This is my big tree planting project for next year- it got accepted as a Peace Corps Partnership so it's now just waiting for funding! Please go check it out guys, the link is below!

Hello friends and family! Salam malekum, peace to you

As a agriculture/forestry Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa, I'm excited to announce the "Trees for Fuel" reforestation pilot project! This is a tree planting project between myeself, a few other Peace Corps Volunteers and even some Gambian Department of Forestry counterparts, to be carried out in several villages in my district. It is registered now as a Peace Corps Partnerships project, which means everyone can go to the link and glance at the proposal and, if you want, contribute ANY amount right then and there. If you have nothing extra to contribute right now, or course, no worries. But please, if you know others with charitable tendencies or interests in rescuing this planet's forests, please pass this link on.

https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=635-042®ion=africa

This is why I'm so excited about this project:
Driving a few hundred kilometers through northern Senegal to the airport a few weeks ago I saw the shocking picture of desertification in full for the first time. The parkland of The Gambia, sparse but still treed, unfolded mile by mile into a devastated washed-out waste land. It's not fair to call it a desert, conjuring up pictures of lizards and cactus, red sand dunes and canyons, wolves howling at the moon from atop mesas. This was a man-made expanse, stripped of its layers of life down to a nutrient-void greyness, dotted only occasionally with an angry little shrub inevidably snagging some shred of plastic trash. Yikes. Senegal has electricity; power lined cut through the desert scene in all directions. Yes they are "developing," but at what cost?

The Gambia in in trouble, but it's not a desert yet. And the institutions are in place to inform people that desertification is a real scenario, that planting trees will keep their wells wet and the rainy season long. The time is right to make it "cool" to plant you own trees for firewood- the concept of planting mangoes and cashews caught on beautifully and it's just a small hop to making fuel wood tree propagation a practice.

So- thanks for listening! Pass on the link to all who might be interested and help us if you can. Feel free to email me with any questions. I wish you all well!