The Trinidad Hillside a Community Refused to Let Burn

The Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project (FACRP) began in 1982 when Tacuma and Akilah Jaramogi started clearing firebreaks above their hillside neighborhood in St. Ann's, Trinidad, to stop the bush fires that scorched the watershed every dry season. More than 40 years on, FACRP's Clean Trees Organic Nursery has grown and replanted over 200,000 native trees, restoring a denuded, dusty hillside into a functioning forest that protects a reservoir supplying metropolitan Port of Spain. The community's volunteer fire patrols and maintained fire traces have kept the watershed largely free of major bush fires since 1997, a result achieved through neighborhood organizing rather than government intervention. FACRP has won Trinidad and Tobago's Green Leaf Award multiple times and now runs environmental education programs that pass its fire-prevention and reforestation skills to the next generation.