I was thus occupied when a welfare work sign-up sheet came around in Priesthood meeting.

I signed up automatically. Welfare work is important. More to the point it seems a better way to spend one's time than pressing one's hams in church. Less talk, more walk.

Moments later the words "dairy farm" caused my hair to stand and be recognized. If there is a part of the gospel plan I hate more than anything, it's meetings. But right after that it is cows.

Who knows what God was thinking when he created cows. I chalk it up to having a completely bad creation day, something I suppose even deity is entitled to once in awhile and would almost certainly explain Larry Erdmann.

But cows. Why did it have to be cows? I lost a testimony of the gospel over a previous welfare assignment involving evil bovines, one of many testimonies I have misplaced over the years, some deliberately.

Frantic attempts to have my name struck from the welfare sign-up sheet failed, including a hollered claim that I was now an atheist or possibly even a voodoo guy. Instead, I would have to face my fears.

On Tuesday, my wife drove a thoroughly embittered me down to LDS Welfare Square and dropped me off. With several other ward fools I trudged inside and -- felt the heavens part.

In a building clearly marked "DAIRY" there were no cows. The entire facility avoided even the very appearance of cow. The closest I saw were cheese and milk.

Pleased that God was back in his heaven, I spent the next four hours gladly loading pallets with 50-pound bags of Atmit.

Atmit sounds like the name of a Book of Mormon lawyer, but is actually the Ethiopian word for "porridge." Or so they said. It could have been Inuit for "rat poison" for all we knew.

Being a journalist, I made them prove it. During a break we cooked up some Atmit and tried it. The first taste was OK, the second rather less so. Third bordered on awful, and forth - well, there wasn't one.

Atmit consists of oat flour, sugar, powdered milk and vitamins. It is an acquired taste, almost certainly acquired through starvation and not through a steady diet of Hostess products.

The porridge is being sent to Africa to bring starving children and the elderly back from the brink of death. So far gone are some of them that they can only stomach a few tablespoons of Atmit per day.

We bagged and loaded 18,000 pounds of Atmit in four hours. All the while I could not shake the image of my granddaughter starving, nor the hope that, if she were, someone else would also set aside fear and indifference to load Atmit for her.

Sometimes it takes a brush with cows to remind us that other people's business should be our business.

rkirby@

sltrib.com