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I Had a Farm in Atlanta
- University of Georgia Press
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90 I Had a Farm in Atlanta John T. Edge The van is white, like all the others, with four rows of vinyl bench seats and door handles that rattle when we crest speed bumps or brake to stops alongside clutches of dumpsters overflowing with debris. Other vans, parked in the blacktop lots that encircle the Indian Valley apartment complex on the northwestern fringe of Atlanta, are taped with precise blue script. Chin Community Baptist Church drives a white van. So does Matupi Christian Church, and Georgia Chin Baptist Church. But this white van, packed with recent refugees from the East African nation of Burundi—driven by a onetime hospital chaplain who came to Atlanta to attend theology school—does not declare denomination or ethnicity. Nor does it telegraph the riot of colored garments worn by the women within, or the patchouli of sweet and dusky vapors that trail from the rear luggage hutch. We turn into another two-story complex, Southern Place. With a clapboardand -brick exterior, and a unit numbering system seemingly based on a long disproved algebraic theorem, it resembles the on-the-cheap developments that every other girl I dated after college lived in. Apropos of its setting, west of Stone Mountain, the granite monolith incised with portraits of our fallen Confederate heroes, the sign out front boasts a relief carving of a columned manse that, in the afternoon light, looks a lot like Tara. Jeanne Niyibizi slides an aluminum pan, sloshing with roasted goat bathed in a brick-red sauce, into the luggage compartment. Hiking up her yellow-andgreen batik dress, she vaults into the van, where Donate Nyiramanzi and seven other women—all wearing solar flare–bright garb, many packing stews of yellow peas with yucca or piles of bananas fried in palm oil—will chatter in 91 i had a farm in atlanta Kirundi, their native language, until we reach our destination, a fundraising dinner staged in the Tudor-styled home of Susan Pavlin, director of Global Growers Network, a three-year-old farm-focused nonprofit that serves these refugees and two-hundred-odd more. Before the night is out, I will eat six or eight ginger-stuffed dumplings called momo, made by Kesabi Timsina, a Bhutanese woman who farms an outparcel of land that fronts North DeKalb Mall. I will handle a market basket crafted of kudzu and wisteria by her father, Ram, who does his best work on the stoop of their butt-sprung, wood-framed apartment complex. And Global Growers will raise enough money to pay for a growing season’s worth of transit passes for the men and women who benefit from their nascent farm and market initiatives. At the close of the party, I will stand before the crowd to say that, at a time when every kid under thirty seems to preach the virtues of a farm-totable lifestyle with an earnest, finger-wagging fervor that makes me want to reach for a bag of Flaming Cheetos and a Mountain Dew, I’ve glimpsed an urban gardening initiative that makes good on its promise of connecting real people with real food. Semtok, a globular eggplant also known as bitter ball, is a hard sell, but occidental farmer’s market devotees like me enjoy sour leaf, an herb in the hibiscus family also known as roselle. We also like mustard greens, and okra, so long as you pick the pods when they are still young and tender. Those are a few of the lessons the Burundi women have learned since 2010, when they began working a plot of soil they call Umurima Wa Burundi, the Burundi Women’s Farm. Working with Global Growers, a spin-off of the ten-year-old Decaturbased nonprofit Refugee Family Services, the Burundians have also learned survival skills like how to score a second-shift job in an upstate chicken plant, pulling viscera from feather-stripped carcasses. And how to navigate MARTA, a sprawling multimodal transportation system that Atlanta recidivists fought in the 1970s, labeling it, with an eerie sense of its present potential , Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta. Climatic complements, cultural ties, and transportation link the American South and Africa. Fittingly, Atlanta is now a beacon for African refugees, just as St. Louis hosts a significant population of Croatian refugees, who arrived to join earlier immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, and the foothills of North Carolina boast pockets of Hmong people accustomed to farming similarly hilly terrain. Resettlement agencies place three to...