Mi jardin - My garden
Ruth is a Venezuelan migrant who fled from her country to seek asylum in the UK with her immediate family, leaving many behind. She worked as a teacher for 24 years and applied her creativity in teaching preschool kids. During the pandemic lockdown she started gardening, growing flowers and vegetables for first time in UK. In this audio she relates her experience (in Spanish).
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Transcripción
En este tiempo del Coronavirus, he tratado de hacer cosas de calidad, o emplearme de la mejor forma del tiempo. Una de las cosas que me gusta es la jardinería. Y pues comencé, inicie sembrando, haciendo semilleros de los vegetales que comíamos y después una amiga me trajo unas semillitas, y así he ido y les quiero mostrar. Mire, aquí estoy dentro del greenhouse, con bastantes maticas. Todas son comibles, verdad, hay tomate, hay rabanitos, hay lechugas, hay cilantro, estamos germinando un cilantro bonito. Y también… aquí tengo papas, verdad. Aquí hay unas fresas que están germinando. Y aquí pase algunas al sol. Ve, porque ya están más grande.
Verdad, esto es como una terapia, me relaja mucho ver como crecen, verdad. Y pues también podemos comer lo más sano, esto es una de las cosas a que me dedico más tiempo y me encantan, me relajan, me divierte y puedo compartir con otros mi experiencia.
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Transcript
In this time of Coronavirus, I have tried to do useful things, or use my time in the best way. One of the things I like is gardening. And so I started, I started planting, making seedbeds of the vegetables that we ate and then a friend brought me some seeds, and that's how I started and I want to show you. Look, here I am inside the greenhouse, with quite a few plants. They are all edible, right, there are tomatoes, there are radishes, there are lettuces, there is coriander, we are germinating a beautiful coriander. And also… here I have potatoes, right. Here are some strawberries that are sprouting. And here I moved some into the sun. You see, because they are bigger.
This is like a therapy for me, it relaxes me a lot to see how they grow, right. And well, we can also eat more healthily. This is one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing and I love it, it relaxes me, it amuses me and it means I can share my experience with others.
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This material is part of the Covid Chronicles from the Margins project, funded by The Open University and the International Institute of Social Studies in the Hague. The project aims to highlight the impact of the pandemic on refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants.
