When our partners say the sky is the limit, they don’t often mean literally. 

But of the hundreds of thousands of trees sown by our partner in El Salvador, Agua y Arboles para el Pueblo (AAP), one has reached new heights. 

In early April, AAP’s executive director, Armando Hernandez, received an unusual call from the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. Frank Rubio, a well-known U.S. astronaut of Salvadoran descent, was visiting the country and needed help planting some very special seeds.

Our partnership with Árboles y Agua para el Pueblo (AAP) in El Salvador has been going strong for over 2 decades. Together, we have developed a grassroots-led conservation program that includes rainwater catchment cisterns, tree nurseries for reforestation and watershed protection work, clean cookstoves, dry-composting latrines, women's entrepreneurship initiatives and forest and spring protection.

Armando Hernandez is the salt of the earth. As founder and director of our partner Árboles y Agua para el Pueblo (AAP), he has been humbly implementing projects with TWP since 2001. One of our favorite places on the planet is AAP’s tree nursery in El Porvenir, El Salvador, where we’ve grown hundreds of thousands of diverse seedlings over the years that today are providing habitat, food, shade, firewood, soil, and lumber to communities throughout the country. Knowing that a partnership between TWP and AAP has resulted in thousands upon thousands of trees that are more than two decades old is gratifying to say the least - especially when considering the human and ecological services that these trees help provide.