How Jessica Blem is nurturing her school
VICTORY PARK – The learner started a vegetable garden that now aids the ground staff and their families.
We must all remember how going against the grain in high school tended to make one stand out, whether what they were doing was pegged as cool or not.
Thankfully, even though the status quo of cool and uncool still stands, there are still learners who reap the rewards of doing projects that although may seem lame, positively affect the lives of many.
Take, for example, Jessica Blem of King David Victory Park. She has been at the school since she was about two years old – now, about to turn 18-year-old heads of the school’s environment club.
After being elected as part of the SRC she, like the others elected, was given the opportunity to select the top three clubs they wanted to be a part of and one of those, for her, was the environmental club.
One of her biggest aims was to change the narrative around the club as it had a stigma that deemed it as lame because the club seemed to centre around vegetables and vegans, “So I wanted to completely turn it around and when I got this position, I had this idea to start a community vegetable garden,” she said.
Before her, many had wanted to do something like this for the club that would make a difference but they never did.
As head of this club, in her short time thus far, she has managed to cultivate this idea of a vegetable garden and have it come to fruition. In so doing, it has come to enrich the lives of many, mainly the school’s ground staff and their families.
Before she began the process, she approached the ground staff and simply asked them what vegetables they would like harvested. They suggested cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, beetroot, carrots, cucumber, lettuce and kale. The vegetable garden is currently thriving and looking great. For Jessica the whole initiative has made her feel very proud, “This has unified everyone and it makes people more aware and it fills me with pride that I can leave my legacy here.”
Of course, she doesn’t maintain the garden by herself, the ground staff take great care of the garden and are educated on how to prepare these vegetables, so they get the best nutritional value out of them among other facets, by teacher, Nikki Richards.
“It is great to know that the vegetable garden is making a difference in people’s lives,” Jessica concluded.
