A Sweet Gift
By Robert Morikawa

At first I thought it was a grapefruit. I was being offered a sweet orange by my generous host, a grandmother in her early sixties. This was no ordinary orange. Yes, it was unusually big, and it turned out to be indescribably sweet, but there's more to it than that. Several years ago, this woman, Andrena, had joined a new group in her small Haitian community, the Floresta cooperative. She had gone to the meetings, participated in cooperative activities, attended some training seminars. One of the seminars had been about fruit grafting. A technician knowledgeable about grafting had showed them how to cut a bud from a sweet orange branch, prepare a cut in a sour orange tree, bind the bud to the tree, and care for the graft properly to nurture the new growth. Andrena returned home and put her new skills to work, grafting several sour orange trees in her yard. Over time, the newly grafted branches took hold and grew, and as Andrena cared for them, watering the trees, and protecting them from insects and disease, they began to bear fruit. Today, Andrena not only has oranges for herself and the grandchildren living under her roof, she has enough to sell at the local market.

Andrena took great joy in offering me that orange. With her own hands worn by a lifetime of cultivating dry rocky soils on her tiny farm, hands which until very recently could not write her own name (literacy training is also offered), she had successfully done something usually performed only by trained technicians. I joyfully accepted her gift. Perhaps that made it taste all the sweeter.