(
FOOD $ &drink
%where she
BELONGS Meet a young Asian American leader preserving her cultural heritage through farming
$
By An n a- Rh esa Versol a
Photography by J ohn Mi chael Si m pson
sar Ree Ree Wei, 25, has big ambitions for herself and Transplanting Traditions Community Farm, the Chapel
included arriving refugees from Burma. By 2010, Kelly Owensby founded Transplanting Traditions Community Farm and formed a grant-funded partnership with the Triangle Land Conservancy to lease the property for agricultural purposes. Today, 25 refugee farmers from Burma grow seasonal fruit and vegetables, including varieties popular in Asian cuisine but difficult to find in local grocery store chains. “Every farmer gets their own number of beds based on the size of their operation,” Ree Ree says. “One or two farmers have almost an acre. Our smallest farmers have about two beds because they are only growing food for themselves and their families.” Ree Ree says there is also a food access program for part-time farmers, like stay-at-home moms who cannot spend entire days farming but still need to generate a small income by selling produce.
Hill nonprofit organization she leads as executive director. She helps preserve her cultural identity through education and agriculture on the 8 acres off of Jones Ferry Road where other refugees from Burma (also known as Myanmar) can gather and build community. “We love our food,” Ree Ree says about growing fruit and vegetables familiar to refugees from Burma. When she was a child, she remembers how her family would drive to High Point or Greensboro to find Asian food markets that would sell produce like ABOVE Yellow squash, cucumber, Thai eggplant bitter melon or water spinach. Such items and sweet potato greens. RIGHT Paw Moo, were not available in local grocery chains in Ree Ree Wei and Ha Na stand in one of the vegetable patches by the marigolds. Chapel Hill or Carrboro but could be found in the Triad area where many Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees settled in the state. Ree Ree was born in a refugee camp in North Carolina has the fourth largest refugee population from Burma, Thailand in 1998 after her parents and two older sisters had escaped according to a 2016 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. military skirmishes that have plagued Burma for decades, making it “the setting of one of the longest-running civil wars in the world.” Two more siblings were born in that camp, too. She was 8 years old when she and her family landed in Chicago in In the early 2000s, a garden project by the Orange County 2006 to begin a long resettlement process in the United States. At first, Partnership for Young Children, a Smart Start initiative, primarily they were sent to Columbia, South Carolina, but seven months later served children of the Latino immigrant community and then they were moved to Chapel Hill where her youngest sibling was born.
$
Resettlement
The Farm 72
chapelhillmagazine.com
September/October 2023