Vietnamese church resowing tradition

Section: Religion

Bruce Nolan

one of the more unusual recovery projects to be born out of months of intense community planning, parishioners at Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church in eastern New Orleans have begun laying the groundwork for an urban farm, with the hope of rebuilding the rich communal vegetable gardens that once mimicked rural Vietnam in suburban New Orleans.

The working farm will be on a 20-acre parcel next to the church on Dwyer Boulevard and likely will include a mix of smaller family and larger commercial lots, one or more fish-raising ponds and space for raising chickens or goats.

The project is being designed for free by the Tulane University architecture school's City Center and Louisiana State University's Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture.

Beyond that, the project envisions a new open-air market where leaseholders could sell their produce to residents, local groceries or restaurants, supplanting the Saturday morning market now located nearby on Alcee Fortier Boulevard.

"They came to us with an outline of what they wanted us to do," said Elizabeth Mossop, director of LSU's school of landscape architecture. "All the operations will basically be organic. They're very interested in water collection and recycling water on site. And we're very interested in making it environmentally innovative in terms of materials, design and so forth."

The project would restore the distinctive, relatively large-scale collective gardening that for the past 30 years transformed parts of the eastern New Orleans landscape into visions of Southeast Asia.

For decades, hundreds of Vietnamese families living around the church in the Village de L'Est neighborhood maintained -- and still maintain -- small backyard gardens to supply their own tables.

Beyond that there were larger communal gardens, the largest one about 30 acres, on the outskirts of the community. Katrina wreaked havoc on those, and their elderly caretakers have been unable to repair them, said Peter Nguyen, the manager of the garden project.

The idea for a larger, more sophisticated communal garden is the vision of the Rev. Vien Nguyen, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam, said Peter Nguyen.

Peter Nguyen, 44, works for the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corp., a separate but related parish-based nonprofit that is pursuing several projects in addition to the garden.

The corporation recently purchased the land for $550,000, said Nguyen, a farmer who recently moved to New Orleans from Parrish, Fla., where he grew tropical fruit trees. His hope is that the farm will open for business in mid-2009.

Rebuilding the gardens is important for more than economic development reasons, Nguyen said.

For years, gardening has had important psychic and social benefits for the Vietnamese community that settled around Village de L'Est in the mid-1970s.

Gardening rooted displaced elders in a familiar way of life in new surroundings. It kept them healthy and active. In some cases, home gardens were the only local source for Vietnamese vegetables not found in local stores.

"This is our culture. It's what we've done for a thousand years before coming here," Nguyen said.

Moreover, he and others said, a revived garden operation holds the promise of keeping contact between the community's elders, still deeply rooted in the customs of their former lives, and younger, thoroughly Americanized Vietnamese who are rapidly moving toward full assimilation.

People like Mossop are especially intrigued by the garden's possibilities to knit the generations together. Elders who are master gardeners might continue to pass on their skills. And younger Vietnamese of a more entrepreneurial bent may be able to take advantage of the market to raise capital and launch small businesses, she said.

Participating in the project are institutions such as Tulane, LSU, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Montana, which have offered specific planning or agricultural aid, Nguyen said.

In addition, the development corporation has already received grants from the Ford Foundation, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, Winn-Dixie and other groups interested in lending a hand.

The project also appears on the city's list of post-Katrina renewal projects identified by the city's Office of Recovery Management. That means it may become eligible for rebuilding aid being funneled through the city from state and federal sources.