Refugee Response Produce sold at the Ohio City Farm Stand, Open in June
The weekend of June 3rd and 4th, the Ohio City Farm Stand will open for the 2016 growing season. The Farm Stand is open Fridays, 11:00am to 3:00pm and Saturdays, 9:00am to 3:00pm. Throughout the growing season we will offer The Refugee Response Produce—that is local, organically-grown produce, nurtured and harvested by refugee farmers, at the Ohio City Farm and Urban Community School.
The mission of the Ohio City Farm Stand is to increase availability of fresh produce to all community members. At the Farm Stand we proudly accept the Ohio Direction Card, Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program and WIC coupons, as well as credit and debit.
That community includes the farmers themselves. Each week our Refugee farmers shop at the farm stand for $10 worth of free produce to take home. This fulfills our mission to make sure everyone is taking home fresh vegetables from the farm. It also provides English practice for those refugees who don't yet speak the language because we get to review English vegetable names. Additionally, the farmers also make sure that I'm learning names of the vegetables in their languages.
From my observing, the most popular vegetables across all cultures are potato, tomato and onion. The amazing thing is that you can see this popularity in the languages. The word for "potato" in Karen (Burmese language), Nepali (Bhutan & Nepal), and Urdu (language of Pakistan/Afghanistan) is "alu." Here are vegetables names in other languages.
Potato
Karen, Nepali, Urdu = alu
Somali = baradho
Tomato:
Karen = tha gaw sei
Nepali = golebheda
Somali = yaanyo
Onion:
Karen = ptheh thar
Somali = basal
Nepali = pyaz
There will be no test, but if you come to the farm stand for some local, organically grown produce, one of the refugee farmers will be working, so feel free to try out some words. They would love it!
Margaret Fitzpatrick
Maggie is the Director of Agricultural Empowerment and Programing for Refugee Response in Cleveland. She earned her B.S. in biology at John Carroll University with an environmental studies concentration, and M.S. in community-based food systems from Michigan State University in 2010. Maggie completed post-graduate internships on farms in Ohio and Vermont and she has worked on farms in Ireland.