Planting Seeds of Hope
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Imagine that you’re in a state of despair, separated from your keiki and locked up for drug offenses.
Then one day you plant a seed ...
A dozen offenders have taken that step in the past year at the Women’s Community Correctional Center in Kailua, and the results have amazed everyone involved - including the prisoners.
Since December 2008, the pilot program on hydro-ponic (soil-free) gardening has produced a steady harvest of lettuce and tomatoes - enough to serve salad to 286 women inmates three days a week and delight the cook who can now spice up the institutional menu with 20 different herbs.
“For me, it’s been such a blessing,” says Karen Newberry. “The Outdoor Circle is so good to us; we just love it.” She and Jackie Perkins helped build the original water systems and contributed to the how-to manual the women wrote for their sisters who follow.
Margaret Brezel, who coordinates the program for Lani-Kailua Outdoor Circle, says “It’s a total joy to be with them and share this sustainable work.”
“I’m the fertilizer department today,” reports Maile Bent at the work site.
“I’m the seeder this month,” adds Amourelle Camfield. Chewing on an edible blossom, she admits she once grew marijuana this way. “Now I can use my skills without being on the wrong side of the law.”
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Nursery jobs rotate among the women, mentored by LKOC members and their technical consultant Chuck Glenn in a partnership called Learning To Grow. The all-volunteer effort is subsidized by the club and costs the state nothing but water and electricity. LKOC data puts the value of the lettuce crop in the first year at $20,292, while the club’s investment has been about $6,800.
“I’ve had a good experience with the inmates,” says Glenn, a retired Olomana School counselor who designed the hydroponic set-up for the women to build. “They’re enthusiastic and very cooperative.” He adds that hydroponic lettuce tastes better and grows one-third faster that soil-rooted plants.
Healthy greens in 288 grow-cubes and baskets perch along gleaming white water lines, which the women fuss over together daily at the back of the prison campus. Kailua High School’s football field is visible from the prison work area, which also has fruits, herbs and a large variety of soil-grown plants now being readied for the LKOC plant sale.
(The annual sale starts at 8 a.m. March 20 at Kailua Elementary School, and the plants go fast. Cultivated at WCCC, they include palms, ginger, gardenias, bromeliads, ferns, crotons, ti and more - and proceeds go back to Learning to Grow.)
Warden Mark Patterson calls it horticultural therapy, a way to “influence transformative change” in the women on 15 acres of his 122-acre facility. He also enjoys eating the salads - “I can’t have them eating things I’ve never tried!” - and he’s making plans to expand the farm and share its bounty with the local hospital, kupuna housing and others.
An immediate goal is to have enough lettuce for “a salad bar in every cottage” at the prison, he says. And with the women’s help, Patterson also intends to add pavilions, gazebos, stream pathways, improve the lo’i garden and add a hula mound in cooperation with other solid community partners such as Honolulu Garden Club and Hina Mauka’s residential addiction-recovery program, KeAlaula. To offer help, call 266-9580.
For Bent, however, it’s all simply a miracle.
“I wasn’t prepared for the way this place embraced me,” she says. “It’s a spiritual freedom. This time with one another really restores me in my recovery. It’s healing through hydroponics.”
She and Charmaine Heanu then turn to the plants and recite a moving chant. “We feed our mana to the plants,” explains Heanu. “It flows to the plants and back into us,” Bent adds.
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The women are all in the prison’s faith-based Total Life Recovery, a relapse-prevention program that applies its philosophy directly to the garden as a third partner. Volunteer chaplain Bonnie Holcombe, who directs TLR for Fishnet Ministries, explains that it combines spiritual knowledge with common sense. And by serving “outside themselves for the good of others,” she says, they’re learning “to live and work together as a community and to understand the meaning of commitment and accountability within it.”
There’s laughter among the gardeners as they check the pH levels, drain and flush tubes, trim the greens, check the pumps and monitor the new worm-composting bins.
LKOC’s Annetta Kinnicutt aka lead teacher and thrifty recycling queen (“If you can’t get rid of it, put a plant in it!”) is showing them how to pad clay pots using her shredded financial records from home.
A retired teacher, she un-retires every day she comes to WCCC.
“I always had a garden of some kind outside my classrooms,” she recalls, adding that her current students should easily find jobs at hydroponic nurseries scattered across the island - or at least know how to grow food for their own family in a small space. “Grow plants, grow people. Create a life, feed people,” is her theme.
The program also aims to help them gain the confidence needed to deal with real-life problems, Kinnicutt says. “Take the slim harvest of sweet potatoes we dug up yesterday. Maybe it was a mistake, and they should try a different tack next time.”
Staff from Lanakila (Meals on Wheels) and from the state hospital in Kaneohe have come calling, meanwhile, and it looks like the women will be creating smaller hydroponic systems for them soon. That could expand to building home-garden systems.
“We have loving hands and enthusiasm,” Patterson says, “and 75 percent of the programs come from community resources.”
As the work bus trundles back up the hill, Sarah Whitford agrees, adding, “All those who help us - it helps us to see we’re not forgotten, even though we’ve made single or multiple mistakes.”
Waiawa Correctional Facility also has a horticulture program, run by a paid farm manager with work-line labor. Though it doesn’t generate the emotional testimony of the women of WCCC, warden Jodie Maesaka says the men produce enough lettuce to share with Halawa and OCCC prisons, and sometimes to outside groups.
“The men are proud of the farm and they even brag about it,” she says, “especially when the harvest goes to the homeless shelters.”
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