The Village, the Goats, and the Little Sapplings

My school has a village problem.  I few months back I posted a link to see my village through Google Maps.  If you take a look at it you’ll see that my school is in the middle of the village with one side towards vast fields.  Most of us would think that people would respect the school educating their children but that’s not the case; the village is actually quite malicious to the school.

Min. of Forestry teaching students how to plant the trees

The herd boys, for instance, allow their cattle to graze on the school grounds and this is a huge problem.  Part of the agricultural program is to have practicals and part of this is crop production.  Every year the Form C’s raise crops with the hopes of selling them and every year almost all the crops are eaten by the cattle not to mention often trampled.  It’s not just that the herd boys walk their cattle through the school (which they often do at night); the herd boys don’t watch their cattle very carefully and every week we find stray cattle munching on school property.  For a long time the school would have some boys bring the strays to the chief in hopes that he would find the owner and punish them as a good chief should but that rarely is the case.  Thus, the problem persists.

The saplings looked like glorified branches

In August 2011 a new group of volunteers came to Lesotho and one of them was working for the Ministry of Agriculture in my local camptown.  She told me that the Ministry was giving away fruit trees for free.  I brought the idea to my Agriculture teacher and she jumped out of her seat with the idea of getting the school some trees.  Unfortunately the trees ran out before I had the chance to co-ordinate with the Ministry.

Basotho students know how to work!

The next year, in June, I decided to pursue the project and emailed someone from the Ministry of Forestry, the organization giving away the trees.  I soon set up an appointment with them to talk details and I brought my Agriculture teacher along since I have very little knowledge on the topic.  The meeting went great with my co-worker doing all the talking and co-ordination.  She set up a date for the Ministry to visit us and get a better idea how many trees they could give us.  All the school had to do was to start digging holes for the saplings.

By the end of June, just as schools were closing, the Ministry and the school set a date for when we would plant the saplings.  The day came and, with the help of the students, we planted over a hundred trees.  This project couldn’t have gone any better!

After a long days work, over a hundred trees planted

 I wish the story ended there for from this point things start going bad.  A few weeks after we planted the trees we noticed that some of the saplings were now missing; holes that had a tree in them now were empty.  When the Ministry came to plant the trees they brought many for the villagers to plant in their homes.  Unfortunately greed doesn’t have a limit.

The trees now have branches and have grown a little

Then there was the drought.  New trees need a lot of water and while the school did their best to water the trees at least once a week a bit of rain would have helped a lot.  Many of the trees seem to have gone dry and are no longer growing.

After that came the animals.  In September one of the trees started producing leaves and a few flower buds.  We were all so excited.  In a week, the tree was completely gone.  Other trees had been eaten and were half the size that they once were.  My colleagues tell me that this is the work of goats.

The first tree to have leaves.

About two weeks back I counted about ten saplings with leaves and I was happy since many of those had been eaten by goats.  The next week all those trees had lost their leaves.

It’s really quite sad seeing something you worked so hard for going to waste and knowing that there’s very little you can do about it.  My colleagues and I talk about building a fence but that takes money so there’s no guarantee that it will happen.  And at the rate the trees are being eaten and damaged its doubtful that even one will survive.  As I said in a previous post, not everything PCVs work at ends up going well and this is a project I thought was guaranteed to succeed.  Still, the school is hopeful that they will find a solution to the problem and get more trees in the next few years.  All I can do is hope that they do.