la hortaliza and humility

Each grade at IEIMC spends about an hour of their week working in the school's garden. While each grade has their own plant bed, the children also spend a fair amount of the time watering, turning compost, weeding, and doing general garden maintenance. I have the absolute joy of getting to spend this time with the students. The hortaliza is a place of community, learning, laughter, and messiness for the IEIMC students. For me it's a place of peace and a place of humility.

The first time I headed to the garden it became immensely clear to all involved that I had little to no idea what I was doing. To start, I knew basically zero gardening vocabulary (come on Spanish minor, where are you when I need you?!!). I ended up doing a lot of miming and asking for things in roundabout ways using the vocabulary I did know (the box with the one wheel and the sticks (wheelbarrow)? the snake that has water (hose)? the giant fork thing (pitchfork)? etc.). As a result, the very patient teachers recognized my uncertainty and general ineffectiveness and gave me pretty basic tasks. I spent a lot of my first few weeks in the garden, weeding, watering, organizing the tool shed, and completing other tasks that were essentially foolproof. Despite their kindly easing me into my work in the garden, I still had a few mishaps along the way. One week, I spent hours digging up all of big branches and tree trunks that had been placed in the beds to elevate them and add compost. I had misunderstood (a pretty common occurrence) and it turns out the teachers had only asked me to dig up a few of those branches from each bed. So, I spent hours the next week re-planting all of the branches I had mistakenly dug up. 

Slowly but surely,  I started to grow in gardening confidence. The horataliza began to feel like home. I knew where everything went. I took pride in sweeping out the tool shed and organizing the watering cans. I started to lead the kids in their hortaliza time with more confidence and joy (largely because I could actually call the tools by their real names, not my made up weird descriptions of them). 

Then, one day, Maestra Laura (the 5th and 6th grade teacher) asked that I take some of my solo horatliza hours and transplant the spinach that had been growing in the greenhouse into one of the open plant beds. I immediately slapped a big smile on my face, told her, "Yes! Of course! Absolutely!" (in hindsight she was probably a tad confused by my very enthusiastic response to her spinach request). I trotted off to the garden with  my head high, SO EXCITED for my first real, challenging gardening task. In my mind this task was the culmination of all my gardening improvements over the past few weeks. They had clearly seen my growth and development and now trusted me with such a sacred task as transplanting spinach. I took as much care as humanly possible transplanting that spinach. I gently watered it, covered it in wonderful compost-rich soil, made sure that the roots were deeply planted and the leaves just gently resting on the soil. I walked away so confident that in just a few weeks, we'd be feasting on my deliciously transplanted spinach in the lunchroom. 

Later that day, the first graders had their time in the garden. With their Maestra, Lupita, we transplanted carrots into their plant bed. After we finished, I definitely took the opportunity to walk them all past the spinach recently transplanted by yours truly. It was probably the proudest moment of my fledgling gardening career.

Fast forward 5 days...

Expertly transplanted and thriving carrots

The remains of the spinach

I arrived in the hortaliza Monday morning to begin the daily watering. I walked past the carrots-they looked great and were truly coming into their own and adjusting to their new bed. Then I arrived at my spinach. It was dry, brown, and dead as a doornail. I was crushed! The death of the spinach elicited a ridiculously real and emotional reaction from me. My gardening game had been shown up by a group of six-year olds. Later that day, I shared the tragic news with Maestra Laura. She just chuckled and said, "Oh don't worry about it! Sometimes the roots take, and sometimes they don't. Why don't you try the radishes next."

My dead spinach served me my first of many needed doses of humility.Yes, it was very humbling to watch first graders seamlessly transplant carrots while I struggled and failed to do the same. The more humbling experience, however, was realizing that I was the only one who really cared that the spinach had died. 

I was so eager to prove myself to the fellow teachers. I was ready to show them that despite my misunderstandings and lacking vocabulary, I was indeed learning and growing. I was ready to scream, "Look, I can do it! You can give me a task and I can fulfill it!" But, they weren't asking me to prove myself, they weren't providing a test or a metric against which to view my "progress" of the past few weeks. They were just wanting me to try and transplant some of the spinach. 

We've been societally conditioned to attach a value to what we can do and how well we can do it. Our successes and achievements, while laudable, can poison our understanding of our own identity. We can be tricked into thinking our personal worth only exists in places where those achievements mean something. In a sense, since arriving in Mexico, I've been stripped of a lot of what I thought made up my own identity. What I studied, where I studied, organizations I was a part of, leadership positions I held--most of the things I tied my identity to in the past four years have very little bearing on my work here. Especially when I'm elbow deep in soil surrounded my laughing niños. In those moments, what I do and what I've done are infinitely less important than that I am. I am in the midst of those children, I am listening to their stories, I am trying to build relationships rooted in love, I am. It's incredibly humbling (and at times frustrating) to try and build an identity based on being rather than doing.  I'm certainly more comfortable with the latter. I consistently remind myself that what I'm hoping to learn and experience through this year of accompaniment won't be like anything I've done before. It can't summed up into few bullet points on a resume. Like most things that have truly holy value, these relationships and experiences transcend our earthly understanding of merit. And, to me, that is wonderful, scary, liberating, and so very humbling.

Some cuties and their carrots