by Angela Tangente
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” – William Shakespeare
It was a beautiful sunny day when two teams that won the internal ERNI Hero Team contest decided to pack up, bring only the basic necessary stuff and leave the city for a moment, go somewhere around the province and… to chill? No, not to chill. But to help to protect our world. So, let’s start with the very basic. The mother nature.
On 6 April 2019, the winners of the ERNI Hero Team contest comprising of the members from the ERNI Philippines Social Team (1st Place) and the ERNI Philippines Community Core Team (3rd Place), went to Haribon Foundation located at Lumban, Laguna to enjoy the seedlings preparation activity. Yet, due to some emergency, some other team members were not able to join.
We started with a short orientation about the Haribon Foundation. The name Haribon came from the name Haring Ibon also known as the Philippine Eagle. The name was chosen because the existence of the king of birds is a perfect barometer of the state of the Philippine forest. The team was involved in 3 types of activity. At first, everyone prepared the planting materials and did the Soil Sieving and Potting/Bagging. Everyone enjoyed this first part of the job. As a next step, the team did some seed maintenance. Wherein everyone did the weeding, root punning, tagging, measuring and recording of plants. Within this activity, everyone cleaned the nursery using bare hands. The colleagues separated the damaged seedlings from the healthy ones and reorganised the garden/plant bed. The last activity was more about maintenance and cleaning the surroundings. It is important to make the place clean to make the trees grow stronger and healthy.
The team enjoyed the activities very much and gained new knowledge, experience and more passion for contributing to saving mother earth for the future generations.