Plant the trees! Save the planet!
(And pandas of course.)
To my inbox arrived an invitation from Millennium Center Association, asking all EVS volunteers to participate in a unique opportunity. The activity represented a perfect output for the outdoor activity scheduled in our job description, and also a chance to make difference in Arad, and to leave something behind.
Aim of the project is together with the City Council of Arad, Forestier High School and The Technical College of Construction and Environmental Protection to plant 800 trees in a 1.5 hectare terrain within the Ceala Forest Arad. Ceala Forest is located 2km from Arad and streches over an area of 1560 hectares, and is one of the favorite places for leisure and camping in Arad. It's on the area of The Mureş Floodplain Natural Park, which lies downstream from Arad to the Hungarian border, along the river. The event taking place there invited with slogan “Don't stay apart! Join us for a better future!”. So, we joined us. For a better future.
So, at 9:15 in the morning most of us were at the meeting point, willing to give life to a 1.5 hectare deforested land. Two minibuses took us to the forest. Flashbacks from school excursions. Small trees were laying on the ground, waiting until forestry specialists showed us how to plant the tree – dig a hole of 40 cm deep and 40 cm wide and plant the tree vertically. Vertically, that was very important, and it is definitely worth mentioning that the team Sabine-Antonia didn't manage to do it even with the first tree. And of course I broke the shovel with the first digging attempt. Trees were supposed to be planted in a line, where were markings with colour for the distance between them. It would've been more interesting to plant them as some shape, like when you fly with a plane over Arad, you see a huge panda for example. But, we had to stick to the lines.
Some trees were easily confused with other dried plants that had grown on this land before – grey and without any branches. Some others were with lot of branches and many roots, so you take a tree and go to your hole and discover, that you have to dig it even bigger because of the tree you chose so carefully.
For the keyword of 'cultural diversity', it was there definitely – without translation it still remains the mystery for me what kind of trees we planted. For 'developing team spirit' we developed team spirit within our own team and with competing teams. During planting happened, that my wonderful teammate Djena (12 trees!) confused planting 'tree' and 'triin'; appeared, that you can use the mould/dirt/soil/whatever is the word in English for the ground material to use for making a small handgun, or a potato (a hard one) or horse/cow head; instead of snowballs and water you can throw dirtballs, have shovelswordfights, or make contests who throws the ball more far, or more precisely to the hole that you need to fill anyway; or at some point you discover that some people from other teams are helping with digging the holes. So, besides just planting green stuff it was a lot of fun.
At the end of the event we had four broken shovels (at least I saw four, might've been even more), ca 150 freshly planted trees and Alina handed the diplomas to everybody. So, we went home – dusty from the dry soil, but quite happy, and the bus driver agreed to drop us even to Micalaca.
Between the short distance from Billa to home I didn't notice any difference in the air quality. The wind still took the CO2 and dust from passing trucks to our noses, but young forest needs time. After some years maybe deers are running around in the forest we planted, and bears won't tear them apart. And when every city would organize such a small event, maybe all these small areas covered with trees would create more oxygen and it would save the panda bear population of the China. And Tasmanian devils and.. ah, guess you got the idea already.
