Planting 15000 trees in Madagascar

In our world of constant Twitter, Facebook and YouTube feeds, it is an important reminder that not everything works - everywhere all the time - seamlessly. Dropbox is a marvelous invention. A few years back it made burning a CD obsolete plus saving a walk to the post office across town. Four weeks later the CD might drop in our PO Box at some time, if it didn't get lost en route.

But all this modern of technology only works if you have a constant power supply and a constant Internet connection. With blackouts, or roving brownouts in Madagascar, it is difficult to send large files with e.g. dropbox, if your Wi-Fi connection gets interrupted all the time. Hence, due to the lack of a constant power supply, the pictures that should have complemented the December project reports only made it across the oceans into dropbox a few days later and are included in this update.

We had been inquiring with our partners in the villages how they came up with such a precise count of 11,798 trees planted? Most people would say “almost 12,000”. But the secret is in the book (see photos). Maintained by our Zahana gardener each tree planted is meticulously recorded, with the number of seedlings and the name of the person who planted it.

Here is out previous report in case you did not get a chance to read it yet:

The awards ceremony for the three most successful tree planters earlier this year had a lasting result in our communities. In the village of Fiadanana the 2013 results are:

• 450 trees planted by the parents association
• 100 trees planted by students from Zahana’s school
• 1200 trees planted by the villagers.

Fiarenana, our other village, is the leader in the reforestation efforts with 11,798 trees for this season! It is very encouraging for Zahana to see that the tree planting has indeed taken root in our communities. Please keep in mind that Madagascar is in the Southern hemisphere and it is summer and the dry season right now, when it is too hot to plant trees.