Africa

In the scorched highlands of Northern Ethiopia, where the earth had baked into something closer to concrete than soil, thousands of villagers showed up for work. They didn't carry saplings. They carried pickaxes, shovels, and crowbars. And for months, under the skeptical gaze of government officials and the open laughter of neighboring villages, these workers did something that looked completely insane. They dug holes. Millions of them. They excavated over twenty thousand deep trenches. They stacked thirty-eight thousand earthen walls.