nothin An Idea Takes Root In Fair Haven | New Haven Independent

An Idea Takes Root In Fair Haven

Thomas MacMillan Photo

In a garden tucked between two industrial buildings on James Street, Wanda Albandoz filled up a crate of organic kale, string beans, basil, and tomatoes for her family — produce that she had a hand in growing. Meanwhile, Albandoz has lost 30 pounds in five months.

Albandoz (at right in photo) participates in the Fair Haven Community Health Center’s (FHCHC) groundbreaking diabetes prevention program, which uses exercise and education to tackle high rates of diabetes in the neighborhood. Albandoz and other, mostly immigrant, women at risk of diabetes engage in 12 weeks of exercise and nutrition education that involves the whole family.

They tend the new garden to take care of their health, and to put food on the table. Their garden was founded in June on the idea that a health clinic’s work can take root in the soil. It’s run by FHCHC staffer Rebecca Kline (at left in photo).

On land donated by the Chabaso Bread Company, whose bakery is next door to the garden, Kline helps Albdandoz and five to 10 other women grow organic tomatoes, green beans, kale, broccoli, zucchini and more. The women help tend the garden and then enjoy the fruits and vegetables of their labor. It ensures that participants in the diabetes prevention program have easy access to healthy fresh produce, which can otherwise be prohibitively expensive, Kline said.

They get some physical activity,” said Dr. Anne Camp, head of the diabetes prevention program at FHCHC. They get some access to fresh fruits and vegetables. I think it’s really been very successful this summer.”

A recent damp gray afternoon found Kline and Albandoz crouched among the garden’s tomato plants, reaping a tasty harvest. The bleak weather had kept other participants away.

Son dulcecitos!” Albandoz exclaimed of the cherry tomatoes. They’re sweet!

Albandoz, a 42-year-old mother of two, wore blue latex gloves to protect her baroque nail-job.

Albandoz, who drives a school bus for First Student during the school year, said she didn’t have any gardening experience before beginning in the FCHC garden in June. But her family and neighbors had gardens when she was a kid in Puerto Rico, she said. She moved to Fair Haven in 1996.

Since she began the diabetes prevention program in March, she’s lost 30 pounds, Albandoz said. That’s mostly due to the thrice weekly exercise sessions. But Albandoz said she has also changed her and her family’s eating habits, thanks in part to the garden. Her kids, 18 and 11, are learning to eat salad, she said.

The garden is a very straightforward way to ensure that program participants and their families are eating healthy, Kline said. In terms of getting healthy food into their mouths, this is the most direct way to do that.” Even if local stores have vegetables, they can be too pricey to eat regularly, she said.

For me that’s the real intervention,” Kline said. It’s really preventing diabetes, at least this week.”

Over the next hour, as she and Albandoz harvested several varieties of tomatoes, beans, chard, basil, kale and jalapenos, Kline explained more garden/nutrition theory and described how she came to be managing the project, by way of Brazil, Mexico, and India.

The garden started in June as a result of collaboration between FHCHC and Chabaso Bakery.

It was everybody’s idea,” Kline said.

Chabaso had a garden plot that the company had put in several years ago. The owner, Charles Negaro, wasn’t planning to use it this year and was looking for a way that it could benefit the local community.

Chabaso has a history of encouraging health and nutritious eating among its employess, Negaro said. The bakery serves soup to its workers everyday and has worked with FHCHC in the past to offer flu shots to employees. Working together on the garden was an extension of this health-based cooperation.

Negaro again teamed up with FHCHC, which tapped Kline to start up a garden.

I happened to be here, and I have a green thumb,” said Kline, who’s 30 and grew up in Woodbridge.

With almost no funding, Kline set about securing donations of seeds and gardening supplies. The former came from High Mowing Organic Seeds in Vermont. The latter were cobbled together from hardware stores and a garden supply store in Bethany. When tomato baskets turned out to be too pricey, Kline rigged up a system of stakes and string. Robust tomato growth has toppled some of the structures, but they’re holding up overall.

Kline said she’s never before heard of a public health project forming as a result of a public/private partnership like the one between FHCHC and Chabaso. I really do think this might be the beginning of something.”

As they moved through the garden, stopping to smell herbs (pictured), Albandoz and Kline arrived at the kale and rainbow chard, Albandoz said she planned to make a salad out of them. I train them that when you eat it raw it has the most nutritional value,” Kline said.

Kline spoke in Spanish with Albandoz, which can be tricky since Kline’s much more fluent in Portuguese, a keepsake from her time in Brazil. That’s where Kline headed after graduating from New Haven’s High School in the Community and the Educational Center for the Arts, to study capoeira. It’s just one of the countries Kline has visited in a career in revolving around immigration, agriculture, development, food, and poverty.

It started at home in Woodbridge, where Kline’s mom had three really large gardens,” plus goats and chickens. After high school — and capoeira—Kline headed off to Sarah Lawrence college, where she studied immigration issues. On a class trip to Juarez/El Paso Mexican border, Kline encountered the most impoverished place I’d ever seen.” She also encountered indigenous Mexicans in beautiful traditional clothing, who had left their farms further south to head north for the border.

Kline recalled thinking, What are you doing here?” What was wrong with farming? Why had these people left their farms? With these questions gnawing at her, Kline dropped out of college and went to work on a farm in New Mexico. She wanted to study farming at a practical, non-theoretical level.

Six months of farming was followed by six months of cooking, then six months of art school, before Kline found herself back at Sarah Lawrence. Still looking to answer her questions about agriculture and migration, Kline studied international development and came to understand some of the economic and environmental factors whose effects she saw in Juarez.

Since then it’s always been about farmers,” Kline said.

A masters of public administration in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia followed. Then a fellowship to work with poor farmers in India, and stints at the Slow Food Movement in New York City and an Ecoagriculture Partners in DC.

Looking for a way to come back home to southern Connecticut, Kline got hired at FHCHC to help document the diabetes prevention program, and now, to work on the garden. Working with women from Mexico and Guatemala, Kline found that she didn’t have to leave home to work internationally.” The same issues she looked at abroad — nutrition deficiency and poverty — are present in the U.S., she said. Poor people have less access to healthy foods and thus struggle with health problems. This is what it looks like in this country,” she said.

At the end of less than an hour of harvest work, Albandoz peeled off her latex gloves and gave Kline a big hug. She drove away in her minivan with a crate of fresh organic produce in the back seat, for her family.

Kline has big plans for the garden, plans that could include expanded plots, raised beds, maybe even a hoop house for year-round cultivation. Realization of those visions depends in part on being able to raise funds. The garden is accepting donations.

To suggest a gardener of the week, email us here.

Previous Gardeners Of The Week:

Maria Meneses
Katie MacRae
Christopher Schaefer
Visiting Hands Help Chinese Gardens Bloom

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