Community Gardening!

Beginning Friday, April 17th and continuing through the remaining Fridays of this semester, RotarACT will be going to Little Flower Basilica for the afternoon to help work on a community garden. The Little Flower garden was actually one of ACT’s first engagements last fall, prior to joining with Rotaract. Michael Montoya spoke to the group at the Trinity campus on an evening in September about how he became in involved in nonprofit work and came to his current position of Community Programs Manager at the Basilica. Mr. Montoya’s story of searching for a meaningful career touched many of us present at his talk, and affected us through the day-to-day work he does to maintain the community garden and other affiliated programs. Many of us seized the opportunity to work on the garden a few times last fall, and bore witness to the true sense of neighborhood and goodwill that the garden fosters. We’re looking forward to returning this Friday!

On a follow-up note, only Sarah Jones and I were able to make it to the planting event working with refugees last Saturday, but we both felt it was a remarkable experience. We met about thirty people who are now refugees living in San Antonio, but are originally from Iraq and Iran. A few of the kids seemed especially willing to hang around and help us try (in vain) to pronounce a common Arabic greeting. We planted dozens of containers with small tomato, squash, and pepper seedlings, and gave them away to any of the refugees who expressed interest. I asked one little girl who was helping put fertilizer pellets into the pots if she had ever grown anything before. She responded, “Yes, I grew tomatoes in Baghdad.” I found it a simple yet utterly striking statement, coming from a small girl who could be no older than seven or eight. All the refugees we met were incredibly friendly and gracious, offering abundant smiles and bringing us juice as the morning warmed up. I believe Sarah and I were equally awed by these resilient people, and we agreed that it was a very well-spent Saturday morning.