way.”