Treasuring Trees

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.                                                                               -- George Eliot

Today we had our first session of gardening activity. It is a long term service activity and shall account for 8 hours of service for documentation. I find it unfair to limit our CAS hours for CAS is limitless; it is the soul of an IB student. However, I also understand that one needs manage it in order to put it in a curriculum. I never count hours when I am working, but when I sit to write my journal, where I must mention it, I realise how small my task was. I am very much fond of CAS activities; especially this one for it is to do with my beloved plants and nature.

We started with the most elementary of all gardening tasks – weeding. The area we were given was full of wind grass, and so we had to clear it.  At first it appeared like a simple task, but eventually I realised how tedious and tiresome it was. We first started uprooting the unwanted plants with our hands, but I very quickly realised that it was not going to work that way. The tiny – and perhaps microscopic – spikes on the grass caused an itching sensation which was undesirable. So I thought, why not aid our dexterity with some equipment? I asked Ms. Vijayalaxmi (my CAS coordinator) and then ran to our school gardener. He gave me two sickles and a crowbar; I knew it was going to help us for I had seen the local farmers use it. I used my sickle to rapidly crop the grass and shrubs and gave the other one to my friend. It turned out only two people in my class knew how to use a sickle, including myself. I therefore helped my friends learn how to use it. It is extremely simple and when they realised what the trick was, they instantly became experts at using it. It was really a good feeling.

We had planned to work as a team and so we had divided the field into sections. The consequence of our team work was that we were able to clear a substantial amount of land in a little time. We all worked really hard and our sweat was evident of that. I myself became more aware bout my abilities, I never thought I could do such a labour intensive work with such a massive input of energy.  But contrary to the tiresome task we all enjoyed it a lot. The presents of plants brought up many stories and incidences which we shared with each other, and despite our mundane task there was a lot of laughing and giggling which contributed to the already fantastic environment.

Towards the end of today’s session, we sat down to plan for our next session and also discussed why we were doing all this. We aimed to address the global issues likes pollution, deforestation and global warming by planting trees, nurturing them to their bloom and protecting them.  Undoubtedly, all these issues are of global significance and what we would do will contribute, although negligibly, to a healthier global environment.