“Planting trees under whose shade you will never sit.”

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.