Number of Days Officially Unemployed: 92
Hours Worked: 2
This morning, my girlfriend, Etel, has brought me to New Roots Community Garden in City Heights for a regularly scheduled volunteer day. The garden was set up by San Diego's chapter of the International Rescue Committee on 2.3 acres of city-owned land for local immigrants and refugees, and it's worked by 80 immigrant farmers. Each family gets its own, small plot to organically grow whatever crop they want, ranging from prickly pear cactus, or nopales, to strawberries and other foods from around the world. I'm excited, because it's been a lifelong dream of mine to learn organic farming, and I'm thinking that volunteering at the garden might not only serve to help immigrant and refugee families but will help my own education.
Etel and I arrive a little late, so we miss most of the garden tour, led by Bilali Muya, a Somalian refugee who works at the farm as a part-time educator. Muya is beaming this morning, fresh off of being the tour guide for Michelle Obama's visit on Thursday as part of her national campaign against childhood obesity. When he finishes our tour, Muya shows some people yesterday's Union-Tribune article, in which he's pictured with the First Lady, and says, "I'm famous," in a thick Somali accent.
While the First Lady's visit was meant to highlight healthy food alternatives for poor children, it also highlighted the gap between being an important, rich woman and a poor immigrant or regular person in the United States. As you can read in the Union-Tribune article, to protect Michelle Obama, her visit was an invite-only event, and many immigrants and neighbors were kept out of the garden and practically locked in their yards by the Secret Service (which has its own interesting history). Hardly a good lesson in true democracy, but, nonetheless, a great lesson in American timocracy.
This morning, there must be close to fifty volunteers, consisting mostly of white people, ranging from children to old men, and a few young Mexican-American men that are part of a MAAC project program. The development coordinator has us break up into groups of ten and move off into different parts of the garden. At least two of the volunteers in our group belong to a Meetup.com group called "Do-gooders Who Drink," composed of people who head to a local watering hole for a beer after they volunteer.
Muya leads our small group out of the garden and into the neighboring area, where a small stretch of natural grasses and trees border a creek. He takes us over to a large mulch pile in the field, which, he explained earlier, helps keep snails and other unwanted pests out of the garden. When he talked about the mulch, he took on the role of the snail and twisted and squirmed as he explained how the sharp edges of the mulch particles would stab into his body and make it unpleasant to slime across. He tells us to weed a small area between the mulch pile and the garden's Cyclone fence, so we can spread the mulch and connect it with the other area, covered in an older layer of sun-faded mulch.
As with every group project that's not well organized, instructions are sketchy and misunderstood. Our group of ten quickly rips through the entire area, weeding the strip from the mulch pile clear out to the road. The dusty, herbal smell of the pulled weeds takes me back to my childhood of weeding our yard in Clovis, and shoveling the mulch later will remind me of shoveling horse manure out of our old barn for twenty-five cents a wheelbarrow full. Though it's hot, it feels good to perform some manuel labor out here, to get close to the earth and its smells.
While Etel and I carefully remove the black and white striped snails we find and throw them out into the brush toward the river as we weed, a teenager nearby has interpreted their "pest" status as a call to genocide. Every time he, his brother, or his mother finds snails, he gathers them into a small pile and crushes them under his oversized tennis shoes. Since ladybugs' diet of aphids makes them beneficial to the garden, they receive the same teen's admiration and careful transfer. He's learning the important distinction of what we want kept out of the garden and what we want to let into the garden.
As we continue pulling weeds and spreading the mulch, we encounter earwigs, pinacate beetles, and a large cockroach in the mulch pile. While these bugs are unpleasant and make some people squeal, I'm more worried that someone's going to accidentally find a rattlesnake in the deep grass we're tromping through.
While we weed, Muya tells us that he's from the minority Bantu tribe in Somalia and how they're recent immigrants to the U.S., and how he was a farmer over there and misses his land. It's strange to think about how people from all over the world––"Somalia, Cambodia, Burma, Uganda, Congo, Kenya, Mexico, Vietnam, and Guatemala"––and from different backgrounds––farmers, shepherds, etc.––have been plopped down in urban San Diego and are now sharing this small wedge of land and the neighborhood of City Heights.
After we spread most of the mulch and many of our volunteers have disappeared, I take a short break with Muya, whose been working his way around to the different groups, and we search the nearby, oversized bush for bee hives. We don't see any, but the bees are buzzing in and out of two areas within the bush.
When we're almost done spreading the mulch pile, the development coordinator comes out and sees what we've done. She's incredulous, telling us she only wanted a four-foot wide mulch path between the garden fence and the field. "I can't believe they did this," she says, as Muya, looking like a scorned child, turns to survey the mulch spread thin over the entire weeded area. The five of us volunteers that are left spend the next half hour or so grumbling and raking up the mulch and shoveling it into a trash can and wheelbarrow, then hauling it over to the fence to create the path.
While I'm shoveling mulch into the trash can, I have my back to the bee-infested bush. I feel a bee land on the back of my neck. As someone who has harvested honey, I would think I could control my natural reaction, which is to freak out and swat at the bee. I hurry away from the bush and continue brushing my shoulder with panicked swats. I finally calm myself down, even though I can still hear the bee on my back, and I calmly ask the snail crusher's brother if I have a bee on my back. "No," he says. The problem is, I can still hear and feel the bee on my shoulder, which means it's inside my shirt now. I'm waiting for the burn of the inevitable sting, but rip my shirt off over my head anyway. The bee flies off, and both of us are left mutually unharmed.
By now, Etel and I are sweaty, dirty, and possibly sun-burned, so we're ready to go home and clean up for our afternoon visit with a Bhutanese refugee family, whom we'll be tutoring in English and cultural adjustment. While we haven't had any direct contact with the "poor" we're helping, except Muya, it feels good to volunteer. Our task today may have been menial, but it was necessary, and it allows the refugees and immigrants to concentrate on the important work while they're in the garden tending their crops. I need to get further involved, so I can learn more about organic farming and crops while continuing to help feed the poor.
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