Friday 10 February 2017

We Love Trees!!!

Written by Mollie Cohen

Group Reflection - discussing discrimination, diversity and identity.

February thus far has been all about TREES. We have had two delightful days out in the open air of the APIL garden, as well as a few office-based days.
Mary looking fierce with her
shovel.
Albert and Mary shovelling the dirt.
A significant amount of our time this week has also been spent planning our reforestation awareness raising sessions. Our initial plan was to host the awareness raising sessions in schools in Bissiga, where we could target both children and adults. After consulting with APIL they weren’t too keen on the idea, so we created a presentation to try and convince them. On Thursday afternoon Mary and Dramane volunteered themselves (as tributes) to present to the coordinator. Unfortunately he did not think that our cohort would have enough time to set up links with schools in order to carry out the sessions, but he liked our ideas for the future. However, we have been given time during the training sessions already being run by APIL in order to conduct our own planned sessions. Currently we are looking to split the content across 3 or 4 sessions with; reforestation, sanitation, and environment being the key issues we want to expand upon.

Mixing the dirt, sand and
manure together. 
On Wednesday we got down and dirty and learnt how to plant moringa trees, with the help of the APIL trainer – Benjamin. First we had to gather all of the ‘ingredients’ to make the soil, we were sent off to different places with wheelbarrows to collect sand, dry earth, and manure (mmm). This part went relatively well, aside from Khader spilling a full wheelbarrow of dirt. After a few swings of the pick-axe our frustrations just melted away (but to clarify the pick-axe was used for breaking up pieces of earth, not people). Next we mixed the dirt, sand, and manure together with water to make a gorgeous brown soil.  We carefully, and tenderly poured our soil into little black bags which are to house our moringa plants for the next few weeks. Everyone participated in arranging the black bags into neat rows – like a game of tetris, with trees – where we then proceeded to gently poke holes in the soil for the seeds. By the end of the day everyone had green fingers, smiley faces, and some jazzy new pictures to prove it.

Looking like proud parents.
Left to right: Josephine, Khader, Augstin, Sonia, Mollie, Amy, Benjamin, Dramane, Albert & Salif.




Amy and Mollie picking moringa.
Augustin and Barry loving life amongst
the shrubbery.
Everyone got to spend some more quality time with moringa in the great outdoors on Thursday. The morning began with two of the APIL ladies showing us how to properly harvest the moringa. We moved efficiently (reminiscent of the swarm of locusts in Madagascar from Planet Earth II) and removed every single branch of fully grown moringa from the APIL gardens. Next we washed the moringa in buckets of water, ready for the next step – we had to pick each individual leaf from every single branch of moringa.For hours the basket of branches did not deplete, instead it seemed to keep growing. Eventually, to the joy of everyone involved, we finished.

“Working together gets the job done.” – Bob the Builder, 2001.

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