Seeds of Self

I'm at the Roots in the City community garden in Overtown talking to 12-year-old Keyalah, known to her friends as Lala. One of my service-learning projects this year is a collaboration between my writing students and Lala's class on a book about the garden. I offer her some homemade brownies we brought to share. As she takes them and gives me a big hug, I reflect on this place I’ve visited dozens of times over the past six years to facilitate experiences for hundreds of people—this oasis of dark soil beds, sunflowers, collard greens, tomatoes and citrus trees. The high-rise condos of downtown loom to the east; the dirty sidewalks, dilapidated houses and expressways bisecting Miami's poorest neighborhood to the west. 

I've known Lala as long as I have the garden, since she was six-years-old. Now she's in 7th grade, making her way through the labyrinth of adolescence, and still hanging out with me by some miracle of the cosmos. Lala and I come from different worlds. We wouldn't know each other if not for some extraordinary circumstances. She's a low-income half-Haitian, half-African-American kid from Overtown. I come from a middle class Nicaraguan family, grew up in the western suburbs with privilege, teach at the InterAmerican Campus in Little Havana--a neighborhood that borders Overtown, yet in some ways is as far away from there as you can possibly be.

But we both love school. We love each other. And we love Roots in the City, a magical space in Miami, and in my heart, too, where hope springs eternal. Where those who are otherwise segregated can meet. Where the curriculum is life. I would point to these three square blocks of green space in our concrete jungle as the site of some of my most important work as a professor at MDC, and also as a metaphor for who I am.

In my life, vocation, my first seven years at MDC, I have humbly tried to tend a garden everyday—the one in my own heart and that of my relationships with other people. I have watered the roots, pulled the weeds, basked in the beauty of the flowers and fruit. Most of the decisions I’ve made about what texts to use with my students, what discussions to engage in, what projects to invest myself in all come from a desire to embrace the whole person--mind as well as spirit. And to embrace our collective interconnections to the Earth.

The term Earth Ethics begins to describe my educational philosophy, and in fact, I'm a member of the Institute at the College by that name. It means, in part, living from the consciousness that human beings are but one aspect of a cosmic unity. I have worked hard to teach language skills through the prism of ecology--but moving beyond the limited view of a term that conjures green-washed images of recycling bins. In the original Greek, ecology comes from "house," and it means the study of living relations. It is service-learning, global awareness, peace studies, poetry readings, and, of course, community gardens.

It is Lala and I. She is a member of the I Have a Dream Program, which provides mentoring for her and 50 of her peers all the way through their high school graduations. Children who successfully finish the program receive full scholarships for college. I've been structuring mentoring experiences for my students and the Dreamers, like the book project, for these six years I have known Lala.  Today I'm leading a tour around the garden. Each stop will become an essay for our book. We stop at the Mount Zion Baptist Church across the street--one of the oldest structures in Miami--and I mention Dr. King delivered an early version of the I Have a Dream speech there. Then we walk around the block to the D.A. Dorsey House, where Miami's first black millionaire used to live. It has been deemed a Florida Heritage Site. Why is it important to restore old buildings, we ask. 

Then we move on to Jackson's Soul Food, an institution in Overtown. What role do restaurants play in neighborhoods?. Later, Lala and her college mentor work together on an essay based on the descriptive writing and notes we compiled during the tour: "The food puts you in a comfort zone. The atmosphere is really warm, and when you walk in, you smell pancakes, bacon and eggs. Professor Salinas says he likes the combo with salmon. My favorite is the volcano double fudge cake. The employees are like brothers and sisters, and when a customer is rude, the employees are not."

The book has a very specific audience, one that expands the Earth Ethics label in the way I'm suggesting: thirty-four kindergartners in Chacraseca, a rural community in Nicaragua where we've carried out three service trips since last summer. The Dreamers in Miami inspired us to start a program in Nicaragua following the same model. We plan to support our Sonadores (Spanish for “Dreamers”) for the next twelve years with educational programs and school supplies. Although the trips to Nicaragua are not College-sponsored, the fundraising to support this project happens partly on our campuses within the framework of a curriculum to raise awareness of global poverty and promote cross-cultural understanding. We are also installing an organic garden at the school in Nicaragua and working with the teachers to develop an Earth Ethics curriculum.

Who am I? Someone who went from Nicaragua to Little Havana to Overtown and back, and who has tried to take, and wants to keep taking, Lala and hundreds of MDC students along for the ride to meet Christian, Eduardo, Glendy, Jahosca (four of our Sonadores in Nicaragua). I want to learn to be a gardener, and to keep teaching and learning that most important of lessons: that we have each put a magnificent seed in the ground.