Last year I participated in a project called “Trees for Peace” or, in Romanian, “Pomi pentru Pace.” The premise was to plant one tree for each of the 22 years Peace Corps had served in Romania since the fall of communism. This project was carried out in ten communities throughout Romania including mine, Valea Călugărească, resulting in a total of 220 trees planted. Collaborating through one of our talented Peace Corps Volunteer Leaders assigned to work with the Romanian NGO MaiMultVerde, loosely translated as “More Green,” we implemented the project, using U.S. Embassy funds, during a sort of “field day” week that the Romanian Ministry of Education implemented for the first time in 2012. As you may recall from my blog post at the time, the project was a great success. Working closely with my Counterpart and her headmaster class, coincidentally with the profile of Environmental Protection, we partnered with experts from our agriculturally focused high school and planted the prescribed number of trees and installed a custom built bench alongside the commemorative plaque we received from MMV. Before last year’s project was even completed people were already asking me if we could do it again next year. Not knowing how or if we could my default answer was, “Sure, why not?”
Well, the answer to “why not” initially, was that our Peace Corps Volunteer Leader, a third year volunteer assigned to work with the Romanian partner NGO MaiMultVerde, had completed his service and was now gallivanting around Europe. One big reason the project was so successful last year was thanks to having a dedicated volunteer who could focus on managing the project more or less as a fulltime job—after all, he had a desk in the MMV office. So the real question this year was whether or not one of us could manage the nationwide project on top of our regular responsibilities. Willing to give it a shot and, with no one else raising their hand with interest to make an attempt, I volunteered to take on the project and code-named it: “Trees for Peace 2.0, The Greenhouse Effect”.
In November 2012 I reached out to our Peace Corps Country Director and asked if she’d get in-touch with the U.S. Embassy to discuss their interest in facilitating the financials of the project for a second time. Meanwhile, I contacted MaiMultVerde and confirmed their interest, at which time I was partnered up with a very talented individual, Ștefan Bradea, for partnership in coordinating the project. Within a couple of weeks, not only did we have a green light from the Embassy, but also they were encouraging us to expand the project in some way. This was great news, but posed a challenge. How do we grow while our volunteer headcount is shrinking?
Remember that with Peace Corps’ imminent withdrawal from Romania we’re not bringing on new groups of volunteers, so by the time our shovels would be scheduled to hit the dirt we’d be down from 70+ volunteers compiled mainly of Group 27 and Group 28 to only about 35 from the latter. Thus, my thinking was that if we can’t branch out with more trees in more locations why not increase the impact of the project at fewer sites? That’s when I remembered the work of a volunteer from an earlier group who had collaborated with her community to build an entire “Eco Park” from recycled and repurposed materials. The hallmark of this was a greenhouse constructed of used 2-liter plastic water bottles. This idea really stuck with me — () because I thought it was incredibly clever, and (B) it’s tangible; much of the work we do as volunteers is in education and youth development and simply can’t be measured. So, I found appealing the idea of building something and leaving behind a visible mark of our existence here in Romania.
Over the course of the next five months the project came together; the scope was defined; volunteers signed up to participate; funds were distributed; trees were planted; and, greenhouses started to go up. There were plenty of challenges along the road, with countless and constant e-mails flying in and out, uncontrollable delays, mounds of paperwork and tedious tracking of stamped receipts and invoices. But in the end it was totally worth the effort we all invested. Our scheduled day for breaking ground slipped from the first week of April during “Școala Altfel” to, perhaps more appropriately, April 22nd, Earth Day. Sacks of recycled bottles flooded in as each of our six sites began their builds; in total we needed almost ten thousand bottles rinsed, labels removed and bottoms cut off. But with a small army of students, with group leaders naturally emerging, the work went by almost effortlessly.
Although there were the occasional moments of doubt and disagreement, and despite the fact that our greenhouse in Valea Călugărească is more of a rhombus than a rectangle, it sparkles with a calming light blue in the sunlight and is a daily reminder of what we can accomplish and learn when we work together. In the end, I can’t say how long our greenhouse will actually last. As I look around Romania at the old communist bloc apartment buildings, many crumbling from the passage of time, I wonder how many groups of ninth graders will pass by our greenhouse and ask who the crazy American was who helped to build it. Held together by untreated wood, metal wire and, yes, even duct tape, the physical structure may not last more than a few seasons. So, in the end, maybe it is better that we rely on the intangible to promote our Peace Corps legacy into the future. After all, what is ‘peace’ really about? It’s not so much the tangible structures we build together but the friendships and collaborations that foster our cross-cultural understanding that ultimately bring peace.
Click here to see the Prezi I gave at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest
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