April Showers Bring May Flowers.... and Vegetables

Last Sunday, Rohan and I made our last trip down to the gardens. It wasn’t very sunny and a bit chilly in the morning, but the plants in the garden look great with the drizzling April shower that went that went on the whole day the day before. We reached the garden around 11am, and surprise surprise, no one else was there, save for two teenage boys strumming on their guitars in the shaded area. The only thing we can do was go to the inside of the shed and figure out what we should do from the list taped into the back of the door. However, that list was a bit hard for me to understand. I had to figure out what “mulch” is (according to Wikipedia, it is a layer of material applied to the surface of an area of soil, and in our case that meant the pile of bark chips over by the parking lot), or how to differentiate the unwanted weeds from the carefully tended plants. I had no idea where the “grape arbor” was and what was the “shaded area”, or what the “compost bin” looks like. The list was as confusing to me as someone who orders at the Starbucks for the first time. Trying to figure out the “tall, grande, venti, trenta” system takes some time if you don’t speak Italian, don’t worry we have all been there. The thing is, without the basic knowledge of gardening or the basic understanding of the garden’s system and layout, I could not carry out the instructions even though it was written very clearly. I did not have the social competence to understand the words situated in a social context and a culture that I knew nothing about.  The words on the list are layered with meanings that only exist in the culture within the garden itself, and as an outsider, these words meant nothing to me, and google was not helping by telling me that “weeds” are “a pest to the plants” but not how they should look like in this particular bed.  So instead, I just had to hope for the best and wish that I did not pull out any plants that someone has been carefully tending to for the past couple of months.

The Garden Beds

The to-do list

I decided that maybe the two guys playing on their guitar would be able to help me out. It did not worked out the way I planned though, as they couldn’t care less about this garden. Don’t get me wrong, they definitely felt comfortable to be inside the garden, and think of themselves as locals who belong there, but they did not care about the garden. “I don’t know, throw some seeds on the ground, maybe”, might not be the most enthusiastic answer to tell a volunteer here on work day. But I did gleam some information from them about an event that is going to happen later in the day. As we were working, a grandmother brought her grand kids over to the garden. They weren’t gardening though, but instead, they took a walk around the garden admiring the beds, and the kids decided that this place was perfect to play catch and started running around and doing cartwheels on the field. That was when I realized that this garden is more than a place you can get fresh food from, but a shared community space where everyone is welcomed. It also acted as a community park to the locals.

Rohan mulching the walkways, with the two guys playing the guitars at the back

Took me some time to figure this out but this is the Grape Arbor

Later on, Ken showed up with his other class to do a presentation on their project at the garden, and the people started trickling in. What was peculiar was that none of the people that showed up belong in the local community, save for Mother Dawn and the two guys jamming on their guitar, even though the event was to reach out to the community and the project was mainly to serve the people from the community. The power dynamics shifted dramatically from the hands of the locals who felt they belong there, and from the hands of Mother Dawn who was giving us work instructions (finally!), into the hands of the students and the academia from the university who took over the shaded area and decorated it according what they thought was aesthetically pleasing. Their gesture might be well-meaning, but it seems that by altering the appearance of the area, they are transforming the space into something the locals are not familiar and comfortable with. What they are doing here is making what the locals think of as “our space” into “their space”, and naturally, the locals present at the garden were not very interested in listening to a bunch of students talking about a project that they don’t really care about. What was happening there was that the locals are actually leaving as more outsiders form a majority of the group and overpower the local’s presence and claim of ownership. It was interesting to observe how majority rules might translate into power, and how power dynamics can shift under the sheer force of numbers. Authority was transferred from the hands of Mother Dawn into the hands of Ken as he took charge of that event. I was fun for us to listen to people jamming on their guitars and students presenting with their posters, but it might not be something that the locals would enjoy. Sometimes, it take effort for us to negotiate between the interest of the outsiders versus the locals, especially when one does not have the social or cultural competence to get by around a social and physical space.  

Guitar performance at the presentation

A Journey into the Abyss....

A quiet Sunday afternoon was when I visited the Randolph Street Gardens. It was eerily quiet, the gardens looked quiet and deserted from afar. As I entered the gardens it didn’t feel eerie anymore, the freshness of the air, the smell of fresh mint had taken me over. This was the first time I was working in a garden, that too it was a big one. The stories we had heard from Mother Dawn had left us in awe. Let me tell you the actual site was much more breath-taking!

              I took a look and tried to decipher the to-do list, with a little bit of pondering and help from google I was able to pick one. Mulching the area near the garden beds it was! Let me tell you, I had never heard the word mulch before this, anything related to gardening was not even close to the hustling bustling city life which I had for the last 19 years. As I started to work, everything started feeling right, although my first time I felt I belonged here, I felt empowered.

              Unluckily for me I was the only one present at the gardens. Well, this made it impossible for me to interact with people and get to know them but it allowed me to feel a different kind of serenity which wouldn’t have been there otherwise. I had the power of imagination. I imagined myself a part of something I never had been a part of. To my surprise I was a perfect fit. I took from this garden that everyone was a perfect fit here. This was the charm of such a community garden, only had e heard from mother dawn how this garden bought people together, now I felt the same.

