At SET there are 180 young refugees (with a permit) and Dutch students living together, building up a community with each other and the neighborhood. When the Amsterdam Municipality came up with this initiative we lived already here in this neighborhood.
What is home? Where do we belong to? How do we connect? – through the language; through our interests in common or our shared past, present or future? Who am I? What motivates me on my journey to move on? Where do I belong to? How can I find my place, inner peace, balance?
And as always the answers do not come directly. They arrive when you do not expect they to come. They come when your are cooking together with your neighbors from all over the world; Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and from the Jordan, Amsterdam. When you realize that all these countries have something like our pogácsa but we all have a little different ingredients and different words for it.
We have been living next to each other in the same neighborhood. And this samenleving – how the Dutch says – inspired me to take more concrete steps forward.
We started to plant seeds in the few boxes we got from the Municipality…
And a year later we have a plan to build a real garden, a green island in the city: a Community garden for social integration. A garden which could be a safe place for integration, arrival. A space where people would heal their traumas of migration, can have a rest without being pressed to do anything particular. This garden would be a place for work, for learning, for art, for therapy, just for being. This would be a place without labels, without special aims, where people would keep their dignity and respect.
Here is the concrete design for SET Community gardens in 2020 made by Towards Nature Permaculture Landscaping. We are looking forward to the next steps…
