A Story by: Yemane Gebru and Simon Berhanu
Mulu, 43, is a mother of five. In her hands she holds her father’s old hoe, its handle worn, smooth by decades of use. ”Before WeForest came, for years, I had watched the rain steal our soil. Every rainy season, the water came rushing down the bare slope, carving deep wounds into the nearby fields, taking everything needed to heal our degraded land. The land was leaving us gradually and we had nothing to hold onto.”
Today, she woke before the rooster, wrapped her headscarf tight, walked through what used to be forest, now just rock ground and abandoned farm plots. Below her, tens of people were going into the valley. Old men and young mothers back-carrying their babies are heading toward achieving today’s goal “saving the soil”. Everyone carries a tool (i.e a hoe, a shovel, a pick) they all come to the right site.
A young supervisor, Tesfalem Atsbeha, raised his whistle: “Today we will build two structures. Each one will save this soil.”
The Deep Trenches
On the slopes, they dug a one meter wide, three meters long and one meter deep trench. Following the contour line (water level) — not a finger’s width off, or the water would find its way around. The trench will serve to catch the runoff. The excavated soil became an embankment/ a wall downhill along the contour, holding the water and sediment from the upper slope. Mulu gripped her hoe and swung the earth and broke open then she lifted the soil and threw it onto the growing wall. Beside her, her neighbor Hiwot was digging too. Neither of them spoke. They did not need to.
By midday, the first trench was done. Mulu stood at its edge and looked down to the straight embankments and the trenches which were solid and a meter deep. “When the rain comes, this will hold,” she whispered to herself.
The Halfmoons
On the gentler slopes Mulu and the others dug something different; small, curved basins shaped like half-moons carved into the earth. Open side facing uphill toward the runoff, a curved wall on the downhill side.
“Each one catches the water,” the supervisor Tesfalem Atsbeha explained, “and we stagger them—so if the run off one overflows, the next one catches it.”
By afternoon, dozens of half-moons dotted the lower slopes. Each one promises that water will be held, that soil would stay, so that life would find a way.
At sunset, something even more important had taken root.
The work was done. Mulu sat on the hillside along with others, exhausted, surrounded by her neighbors. For years, they had all farmed alone, each struggling on their own small piece of land. But today, under one sky, digging side by side, they had built something together. Really together.
The supervisor stood up slowly. “We have dug trenches before and we have built terraces before. However, we lack someone to bring us together like this, since the past few years. WeForest gave us the courage to come together, as we did before, and do what is best for retaining our soil from being degraded. We are grateful for all of it. Truly. But what we value most…”
He paused.
Looked around at the faces of his neighbors, and continued: “What we value most is to be here together again, in this difficult time, when everyone is divided because of the unstable political situation. Instead of gossip, we are now thinking and working together to protect our homeland to serve our children and us; this is what we value most. You reminded us that we are stronger together than we ever were alone. That is something no trench can hold. That is something we will carry forever.”
Mulu observed that most of the people around her shaked their heads, because it was true.
The trenches would hold the water. The half-moons would hold the soil. However, what held her, her children and her children’s children was the community itself rediscovered rebuilt – stronger than stone.
WeForest did not just restore the land; they restored us to each other!
