Often villages depended on mountain springs for their drinking water, but these had an unfortunate habit of sinking back into the ground before they had served the thirsty villagers. The Association disciplined the vagrant waters with thirty miles of concrete channels, 293 dams, 400 wells, 51 sumps and 8 reservoirs. Rogue rivers and the invading sea had eaten away valuable farmland, and the Kadoorie Association produced restoratives with 29 seawalls, 30 retaining walls and a variety of culverts and floodgates. Odds and ends, helpful in diverse ways, ranged from rain shelters to compost pits, poultry sheds to outhouses. Pigs were popular because, as Horace explained, “It’s the only animal you can see expanding daily.” Thousands were given away, and advice on caring for them was supplied by the agricultural stations. One group that was the especial beneficiary of pig gifts were farm widows ranging from seventeen to ninety-six years of age. Horace, as the roving scout of the Kadoorie Association, had noticed that hundreds of women whose husbands had been killed by the Japanese or had died natural deaths had not only lost the family rice-winner, they lost the “face” or community status they enjoyed with their husbands. Custom frowned on their remarriage, so they could do little but linger disconsolately on the fringes of village life. The Kadoories talked it over and decided that a gift of pigs, cows, ducks or chickens would give these widows something to occupy themselves with and enable them to earn some money. In a period of two years 10,000 widows received these animals and enclosures for them. Feed they obtained through the Kadoorie Agriculture Aid Loan Fund. Blind and elderly women were able to care for flocks of chickens; younger ones received pigs and cows. The usual pig gift was six purebred Chinese sows from the Kadoorie Experimental and Extension Farm at Pak Ngau Shek; all pigs were inoculated against disease and the Agricultural Department specialists showed the widows how to care for the animals. Many women tripled their small incomes by breeding pigs and selling their offspring. As the owners of livestock, they became persons of consequence in their villages. With the aid of government experts, the brothers bought hundreds of foreign pedigreed pigs, and bred Berkshires, Yorkshires and middle whites with the local animals to produce a larger and hardier strain. Cows and water buffaloes, indispensable as draught animals, were distributed by drawing lots in the villages, and the drawings became lively public gatherings with soft drinks and cakes served all around. Gifts or loans financed the construction of numerous fish-breeding ponds, with the seed fish supplied gratis.