Blog by MBP Volunteer, Hilary
One of our new reforestation volunteers, Hilary, has sent us a blog about the process and preparation it takes to get trees planted back into the forests of Madagascar! It takes a lot of care and back breaking work to get this big job done. We are so happy to have all of the dedicated volunteers and local communities helping.
You can help too… go to greenvolved.com to read more on boosting our project through Greenvolved!
A Week in the Life of the Reforestation Team…
is quite hectic and requires a lot of logistical organization from what I’ve seen already, but I think I’m starting to fall into a bit of a routine. For every planting event, quite a bit of preparation is required. Even days before any trees are all planted, holes need to be dug by hand, compost and sand needs to be mixed and carried uphill to fill the holes and each hole needs to be marked with a bamboo stake. The day before planting, seedlings need to be taken from any of the five nurseries we have in the Kianjavato commune and transported to the staging area by vehicle and on the planting day these trees are carried about twenty minutes, usually uphill, to the planting area in bamboo baskets. The act of planting the trees itself is only a small portion of the work done from start to finish, and that’s not including work done in the nurseries to ensure seedlings are available to plant. For the past two weeks, we’ve been doing two of these planting events a week for a total of 4,000 trees and hope to continue this into the new year. It’s a little disheartening to be planting on a hill, looking across the valley and to see tavy fires burning. At the same time it brings into perspective the importance of incorporating the local community into the conservation efforts and bringing awareness to the value in the ecosystem in which they live.
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