I have been so excited about gardening since I arrived in Swaziland. I asked for a garden at my permanent site, and boy, did Peace Corps deliver! I have about 30 fruit trees (mango, peach, banana, lemon, grape, papaya, and litchee), corn fields, and a lovely vegetable garden (tomatoes, peppers, chard, and lettuce). But I digress.

Peace Corps teaches a type of gardening called permagardening, which is a type of garden with a built-in water retention system and double-dug, raised beds to decrease planting space while increasing
yields. Peace Corps provided one training and one practice session (along with a visit to a local permaculture center called Guba) before we had to build a permagarden on our own.

My language group plus another and their pick-axe-wielding powerhorse of a teacher built our own garden at my family’s homestead. My sisi nearly cried out of excitement when I brought her a few leftover plants a couple weeks ago, so I knew I had found someone who would
attempt to care for our hard work.

She watched in confusion for hours on Sunday while we built a garden unlike any she had seen before. She let us do our thing until planting time, when she spaced the seedlings much closer together than I was anticipating, which is the opposite of what we were told to expect.