Effort puts refugees in touch with the soil — for income and better food
By Katya Cengel • [email protected]
Sunday, July 27, 2008
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Jeanne Olash, with daughter Meg Olash, 13, purchased kale from Ezechiel Ntezimana at a trial market held at Catholic Charities earlier this month. Leocadie Ntanyungu from Burundi held the price list during the sale. |
An ambulance siren sounds as she clears a rock from the vegetable bed.
This is her second plot in the Seventh Street Community Garden. Her first garden, just a few feet away, already has yielded a crop.
And she wants more.
Among her packets of seeds is one for pansies.
"This is flower," says Peter Thiong, the man who gave her the plot.
"Flower," Hakorimana says with a smile. "I waiting you get another (plot); I can have a garden with flower."
Thiong laughs. Hakorimana is one of his better farmers.
In her native Burundi, she says, she employed 30 people on a seven-hectare (17.3-acre) farm. "I will do again," she says. "When I can get some help, I can do here."
Which is where Thiong comes in. A refugee from the civil war in Sudan and recent graduate of Berea College, Thiong manages a new agriculture program at the Kentucky Office for Refugees at Catholic Charities.
Begun earlier this year, the project has helped about 100 refugees grow crops in three gardens around the city by providing land, seeds, tools and information.
Catholic Charities is one of 10 organizations around the country to receive federal funding through the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program, a three-year Office of Refugee Resettlement grant designed to help refugees achieve self-sufficiency through farming and related businesses while also improving their access to healthy food.
The program does not just provide jobs, David H. Siegel, acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, wrote in an e-mail, "It expands upon refugees' skills and backgrounds while giving them advanced farming and marketing tools and the entrepreneurial know-how to support their families for years to come."
Escobar has a simpler way of explaining it: "The majority of these people have been farmers for five to 30 years, and a lot of times, for the people that arrive here, that's the only skill that they come with -- agriculture -- so we just thought it would be a really great thing."
Planting the seeds
Some of the first questions from refugees were whether they could grow coffee and mangoes in Kentucky.
"They really had no idea what to expect from this climate," said Denise Peterson, who put together a classroom program for them.
In her job as a Jefferson County Cooperative Extension agent, Peterson manages the community gardens, two of which the program planned to utilize: Seventh Street and Blackacre. Before they did any digging, she explained what produce would grow in Kentucky, what it looked like and when it would need to be planted and harvested. More than 70 refugees from at least five countries attended the three daylong training sessions she offered.
Although she streamlined the information as much as possible, says Peterson, few grasped all that she had covered. Escobar agreed that with only about 5 percent of the participants speaking English, more hands-on methods would work better in the future. With the help of an advisory panel, she is working on conducting farmer exchanges.
In spring they planted tomatoes, peppers, corn, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, okra, soybeans and a number of other crops in three plots around the city. The Seventh Street garden is the most centrally located, near public housing where some refugees reside, and the most diverse, with Somali Bantu, Burundian, Karen and Meskhetian Turk participants, Escobar says.
Blackacre, on Tucker Station Road, is mostly used by Meskhetian Turks who live nearby, while the plot at New Heights Baptist Church on Southside Drive is worked mostly by the Karen.
Individual plots are 30 by 30 feet at Seventh Street and 40 by 40 feet at the other two gardens. The cost of the plots (about $30 a season), seeds and equipment comes from the $95,000 annual sum provided by the grant.
But in time, Escobar and Thiong hope to make participants more self-sufficient, and toward that end they are setting up farmers markets at which participants can sell what they cannot consume.
At a trial market held at Catholic Charities earlier this month, banana peppers were three for $1, and mixed salad went for $2. After several hours, the cucumbers were gone, the basket of banana peppers was nearly empty, and only a dozen heads of lettuce remained.
A woman eyeing the kale wanted to know how Burundians might cook it.
Ezechiel Ntezimana explained that they boil it.
An elementary school teacher in Burundi, Ntezimana now serves as coordinator of the 10 Burundi families that work in the gardens. Most of them, he said, were farmers before fighting forced them to flee their country.
Now they tend their plots after the sun goes down, and complain only about the wait for water.
At the Seventh Street garden, there isn't a faucet for every plot, and if a gardener arrives when all the faucets at the nearest hydrant are being used, he or she must wait, Peterson explains. The gardener also must be careful to use the pathways rather than drag the hose over other people's crops. For new farmers, there was a learning period, Peterson says.
Gardeners have also had to adjust to different soil and planting methods, says Hassan Muya, president of a local Bantu community association.
"When we were in Africa … we just have to go and plant and we know how to deal with it," he said. "But here, it's kind of like difficult. You have to mix a lot of things in order to plant the thing you want."
A bigger plot
Gulya Gassanova has worked in gardens all her life.
She says her husband, Sherzod Aliyev, would like to garden all the time. So when she came to Louisville almost three years ago and there was no garden, says Gassanova, "I had a problem."
Not only was her husband sad about spending his nights in a factory rather than his days outdoors, but produce was expensive. Since they joined the garden project, they have had fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and much more, all free and "delicious," she says.
For refugees like Gassanova, a Meskhetian Turk, access to fresh, healthy foods often is limited by a lack of transportation and availability, Escobar says. The gardens are meant to help fill this void and are located in areas the refugees can easily reach.
Hakorimana hardly has to walk at all to reach her plot -- the Seventh Street garden is practically right in back of her apartment building. She comes here twice a day to tend to her vegetables, to water, weed and plant.
Peterson was here a few weeks ago. From what she has seen, the gardens are generally well-maintained.
"They look good," she says.
But they are just the beginning, "experimental" or "practice" plots that the refugees can use while they learn the climate, the soil, the crops and the customs.
When all that becomes second nature, the hope is that they will be ready to start their own farms, she says. With farmers getting older and their children leaving the business, says Peterson, refugees "have the potential to fill a niche in our agriculture system."
It is something Muya said the Somali Bantu, many of whom farmed in Somalia, are eager to do.
"I've seen a lot of people asking, 'When do you think we come to the point we will have own cattle?' "
Reporter Katya Cengel can be reached at (502) 582-4224.