In the Italian school for asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants most of the students come from countries from the Occidental and North Africa and they live in care centers and in the so called Emergency North Africa, for periods between 3 months and 1 year. Many of them wait for the summoning from the police headquarters for months and this condition of suspension and waiting has been a constant theme discussed at school that often immersed also in the school evaluation reports.
With this background was born the project to cultivate an urban garden, immediately supported by the Circolo Garbatella of Legambiente that assigned an urban garden to the Asinitas school of Italian in March, 2012, in the Garbatella neighborhood, near the school. Taking care of the garden, knowing to wait for the rhythms of nature, being conditioned by the atmospheric factors and the man’s hand seemed a suitable metaphor for the life of many of them. The growth of a fragile and delicate plant, the passage from seed to fruit gives the waiting a positive and fertile image. Taking care of ourselves and of what is part of our life is a motivating force to not give up and to not get lost in the labyrinth and on the blind streets of bureaucracy.
Objectives
Materials
Implementation
Evaluation
Tipps
Aims
The project’s aims are:
- to construct paths of social inclusion between migrants, refugees, asylum seekers residents in the urban territory and the citizens of the XIth district of Rome;
- to deliver a basic training education through the shared biological cultivation practice of the Urban Gardens Garbatella, of its orchard and of the tree growing in the “Garbatella Park”
- to promote the sharing of knowledge about land cultivation between different generations: old people, keepers of peasant knowledge, and foreigners, keepers of peasant knowledge from other cultures;
- to save the abandoned areas through the identification of a first sensible area, guarded, cultivated and maintained that could expand the green territory of the urban gardens Garbatella, generating responsibility for the public space.
Outcomes
- participative construction workshops
- publication of a booklet designed inside the garden
- the restoration of an abandoned urban green
- educational paths and internships for a group of foreign youngsters that will be involved in a specific training on practices of cultivation and biological agriculture techniques
- intergenerational and intercultural education with the refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, the inhabitants and public schools students of the XIth District of Rome.
