It is 3am on a Friday morning, and my alarm is going off. I get up, get dressed and ready to go, and am waiting in the darkness of the patio by 3:45am. The stars are incredible and the moon is nearly full, casting a crisp blue glow on the sleeping world. Only that my part of the world isn’t sleeping. There was a school anniversary celebration in the next town, and drunken men are stumbling back to their houses. These are not the characters I’m waiting for. I’m actually waiting for the president of the newly formed Tree Planting Committee and his donkeys.
The day before, I had hauled 180 pounds of barbed wire from the National Park office in Huaraz to my house in Cashapampa. It of course couldn’t have been one straight shot, but rather it entailed a truck, a combi, a mototaxi, and a colectico over the course of three hours. Once everything was safely packed into the back of the colectivo for the last leg of the trip, I bought four huge bottles of soda in anticipation of celebrating the building of the fence. Halfway up the mountain, there was a shifting of barbed wire which proceeded to puncture one of the soda bottles. I knew everyone in the car so I offered them all soda, which is a very Peruvian thing to do. It was a nice moment we all shared as soda was dripping everywhere and on everyone and the driver stopped so we could have a few minutes without bumps. We made it the rest of the way without incident although I’m sure several passengers were waiting to get to a bathroom.
Getting back to that incredibly early morning… There I was waiting in the dark with 11 rolls of barbed wire. One by one the forestation crew showed up with one pole each, as did my sitemate who changed her mind about thinking 4am was too early to meet. The president of the reforestation committee was concerned that only 10 of the 115 members of the tourist association had shown up by the 4am meeting time. Nonetheless, he told us to start hiking and he’d wait until 5am for any latecomers. The moon had just set as we made our way in the dark up into the ravine. Climbing, climbing, climbing for a few hours until we reached the reforestation area as the sun came up and warmed my body and frozen hands. I pulled out the map given to me by the National Park, and couldn’t figure out where these parcels of land were located. Instead of one big plot of land, there were seven small pieces So there I was not having any idea where to build these fences, plus without the manpower and fence posts that were needed. I thought we’d have to guess and build a fence on land that looked suitable for tree planting. My sitemate and I decided on an area that looked like it might have been one of the parcels on the map. Not feeling totally convinced of this fence-building business, I walked back towards the group of men and saw that not only did more men and fence posts arrive, but so did one of the park guards. The same park guard that was present the day the parcels of land were picked out by engineers from the National Park. He knew exactly where every parcel was located, and confirmed that the one my sitemate and I had picked out was indeed one of the seven. Woohoo! Good guess! The men ate breakfast and then got right down to work. There ended up being 35 men with their fence posts. Enough to build two fences around pretty decent-sized plots of land.
A few hours later, I looked out across the plots of land that were newly fenced-in. They also dug all the holes at the correct distance apart, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about tourists bringing tools and leaving them, or the possibility of being stolen. The tourist will just have to bring up their tree and put it in the hole. We even cleaned up all the cow patties and made a designated area for compost. Within a few hours, all the planning of a year and a half came together. Next week, we’ll bring some trees to the area to start selling them to tourists so that we can see how the process works. If it goes well, we’ll let the project loose and see what happens when tourists have the carry their own trees and plant them unsupervised. Hopefully in the future, there will be a park guard hired specifically to oversee the project and be stationed close to the reforestation parcels. In the meantime, we’ll see what happens this tourist season in order to make improvements for next year.
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