GROWING Together

Imagine it’s a warm summer day. You’re outside with your family and friends. Birds are singing, there is a soft hum of traffic in the distance. The sun warms your back as you make your way among rows of vegetables, planting seeds or pulling weeds with all the others, whose chatter and laughter fill the air. Your children are all helping or playing together. Someone has brought enough cool, clean water for everyone. Another has brought enough bread and sandwich fixings for everyone to have lunch. You’re in good company, and you’re safe.

Now imagine armed men storming in on horseback, or in vehicles, shooting indiscriminately. Imagine you find out the armed men are rounding up all the men in your town―husbands, uncles, fathers, any grown man―and shooting them. Then imagine they’re taking all the children who haven’t fled and turning them into soldiers or slaves. You flee by foot and hide wherever you can, searching for your children, not knowing if you can trust the children you meet because they could be working for the armed men. Imagine eating anything you can find to survive.

For many of Fargo’s refugee population, this was their reality, or―for the younger ones― the reality of their parents, as many of them have spent years in refugee camps with their parents before being sent to Fargo and other places around the U.S. and the world. While the refugees I spoke with were grateful to Fargo for taking them in―for the safety, kindness and support of the community―many are not here with the familial support system they knew and relied on, and many did not receive a formal education before arriving. They grew their food and paid for their children’s education by farming small plots of land and selling their harvest. After being raised in an environment where the village truly raised and watched out for each other’s children, they’ve arrived with their families alone. They carry on their backs the challenges of learning a new language and new culture, finding out the hard way what “winter” means, finding a job, navigating a public transportation system with large gaps, putting food on the table, putting their children in daycare, and―surprisingly― paying back the cost of the airplane ticket that brought them across the world to Fargo.

Back in 2005, Nola Storm was working for the Fargo Public Schools ELL (English Language Learners) Program and the Fargo Adult Learning Center English as a Second Language and Family Literacy Program. Through both home visits and through talking with students and teachers at school, she learned much about the refugee population in Fargo. There was a sense of isolation among the refugees that affected Storm the most. In her conversations with the principal at Lewis & Clark and the K-12 ELL coordinator― both of whom, along with Storm, belonged to Olivet Lutheran Church in Fargo―there was a consensus that after losing so much, these people needed something more. “We knew we couldn't fix all the problems our new American neighbors face, but we should be able to do something.”

That something became “Growing Together,” the first community garden organization in Fargo starting in 2006 as a collaborative effort of many, but headed by Nola Storm, Kathy Johnson, Anita Hoffsommer, and Jack Wood. Now the number has grown to four community gardens due to Growing Together’s partnerships with Lutheran Social Services, United Methodist Church, CHARISM and many volunteers.

Jack Woods, master gardener and heirloom tomato enthusiast, was growing all the bedding plant seedlings in his basement during Growing Together’s infancy. They now are able to use an older greenhouse at NDSU, but Woods continues to grow a large number of the plants at his house. Storm credits an enormous list of collaborators, and during gardening nights you’ll see Storm, Woods and Hoffmayer all helping out alongside the new Americans, but Storm remains insistent that the real heroes are the new Americans whose time and efforts make the gardens successful. “It's really about them. We are the organizers, but without our amazing gardeners, it really wouldn't be anything.”

Rosaline, a Liberian who spent fourteen years in a refugee camp before coming to Fargo, recalls when Storm ran the idea for a garden passed her and the other Liberian refugees. “We told her ‘Yes! We love to garden!’ This is how our people raised money to pay school fees.” The food they grow is not only healthy, but also allows Food Stamp dollars to be stretched for those who receive them. Now, with the abundant harvest, Rosaline and her daughter Fataba not only use the harvest at home, but also run a small farmer’s market at the garden on 25th Street and 40th Avenue South in

Fargo every Thursday. The proceeds help to buy clothing and Christmas gifts for the children of the new Americans, and seeds for next year. Rosaline added, “[The garden] helps our kids stay out of trouble during the summer because it gives them something else to do.”

There are several challenges Storm said the gardening groups face. On the forefront is transportation to the gardens. “All of the gardeners find their own transportation via bikes, friends, relatives and city bus,” she said. Another challenge comes at the end of the growing season, after the gardeners have worked hard all summer, and then people show up only during harvest and want to participate. We struggle with that as we hate to turn anyone away,” said Storm, “but we want to honor the feelings, desires and hard work of our gardeners.”

The community gardens serve the community and impact individuals in both tangible and immeasurable intangible ways. A garden allows families a great reason to get outdoors, get out of their apartments and in the fresh air. “It’s lots of exercise,” said Rosaline. “We meet other people from other countries. We are happy. We are all family so we love it, although we don’t speak the same language.”

They also meet new people and form new friendships and support systems. “I know that some of our gardeners struggle with depression and PTSD, and being able to be at the garden lifts their spirits and in one case actually a reason to keep going,” explained Storm, recalling a woman who told her that being able to participate in the garden actually kept her alive. Storm remembered a conversation with a Somali man last year who told her, "I have diabetes, and high blood pressure, without the garden I would be sitting in my apartment alone. At the garden I can get exercise, fresh air and I can be around other people and make new friends.”

Thirty-year-old Dolma, whose family was forced from their home in Bhutan when she was just nine years old, lived in a bamboo home in a refugee camp in Nepal for fourteen years before coming to the U.S. in 2008. The Growing Together gardens are the only place she is aware of that she can garden. She says that when she’s here in the garden with her young sons it brings back happy memories of her childhood in Bhutan, helping her mom and dad in the garden.

In 2010, Lutheran Social Services opened up their property at 3911 20th Avenue South, Fargo, primarily with the elder refugee populations in mind. Storm said many of the older new Americans were really missing their former livelihood― farming. She recalls a Bhutanese man telling her how his father came to him one day and said, "Get me an ox, I need and ox." He had spotted an empty property and wanted an ox to prepare the ground for farming. The son explained that it wasn’t their property and they couldn’t just start a farm there. But the sheer desire that man had speaks volumes to how a person’s connection to the earth through planting and harvesting can be a passionate one.

Storm would like to propose a challenge to this community: “Any church or business or organization that has appropriate green space, consider putting a garden there. Congregation members, neighbors―invite them all to use your space.” By providing our new American neighbors a space and the means to garden in our community is a meaningful way we can allow them to feel “home” again, connecting with each other, and the ground in this community they live in.

A quote by Anne Raver, a long-time garden writer for the New York Times said: “Gardens, scholars say, are the first sign of commitment to a community. When people plant corn they are saying, let's stay here. And by their connection to the land, they are connected to one another." One of Storm’s favorite stories speaks so well to this. One of the original gardeners, Jeanette, a young single mother from Rwanda, was shy and spoke hardly any English. She worked week after week at the garden with her two sons, one so small she tied him on her back as she worked. “Going to school, working and gardening over the years her English improved, to the point where she can talk to anyone, and her playful personality has really blossomed,” said Storm. She goes on to recall how during one of last year’s harvest sharings, Jeanette hardly took anything. When Storm asked her why she was taking so little, Jeanette replied, “She replied, "I don't come to the garden for the vegetables, I come because you are my friends." [AWM]

Do

YOU HAVE A SPACE AVAILABLE for a community garden and need some help getting started? Contact Nola Strom with Growing Together – nstorm53@gmail.com