school gardens; A tool for healing in a broken world

Today I witnessed a trauma. A trauma that happens everyday in the land of Bayview/ Hunters point. I’m not talking about Uganda, but 94124, Bayview/ Hunters Point, San Francisco, one of the liberal hubs of the universe.
A superfund, toxic point, a modern day ghetto where the normal pedestrian has to travel a miles distance to get to a grocery store with “healthy” produce, a.k.a fresh vegetables.

I work in Bayview/ Hunters Point. As a garden educator in one of the most defunk schools in San Francisco. As one outsider called it, this school is a double ”u” school, unchecked and unchallenged, or in other words neglected.
I steward the land in the largest school garden in San Francisco. It has 20 raised vegetable beds, an outdoor classroom, pond, orchard with over 20 fruit trees, an herb garden and over an acre of green land that the kids have access to explore.

This is a hub in the middle of the most toxic area of San Francisco. The garden is an area of peace in side of chain link fences, poverty, and violence. This neighborhood houses PG&E, a third of the cities industry and had toxic waste dumped in the port next store during the Vietnam War. As a result over 50% of the students have asthma, while diabetes and heart disease are found in abundant numbers among the residents.

”What is food security”, I ask my students in garden class, and chills begin to run up my back as I realize that this is not just a lesson written for the purposes of presenting data for a grant report, no, this lesson is for them as much as me.

The kids get quiet and start participating. I put out big ideas, in my hip-hop intonations and they hear me,
like a rapstar on tv, because that is how they hear best. Through rhythm, that is how they wake up out of their trauma filled, late night drama like you see on the wire, and I aint even jokin.
When I saw the wire I understood my school more.
The next day I went to a friend and colleague and asked, “Is that for real, is the wire really like Willie Brown Jr. Academy?” “Yes”. He said.
In shock, I asked a kid in the office if there were gangs in their hood. He started to go off about how they work, and without a doubt I realized how messed up this whole system is

So the lesson continues and they get it.
I ask again “What is food security?” “When you can walk down the street and get fruits and vegetables”, my students answer. They get it.
“How can you make a difference”, I ask. “Plant food in a park”, answers roll off the tongues of this normally high energy, chaotic class, students start to listen to each other, because this is something that makes sense.
We aint’ speakin’ of the dinosaurs or white people who made this country, in order to meet some standards so they can pass a test that was meant for them to be “left behind”.
I’m speakin’ truth and they throw words back of authenticity and their creative minds start bubbling.

Like the grease in McDonalds left to the side, the sickening grease that is the result of inhumane animal treatment and commercial seduction to sedate the minds, and numb the souls of the African American and minority, lower class people.

The unhealthy food equals numbed minds and an inability to think critically about how the world is and how to make it better.

Like the grease, these people have been abused. Coming from the South, African people left the plantations as freed men and women and were for the first time in their free lives given the opportunity to make money and rise. In hoards people left and headed to San Francisco worked on the shipyards, the same place where toxic waste from World War II was dumped. They worked and some rose to places of wealth, while others were eventually places in low-income housing. Abandoned military barracks, that were disheveled, asbestos filled pieces of shit.
This is what they were placed in, like Bedouins in the far reaching deserts of Be’er Sheva where the sun beats hot in the middle eastern country of Israel, another minority people, placed next to nuclear weapons and electric plants, denied citizenship and more diseases than one can shake a stick at these people were trying to be annihilated, slowly, deliberately as Ben Gurion can be found saying.

In America, the masks are too great, so that a black mayor, who my school is named after, tried to sell out this ghetto to the white people, removing low-income families from their homes because they wanted to turn their buildings into luxury condos. Then as the politician’s pocket books grew he would kindly re-house them in a “better” place for the same price, miles away from their family and friends.

Just like the Bedouins who have been encouraged to leave their tribal way of living and move into bland homes in a shanty town set up for them with the look of a movie set that is ugly, and uninspiring. At least their people live with them next to the electric company in the unrecognized village, in the recognized village with the electricity, and healthcare, they sell out to the government as materialism, nokia phones and pornography on the Internet replace their tribal ways.
Where does culture go when the flashing lights of the billboards rings higher than the fluorescent light of the mosque. What happens when the African people forget their culture because they have been displaced, without a culture? Violence, hatred, anger, abuse, poverty, depression, guns, killing, stealing, havoc.

