Marisa Glassman is GlobalGiving's Business Development Manager. She recently traveled throughout Brazil and visited a number of GlobalGiving projects. On May 4th she visited "Trees and Education Protect Rainforest in Brazil." When asked what she would tell her friends about this project, Marisa said: "Great: They are making a difference."
"With just a short time in as large a country as Brazil, I was afraid I wouldn´t be able to see enough of the country. And while I´ll almost certainly never be able to see as much as I´d like to, today´s visit to Roberto Lamego´s forest in Valença gave me a welcome complement to all of the city-based work I´ve seen. Now I can leave Brazil happy. While finding a way to get there was tricky to say the least, I can´t imagine this trip being complete had I not been able to go. The forest I visited was a two-hour drive outside of Rio de Janeiro city, where most of the land is now rolling hills where vast forests once stood. When man cleared the land to plant coffee trees and other produce, the forests were decimated. And although the crops thrived for a short time, they eventually disappeared because the land could not maintain them without the cover and moisture the forest had provided. Left with almost nothing, most local residents turned to other uses for their land, such as cow farming. With many animals throughout the area, the forests have not been able to grow back.
"On a plot of this land, Roberto Lamego´s family had a farm. The land was eventually abandoned while Roberto was living abroad, but he decided to return to Brazil to try and salvage it. Since 1993, Roberto has planted hundreds of thousands of trees and other crops on his family´s land, and his forest now thrives among the surrounding barren hills. With proper care and attention, he and his dedicated staff, who live on the forest grounds Monday through Friday, have grown a forest which not only houses tall trees such as palm trees, which will no longer grow on their own in most of the surrounding area, but also houses crops such as passion fruit, mangoes, limes, coffee, and various other fruits I wish I could spell in English - some of which I tasted right off the trees.
"Once or twice every month, Roberto brings a school bus full of local children to the forest to learn about the landscape and work he and his coworkers have done. He realizes the community´s immediate need for income, and thus conveys the message that, not only does his forest help preserve the land, but provides a sustainable way to produce crops for many years by giving them the environment they need to thrive. It is often an uphill battle against a government that does not share his goals and local community members whose immediate financial needs make it difficult to maintain the long-term outlook necessary to follow Roberto´s methodology. But Roberto´s will and conviction make his efforts less of a choice than a natural path. I am so thankful I was able to visit the forest with a diverse group of local students who were also visiting for the first time. Their enthusiasm and curiosity were wonderful to see, and although the language barrier between us didn´t allow us to communicate fully, we did manage to find the one thing that saved us all from some unnecessary itching: the citronella plant Roberto showed us, which luckily is the same word in English and Portuguese."
Dear donors and project friends,
Project “Provide Vegetable Gardens for Families in Brazil” continues its activities, and since last update report, this project made possible many things to happen here in our communities. We continue to search for possible recipients for new vegetable gardens donations, but this is not an easy task. Our first recipient continues his work and sells his production of different vegetables every Sunday at the local market. Mr. Helcione works as a mason most of his time but I am sure the income he gets from his garden helps a lot at the end of the month. With the end of the winter and with milder temperatures we will supply baby fishes for his water reservoir. He now has the means to feed these fish. We are supplying a truck load of cattle manure to his garden in a week or two. But, as I said, for many reasons it is not easy to locate and find new recipients for vegetable gardens donations. We even placed ads at the local newspaper and posters at the local market, without any result. As most of possible recipients are not ready to start an organic vegetable garden exploitation, we decided that the first thing to do was to improve the knowledge or in most cases introduce Organic Farming to them. Luckily there is a big organic producer in a neighboring town that regularly gives courses on organic agriculture and so in a course he gave in May we could offer 10 seats for possible recipients. His next training will be in September we will offer another 10 places. Please see the pictures of this course at the project page. As you know, this project runs together with GG project “Trees and Education Protect Rainforest in Brazil”, that among other things, takes students for “a Day in the Forest” Ecological Trekking to the Concordia Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. Please find at the project page a link to this other project page. Most of these schools have vegetable gardens to provide the kitchen. But, believe it or not, these Municipal Schools gardens receive very little or no assistance at all from the Municipality. We saw that they needed help and we are trying to help, improving the vegetable gardens of these Municipal schools of Valença County. We are attending two schools and after winter holidays another two will receive our assistance and help. The two gardeners were students of the Organic Farming training course. For one of the schools we are providing a new watering system. Please see attached pictures of these two schools. As it has not being easy to find new recipients, we are working to enhance the production of sprouts of vegetables that are supplied to producers, helping one of them to make a new and much better production center. We are also studying the possibility of supplying a plastic water reservoir to another producer, all members of the local Organic Producers Association. The work continues, the project is better known today and some people are beginning to make contact with us looking for help or partnerships. I am sure that in the next report we will have many more achievements to show you. SALVEASERRA counts with your support to be able to develop these actions in a so needed and poor environment. Thank you all for your help and donations that make all this possible. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, ideas or suggestions. Thank you again for this support, Roberto.
Dear donors and project friends, once again thank you for your support and donations that makes all this possible.
As we are about to finish our year plantation operations we want to share with you what we are do with our forests and the donated seedlings. Since 1995, SALVEASERRA recovers forests with agroforestry plantations methods in an effort to attract and convince economically land owners and cattle ranchers to protect the environment with the use of these ecological and economical possibilities that brings profits to them and avoids deforestation. As farmers have very little information about these agricultural techniques and procedures, our pilot demonstration areas are used in courses and field training programs to show students and land owners that it is possible to preserve the forest, protect biodiversity and obtain income doing things like we do. We add value to the forest with our planting methods. All the work starts at the tree nursery and our nursery produces low cost seedlings and costs very little to maintain since it was built under the forest shade and with local materials. We have produced countless seedlings since we started planting and when we buy seedlings they are brought here until definitive planting. From the nursery the seedlings are taken to a place near the plantation areas and then separated by species before planting. Each tree species is planted in its best appropriate ecosystem condition. In our plantations, trees, palm trees and fruit trees are planted in squares that have 3 or 4 meters sides and a great quantity of new plants can be introduced in a small area. This year we opened three new areas for different agroforestry system planting plots. In two of them timber trees were mainly planted and the other one was directed to fruit trees. Remember that when you plant agroforestry systems you never stop planting and there is always room to plant something else in the same area. All plants must have an economical and ecological interest to be there and because these areas are ecologically balanced areas there are no pest attacks and ants are a rarely problem.
But maybe this is the easy part of the act of planting trees as people always forget that if we want these baby trees to become mature trees they have to be inspected and cared for at least 2 times a year and during 4 years. If you don't do this, there is an enormous chance that these very fragile seedlings will die, be it by drought, by fire, eaten by ants, crushed by branches or tree trunks, swallowed by lust vegetation or stepped up by cows. What I want to say is and it is absolutely necessary to have this always in mind, is that for at least 4 years, it is not possible to abandon these young trees after they are planted otherwise many plants will not survive and this international effort in resources and manpower to aid the environment will be useless and meaningless. I am very much concerned with this plant abandon situation because I have witnessed this happen many times here in Brazil and I would not like to see this happen with GlobalGiving Green so dearly donated trees. Donor must consider that in many situations one dollar one tree is not enough to make this sapling become a big, mature and reproductive tree. I am writing this update in the middle of GlobalGiving's fundraising campaign, “Give a Little Green" and you can be sure that if you want to contribute, every extra dollar our project can obtain from this campaign will become a nice tree, timber, palm tree or fruit tree. Who knows if some time donors will be able to visit the planting areas and plant a few trees with their hands?
Thank you all very much and all the best,
Roberto Lamego
