Nuestra Tierra

After working in the on-site Classroom garden at the Food Bank for the last few days, I took some great pictures to share with you. Enjoy!

I am working in the Community Food Resource Center, which targets long-term food insecurity by teaching and enabling residents to grow their own food. To this end, the Food Bank has created the Nuestra Tierra classroom garden to show people how to efficiently grow vegetables.

Vegetables such as the eggplant, okra and squash pictured above are also sold at the Food Bank-sponsored Farmer's Market on Thursday nights. My co-worker Audra helps local small farmers consign their veggies at the market to supplement what we can grow. In this way, the Food Bank helps residents grow what they need and sell what they don't.

Staff at the Food Bank support local growers with tons of different workshops to help get a garden started.

With the Home Garden program, the Food Bank really facilitates growing throughout the community. A family that meets a few stipulations can get free seeds, compost and even sprouts of vegetables that can be transplanted into their own garden. We start growing these in our greenhouse, and people can come by and get them when they are ready for transplanting.

Lately, I have been watering plants, taking care of chickens, digging beds and doing renovations to the greenhouse. Take a look at the Food Bank's web site for more information-- the Community Food Resource Center is doing really great things!

What can you grow in rock?

“What can you grow in rock?” Carlos asked his teacher, Mr. Perales, kicking around the dust and stones that make up the soil of the winding garden behind his school. Today was my first day at my job with the Community Food Bank, and my supervisor, Amanda, brought me along to a meeting at a local high school. I get really excited when teachers understand that students are capable of understanding complex concepts and put forth high expectations for comprehension and application of these concepts, so this meeting was really inspiring to me. To have the opportunity to support such forward-thinking educators generates such a powerful feeling of triumph for me.

Mr. Perales had big plans for his sophomore and senior students for the year, based on a grant he had recently received, and wanted to talk to Amanda about possible lines of intersection. The course would begin with an examination of social inequalities, specifically on the impact the current food system has had in creating such inequalities. America’s obsession with specialization has produced an environment in which about 2% of our population grows the food eaten by the rest of the 98%, which has resulted in a vast number of families facing food insecurity. Can you imagine being the head of a household and not being able to properly feed your children? What manifold psychological and emotional implications that must have.

Here are the problems, now what are we going to do about it? That will be Mr. Perales’ approach to this class. Armed with an overview of anthropological research methods, students will be tasked with investigating the sustainability of their own neighborhoods. How many gardens are there? How many people are dealing with hunger? The students would then develop a student-driven plan of action to address the needs discovered within their communities. This is where the food bank would come into play, because Mr. Perales wanted to bring in experts to show students what could be done in their own neighborhoods. He had plans for his students to visit farms around town, take composting workshops, and gain an understanding for what can be grown in rock, and how it could be accomplished. This information would be used to develop their own school garden, with the intended eventual result of a neighborhood seed bank, providing for the community the resources to meet nutrition needs locally.

Beyond the paper curriculum, however, Mr. Perales espoused his further-flung desires to make his students marketable by helping them to become not just builders, but rebuilders; not just landscapers, but garden designers. Through his dynamic course structure, he wanted to have his students examine how working class folks fit into the environmental movement, in turn building up knowledge and skills in gardening and green energy in preparation for entering a work force increasingly in need of such expertise. He envisioned a kind of Green certification program, something that his students could present when applying for Green jobs to show an understanding of the theory and practical abilities that would make them invaluable to the field of employment.

In the desert, a planter has a lot to consider to make a garden successful. Water catchments, sunken plots to retain the little water that comes in, composting for supplementary soil better fitting a garden than the dust that covers the ground, plants that can survive the various conditions that can differ even by placement within the garden… all of these a planter must study up on, take advice from other farmers about, and put into action. Just as the seemingly impossible task of growing food in the desert can be made feasible with the necessary commitment and willingness to learn, so can the daunting task of resolving hunger issues in the United States be confronted through appropriate action.

By assisting in the Community Food Bank’s school gardening program, I feel like I have the opportunity to open the eyes of so many students to the realities of food insecurity in their own neighborhoods and make them aware of the myriad ways they can help create a sustainable, beneficial solution to hunger. Mr. Perales is planting seeds of thought, of consideration for the reasons why social inequalities exist. He is sharing with his students information about community efforts to confront these problems, helping students find the most effective programs for helping the community just like a planter would choose the crops with the best chance of surviving the local conditions. A planter might then build a compost pit and add to it daily, creating a sustainable source of nutrient-rich soil to add to the garden to ensure continued success. In the same way, Mr. Perales is giving his students environmental skills to cultivate continued momentum in the Green direction.

