| This is the first in what we hope will be a regular series of Stories from Gorton - see website link. This is a description of a simple, low-cost, practical project that is really making a difference to people's lives and helping different communities to understand and relate to each other. This must be highly replicable and, indeed, we suspect there are many other such projects about. Is your project doing something similar? Could you describe,step by step, what you do so that others could follow or learn from your example? If so, email your 'How we do it' story to Libby Brayshaw.
Rainbows, a project working with asylum seekers and local people in Gorton, held a an open day and invited me to run a workshop to encourage people to plant up hanging baskets, window boxes and planters with herbs and flowers to take home as a memento of their time together. The first comers were shown how to lay the pebbles for drainage and taken through the process to the finished planter. As we got busier, I was pleased to see people helping each other with the various stages. Mums, dads, children, and grandparents from both new-comer and host community backgrounds were soon helping each other chose plants and arrange them in the soil. People seemed overjoyed to be handling plants and told me about their gardens back home. One man's mother had sent him the seeds of a certain plant to remind him of home, but he was not sure if they would grow in the UK climate. There were a few expressions of sadness from those who no longer had had a garden but had previously grown fruit, flowers or vegetables in their homeland. Some of the women talked about the herbs they used in cooking and lots of people rubbed lavender or herbs in their hands before sniffing fingers or sharing the smell with a child or older relative. In fact, this sharing of aromas was one of the ways that I and participants who were not confident in their English communicated our shared appreciation of growing things. It made me wonder how bereaved I myself would feel were I ever in a position of not being able to engage with the cycle of the seasons by growing things in my yard and at our allotment. I told people about our community allotment, where they could come and find a space to grow something. The man who wondered if his mother's seeds would grow in the English climate was surprised when I told him about a Russian woman who came to the community allotment to grow coffee. People asked what would grow in England and wanted me to list our allotment crop from the previous growing season. They were not surprised that we grew potatoes, onions, carrots, leeks, cabbage, cauliflower, courgettes, cucumber, sprouts, peas, apples and tomatoes but got excited on learning that we grow plums, sweet corn, peppers, grapes and melons. Our time together stimulated dreams of possibilities for a blossoming future in this strange new land. We had a lot of fun and it was a great way to bring local people and refugees new to the area together. This continued a Gorton tradition that began when the parents and grandparents of current allotment plot holders came to the area as refugees in the aftermath of WW2. This simple approach to sharing skills between members of a host community and asylum seekers moving into an area gave us all a wonderful insight into the benefits of sharing. We all need to know the benefits of fresh food; green exercise and healthy diet; how much more we can learn from sharing our humanity around mutual interest. |