In May this year, Faith Aryokot, an accountant working at a law firm, sat down to take inventory of her life and evaluate her purpose. This evaluation made her realize she was lacking something needed to live a fulfilled life of purpose. “What is my purpose? Yes I am an accountant, yes I have a job, but I want to have this purpose, something I stand for, something that people can see me for, at the end of the day.”
Around this time, she read about renowned Kenyan social, environmental and political activist Maathai Wangari who founded the ‘Green Belt Movement’ that was responsible for planting over 30 million trees and empowering women to take part in social change, an act of courage and resistance against the Kenyan government for which she was beaten and imprisoned multiple times, but ultimately helped blaze a new path to ecological resilience. This piqued Faith’s interest,and inspired her and took her down memory lane to her childhood.
As a child, Faith had so much fun planting trees, a passion she picked from her father who had a nursery where he raised seedlings. She used to take an active role in helping raise the seedlings and tagging along during his tree planting trips in the village, granted at that time it was just for fun.
These fond memories made her dive into doing research on trees in Uganda and it was here that she was met with the harrowing state of Uganda’s forest coverage. “We have only 8% forest cover. The deforestation is too high and there is little being done to curb this.”
Faith decided, she was going to do something about this. She launched her tree planting initiative called Faith In Trees, with the goal of planting 50,000 trees around Uganda.
“Trees give us the obvious, literally they give us life. They give us oxygen. They give us furniture, fuel, charcoal; trees are so diverse in their advantages to us.”
To fund her initiative, she is making ‘Faith In Trees’ t-shirts that come in different colors for sale. “The proceeds from the t-shirts buy the trees but I do foot the labour, transport and other expenses.”
Currently she is using schools for her initiative because they usually have a lot of land, therefore she is ensured of their sustainability. Additionally, she gets to have a chance to interact with the children, include them in the tree planting process and talks to them about why tree planting should be everyone’s responsibility. “I donate the trees and plant with them with the simple request that I will continue talking to the children about the advantages of trees and to ensure their survival. I take it so serious I actually go back and check on the trees.”
Since launching the ‘Faith In Trees’ initiative 3 months ago, Faith has been able to plant over 2,000 trees and visit 5 schools in Soroti District like Owale Primary School, Okuyo Primary School and Awokya Primary School. “I started with Soroti because its home although the idea is not for it to stay there. I want it to go to the entire Uganda.” She has also been able to meet other prominent people championing the tree planting movement like Vision Group CEO Robert Kabushenga, as well as an outpouring of supportive messages from people applauding her initiative and urging her to keep going.
However, much as the initiative is proving to be a success, Faith is facing a few hurdles that include going an extra mile to plead with people who seem uninterested in tree planting while others complain that the tshirts are too expensive, leaving her with inadequate funds to see her initiative through smoothly.
You can be a part of the ‘Faith In Trees’ initiative by reaching out to Faith through her various social media accounts, purchase tshirts or support her crowdfunding campaign on Akabbo.
“You can also just plant trees, it’s not about me. I will be happy to know that maybe I made you do something about them.’’
Faith’s message to women is to get involved in creating change. “The time is now; we have to join all these purposeful movements. If we are to limit it down to tree planting, women actually have a very great role to play because we are caring and not so distracted. I think we are the best people to actually move this movement forward.”
