Weeding for a well rounded life
Local community project builds links with dysphasic youth by working in the garden
The coordinators of Dysphasie Estrie’s annual summer camp are hoping that a partnership with Lennoxville’s Tierra del Fuego community will sow the seeds of success for the young people under their care.
“It was an idea that blossomed one Sunday afternoon in the garden,” Noémie Poliquin-côté, Camp coordinator with Dysphasie Estrie, a local organization working with children who have impairments in their ability to produce and understand spoken language. “Often in school dysphasic children are set aside in projects because they need to work at a different pace,” Poliquincôté said. “We wanted to provide them with an opportunity to be at the head of the work.”
The camp coordinator explained that she first heard about the community garden behind the house at 19 Church Street in Lennoxville through a friend and started coming to work in the space on a fairly regular basis because she enjoyed the community atmosphere. The idea of bringing the Dysphasie Estrie campers to the garden came later, inspired by the hands-on nature of the work
“This environment is well suited to (the campers),” Poliquin-côté said. “Here they don’t feel different, they are understood. That makes a difference.”
Poliquin-côté called the camp a kind of “life school,” that puts the needs of its campers first and helps them focus on their strengths. Although Dysphasia is
primarily a language disorder, the coordinator said that the summer camp focuses activities on building confidence through concrete learning activities that are not language-specific.
“Here they made their own iced tea, they harvested things, they have organized things; these are real skills and I think it has really done something good for their confidence,” she said “We didn’t come very often, but each time they came back with pride and stories of the things they had done.”
Martin Bessette, one of the six people living as a part of the Tierra del Fuego community, explained that the partnership with Dysphasie Estrie is very much in keeping with the spirit of the space.
“Our project revolves a lot around growing our own food, learning to do things yourself, and building and sharing knowledge,” Bessette said adding that the focus of Tierra del Fuego is on building links within the community through knowledge exchange. “It is a house that is open for people to come see how we live,” he continued, explaining that the space is an intentional community where residents share food, costs, and household tasks with the overall goal of creating a better quality of life for all.
The community member noted that this summer mark’s Tierra del Fuego’s tenth year in existence, and he said that in that time a large number of people and groups have come to engage with and participate in a number of open workshops and activities in the house.
“Throughout the year we do a lot of activities around making things: bread, soap, kombucha,” Bessette said. “our activities are open to everyone.”
This past Thursday, the campers split up into three groups that were responsible for harvesting broccoli squash and raspberries, cleaning chicken coops, and separating worms out of compost bins. That model of hands-on activities based around choice has been at the heart of each workshop that the group took part in this summer
“There were always multiple choices,” Poliquin-côté said, explaining that providing options is an essential part of how the activity builds self-confidence.
“They can be themselves,” Bessette added, saying that he too has seen progress even in just a few short visits. “This is what life in community brings out in us,” he said. “You have no choice but to be open to difference to live in community.”
The Dysphasie Estrie summer camp operates in French for seven weeks and is open to children three to 18 years of age. The partnership with Tierra del Fuego was a project with the camp’s older participants this summer and is likely to return, given the opportunity, next year.
“Honestly, I am a teacher and I would love to do it with my students this year,” Poliquin-côté said.