Follow up on WWF plantings

I am doing rounds now for the trees we planted with WWF. They have a form to fill out to monitor the trees, which is a good thing. You mark how many trees people received, how many were put in the ground, how many protected, what species, how many died, and reasons why. Monitoring is very importnat, to know esp who are those who are really devoted to taking care of their trees. Good success rates means more trees for the future. Bad success rates means perhaps they won't be recipiants of the trees in the future. Usually the biggest problem is that people haven't protected their trees from goats or watered them. I just returned from the Muslim Quartier and it is really disheartening. This year grasshoppers have been really bad. They swarm on the mango trees in large numbers and have eaten through all the leaves, and then start on the stems so all you have left is one branch sticking up. This is a big problem this year all over the region., apparently not usually like this, and it brings to mind stories of plagues in Egypt in the Bible. And walking house to house yesterday it was so frustrating becuase here are a bunch of families who probably never planted a tree before, who were doing something new and different, partly because of me, and hoping for the future. And most of them even protected them well from goats and watered them daily. Adn most were tall, to my shoulder height with lots of new branches and growth when I came by last month. But now all are just stems. And its so frustrating because its like, with the dryness, the heat, the bad soil, the termites that eat through roots, the goats that chomp every available tree down to the ground, the cattle that trample small trees, its really really hard to get things to grow here. And now you have to add on to that grasshoppers this year? What's the point when everything is against you? And the hopes of people dashed like that. Is it even possible at this point to say Öh well, lets try again this year from scratch." I don't think so.

The water in the well went down further, overnight even. Had to get down low for the bucket to reach, whereas last night it hit the water with me standing up. I hope it doesn't descend any more or I'll have to add yet another addition to my already 12 m long rope.