In Retrospect... Sawmill Training (a GFRS unblog)

Today is the last day of the sawmill training here at camp Awekaim, Ogia. For the past 2 weeks, Amele have been drilling the 15 participants really hard... filling their heads with mathematical formulas, secret key numbers, computing (calculating I mean) skills, and of course sawmill handling skills.

Being the end of the training, I decided that I must interview Amele today... otherwise it'll never be done and my film will be denied the awe-inspiring wisdom of Amele.

The interview lasted more than an hour, but one question burns in me.

"At the beginning of the training, you told the participants that there's 380,000,000 kinas (120 mil USD) that could be made from the forest in the next 25 years. Don't you think that by saying this you might raise the expectations of the participants?"

"I'm not here to raise their expectations... what I'm trying to do is to teach them how to value their forests. Because, if the community allows industrial logging, that would be how much they will be robbed by the logging industry... leaving them with 3 kinas per cubic meter of timber and no forest left. But if they learn how much the value of their forest is, they can do the work themselves in a sustainable manner, have more money for their community and at the end of it still have their
forest with them... once again, i'm teaching them to take timber out of their forests, while keeping their forests in their forests."

Amele was also rather upset at Camp Awekaim's landowners who have chopped up way too many trees to set up the milling camp here... especially since the camp is located within the forest management area of the clan. Well frankly speaking, it really does look like hell here (Luke codenamed this place 'camp hell', and I do agree with him)... trees are felled, with no shade the sun burns every inch of my skin, mozzies thrive like mad (and so does flies in the morning)... it's not a pretty sight. It looks like a smaller version of a clear felled land. When I first arrived 2 weeks ago, I had serious doubts. "Is this the future of eco-forestry? gasps!", I exclaimed secretly in my heart.

One may think that the above paragraph is not gonna do much good for the campaign... but one need to realize that as noble an idea or a campaign might be, mistakes will be made. The trees felled for this camp is one mistake, and fortunately the clan's landowners are sorry for what they've done and have learnt their lessons... the landowners from the other clans have also learnt their lessons from this too.

I asked Amele what do we do about this. He told me that he'll get the participants to take a seed each from the forests and replant them in the camp. I follow Jaime (a participant from catfish clan) into the forest and he picked a seed and took it to the camp. Amele insisted that the kids from the clan come along and see the seed being planted. Once that was done, he told the kids...

"This tree will be your responsibility. You'll need to look after this tree until it becomes big because all this forest will one day belong to you."