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The Catholic New World

Volunteer Francisco Deycaza picks beans July 20 in the garden Cardoza created behind St. Dismas Church in Waukegan.

Catholic New World photo by Karen Callaway

Young peacebuilder plants seeds, grows hope and food in Waukegan garden

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Mud clings to their shoes and dapples the leaves after a July rainstorm. In the damp air under gray skies, Marcos Cardoza and his family and friends harvest the first pale green lettuces and wax beans from a raised garden bed.

The garden workers stand and watch a small group walk toward them, coming around the back of behind St. Dismas Church in Waukegan. The visitors are residents at the Waukegan PADS shelter, and are among the people who will benefit from this garden. They also will help make it grow.

“This is your garden,” Cardoza says. “I’m just the one taking care of it.”

Cardoza, 17, started the organic garden after attending the Peacebuilders Initiative last summer at Catholic Theological Union. After a weeklong intensive seminar on Catholic teaching about peace and justice, Catholic social teaching and conflict resolution, the Peacebuilders return to their schools and parishes charged with developing a project to put their new skills to work.

Several of his fellow Peacebuilders talked of creating cafe-type projects; Cardoza decided to go a step back in the food cycle by growing it. The garden he planned will provide fresh produce for PADS, as well as offering an opportunity for both PADS residents and young people from St. Dismas to get their hands dirty—weeding, harvesting and mulching.

It wasn’t easy for a 17-year-old whose only previous gardening experience was helping his mother with her tomato plants.

Cardoza worked with Terry Zawacki, St. Dismas director of religious education, to convince Father John Ryan, St. Dismas’ pastor, to let them use church property and received a $500 Peacebuilders grant from the Lilly Endowment, which funds the Peacebuilders Initiative.

He also approached the Chicago Botanic Gardens for help, and found a source of both education and plants that are now growing in the garden.

They include lettuce and beans, several types of peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and more.

Teresa Banks and her daughters, Teara, 8, and Dasia, 6, are looking forward to sharing in the produce, and the process of growing it.

Dasia was “eyeing the tomatoes already,” said Banks.

Cardoza answered his guests’ questions about how the garden started, why some plants were mulched with straw and some weren’t and how he expects the garden to grow. Next year, he said, Mercedes Garcia—who attended the Peacebuilders seminar in June—will join him to make a bigger garden. If they grow more vegetables than PADS can use, they will sell the excess and donate the profits to the shelter program.

“Doing this organically, without pesticides, is a lot of work,” Cardoza said. “I’m going to need a lot of help.”

He and several friends—Paulo and Rudy Ochoa, Fernando Garcia, Mario and Eddie Padilla, Adelaida Guzman, Glenn and Crystal Gutierrez, Joseph Young—and his brother, Eliseo Cardoza Jr.—spend a June evening leveling the new topsoil that became the garden, and the next day setting out plants. Since then, they have come every other day to water and weed.

A month later, the pale green lettuce was the first to be harvested.

For Cardoza, who will be a senior at Waukegan High School next year and hopes to study engineering in college, the garden has provided a personal peace as well.

“It helps a lot,” he said. “Sometimes, I just come out here and water my garden and watch it grow.

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