Member Mondays - Lien Nguyen

*Every Monday, the Silicon Valley HealthCorps blog attempts to capture a member's experience and story during their time as a HealthCorps member.

One of my favorite memories from the Garden and Nutrition Workshop was with Rahul Ray, a two and a half year old boy that absolutely LOVES cars and gets easily distracted with his favorite green toy car that is always in his possession. In the beginning, Rahul would play with his car and seemed uninterested in any of the activities. However, slowly yet evidently this changed. Rahul started participating and later became an active participant in our activities.

In one of the workshops, we made vegetable soup and Rahul sipped the all soup and ate all the vegetables until the bowl was completely emptied. Even his mother was shocked! She told us that before this workshop, Rahul was very reluctant to try vegetables and she would never imagine him eating vegetable soup like he did. She also told me that at home he would demand vegetables from her and her husband. And, when they asked him why he wanted to eat vegetables he said, “Because it’s good for you!” and he would tell them the he had learned it in “school.”

Stories like these are reasons why I became so attached and inspired to work the community. It’s fascinating how these young minds can grasp such an understanding and change the way they view fruits and vegetables. It is even more amazing to see families transform their eating habits and change their lifestyle to be healthier. Especially with my nutrition background, you cannot even start imagine how proud and honor I am to partake in such wonderful experiences. I will forever be appreciative to what Silicon Valley HealthCorps has given for me.

Helping young minds grow

One of the most enjoyable and challenging aspects of being a Silicon Valley Health Corps member is exposing children to the miraculous transformation from seed to vegetable to delicious meal. Ask children where their food comes from and they will be more likely to say from the supermarket than from the ground. The children of Rock Springs neighborhood have read about the plant cycle in science textbooks but have never witnessed the process and certainly do not make the connection between the seeds in the ground and the food on their table. Many of them live in apartment buildings and have never had an opportunity to garden on their own. I started Garden Club at History Park with them in mind.

My hope was that by bringing them to the garden and involving them in every aspect of food production, they could gain some insight into the complex relationships that underlie our lives and our environment. Every week, we discuss a different topic in food production and perform a related activity in the garden. The children tend to squirm in their seats during the discussion portion, anxiously awaiting the moment where they get to pick up their tools and tend to their young plants. Although the children struggle to understand the benefits of composting and the intricacies of our food system, they derive great pleasure from sorting through worm castings and watering their seedlings. While I would like to get a bigger message across, I think that creating a positive association with growing vegetables and being outside is an equally valuable outcome.

Learning about Loam

In one HEAL lesson, our second grade students learned about the three types of soil--clay, sand, and loam--and that we want good quality loam soil, with lots of living material from compost, in order to grow huge, healthy vegetables and fruits in our raised garden beds. That is, regretfully, not the current state of our beds, especially since March, when we had heavy, soaking rains for 28 out of 31 days.

The next week, while re-digging and amending our hardened garden beds, we decided to add coconut coir. In each class, we discussed the sustainability of coconut coir compared to peat moss, that it is a by-product of the coconut industry (and therefore re-used instead of being thrown away), and that it is "crumbly, not sticky" and will therefore help keep the high concentration of clay soil in our beds from creating a hard, quick-drying mass that the plant roots will not thrive in. Then, to demonstrate the water-carrying capacity of this soil amendment, I grabbed a softball-sized lump of the well-soaked coir, and asked the students how we want soil to handle water.

"Like a sponge, keeping the roots moist but not soaked," they replied. Such good learners! I asked them to watch while I squeezed the coir over our soil bed. Nearly three cups of water streamed down into the garden beds. "WHOA!" they exclaimed.

"So, do you think this will help our plants grow in the garden?" I asked.

"YEAH!" was the emphatic reply. They were excited to add in the new organic matter and, with much gusto, finished preparing the beds for the next week's planting. I was just as excited to see they are getting hands-on garden experience to go with our (also hands-on) classroom lessons.

MLK Jr. Day 2011

Our day of service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a success! Collective Roots hosted a Community Garden Work Day and the Silicon Valley Health Corps had the opportunity to plant fruit trees with the East Palo Alto neighbors.

