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My name is Tahmina Martelly.
I'm the resiliency programs manager at World Relief Seattle.
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The beautiful thing
about this particular garden is where it's located.
Many of the people in this community,
especially refugee immigrant communities,
wanted a place where they could grow food.
They wanted a place
that they
could get their hands in the soil
and it would make them feel at home,
because that's what's familiar.
Even if you're displaced from home, your hand in the soil,
you know that.
People miss that.
As a person who has displaced myself, I came from Bangladesh
and that's
one of the things I missed, is having a place to grow food
or to plant flowers, to have my hands in the soil.
And if you live in an apartment complex,
you're disconnected from the land,
you're disconnected from the soil,
and you feel separated.
And it also affects your mental health
and your sense of community.
So a place to grow food, connect with neighbors
and share stories is so important.
This particular garden
was carved out of a one-acre asphalt
and parking lot right in the middle of Kent, Washington.
And the beautiful thing about it
is it's a way to solve more than one problem.
This was a major area because it's on a hillside
for water quality issues.
It flooded regularly.
A huge area where it would
stormwater would collect, and polluted stormwater would
enter right into Mill Creek,
into the Green River, straight into the Duwamish,
affecting our salmon and our orca.
And so we have put in rain gardens, bioswales,
rainwater capture systems, all of those together.
This has become a thriving green stormwater
infrastructure site.
So we're solving so many problems in the same place.
People have a chance to grow food, build community,
and we get to affect our watershed.
I'm trying to find ways a little bit.
(indiscernible conversation)
That tiny little spine sticking out of it.
These, again, you can't find in any local grocery store.
Nepali and Bhutanese people call this (foreign word).
They're wonderful, very tasty, highly nutritious, difficult
to find anywhere, but easy to grow in a garden.
When you're a newcomer in this country and you're
holding down more than one job, it's hard to know,
how do you effect climate change?
How do you understand it? Learn about it?
What do you do in your personal life?
What's beautiful about this garden is because you're growing
food and building community and a space where you are actively
working at capturing rainwater, where you're actively
working with rain gardens in a bioswale and a food forest.
You're learning about the solutions
to climate change, how it affects the watershed
in easily understandable, digestible ways
so that it's
not such a broad concept and you're able to figure out,
no matter what
your language is, how it is , that you can affect change
and big and little ways
into your own community, into your own watershed.
That's what's really beautiful about it.
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