J-This was one of the metaphors presented to us about Peace
Corps service during the first few weeks of our training. Normally, I am not a fan of metaphors outside
of literature. In real life, they almost
always either fall short or end up growing exponentially out of control until
the speaker can’t remember if the initial metaphor was supposed to be about a
tree, river, road, or path. Today seemed
an exception to that rule. Today, we
made the phrase a reality.
Let me backtrack a little.
This past Sunday, we all had the day free. A lot of the volunteers in our Cabele
(district) were out by the gorge near our houses with our host siblings. Some of us were strolling along the
precipitous cliffs, others were playing soccer, and some of us were just
sitting near the edge watching the men heard their cattle and sheep in the
green valley below our feet. While we
were out there, all of us noticed that there were a large number of deep,
freshly dug holes dotting the area above the cliffs. As we walked along the cliff side, we noticed
some men digging these holes. They were
glad to explain to Donovan and another volunteer that they were planting trees
to prevent the rest of the cliff from eroding away, which was a serious concern
judging from the obvious slip-slope slides that had already happened. They were digging the holes this weekend and
were planning on putting the saplings they had with them (which was at least a
few hundred) in the ground starting either this Monday or Tuesday. They invited all of us to come by any time to
help them plant, though I doubt any of us realized what exactly would come of
that invitation the following day.
This Monday, after being in classes from 8 AM til 5:30,
Donovan still wanted to go down to the cliff to see if he could help plant,
despite the fact that we were both pretty tired. All of the other volunteers who had been
around when the invitation was extended showed up too. Five volunteers showed up, each with at least
4 kids in tow. We could not find the men
at first, so we hung around to watch the sun begin to set and the kids from our
Cabele playing another round of soccer.
Eventually, a man from the work crew approached us to say hi. They were done digging holes for the day, and
from the look of things they were exhausted.
They took us around and showed us the dozens of new holes they had dug
that day, and in the end decided to give us a brief demonstration on how to
unwrap and plant the saplings. They
filled up a plastic box with about a dozen baby trees and took them over to the
freshly dug holes. Of course, all of the
volunteers wanted to literally get our hands dirty, so we each grabbed one,
dropped to our knees, and began to cover the saplings’ roots with dirt. A handful of our host siblings and neighbors
had followed us out to the cliffs, although most of the kids were still playing
soccer at our insistence, and they too wanted to help plant the trees. We polished off that initial test basket in
perhaps 5-10 minutes, and the both kids and the volunteers wanted to do
more. We filled it up again and took it
over to some other holes.
This was when things started picking up speed. The kids who were still playing soccer saw
all of us having a good time planting the trees, and they started to join
us. Each time that a new basket of
plants was brought down to the current work site, you had to grab 2 plants
because it was going to be empty by the time you were done planting the
first. By the end of things, the kids
weren’t even waiting for the basket to come back; they’d run to where the
saplings were piled and bring back 3 or 4 of them, which they were then happy
to share with anyone who asked. All
told, a handful of workers, 5 PCTs, and about 20 children planted at the very
least 200 (we weren’t keeping track) trees in the course of a half hour.
My nails have dirt under them that I think it’ll probably
take a week or two to scrub out, but I can honestly say that this was the most
rewarding thing I have done during training, even though it was completely
unrelated to it.
