Part XII: Women and trees, protecting the forests.

One of the days I was planting rice and I was sitting and eating lunch with the women I noticed that the hillside I was gazing at had large rectangles of different shades of green in each, like a patchwork, indicating different succession stages of the trees growing there. I asked one of the women why new trees had to be planted there. The woman told me that young tree seedlings were planted there at different times to replace forests that had been cut down illegally. “Who planted the seedlings,” I asked? “We did,” the woman replied pointing to the four of them sitting there. “And others, too,” she added, “all women.”

She explained that the Nepal government had sold the forest and trees growing on the hillside to a large international company who wanted the timber and were planning on exporting it to China. The large company, in turn, hired contractors from Indians to cut down the trees and haul them to a place to be shipped to China. Probably reading my thoughts the woman said that what the government had done was illegal and that the forests, by decree of the King of Nepal some years ago, had chartered the forests and given them to the Nepal’s indigenous women. So it was law and the new government, she said passionately, had no right to sell the forests.

This photo appeared earlier in the blog and it's of a group of women who each month, in a specific phase of the moon, go out and worship a tree by making offerings of food and water and then they meditate as a group sitting beside the tree, or around it. This group of women were gracious and invited me to sit with them and they answered my questions and didn't mind me taking a few photographs.