Live From Around the World

A Garden We Won’t Soon Forget

July 19, 2011, San Francisco

posted by Debbie Jones, J2A mentor

It's 10:30 p.m. on the coast and the kids are toast. "Nobody knows how to do a blog," says Henry, after going upstairs at the hostel to ask Kate or Maux, who surely know ALL about communicatin'.

Turns out all we had to do was e-mail, but Henry, like the rest of us, is just dead-tired after a long, but totally fulfilling day that took the nine intrepid, interested, and hard-working J2Aers on a long early morning bus ride to the BayView area of the city by the bay. After getting off the bus, we had to dodge broken glass and various other industrial-strength issues to get to a mission called BayView. We marched across the bustling area that's like South Richmond if South Richmond had a big blue bay beside it.

While we may have expected a run-of-the-mill feeding program, what we found was an extraordinary former farm in a neighborhood of stucco houses on a hill. A gracious, energetic, and totally creative woman named Nina was on the sidewalk where dozens of people, many of them elderly, were gathered, waiting for her weekly ritual of giving. Nina, it turns out, is an Episcopal deacon and grew up in the place she has turned into a shelter from the storm of poverty. She even has beehives, with bees buzzing in the cool morning air, pollinating the lush garden nearby.

Our J2Aers jumped right into the jobs she laid out -- cleaning toys for the kids, crushing boxes to recycle, handing out fresh vegetables, including some of the hugest and tastiest broccoli we'd ever seen. Ginny, Kate, Lucy and others were seen crunching on the broccoli like Bugs Bunny eating a carrot.

Moms marched up the hill with babies in carriages, and they carefully selected clothes for their children; grandparents brought grandkids along... a steady stream of humanity marched up the hill to where the St. Paul's J2ers were waiting to serve them with good cheer, and good hearts.

After we shared a meal together, Nina gave everyone a gift scented with the lavender growing in her garden. It is a garden that we won't soon forget.