If we aint feeding the lowest rung of the culture then how can they survive? If they are not thriving then they are traumatizing the lives of other through car theft, murder and random acts of non-understood violence.
It’s understood, its roots are clear and if we want to make a change, food security is essential. Healthy food is the beginning of healthy thought.

Right now the world is deteriorating at such a quick pace that we need the people to work in mass to create better solutions to complex problems. We need the human power!
Hunters point is the most densely populated neighborhood in San Francisco. That means that there are myriads of people waiting to be awakened.

But today I witnessed a tragedy, a trauma that happens every day

It began when I brought flowers to the office, because I wanted the office to be more joyful, I wanted them to connect to the beautiful energy inherent in our garden, the garden that can be seen from most windows in the building, but who dares to look, in their minds these students walk, trauma bumping into trauma in the halls as one student makes fun of another, hits another, getting out the aggression inherent in abused societies where the majority of students have a parent who is either involved in drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse or prison.

This is the reality of the underworld; The “Other”.

And when I witnessed this sweet 5th grade special ed foster kid,
who is moving from home to home, unsure of who loves him and what he needs to do to make that happen, because who knows why he’s in a foster home and what his momma was doing when she was pregnant,
being pulled off a chair from the office by one kid and then kicked in the guts by a girl. I stopped them,
with anger and vigilance,
justice and authority.
The girl who hit this kid, this boy, this comrade of mine,
ran ashamed,
she ran, humiliated that she this, wise, sweet girl, had succumbed to her own boiling point. She broke.
She broke, not because she is mean but because her world is so hard that something needs to break sometimes

Yet the system is so screwed up that she came in the next day with an attitude, telling me the principal told her that it was good she beat him up, it taught him a lesson. With no repercussions the student goes unchecked, unchallenged; neglected.

When children are abused kids, are called names, and their whole lives are trauma, can you expect more from them? I can

Because in the garden that little girl who beat up that boy is a little girl.
She plays in the dirt, plants chard and runs around in the secret garden. She follows direction, gets other to listen to me and is an all around good kid, but she broke and now I need to walk back into school and when I see all those children I need to show love, because in the garden there is love and they feel it. That boy who had been beaten on the floor will come with his therapist and he will come back to the bench in the garden and he will come over to me, calling me an angel and telling me he sees the world from the peak of the hill in the secret garden

This boy will do work when I ask because he is seen by me, some therapeutic test might say he has some issues but he shines in garden, I can expect more from him and her but I need help to make this happen. I cannot do this work alone. I need to come to it from a place of abundance because they need to know that this is a possibility for anyone who puts their minds towards it. I need to have the sustenance to make this program run. We are at a crux, ready to move to the next stage, but we need funding to help us get there.

I am starting to get what grants are looking for. They want communities to have true food security, access to fresh fruits and vegetables. That is what my garden is. It is just a matter of implementing innovative programming to make this successful. Employing youth, getting boxes of produce delivered to their neighborhood. Collecting food from several gardens in the neighborhood, working together as a cohesive. This garden is big enough to make a real impact in the neighborhood. This new stage means really serving the population the good food they need to begin this process of being active positive citizens.

Yet if I am constantly searching for funding, justifying to some strange man with weird glasses how my program needs to be warranted, and feeling belittled when I cannot answer with full confidence how this program can be sustained, I shrink and wonder “How am I gonna make this place work if people don’t start giving us money?”
When so much money is embezzled and placed into the wrong hands why can’t it go in the right hands, a program that is really making a difference.
.

It is hard to say, but a truth, this program needs money now, so that I can work with a team of other committed human beings to make this program work.

The healing of this earth is amazing. After I witnessed this trauma I went back to the garden and immediately was asked to help on a project. Without a word I put the dirt on top of the gopher wire. A couple minutes later I shared with my coworker the travails I had just undergone. And before I knew it the garden had helped me feel better again, working the land I got out my energy and began to come back to center.

This healing happens every day for me, the staff and the children who truly allow themselves to breathe in the beauty of this land. I long to return there each morning. I long to place my hands in the earth again, because she is the wisest teacher of all.

I am blessed and can witness this and come back to my kind community of lovely individuals who can listen and advise me and I need to use this privilege to make a difference. This is my beginning and I need to learn how.