For many
of us, growing tomatoes or squash is a simple, satisfying way to spend summer
afternoons and feed our families. For Hasta Bhattarai, a refugee from Bhutan
who was resettled by RefugeeOne in 2008, gardening is all that and more: it’s a
way to live out a legacy that goes back generations. As a coordinator of the
Global Gardens Refugee Training Farm, he uses his knowledge of farming to help
build community among refugees in Chicago.
Bhutan, where
Hasta was born, is a small country in the eastern Himalayas. Though it’s known
for being the only country that measures Gross National Happiness alongside
Gross Domestic Product, Bhutan isn’t always a sunny place—especially not for
the Lhotshampa. Descended from Nepalese immigrants who arrived in Bhutan in the
19th century to work as farmers, the Lhotshampa (which means
“southerners”) preserved Nepalese traditions even as they thought of themselves
as citizens of Bhutan. But by the 1990s, the Bhutanese government had branded
the Lhotshampa as illegal immigrants—despite the fact that their families had
been working the same farms for generations—and targeted them for harassment,
violence, and even deportation.
In 1992,
after Hasta graduated high school, the government forced his family from their
farm and out of the country. He and his parents, brother, and sister traveled
to Nepal, where they settled in a camp alongside other refugees from Bhutan.
There, separated from the country and work they had known all their lives, the
family waited. Though the wait was punctuated by moments of happiness—Hasta met
and married his wife Chandra in Nepal, for instance—it was hard to be in
perpetual limbo without citizenship anywhere.
After
sixteen years, Hasta and Chandra found out that they were to be permanently
settled in Chicago, and better yet, that his parents and siblings would follow.
They were greeted by RefugeeOne staff at O’Hare in August 2008, and taken to
their new apartment. Soon after, RefugeeOne helped Hasta connect with his first
job: working in a restaurant at O’Hare. As Hasta
and his family found their bearings in their new city, he wanted to give back
to other refugees. In 2012, he had a chance to do just that when he became one
of three leading volunteers at the Global Gardens Refugee Training Farm. The
farm is located in Albany Park and holds about 100 forty-foot-long plots tended
by refugees, who grow crops familiar and novel to feed their families and sell
at a weekly market. The farm includes community garden plots for neighbors,
too. Hasta and his fellow volunteers write grant proposals, tackle
organizational issues, and get their hands dirty with the other farmers. Hasta
estimates he spends about 20 hours a week at the garden, where he grows bitter
melon, broccoli, and snake gourd, among a host of other crops. (“I like all of
them equally,” he says.) His plot is thriving—it’s difficult to believe that
the long Chicago winter could have slowed the planting season when the garden
looks this lush—and provides food for him, Chandra, and their two young sons.
But the garden doesn’t just support his family in their present life in
Chicago: it also connects them to their past in the Himalayas. “In Bhutan,” he
emphasizes, “we were all farmers.” Refugees
from all over the world—and now, from all over the city—have plots at Global
Gardens, too. Many of them were resettled by RefugeeOne. “We connect our
clients to the garden, but not just as a food source. It helps them become part
of the community,” says Helen Sweitzer, manager of adjustment at RefugeeOne.
When Hasta talks about what the farm means for others, it’s clear that it
provides as much emotional as physical comfort to those who work there. “It’s
not only a place to share fresh food, but a place to come together and share
stories,” he explains. “The garden helps people practice English: they sell to
buyers at the farmer’s market, and they talk to refugees from other places.”
And cultural differences are seen as enriching: “We grow some of the same
greens,” he says, “but we don’t all cook them the same way--so we learn from
each other.”