Things can be grown in the desert if we put in the work to discover effective, sustainable methods. We can work to eradicate social injustice in the same way.

No longer going lightly

I wanted to take a minute to explain the significance of the name of this Blog.

Holly Golightly is the main character in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, memorably played by Audrey Hepburn in 1961. This is one of my favorite movies. Holly lived a frivolous life full of parties and excess, always chasing happiness and fooling most people that she was content. At the end of the movie, sad and lonely, she realizes that the two things that truly make her happy and loved are her pet cat and her best friend, Paul.

The last two years in Boston I was lost. Working at a job that was not spiritually fulfilling, I spent money I did not have and tried to become more like the people around me; happiness was elusive. By moving to Tucson and becoming a part of the PC-USA Young Adult Volunteer program, I am claiming as my own the things that truly make me joyous-- God, a community of faith, a lifestyle driven by social and environmental consciousness, and work targeted at educating children in an engaging and well-rounded way.

Extravagance rarely feeds our souls. This year I will be stripping away the extravagance and holding onto what I know is fulfilling to me.

Also, the Desert Holly is a flower found in the Sonoran desert, where Tucson is located:

Humanitarian Aid is Never a Crime

Hiking through the rocks that sometimes serve as a riverbed through a remote canyon, the abandoned socks, shoes, backpacks and empty bottles that I passed all represented to me a person in pain. Each belonged to a person struggling through rugged terrain in hopes of reaching the U.S. in safety. Along with coordinators and other volunteers, I hiked into the desert to drop six gallons of water along a path commonly walked by migrants. I fell in love with the desert, and am so grateful to have encountered its scenery—green, and spattered with flowers, no two the same color—but I came prepared and stayed for only a few hours. My sunburnt shoulders attest to the dangers of even a day trip. Thinking about those who make the journey through the harsh Sonoran desert to escape the problems at home, it is hard to imagine just this gallon of water will offer any relief—but I hope it does.

Sitting around with coordinators of No More Deaths the night before, I heard stories about families making this journey and facing the frightening decision of leaving a brother behind because he had blisters on his feet and could not continue along the exodus. In my mind, each article left behind symbolized a cousin or friend that was exhausted from heat and lack of water, dying alone and despondent in the desert that is at once both magnificent and fierce.

One story I heard was about a family who had left behind a brother named Jesus. Upon reaching their destination, family sent word back that Jesus could not walk any farther and had been left by a body of water. Volunteers went looking for him and dropped water jugs as usual, but did not find Jesus. A few weeks later, a man came into camp holding one of the jugs that had been deposited during the search. He had been ready to give up, he couldn't go on, when he found the water jug. What an inspiration-- the volunteers had failed in rescuing Jesus, but were able to help this man instead.

We hiked out a little more than half a mile to visit a migrant shrine. Flanking a small rock cutout were nearly 50 lamenated Saints cards, each with a prayer on the back. Rosaries and candles hung or rested nearby as well. I shivered, thinking of those who had become like shadow people, moving through the night in desperate search of deliverance, holding onto the faith that God is with them even then. My prayers have never been as profound as those that must have gone up to the heavens from this spot.

I am not very knowledgeable about the contentious issues and challenges surrounding immigration into the United States. I have no founding on which to base an opinion on right or wrong regarding the tactics for dealing with Latin Americans attempting to enter the country through the border south of my new home; but I do know that my heart and my faith lead me to believe that I am charged with easing pain in the world whenever I see it.

In all the heated back and forth among protestors or congress members about what is the correct course of action along the border, what gets lost is the suffering of the immigrant found dead by the side of the road near a ranch. While talking heads have hypothetical conversations, real people die in droves. As I continue my self-education on border issues, there may come a day when I come down on one side of the fence or the other. It is important to keep in mind that I am privileged to deal in the abstract when it comes to this question. For many men, women and children, the reality is death, and I think that all too often is forgotten.

We are all called to be good Samaritans, regardless of our judgments of one another.

For those of you interested in learning more about No More Deaths

Please visit www.normoredeaths.org.

From the web site: A morally intolerable situation inspired a remarkable humanitarian movement inSouthern Arizona in the spring of 2004. Driven by economic inequality, thwarted by ill-conceived US border policy, and ignorant of the harsh conditions of the Sonoran Desert, more than 2,000 men, women, and children have died trying to cross the Mexican border into the United States since 1998. Most of the deaths occurred in the brutal heat of the summer months. With another summer of inevitable deaths looming, diverse faith-based and social activist groups—along with concerned individuals—felt compelled to act to stem the death tide and attempt to save at least some lives. The result was the converging of hundreds of volunteers—local, regional and national—who came together to work for one common goal: No Más Muertes: No More Deaths.