At 9:24 p.m., September 20, 2016, a woman arrived at the Quad-City International Airport with her six children ages 2 to 16. Two weeks before, they had left the Ugandan refugee camp they had called home for 11 years. A group from St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport welcomed them as best as possible, loading them up in a van, shuttling them to the small two-bedroom place they would call home for a few months until a more permanent home could be found.

Charlene is the oldest of the kids, and is now almost 20 years old. As the days turned to months in her new home in Davenport, hints of her skills and talents came through. She once presented one of our board members with a gift from the garden she tended in the family's backyard - a humungous cabbage with the root still attached. A bowl of spinach soon followed.

This past summer, her American friends finally (finally!) figured it out - gardening is something Charlene can do really well. And it makes her happy.

Charlene was the first employee of Tapestry Farms. She worked as a community garden associate this summer, helping to tend four gardens throughout the city.

Charlene: Growing a garden