First Breath Of New Life..

In August 2012 I broke ground for the first time in the Resurrection Garden. We were in the middle of Monsoon so with lots of regular rain and sunshine a whole lot of weeds had begun feeling right at home right where I planned to create. Even from looking at it I could tell it was going to be a huge task but had made the decision that I really wanted to put the effort into cleaning out of all the rocks, rubbish and debris in the soil and so I built a large sieve from some wood and chicken wire and began work. Suffice to say, it didn’t take more that a couple of thrusts of the shovel to work out that I had massively underestimated the size of this project!

A brief list of items I’ve found while digging in the garden; batteries, shoes, spoons, plastic bags, chess pieces, bangles (by the thousands), broken toys, shirts, cups, roti plates, broken rolling pins, socks, saris, chip packets, clay chai cups, medicine bottles, diyas/candles, a library card, human poo wrapped in plastic, kite string, school homework, marbles, lolly wrappers, bike tyres, plastic syringes, bolts, rings, whistles, whiskey bottles, 15kg slabs of concrete, gloves, our neighbour’s left over breakfast, Paan packets (by the millions), animal bones and innumerable rocks, stones and broken bricks. And as you can see below, it wasn't just within the top few centimeters, even 2 and 3 feet down the earth kept spewing forth decades worth of discarded waste.

Within the first hour the sieve broke under the stress of all the rocks and debris being thrown against it. This didn’t phase me too much as I wasn’t finding it as useful as I'd first hoped and found I could extract the rubbish just as happily with my hands. Our neighbour’s found great delight in hanging out their windows or climbing onto the roof to watch the hairy Videshi (‘foreigner’) doing a job which no self respecting Indian would ever consider doing. On that first afternoon I probably had between 10-15 people, ageing from 5 to 100 watching me for the few hours that I was there. In this regard, even now, a whole year later, nothing much has changed.

Considering the temperatures were still so high and the humidity was through the roof it was really only possible for me to work from around 3pm till the mosquitoes came out just before sundown. I tried a couple of times to go out earlier in the day but after 15-20 minutes I'd end up with heat stroke and spend the rest of the day on the floor. As you can image, progress was slow. Really slow.

Every afternoon I was incinerating countless buckets of waste and amassing a rather large collection of broken bricks and began using them simply to mark out the boundaries of the garden. At some point I began stacking them and before long had a pretty sweet little garden wall happening. But in amongst all this, my most pressing problem was the weeds. In monsoon they grow so fast that even though I had a small section all cleared out it didn't take them long to fall in love with my work and grow intent on moving back on in. 

I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't do all this work alone (something I had really wanted to do) and that I needed to work smarter, not harder, so one day in a conversation with my sweet friend Shoonkdedy bloom, she told me how in the past they had hired some day laborers to come in and dig some holes for them - and here's the kicker -  the average wage is around 350rupees a day (roughly AU$6.36)... I hired 4...

 

These guys achieved in one day what would have literally taken me months to do. Sadly they were a little on the dodgy side and didn't really do as I had asked (basically they cleared out some areas of soil then spread it out over the other areas to make it look like they had dug through the whole thing.. sneaky) but never the less, what work they did do was still super useful, Winnie got to make them a couple of sweet pots of Chai and they got paid above average wages for a days work (which is not so much for a Westerner but can be pretty big for someone living on the poverty line).

So finally, 3 month after I had first stuck a shovel in the ground the soil was clear of bricks and debris (well, sort of) but after the decades of mistreatment it had received it was still in bad shape. After all this work and countless hours messing around in the soil I hadn't laid my eyes on even one earth worm (maybe it was the heat stroke but one afternoon I began questioning the reason for their absence so much that I actually googled to check that they lived in this part of the world! They do by the way) So then it was time to start focusing on getting some love back into the soil, but I'll be saving that one for the next post. 

Hairy Love