Co-founders help Senegalese DIG in with gardens

When Sarah Koch graduated from the College of Charleston three years ago, she never dreamed that in a few short years, she would be the co-founder of a gardening nonprofit whose home base is in San Diego but whose true roots are in Africa.

Koch is the vice president and co-founder of Development in Gardening, or DIG. Its mission is to provide the means for HIV/AIDS patients to plant vegetable micro-gardens in countries that often have less-than-adequate resources, wealth and nutrition.

Koch and DIG co-founder Steve Bolinger do this not by merely planting seeds and growing vegetables for the patients, but by teaching them how to grow the crops themselves and about the produce.

"We grow everything," Koch said. "We grow all the typical things you could find in Senegal, like eggplant, carrots, sweet potatoes and okra, and then things they've never heard of before, like kale and broccoli."

So far, Koch and Bolinger have started three gardens at medical facilities in Senegal that are about 13,000 square feet each and produce roughly 660 pounds of vegetables per month. Additionally, they helped many more individuals develop "home urban gardens" on small plots of land outside their houses. A small plot can be a few square feet or even a strip of ground between two buildings.

Bolinger and Koch met in the west African country of Senegal when they were in the Peace

Corps. Koch, who was teaching health education in a rural community, and Bolinger realized that many of the patients who have HIV and AIDS were receiving the proper medications from hospitals but were not getting what they needed nutritionally. The Senegalese diet is heavy on rice and little else.

"Most of these individuals earn less than a dollar a day and suffer from malnutrition," Koch said. "Our gardens are an easy, cost-effective way for them to change these realities."

These gardens help change another reality for the people who plant them, too: their economic standing. The home urban gardens produce not only food but a source of income that wasn't there before and the means to share that wealth and knowledge.

"Most of these people were women who didn't work, and now they see that they can bring in income," said Koch. "A lot of the people who have these are teaching their neighbors about this and teaching them to garden because you don't have to be HIV-positive to benefit from this."

When they started the first garden at the Fann Hospital in Dakar, Senegal's capital, Koch and Bolinger had to do much of the initial work because the hospital housed mostly severely ill patients who were too weakened by disease to participate. But outpatients came every day to learn how to grow the vegetables. Over a six-month period, the area was transformed from a sandy lot to a fully functioning garden that produces more than $9,000 worth of vegetables for market each year.

The patients maintain the garden and sell the produce to the hospital kitchen for patients' meals. They sell the excess to doctors, nurses and the local community, and all proceeds for the hospital gardens go back into the garden to maintain it. The goal is to make it sustainable.

The people who work in these gardens have to employ creative tactics to ensure they bear the fruits of their labor. Old trash items, such as tires, rice sacks, water bottles, juice boxes and even vegetable oil cans cut in half, are recycled and used as vegetable planters. PVC pipes are suspended from many garden walls to hold plants and capture moisture. All the containers are lined in plastic to catch and store rain during the rainy season, which lasts from June to October. Even the soil itself is a specially created hybrid of material, such as peanut shells, coconut shells, rocks and sand. DIG is starting to gain attention from the media and some high-profile people. In June, first lady Laura Bush and her daughter, Jenna, went to Senegal to see DIG's work.

There is one more benefit Koch sees when she helps people develop their gardens. Because AIDS has ravaged the African population, people who have the disease feel marginalized from society once people know they have it. But the gardens are a way for patients to form a common bond.

"It's taking a group of people who have no jobs and empowering them," said Koch. "The gardens turned into something we didn't expect, which was a place where they could be open about themselves because they couldn't be open anywhere else."

Reach Sophia Rodriguez at 937-5538 or srodriguez@postandcourier.com.