200 trees and counting
We just came back from a visit to St Raphael last week. We had gone up to bring members of Robi's family - who had left St Raphael over a decade ago and now live in the US - back to visit the their home town. And as always, we stopped at Pak Nan Ginen to check on the progress of the park.
While the lack of rain and the dry well has been holding back our trees a bit, they are still firmly established and growing slowly but surely. We walked around to do an inventory of the trees, and we counted over 200 established trees, with 85 that are taller than me. The park, which was a dusty, bare strip of land when we found it, is finally starting to look like a park, if not yet like a full-fledged forest. In a year or two year's time, we will begin to have a forest that looks like the way Rakblez did before people started cutting down the trees for charcoal.
The quarter acre of land we have can probable hold another 100 trees - if we begin to plant in the land that is currently the soccer field. It looks like it may be time to start looking for additional pieces of land so we can continue to grow our young forest...
