Tree Planting and Overnight Holidays

It has been a great week here, and I'll be on my way back to Santo Domingo tomorrow to pick up the rest of the team. I've found a great inn where everyone can sleep and have arranged for a woman at my favorite restaurant to cook our suppers every evening. I think everything is more or less in place, and I hope this trip will be the first of many more exchanges between my Haitian and American friends; maybe some of you, too, will come one day!

Yesterday we did a big tree-planting expedition in Anse a Pitre, which was a lot of fun. There are three nurseries at Sadhana Forest that we built three years ago and are now home to seedlings of several types of trees--mango, papaya, Mayan nut, tamarind, meringue, avocado, and a few others I haven't translated yet. When we do a "planting," we flood the area around the saplings with water, in order to loosen up the roots, then carefully pull them from the soil and carry them in a bucket around the town to people's yards. Yesterday we gave away about 30 mango trees, planting them in water-filled mounds and mulching them with dry leaves and old clothes. Sadhana Forest keeps track of every tree they plant, and the number is up past 34,000! The Mayan Nut trees that were planted my first year should be producing fruit by this time next year.  I love having the opportunity to check in every year, and to witness the scope of a project that is greater than any single person or period of time. 

 The Haitians who are most involved with Sadhana Forest are young people in their late teens or early 20s. Most are living here without much family, and they all have a story, or many, to tell. I love having conversations with people as we work, cook, or eat together. We speak in a mixture of Creole and English and talk about each other's countries, families, sports, and hopes for the future.  They're teaching me about Haitian pop culture, although I have a lot of ground to make up.  I thought they'd told me that yesterday was a holiday, so I went to church in the afternoon. It was empty, with a padlock on it. Apparently the holiday was an overnight one, because it sounded like a giant karaoke party was being broadcast all over the town at about 2 in the morning. But then when I got up at 5 to run, everybody was up and starting their day, too, like nothing had ever happened. Just another day!

I hope you have all had a wonderful week as well, and I'll check back in when our whole team is here!