YULETIDE LETTER, 2008

January 1, 2009

Dear Family and Friends,
Adell Allen, a long-time parishioner of St. Augustine Catholic Church here in the South Bronx, died on the first of December. She was 92. Born in Jamaica and trained as a teacher, she moved to New York in 1945, working menial jobs for years before finding employment at Lincoln Hospital and rising to unit coordinator. She and her husband raised two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom became medical doctors. At her funeral, her son told the mourners: "My mother defied the racial prejudice she experienced here in America and made a successful career, as did my father. They motivated us kids to do the same. But Mom always said she'd never live to see the day when a Black person would become president of the United States. For the first time in her life, she was wrong about something."
On election night at eleven o'clock, the neighborhood around St. Augustine's erupted with firecrackers and shouts: "O-bam-AH! O-bam-AH!" Not long ago, the noise would have come from gunfire and fights.
Talk about "change."
Whether or not the new administration will be able to effect change in the political sense, profound change has already occurred in the symbolic sense. Electing a Black president has lifted not only Blacks' self-esteem but the whole nation's — and the world's. My friend Georg Michels, a history professor at U.C. Riverside, told me that his aged father in Germany — along with most of the globe — stayed up till dawn watching the election returns and Obama's victory speech. His dad calls Obama der Weltpresident — the World-president.
Let's hope our new leader can use this enormous cache of good will to make genuine progress toward peace and justice here and abroad.
Change: It definitely was a year of it, wasn't it? Just look at your retirement account. Who but those few economists that take the dismal science literally could have predicted what might be the Great Depression II?
Oh well, it's only money.
A receding tide lowers all boats, but it's less evident in areas that are perpetually aground, like the South Bronx. The working poor here are still working and still poor, but the basics get harder to meet. Rents continue to rise, as downsized Manhattanites begin finding the Bronx suddenly attractive. The population is slowly diversifying; White artistic types are colonizing the far south of the South Bronx, doing the loft thing to rundown furniture factories on the waterfront and opening up tony restaurants nearby. Albanians are retreating north, selling their bodegas to the Arabs: Up on Third Avenue, the Kosovo Grocery has become the Anwar Deli. Many West Africans are moving into this formerly entirely American Black and Hispanic neighborhood, as well as a few daring Jews and Asians.
The building boom continues here, though it may only be the completion of securely-financed projects. Two blocks west on Third Avenue, a brewery from the 1920's, one of many in this once-German area, long since turned into warehouses and parking garages, has been demolished, to be replaced by a strip mall, of all things.
But if there is any indicator of economic health and sickness, it is food. The number of people coming weekly to the St. Augustine Food Pantry has tripled, from 200 a year ago to 600 today. Obtaining that much food is a challenge to the pantry's director, Sister Dorothy Hall, an African-American widow and mother who retired from government service six years ago to join the Dominican Order of nuns. One of her main funders is America's Second Harvest, a Chicago-based food philanthropy. This year my sister Jeannie requested our family to forgo Christmas gifts and donate the money to this charity, which I most gladly did.
A related food issue is "sustainability" — decreasing dependence on industrial agriculture by producing food locally. Everywhere in New York City, community-run farmers' markets are springing up, supporting upstate family farmers and bringing urbanites fresh fruits and vegetables at reasonable prices — particularly important in places like the South Bronx, where poor nutrition and low-quality supermarket produce lead to virtual epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other diseases.
Community gardens also contribute. Last summer, our tiny garden here produced enormous quantities of vegetables, the surfeit of which we gave to the farmers' market up the block, run by local high-school students.
But it's not just vegetables anymore. In August, faculty, students, and alumni of St. Augustine Catholic School built a chicken coop in their garden, and in October, 15 hens arrived from an upstate chicken farm to live and lay in it. In addition to giving the community fresh, nutritious eggs and providing our gardens with natural, nitrogen-rich fertilizer, the chickens have become a unique kind of clucking teacher, showing children where their food comes from and asking them to take responsibility for their care. (The chicken project, by the way, was funded by Heifer International, the organization known for supplying livestock to poverty areas worldwide — another worthy cause to support.)
And my beehives continue to thrive, yielding great quantities of pure, healthful local honey.
It's only natural.
For the chickens' bedding and nesting, we buy hay from a feed store just a few blocks from here — the last holdover from earlier times, when West Farms was not just the name of a subway stop smack in the middle of the Bronx.
There's something timeless about it. The sweet smell of hay in our henhouse stretches back to Bethlehem.
Wishing you peace and well-being in the New Year,
Roger Repohl

