Environmental Projects in May

Doing an impromptu training on composting at our local farmer training center. The use of Urea and Dap as powerful soil-nutrient depleting chemical fertilizers is common here. One of our program objectives is to promote organic fertilizing techniques like this.

Making our compost pile out of straw, manure, green plants, charcoal, and wood ash (the stick in the middle is to measure heat during decomposition.)

Packing little tree planting sleeves with soil/fertilizer mixture at our primary school. The man second from the right is our "counterpart" who is a forestry expert and whose help has been huge for us. His name is Mesfin.

Recess time brings out the mass of staring kiddos. This working environment has been challenging to get use to.

All of these kids collected manure for use to use in our potting soil mix. But we failed communicate to them when we had enough and ended up with about 300 pounds of manure all in little plastic bags. The kids are usually very eager to get involved in all of our activites.

Planting the tree seeds

Covering the new seeds with straw to shade and protect from birds. This is the same straw material used to thatch roofs here, a very cool traditional skill.

The tree seedlings after two weeks. The ones in the back are Eucalyptus trees, by far the most widespread and fastest growing tree around.