              My aim was to take from this trip a lesson to help me in my research of power dynamic in a society. Lack of other people hindered me from that. But what I took from this trip was ineffable. I took away the understanding that communities have their own charm, they are a place where people belong and one cannot just see them as a cluster of people and study them, to understand them you have to be a part you have to be one among them.

Week 3: Insider/Outsider?

On Sunday, April 24^th I stopped by the Randolph Street Community Gardens. A handful of people were there, quietly working on their plots. I stopped by the shed to see what Mother Dawn had left on her list of work to be done, smiled and waved at a few of the gardeners who greeted me kindly and carried on working. I spent a while collecting garbage and bringing tools and unneeded fence posts back to the shed, and while I was working I started thinking about the insider-outsider paradigm that is often associated with the study of power dynamic.

I was here as an outsider, observing and participating in an activity that (to whatever extent) has become a part of these people’s day-to-day lives. In a way, I was like the foreigners (or extranjeros) in Lumbisi, who can rent but not own dwellings in Lumbisí. But is the insider/outsider paradigm really a productive way to look at power dynamics?

My answer would have to be that I don’t know… I came to the community gardens with a prerogative- I was hoping to study the gardeners and their interactions. Maybe it was this (and not my outsider status) that isolated me from the main activity at the gardens that day, because the people working in the gardens sure didn’t seem to mind treating me as pleasantly as I’d imagine they treat each other.

The biggest thing I took away from my time spent at the Randolph Street Community Gardens was this: the study of power dynamic must reach deeper than the issue of insider/outsider dynamics. There will always be an in-group and an out-group, but to conduct truly meaningful research, we must go deeper. The divide between foreigners and registered families in Lumbisi seems to be one of the clearest distinguishing features of the population, however we cannot let this be the only dynamic we look at if we hope to conduct truly meaningful research. 

2nd Week of Randolph Community Garden!

Another great day of sunshine for the Fat Turtles’ trip to the Randolph community garden. On this trip, our fat turtle friend, Max, came along to understand what the garden was all about. It was interesting to see how the garden has progressed since our last visit. Many of the preliminary tasks on the “to do” list such as spreading mulch, moving the bench, and removing leaves were completed, and tasks like pulling weeds and preparing the growing plants were next on the list. This was really showing us how the garden is moving along nicely and staying on track even though the weather has not been very permitting. As it was Max's first visit, he was surprised to see that the shed was unlocked and wondered how all of the tools and supplies does not get stolen. Since our group is studying the culture and dynamics of power, I was able to explain to him the importance of trust and cooperation to the community's culture and how

Max exploring future vines.

Mother Dawn has the power, if she needs to, to lock the shed and only allow people to come on her terms. So far the community has listened to her requests and they are able to come together for their common interest and goal of gardening and growing their own plants. The power dynamic in the garden seems equal to those under Mother Dawn, but I think it will be interesting to see how things progress as the garden continues to grow.

First week of Gardening! -Chatrice White

Saturday marked our first weekly garden experience and it was a great day for it.  Besides the 20 mph wind, the sun was shining and the temperature was perfect for a day in the garden.  Now, as part of our research question, we will be looking into the power dynamics of the community of Lumbisi, and I found it very interesting how the gardens have their own power dynamics as well.  Starting with Mother Dawn, as head of the community gardens because of her knowledge of the ins and outs of what needs to take place in the gardens to have the greatest success.  At the garden there is a list of tasks that need to be done at the gardens for whoever wants to come and work.  When I showed up to the garden, I jumped right in to what the other workers were doing which was raking out the dead leaves in the crop beds.  Then, Mother Dawn suggested that I work on hauling and setting out new mulch in between other crop beds on the opposite side of the garden.  I found it interesting how there is a culture at the garden where everyone knows that Mother Dawn is the head and she and her task list are what the workers look to for the next move.  This relates to our research question because of how the community members work together with a shared goal in mind, under a common authority.  Because we are so early in our research, our group is looking forward to continuing our research at the community gardens for the rest of the semester.

Fat Turtles are Gardening!

We are the Fat Turtles! We are a team of students working on a research topic for the Lumbisi Irrigation Project. We are interested in socio-economic power differential of the community, and how development projects affect and is affected by the differences in cultures and power dynamics.

The Randolph Street Community Garden (RSCG) is a community garden that allows the local community to grow their own fresh product, making fresh food easily accessible to the community who would otherwise need to travel very far for subsistence. Our plan is to visit the RSCG once a week to work and interact with the local gardeners, so that we can get a better understanding of how the garden works. Currently, working with the Randolph Street Community Garden is a good way to investigate the power relations inside the community garden, and the relation of the garden with the community. We can study the administration model that makes the garden such a success, the relationship in between gardeners and with the administrator. It will also be interesting to take note of the role that RSCG plays in the community, not just as a project to bring fresh product to the community, but also as a social and communication platform. We also believe that RSCG plays a big role in affecting the economy and the health of the community, and we are excited to find out more about that. The demographics and the culture of the community in which the garden is operating in is also very important to us, as it provides context for our study questions.

We are very excited to start working with the RSCG and bring new thoughts and observation to everyone. We hope that you will enjoy reading our blog, so stay posted for more!