Article March 1, 1969 Issue

Signs of the Times

Richard C. Davids

The Rotarian

Richard C. Davids in The Rotarian Evanston, Illinois

Vein Schield, a slight, sandy-haired, self-made Iowa industrialist, now 64, has for 16 years carried on his own one-inan aid mission to help the world's hungry help themselves. It is based on a simple but burning conviction: that the United States is full of old, discarded machinery, which, when reconditioned, can be a godsend in areas still dependent on the muscles of humans and oxen. All those years he has been collecting and repairing old machines and shipping them in a never-ending stream to the far parts of the earth—over 50 train carloads to 38 countries. He calls his nonprofit salvage operation Self Help, Inc., because, he says, "Nobody in the world wants charity."

Though Schield supplies his machines only to missionaries and Peace Corps and Point IV technicians, he permits them to resell to nonprofit cooperatives. In a shipment to the Dominican Republic, Peace Corpsmen got a silage cutter, hammer mill, disc harrow, tractor, corn planter, and concrete-block machine, resold them to local coops, and then helped villagers make furniture out of the packing boxes. Often a coöperative is formed expressly to accommodate a Self Help tractor. and small plots the size of a garden, once hand-hoed, now are joined into sizeable fields farmed with power.

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