CODEP Still Strong As Ever
In the summer, in Haiti, it is astoundingly hot and humid. When
rainy nights cool the air 5 or 10 de-grees to a more-comfortable
85°, the morning starts out cool. Light comes by 5:00 AM and it isn’t long before the oppressive morning humidity is upon you. We usually start the work day before 6:00 AM, to deliver boxes of food graciously provided by Stop Hunger Now, or deliver tools and seeds, make visits to CODEP work groups, or just to head up the mountain for a meeting. It stays cooler longer on the mountain, but by 10:00AM, all bets are off. Just walking down or up a hill in the muddy trail soaks one’s
clothes with sweat completely in only a few minutes.
But, lest you think all the heat and humidity are flagging the souls
of CODEP people, you are very wrong. They have an amazing capacity
to do prodigious amounts of work, and trip lightly up and down the
trails that require waking sticks and careful measuring with every step for most Americans. The season is high for planting fruit and
shade-tree seeds in ‘pepinyès’ which are tree seedling nurseries. Of the roughly 950,000 trees CODEP plants each year, approximately 20 % of these are fruit trees – avocados,
cherries, mangos, breadfruit, papaya, oranges, lemons, limes, and
a variety of other fruit plants that aren’t known well outside of Haiti. In addition, the groups have begun planting and growing coffee, because in three years they will have a cash crop to sell.
There are 33 work groups in CODEP, from small ones in developed areas of four or five people, all the way to twenty-five or more. They dig contour canals (ramps to the Haitians), plant vetiver holding grasses, and than plant shade tree-seedlings strategically above the canal. The trees’ leaves, which fall all year around, collect in the ditches and begin to decay and form a natural compost from which verdant soils come for planting gardens and varieties of fruit trees, coffee and other crops.
Vetiver grass is common in m any places in the world, used often in shady areas where other grasses won’t grow, and kept cut short all season long. In Haiti, its deep roots help hold the leading edge of the canals from eroding in rainstorms. The grass is plentiful and is simply cut off on the way to the job site, then planted merely by sticking it in the ground. By the end of the day it looks withered and worn, looking dead, but in a week or so, new shoots of green have appeared and in only a few months it stands taller than most people, and can have a root system even deeper.
All of the trees grown in the pepinyès are started from seeds carefully collected by CODEP workers and planted in little plastic sacks where they are stacked close together and wa-tered daily for six months. They will grow to 6 – 15 inches tall and then are planted along the hillsides. Sometimes visiting mission groups help a crew in a pepinyè ‘break dirt.’ This is the process whereby dried animal dung is mixed 50-50 with topsoil to make a rich nutrient for the seedlings to germinate and grow. The pepinyès have poles put in the ground around them and they are covered with palm fronds to keep out the harsh summer sun so the tender seedlings can get a good start on the way to becoming a “CODEP Tree.”
And, there is ample evidence of the value of this work – in
terms of holding the water in the mountains to serve to nourish the trees.
At the left is the river Larione as it flows under a bridge near Léogâne, which
drains a nearby watershed not served by CODEP. And, on the right is the Kormye
River, draining CODEP forests – note the significant difference
in water flow. This means that much of the summer rain runoff is held in the
mountains to nourish the trees, and consequently does not erode the topsoil
and valuable nutrients.
So, in spite of the heat and humidity, the summer in Haiti is a time of rejuvenation and growth and you can bet that everything grows incredibly fast. |