A school planted ten thousand trees in a morning

Three hundred children from a school near Mahajanga planted 10,000 seedlings in a single morning. It was loud, muddy and chaotic in the best way, and by lunchtime the plot was in the ground.

We are wary of planting days as a rule. They are easy to stage, they photograph well, and they are easy to forget by the following week. A seedling left alone through its first dry season usually dies, so a thousand trees planted and abandoned is not a thousand trees, it is a photo opportunity that wasted a thousand seedlings.

So we only run them when the class commits to looking after the plot afterward. This school signed up for the boring follow-up, a year of weeding and watering through the dry months, before we agreed to the planting day at all. That commitment is the part that actually counts.

The teachers have folded the plot into lessons on soil, water and how a forest holds a hillside together. The children measure their own trees and keep a record, which turns out to teach more than a textbook does.

The Sahy nursery cooperative grew the seedlings, mostly hardy natives chosen to survive rough handling by three hundred excited children. A few hundred will not make it regardless, and we have told the class that too, because a tree dying is part of how a forest works.

What we get is 10,000 trees with a year of care behind them and a village whose children are growing up knowing that patch of forest is theirs. That second part may outlast the trees.