A Garden That Brings Community Together
Across the globe, there are people working in news who think the only way to get an audience’s attention is by scaring or enraging them.
It doesn’t need to be.
For sure, delivering news also involves imparting bad news. Any news organisation that had an unrelentingly positive faceslap for you all the time wouldn’t be a very good news organisation! But to cut out the hopeful, and instructive — the redemptive — in a mad grab for rage-traffic is every bit as much of a misstep. And all of us see more of it, especially now in the age of social media.
So I’m happy when readers give an overwhelming thumbs up to a story like they did to one that I am bringing you this week. “I want to make something, a garden for the whole neighbourhood,” Mohammad Al Hashemi told Ruqayyah Al Qaydi.
Beginning in 2000, the Emirati started turning “his home farm into a community pantry that provides fresh vegetables and leafy greens and other essentials to his neighbors — and anyone else who may need them,” we wrote late last week.
"So his 'generosity has meant that friends and neighbours, including the domestic helpers of his neighbour's properties have come to collect fresh produce from his garden thereafter”.
Ruqayya outlines how Al Hashemi slowly built the garden gradually over the years and reveals the specifics of its functions. For instance, he eschews chemicals in his fertiliser, relying instead on manure with the occasional organic supplement based on fish.
Neighbours pop by to take whatever they require: parsley, coriander, basil, peppers; there is plenty. We photographed — Ruqayya also shot this gallery — the results online.
Now, Al Hashemi has begun teaching gardening workshops and dispensing advice on social media. Among those several tens of thousands of readers who dove into that story online, I’m sure more than a few navigated to those gardening videos.
We’re going to share with you more stories like this, where our emphasis on the UAE and the people who reside here — Emiratis and expatriates alike — remains unequivocal.
That means occasionally — or maybe even regularly exploring your concerns and frustrations. But, at other times, it means giving you something to feel good about.
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