CHICKEN THERAPY FOR THE SOUL

November 27, 2008

Every school day at 7 a.m. sharp, 12-year-old Mame arrives at the Peace Garden adjoining St. Augustine Catholic School in the South Bronx.
The chickens are waiting.
The rustle of her footsteps through the fallen leaves brings 15 big, colorful birds out of their coop and into the pen. They come around her, eyeing her intently, clucking curiously. Mame (pronounced "Mommy") checks their water and food, then looks inside the henhouse. Today she finds a clutch of three large brown eggs, neatly laid in a nest of straw on the floor. She gathers them up.
"I love to take care of the chickens!" Mame smiles. "They look so beautiful, and they know me!"
Mame, whose family immigrated from Senegal two years ago, is a member of the school's Chicken Club, nine students whose year- long project is to learn about ecosystems and human nutrition while practicing hands-on animal husbandry. They perform the daily tasks of keeping the water fresh, the food abundant, the pen cleaned and layered with sweet-smelling straw: farmers' work. They monitor the health of the chickens, their egg production, and the cost of feed. In the spring, they will present their findings at the New York Catholic Schools Science Fair. They're confident they'll win.
"Whenever I go to a principals' meeting," says Cathryn Trapp, St. Augustine's principal, "their first question always is, ‘Well, how are the chickens?' They're jealous."
The school's experiment in urban agriculture is sponsored by Heifer International, the same folks who turn your donations into beehives in Bolivia and goats in Ghana, and Just Food, a nonprofit group committed to localizing the food supply by organizing neighborhood-run farmers' markets and showing community gardeners how to increase their productivity and diversify their output. Their mutual goal, in the word of the day, is "sustainability."
"Chickens are a must for farming ecologically," remarks Owen Taylor, who heads up the chicken project for Just Food. "They eat everything. They'll pick off the insect pests in your garden and consume all your kitchen scraps — meat and egg-shells included. They also aerate the soil by their scratching. In return, you not only get absolutely fresh eggs but the best high-nitrogen fertilizer around. It's great nutrition for you and less chemicals for your garden. And they're not that much work. Plus, they'll bring people to your garden just for the interest."
Mike Brady, the development director at St. Augustine's, was intrigued by the idea and last summer secured a grant from Heifer and Just Food for a coop and pen, 15 chickens, and dry feed enough for a year. In accord with Heifer's philosophy of "passing on the gift," the school's chicken corps will share their expertise with other interested gardeners and lend a hand in new coop construction. Just Food currently sponsors six sites in the city, and Taylor anticipates three more next year.
The St. Augustine group built their structures over three days in August. It was a cooperative project: Taylor drew up the plans and ordered the materials — basically wood, nails, and of course, chicken wire — from Home Depot. Students (Mame among them), teenage alumni, and community gardeners performed the labor. "Working with St. Augustine's was really satisfying, with all the young people involved," Taylor notes. "That's where it's at in terms of community involvement."
The chickens arrived in October from Awesome Farm, a 30-acre organic livestock operation in Tivoli, N.Y., about a hundred miles north of the city.
"The kind we brought them," says KayCee Wimbish, a crazy- for-chickens young woman who runs the farm with her partner Owen O'Connor, "are called Black Sex-linked chickens, which I know is a weird name — it means you can tell male from female chicks by their color as soon as they hatch. They're a cross between the Rhode Island Red and the Barred Rock varieties. They're bred for their heartiness and their productivity, and because they mature early."
The hens at the St. Augustine Peace Garden are mateless — New York City codes forbid roosters because of their noisy crowing (car alarms, however, are permitted) — but this does not matter, to the humans at least; unmated hens will still produce an egg every 18 hours or so.
The fowl are well-fed. In addition to poultry pellets (which Brady buys along with bales of straw from the only remaining feed store in New York City, right down the block), they are given the leftovers from the school cafeteria, which in the past were just bagged up as garbage. That's urban ecology.
But there's human ecology too.
Sixth-grader Ken, age 12, is a member of the Chicken Club.
"He's a little crazy — attention-deficit," Trapp admits. "He's on meds, he's in special ed, he's a terror in the classroom, but he's a different person when he gets out there. I call it ‘chicken therapy for the soul.'"
"I like animals," Ken says. "I can tell all the chickens apart — they're just like people. I have a favorite one, too — I named her Cassandra. She always comes when I call to her."
"It's amazing," remarks Brady. "Kids who are hyperactive, who have no patience in the classroom, are patient with the chickens. They love it when the chickens pile out the henhouse door to greet them."
But there is another side. The productive life of a laying hen is about two years, which means that before they graduate, Mame and Ken will have to face the hardest fact of farming: turning the hens they have come to love into chicken soup.
Brady is unruffled at the gruesome prospect. In the spring, he'll add a pair of turkeys to the school's micro-farm; they'll be ready for slaughter by November.
"I'm not sure what next Thanksgiving will bring," he says. "There may be some heartbreak here. But kids need to experience that too. They need to know how food really gets to their table."
That teaching may come slowly. Right now, the children — and even some of the teachers — will not eat the eggs. "They think it's robbing the cradle or something," Brady guesses.
"They're learning about the cycle of life," says Trapp. "They're learning about caring and taking responsibility. And they're learning that we're all part of nature — even here in the South Bronx."