Tree Chops

Our tree expert shown training
students to make a tree nursery, with
about 3,000 Gao trees.

“Ain’t no tree, gonna’ lift its branches- I’ll lift my hands to glorify God’s holy name!” Those are some lyrics to one of our kids’ favorite songs, which we’re singing in translation for our church on our last Sunday together. Underneath its fun and motions, the song hits on how even trees can glorify God. That’s a strong conviction we have, which goes along well with the importance we know that trees have for the Sahel at this time. With more trees there will be less erosion, better soil, and more stimulation of rain. And there are so many uses for trees!

One of our last efforts here has been helping the church with a tree planting initiative to do their part in encouraging more care for trees. The idea is to plant more trees in the fields of the Bible schools and hopefully villages where there are evangelists. The church leaders decided to focus on Gao trees because they’re very good for putting nitrogen back in the soil, and not as desired for eating by animals. But their seed pods are a very valuable animal feed. The other part of the idea is to train students at the Bible school in how to make tree nurseries. There's a lot of special considerations to nurture seedlings until they can be put into the fields at the right time of the rainy season to help them have the best chance of flourishing. 

I discovered some new things when I started working on this initiative with a few church leaders. What I didn’t think too much about previously was all the obstacles to the continued growth of the trees we’re nurturing. It makes a ton of sense for farmers to want to put these Gao trees in their fields, so I mostly thought of the obstacles as being lack of education/information on the importance of the trees, and then how to nurture the small trees that naturally grow. Maybe the next biggest obstacle being the presence of migratory herders, whose animals kill small foliage. That made me figure the biggest problems arose when the trees were young and not established. But my colleagues who have fields and who grew up here have pointed out that a typical farmer actually has very little control of his fields here. The fields are normally far out from the village and don’t have any sort of walls or fences around them. This means that other people can come through and cut the trees down at will for firewood (even though there are supposed to be “bush rangers” who regulate this). 

Typical fields near the Bible school
buildings, with a few trees in them
from other years of planting.

They’ve told me stories of villages where they had fields or where they were part of projects to plant trees in the area, but 5-10 years later you go back and all the trees they planted have been cut down. At one Bible school 10 years ago, a tree planting project had to take on students to guard them.  They would rotate days to go out and patrol the fields where they had planted trees, to make sure that they weren’t being destroyed in the first year after planting.  But that’s not very sustainable to keep up in the long term. 

This all highlights for me how planting trees is important, but the other important part now for the Sahel is finding better ways to take care of them.  Equally important in this is using less firewood (we’re trying better clay stoves!) and finding some ways to have more no-grazing zones.

-- El Padre