After a year travelling all around Europe, a former Summer Program monitor and her boyfriend decided to grow a new project for PSE. Indeed, Margaux and Enguéran spent several months traveling from biological farms to autonomous communities and learnt the basics to cultivate a vegetable garden. Initiated to permaculture techniques (techniques according to which the association of different plants and vegetables actually helps each other to grow because of their complementary characteristics and needs), and already sensitized to volunteering, little by little it became obvious for them to couple these two.
Growing its own vegetable garden allows one to increase its food independence, to feed itself better and to cultivate some personal improvements such as peace of mind, hand work culture and patience.
Everything started with an observation that the two young Frenchs made during their trip: growing its own vegetable garden allows one to increase its food independence, to feed itself better and to cultivate some personal improvements such as peace of mind, hand work culture and patience. These are obviously benefits that anyone could look for, but they can become life lessons for children. Especially for children that are looking for life goals, children that are missing what would be considered as basic education in occidental countries, children that don’t have families to teach them about independency, healthy food and work culture. “Growing a vegetable garden is also a form of education, learning how to work the land, how to well feed yourself. gardening is also related to a lot of personal benefits like work habits, tranquility, meditation”, Margaux.
Margaux, who had volunteered during the 2018 School Continuity Program, wanted to come back with Enguéran for the 2019 edition and both of them agreed they could bring something more by developing this gardening project within the summer programs.
Planting and growing a vegetable garden is a long-run project, not only a 4 weeks-long one.
It’s been a long process for them to arrive where they did this summer, and they first submit the project to the General Director of PSE. Indeed, planting and growing a vegetable garden is a long-run project, not only a 4 weeks-long one. Once they got her agreement, they talked about it to Marisa, the president of the School Continuity Program, then to the director of the Pensionnaires. The latter’s involvement was essential for the project to be brought to life: without him, the project wouldn’t be going to last longer than the summer program. However, he got very excited about it. Actually, growing a vegetable garden was already a topic of discussion on his side and with this already-existing-will to do it, the agreement and the motivation just followed, making it possible to become a long-term project.
To finance it, funds needed to be raised too and Enguéran and Margaux first decided to run an trail in Norway to get some and then, they opened a crowdfunding kitty. They shared it among friends and families and the word of mouth spread it even wider, allowing the project to gather much more money than needed.
Four weeks later, under the rains, the heat and the sun of Phnom Penh, salads, tomatoes, lemons and aromatic herbs already start to come out of the ground or to grow up on a land where they created everything from scratch.
To create this whole new vegetable garden they also needed the help of children who could take care of it later on so that they would consider it as their own project from the very beginning. The choice was quite easy and the project has been decided to be affiliated to the Pensionnaires’ summer program. Indeed, “PSE is their home so they will be the first for whom it’d be interesting for it to be a success”. Therefore, two times a week the older kroms of the Pensionnaires’ project, meaning kids from about 10 to 15, came to till the soil, saw bamboos, plant seeds and salads. They loved the idea and got really quickly motivated and involved in this new project: they were careful listeners to what they were told and extremely good at hand working. “They did great with nothing! We used scraps of kramas, plastic bottles, bamboos… Only materials that surround them to show them that we can do a lot by recycling what is all around them”. Four weeks later, under the rains, the heat and the sun of Phnom Penh, salads, tomatoes, lemons and aromatic herbs already start to come out of the ground or to grow up on a land where they created everything from scratch.
The biggest wish of Enguéran and Margaux at the end of this summer is for the Pensionnaires and PSE’s students to be able to take care of this vegetable garden for as long as they can. It has been decided than the pensionnaires will have a workshop there every weekend while the daily maintaining will be taken care of by the PSE’s students studying in the building in front of where the new garden is located, lead by a botany teacher. “These children will later have families and when they learn now that a well planted and cultivated seed sprouts and gives vegetables, they learn about patience and autonomy”.
