On September 2, Peter Jensen, Katherine, another PCV, and I drove from Dar es Salaam to our house in Lushoto. Katherine and I had spent the weekend at Bagamoyo Beach Hotel, swimming, eating fresh fish, and celebrating the service of three year volunteers now returning to USA. Katherine and I spent Sunday and Monday at Peter’s house, having pizza while watching Frasier with his family, having breakfast and dinner conversations at the dining room table (and bare feet on carpeted floors) as the girls went off to school and Elise was getting ready for work. These family conversations, playing with the family dog and guinea pigs and helping with their garden was truly a time we both missed being home with our own families.
Peter Jensen has been working in Tanzania for 8 years, working with people all over Tanzania as well as training Peace Corps Volunteers about ways to grow more food in small spaces. His work with the Peace Corps is especially for People and families living with HIV/AIDS. The biointensive gardening and permaculture methods are a way for these folks to be able to have very productive gardens close to home and that take minimal energy to maintain. He was making his second visit to our area to develop a demonstration garden for our primary school , working with the students, teachers and community adults—learning by doing and working together to meld what Peter knows works and what the community knows works in their area with their cultural priorities and preferences for food and planting.
Arriving Tuesday afternoon, we met with the school adults to lay out a logistic plan to rotate students during the week to work and learn from the garden. We also had to find out how to bring adults from the community into the work in a proper way. We looked over the school grounds and the school made a decision as to where to put the garden. The school had already brought many buckets of manure and water for the garden.
Wednesday morning started with Peter showing his new movie of Tanzanians from different climates using the gardening methods successfully. The movie also has tutorials and graphics showing the methods we would be using during the week to develop their garden. Excitement was in the air. Students (grades 5, 6, &7), community adults and teachers all watching the movie, (about 200).
The garden started first by sprucing up the guild we had built during the Girls Workshop and constructing the double dug planting beds (6 total in the end!). At 1:30pm we stopped to have a celebratory lunch together with the school leaders. Sister Shirema welcomed Peter into their school family as we began our week together. Another 1.5 hours working in the garden and then Peter and I went to Lushoto to visit Rose.
Rose is a member of a group of women in Lushoto living with HIV/AIDS. She and I met when Nice brought Rose to the Girls Leadership Workshop as a guest speaker. Nice is the program director for an NGO serving women, teaching them computer skills to enable them to find jobs to support their families. Rose participated in the Permaculture demonstration we did at the Girls Workshop and said to me then, “I and my group and the people that really need to know these methods!” At that very moment, Nice, Rose and I started planning how to work together to start making gardens at Rose’s house and teach all the people of the group that wanted to learn.
Rose was not home as she needed to travel to Moshi Health Clinic, but she left instructions with her children to welcome us and help choose a garden spot at their house. Nice, Peter and I visited her house. It is truly amazing to see a landscape through Peter’s eyes! I had visited Rose’s House a week before to look at garden spots, but through Peter’s eyes, I learned how to look for the information that the soil, erosion and plant life that is their can teach. We left with a plan and Rose’s daughter ready to do her part before we returned to build a garden on Saturday!
Thursday through Friday, the Kongei garden took shape and the community’s ability to teach their children through showing then stepping back and letting them do was awe inspiring. Peter was family as the week progressed, that was clear. Three guilds, three banana trees added, a fresh compost pile started and 6 beds of vegetables planted happened by Friday afternoon. A guild is a Papaya tree, matembele below (nutritious perennial), lemon grass, and aloe vera planted in a group. This is a power packed grouping that is of plants common to every house in Tanzania. The beds planted are 1 meter wide and 6 meters long. There are two beds of carrots, two of kunde (beans), two of an orange sweet potatoe together with a local greens that covers the soil and is harvested once the potatoes come up.
Another important feature of the garden is the holes and shallow trenches to control the flow of water, directing it into the beds and slowing it down as it runs down the mountain side. This garden is a beautiful from the shape, colors, food it will provide and the engineering of structures to maximize the water that flows naturally.
After all cleaned up and the garden site, too, we all gathered to watch the movie again. But, in Tanzanian style, the generator created a electrical surge and the projector became toast. So, the students sang a song they wrote for Peter and we handed out the books on nutrition and life skills in kid language and a carrot to eat. A factor we did not consider when we invited parents to come on Friday was Ramadan. One parent came to look at the garden and then he and the adults working in the garden watched the movie. (Since this day we have heard testimony from a variety of folks that kids have told their parents about the garden and parents have been, now, stopping by to see the garden and have said they want to try one at their house.)
Saturday, Peter and I headed to Lushoto. Rose’s garden began. There were 14 friends of Rose that joined her to make a garden. The Lushoto Community Development Director, the secretary of another local NGO for controlling AIDS, and three teachers from a secondary school came. Peace Corps has 5 new health volunteers in the area and all were there, too, along with another PCV teacher. Then, of course were the children that easily made up another 6 participants.
The garden took shape, the first bed done slowly teaching the methods and building a sense of family between us as we built a garden. After chai, bread and bananas in the welcoming warmth of Rose’s home, we all put to use our knowledge. The women eagerly started another bed. Peter took small groups to construct three guilds in spots where the water runs naturally. Then Peter’s eyes became ours as he showed us where to dig holes to stop the water and where to dig inclined trenches to move the water down each bed. By 1:30 Rose’s Garden was a fact and we walked together with Peter to see other possibilities along the path to the dala dala that took us to Lunch at the Tea Room in Lushoto. Jackie served us all a delicious lunch of greens, beans, rice and meat. NyaKoki, community Development director then lead us to a meeting room where Peter showed his movie, questions were discussed and books and directions on the methods taught, nutrition and life skills were provided. I headed back to my school early, as we had Parent Day going on, but I heard that Peter was able to visit another secondary school of a PCV in the area, seeing the guild they had built and the papaya seedlings begun before taking his rest that evening.
These events of this powerful week are alive. I continue to work in my garden with my neighbors that are teaching me as I teach them--, harvesting potatoes, transplanting leeks, thinning carrots; harvesting g sweet potatoes from my matembele I did not realize were growing. I have reworked two beds by adding my 4 month old compost to the top! It is true, we did not have to double dig again, and they are still deep and loose!
Nice and Rose have told me that we are going to develop a garden at each woman’s house in her group. It is the spirit of a quilting bee I think. The group came to Rose’s house and built a garden, now we will continue the rotation until each woman has a garden. I told them, “I will be there.” Ali and Twaha, two of the adults at the Kongei garden have asked me which day I am free for us to go to another primary school and develop their garden—a school where their neighbors children go and have heard of the Kongei garden. They also ask, “Will you garden like this when you return to America?”
Food. Water. This is one way I know I can participate in this struggle with my neighbors here. We share the knowledge, work, food and spirit of a family.