I am originally from Nicaragua. My parents' house has a backyard with avocado, orange, mango, guava and banana trees. Me and my brother and sisters loved to go to our backyard after school and get our snacks from the trees. It makes me so happy to know that some of the kids in East Palo Alto are going to be be doing the same thing in a couple of years.

Being from another country, I am not familiar with the valley's history and development and this day of service was a amazing learning experience. I got to meet Regina, a lady that has lived in East Palo Alto since 1972. She moved to the area because she wanted to work with a Non-Violence Institute founded by some of Dr. King's followers.

Regina was kind enough to tell us about the place and how it has change since the early '70s, when there still were orchards and she had apple and apricots trees in her garden that died some 10 years ago. During the '80s and '90s East Palo Alto turned into a hotbed for gang activity and she couldn't go out to her backyard after dark without hearing gunfire. She says that now there a lot of families and kids and the violence has significantly decreased. She has a vegetable garden and her neighbors have chickens. They help each other out.

We planted new apple and apricot trees in Regina's backyard and thanked her for sharing her life history with us, East Palo Alto history since 1972. I am very grateful for the knowledge about the region that is now my home and I hope I get the chance to meet and talk to more people like Regina.

Oti.*

McKinley/Bonita Neighborhood Celebrates a New Community Garden

On April 24th, in conjunction with La Mesa Verde's Spring planting day, community members celebrated the official start of the newly established McKinley/Bonita Neighborhood Garden. Approximately 60 community members attended to participate in children's activities, witness a ceremonial garden planting of the community garden bed and chat with their neighbors and friends.

And what, might you say, is so different about this community garden? Why not spotlight all of the other community gardens popping up around the area? This garden is a unique testament to the power of community development and the increasing interest in urban agriculture opportunities. The garden isn't growing in a vacant lot, or filling a corner of a city park, it is in the front yard of a community members home. The homeowner graciously offered up her front yard, tore out her Bermuda grass with the help of Silicon Valley Health Corps volunteers, and is now letting 3 families from the community grow food in her front yard.

Three participants of the La Mesa Verde program with part of their early summer harvest.

Each family is participating in the La Mesa Verde program, which offers free wooden garden beds, plants, soil, gardening classes and mentorship for families in San Jose who want help growing their own food. All 3 of these families live in apartments and therefore, wouldn't usually be able to participate in the program.

On the 24th, they planted all sorts of summer vegetables including; peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pole beans and melons. During the school year some of the children requested that their parents wait until after school for them to go to the garden, so they could go as well. The participants come to the garden a few days a week to water, harvest and maintain their gardens, bringing their children and families along to share in the responsibilities and delights of the garden.

Field Trip Season- Complete!

The 2010 school year is over, which means a change of pace for my work here at CAFF. Since my work is focused on our farm-to-school program, summer is a welcome respite from farm field trips. Over the course of the past month or so, we hosted at least sixteen field trips with an average of 60 kids on each-- that's almost a thousand kids!

This year we picked these four activity stations, which the students rotate through:
(1) Plant Part Relay Race
(2) Strawberry Parfait Making Snack Station
(3) Worm Bin Exploration
(4) Farm Riddles

Here's a picture from the Farm Riddles station-- students are presented with clues about a vegetable growing in the field and have to figure out which one it is and do a scientific drawing of it. This picture is courtesy of Travis E. Smith, who is doing a cool photography project you can check out at www.tesmithphoto.com.

I've received tons of great feedback from teachers and parents, but nothing compares to elementary school students talking up which vegetables they've tried and what their favorites are. I heard a statistic once (you can find it somewhere in Raj Patel's book Stuffed and Starved) that suggested that for every $1 spent advertising healthy food to children, $500 was spent advertising to them for the unhealthy stuff. What I've realized is that assisting kids in experiencing where their food comes from is the ultimate in advertising 'healthy' as 'cool', and I couldn't be happier to be a facilitator.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service

On January 18th, 2010, the Silicon Valley HealthCorps braved the mud, wind, and rain in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In partnership with Sacred Heart Community Service Center and the La Mesa Verde project, volunteers spent the day installing raised garden beds at the homes of low income families, in order to provide them with access to affordable and organic produce for years. Over the course of the year, these families will be provided with information on how to grow and harvest their own produce, how to prepare the produce they grow, and the nutritional benefits of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. This project truly reflects the mission of the Silicon Valley HealthCorps.