Tree Planting

Once I had become comfortable in my school with language and with my workload, I rounded up some kids who were interested in science and made a science club.  We learn about general scientific ideas and practices and we do experiments.  Hurray! 

Seeing as how everyone seems to think that trees are good, I decided to plant some trees.  I got my school to buy the seeds and I got my kids to plant them following an experimental method that I came up with at first (baby steps) and they can expand on in the future if they want.  This is the product of our first round of plantings:

Those are bags used for drinking water filled with soil and a seed; let me explain.  There is no plumbing in the village, and drinking water from pumps is not a reliable source, health-wise, and drinking from wells is horrendous.  So what they do here is to take water and purify it before sealing it in rectangular plastic bags of 330 or 500mL.  These are usually really cheap and safe to drink.  One problem is that you are left with thousands of these bags lying around empty after people drink them as trashcans are rare in big cities and non existent in villages.  You can take these bags and open one side, fill it with soil and you've got a tree's new home.

How did I get all these bags?  Kids.  Little ones.  I find a gang of 7 year olds, they are everywhere, and say every 25 bags you find I give you a piece of candy and they go bananas because they are not used to being rewarded for helping out an adult.  I ended up with 800 bags.

It works better to use two bags for every tress, to give the roots more room to grow.  This time we used a ratio of 1:1 soil to sand because I wasn't able to get any manure.  In the future, we will test the differences in germination using different amounts and types of manure.  To be honest, there are enough trees in this region of Burkina Faso, but the kids can at least see the scientific method and practice writing up experiments.

We had a lot of fun mixing up the soil; they thought it was so weird to see a professor digging around in dirt with students.  Hopefully I can update with pictures of healthy sprouts in the near future.