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Garden gives area refugees a place to heal
DALLAS
- A community garden with lush green banana trees and rows of leafy Asian
vegetables grows on three-fourths of an acre at North Fitzhugh Avenue in
east Dallas. Gardeners
-- mostly elderly Cambodians and a few Laotians -- cluster under a
makeshift canopy of brightly colored fabrics, selling their exotic produce
each weekend. Since
1986, the garden just north of downtown Dallas has been a center for
displaced refugees who seek comfort and healing among friends and the
soil. Today,
it is one of three nonprofit multicultural Asian gardens known
collectively as Gardeners in Community Development. Gardeners pay $36 a
year to use a plot of land. Money raised through vegetable sales and
fund-raisers helps support the garden, organizers said. Ben
Ouch, 48, is among the gardeners at the largest of the three gardens, the
East Dallas Community Garden at Fitzhugh Avenue. Ouch moved to the United
States from Battambang, Cambodia, in 1980. "I
come not just for the vegetables, but I come here to meet old friends from
[Cambodia]," said Ouch, who was buying a bag of freshly picked water
spinach. "I feel relief, and I'm not sad anymore when I come
here." Lon
Sok, a 63-year-old gardener, said she gets lonely whenever she stays home. "But
here, I meet friends and I'm not lonely," she said through a
translator while chewing on betel nut, a red pasty substance. Sok came to
the United States from Cambodia in 1986 with her husband. For
others, the gardens offer much-needed support and a sense of place in a
foreign land. "I'm
lonely, I have no husband, I have no family, I'm by myself," said
Soeuth Khan, 66, of Dallas, who came from Battambang in 1981. "I have
no one to depend on." Khan
said the Khmer Rouge killed her husband in 1975; 13 years later, she lost
her son to gang violence. Then in 1999, she said, she was laid off from
her assembly-line job at a glass company in Dallas. When
Fitzhugh garden co-founder and community leader Paul Thai and other
gardeners heard about Khan's misfortunes eight years ago, they invited her
to join them. Now she is one of 48 gardeners who participate in the East
Dallas Community Garden. From
7 a.m. to 8 p.m., Khan said, she stays busy planting seeds and cleaning
the ripe vegetables for their daily customers who pay $1 to $3 for the
organic delicacies, which include bitter melon, Chinese broccoli, taro and
ivy leaf gourd. Khan
said she sometimes sleeps at the garden because it reminds her of her
former life as a farmer in Cambodia before she was uprooted by the war.
The Khmer Rouge government massacred an estimated 2 million people from
1975 to 1979. Khan
said she has pain in her chest because of her suffering. "[Gardening]
helps me release the pain," Khan said, stooping on a wooden stool and
patting her chest. "Here, we eat together, we work together and talk
and share the sorrow." Thai
said Khan is reluctant to seek professional help because she does not
speak English and cannot afford it. Clinical
psychologist Loanne Chiu of Fort Worth said Southeast Asians suffer from
higher rates of post-traumatic stress, nightmares and anxiety attacks
because of the trauma they endured from wars. They are also the least
likely to seek treatment. "These
people, they didn't plan to come here," Chiu said. "It was
because of the war that they came." Chiu
said the elderly also fear the stigma associated with psychotherapy. "The
family is traditionally where you go with your problems," she said. The
community garden, Chiu said, benefits the Cambodians because while
reinforcing ties to their homeland, it provides a social outlet that helps
to reduce their anxiety. "I
do believe it's very healing," Chiu said. Gardeners The
Gardeners in Community Development, a Richardson-based group of three
nonprofit multicultural gardens for Asians, was formed in 1994. It has
three gardens: • East
Dallas Community Garden, 1416 N. Fitzhugh Ave. • Live
Oak Community Garden, Live Oak Street and Fitzhugh Avenue • Peace
Community Garden, 4627 Virginia St. For
more information, call Don Lambert, executive director of Gardeners in
Community Development, at (972) 231-3565. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
