The lagoon edge has been retreating for two decades. Cleared mangrove meant faster erosion, and every storm surge reached a little further into the paddy behind it.

The replanting began with forty volunteers, most of them between sixteen and twenty-two. They work on Saturday mornings in the mud, planting propagules in staggered rows and marking each block so survival can be counted honestly the following season.

More than eleven thousand saplings are in the ground. Survival across the first two blocks is running near seventy percent, which is well above what an unmonitored planting usually achieves.

The difference is that the same volunteers come back. A planting day is easy to organise and photograph; returning for two years to replace losses and clear debris is not.

Fishing families have noticed crab and prawn returning to the replanted sections first. That is the argument that has brought older residents into the work — not the environmental case, but the catch.

The corps is now training a second group from the neighbouring village.