How Refugees Are Growing Food from Their Homelands in Inner-City Philadelphia

A man and his wife rifle though tomato bushes growing in a wooden garden bed in the Point Breeze neighborhood in South Philly. All around them, dozens of other raised beds are exploding with green growth.

The one-block, 2.8-acre lot is surrounded by familiar Philadelphia blight: run-down houses, unkempt weeds, a pile of soiled mattresses. But flourishing within the fenced property are symbols of life, growth, and revitalization.

"Every day I come to see the garden," says Moti, a 36-year-old Bhutanese man who spent 20 years living in a refugee camp in Nepal before he arrived in the United States as part of a resettlement program in 2012. "I grow green pepper, tomatoes, lady finger [okra], cucumber, and corn here."

His wife, Sarmila, stands by his side and points to a plot of potatoes. "My sister's garden," she says, smiling. The couple lives in a nearby neighborhood with their three children and work in the garden to supplement their diets with fresh vegetables.

The garden was organized by Nationalities Services Center (NSC), one of several organizations that helps to settle refugees in Philadelphia, to provide new residents a space to grow their own food and strengthen their communities. "I know this, how to grow this," Moti says of his crops, noting that his family uses the produce to make their native food like soups and potato or rice dishes.

The gardens are an opportunity for newcomers to grow culturally appropriate plants such as eggplant, collared greens, Swiss chard, beets, and kale, as well as flowers and herbs to use in religious ceremonies. Many of the crops are familiar ones to Americans, but the refugees also work with lesser-known plants like Thai basil, mustard greens, and bitter melon, which can be otherwise difficult to find and expensive to purchase locally. Mustard greens, for example, are frequently used to make a distinctive cooking oil in Nepal, and are fermented for use in Bhutanese curries. Growing them here allows residents to consume meals they may not have tasted for years when they languished in camps, living on meager rations that might provide only 1,200 calories per day.

Moti and Sarmila are members of a group resettled from refugee camps in Nepal, which were created when people of ethnic Nepalese background were systematically deported from the mountain kingdom of Bhutan in the early 1990s and left with no home of their own. The United States has accepted approximately 85,000 Bhutanese refugees over the past two decades.

NSC already had one established garden elsewhere in South Philly with 107 plots, but it proved so popular they had 200-person waiting list, so they worked with the Philadelphia Horticulture Society to secure more land and get a new garden up and running. The groups forged an agreement in 2014 to rehabilitate the Point Breeze vacant lot where a textile factory once stood, currently owned by a nearby church. Piles of rubble that remain on some of the unused parts of the lot attest to the amount of work involved clearing out concrete, installing water lines, and physically building the garden beds before the space could officially open last year. Everyone who has a plot contributes ten hours per month to workdays to maintain and expand the amount of space available to the community.

The community aspect, in fact, is key to the success of the program. Although the U.S. government provides a small amount of money, and organizations like NSC perform much of the legwork finding jobs and housing, by far the most important factor in refugee integration is help from their fellow countrymen who have already settled and know how to coach newcomers through the difficult process.

Philadelphia welcomes about 800 refugees annually—mostly Bhutanese, Burmese, and Congolese in recent years—and settlement organizations make an effort to find housing near other people from their home countries. The gardens create an additional point of contact for people to meet and share knowledge. "Our communities help us find what we need to live here," says Moti.

Not only is money scarce for refugees, who frequently can only find low-wage jobs, fresh and healthy food is not always easily available in the neighborhoods they live in. Some of the gardeners are working on an entrepreneurship program to supply local farmer's markets with their wares, earning a profit and spreading food access to more people in the city.

The Point Breeze location is especially convenient for the Congolese refugees who are currently settling on the streets immediately surrounding the garden. Neighborhood integration can pose a major challenge given language barriers and vast cultural differences, not to mention persistent poverty and accompanying social ills that plague many of areas of Philadelphia.

The gardens are an effort to address that issue as well, offering longtime residents of the neighborhood their own garden plots and an opportunity to work, learn the finer points of nurturing mustard greens, and socialize with their new neighbors—not to mention enjoy some healthy, fresh food themselves. Currently, about 300 gardeners are using the two existent spaces, approximately 70 percent of them refugees. NSC has aspirations to continue to expand the new garden and add a shade structure to make it more of a gathering point for refugees and native Philadelphians alike.

"For many refugees, their land was taken and they were forced to flee," says Danielle Bossert, the NSC continuum of care project coordinator. Many lived in limbo for years or decades in camps, with no personal property or connections to the land to speak of. Now, they can reclaim a piece of what they had, one wooden garden plot at a time.

"Being able to have a space to call your own is so important," Bossert says. "The community can connect to its cultural roots while it makes new roots in Philadelphia."