Fwd: Steph's Trees for Fuel project

Hello friends and family.  Below is a email from my special lady over here talking about her reforestation pilot project that she will be working on for the duration of her time here in the Gambia.  I am just now switching sites, moving 300 km across the country to work with a really cool environmental NGO called the Stay Green Foundation and will be working on the pilot project with Steph.  Any donations you guys can give to fund the project will definitely be put to good use.  As for the concept of paying people to plant trees, if "Why should we pay people to help themselves?" pops in your head, please consider the fact that we all the time pay people to do things that are in the public interest in US.  It's called government services, but over here with a non functioning goverment they don't have that luxury.  The project model is based off of Kenya's Greenbelt movement, the founder of which won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago.  I hope this finds you all well and happy.

Cam

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stephanie Rayburn <stephrayburn@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 10, 2007 11:38 AM
Subject: Steph's Trees for Fuel project
 

Hellooo friends and family!  Salam malekum, peace to you
 

I'm excited to announce my "Trees for Fuel" reforestation pilot project, to be carried out in several villages in my district!  I have signed it up 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.  It got accepted as a project right before I left on vacation a few weeks ago and I'm so happy to see now that I got back, that random people already contributed $200.00- people are amazingly generous when it comes down to it!
Most of you are my friends, "poor" college kids and the like, with a few professors and family members in the mix and I KNOW you don't have much money to spare. 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&region=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 guys 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.  Take care- peace only to you and your home people! (:

 

-Stephanie