Growing Gardens in Melaka, Malaysia

Postcards from Asia, Part 24

Dear friends,

How do you experience a place on a deeper level?

You get your hands dirty and learn from the land.

Yvonne, a friend from Melaka, Malaysia, sends a message to the Couchsurfing community that she needs help in her garden, where she’s experimenting with permaculture techniques.

To be honest, I’ve been traveling for months and have become so tired of tours and must-see destinations that I jump at the chance to work in a garden. I want to feel the earth, try not to melt in a puddle from the Melaka humidity, and plant seeds that can grow.

My motel, beneath a Chinese temple

Yvonne picks me up from the Chinese temple/ motel where I’m staying, and we enjoy a Malaysian breakfast of roto canai, half-boiled eggs, and teh tehrik (I order cham) and then head to the garden.

A typical Malaysian breakfast

When Yvonne was young, the sea reached the back of her grandmother’s house, the family listening to it lapping on the shore as they fell asleep. Later, the city refilled the land and built more infrastructure. The sea is gone, but you’ll still find shells in the dirt.

Now, Yvonne dreams of restoring the land, removing plastic from the soil and growing herbs, vegetables, and banana plants in her grandmother’s garden.

Yvonne is experimenting with permaculture techniques, learning as she goes

It’s all about experimentation, she says. We have to find ways that work with what nature’s already doing. We find a photo of a flower bed online and play with different ways of stacking bricks that Yvonne has purchased. We place them diagonally and hope for the best.

We talk for hours while working in the garden about the politics and histories of our homelands.

Right now, in my country, they are trying to sell off our public lands, I tell Yvonne. The most breathtaking national parks, forests, and coasts are up for privatization. They will damage the soil and cut off our air supply. The places we loved to camp as children will be sold to the highest bidder.

It’s hard not to feel distress when I think of where we may head in a few decades. Short-term profit for a few people never bodes well for the rest of the country.

I feel despair as I tell Yvonne this and then look at her garden. How she’s reviving the soil to grow nourishing food again. Working with the land instead of against it. Not for profit or because it’s easy or convenient.

But, because she feels this deep urge to let beautiful things grow.

It’s always helpful to remember that your country is not the center of the universe. Even when things feel hopeless, the rest of the world goes on, baby bananas grow from their parent plants, the beans begin to sprout.

For every destructive bill or greed-backed politician, there is a homegrown garden waiting to nourish the community.

Home can seem to be falling apart, yet still the gardens grow.

At night, we head to the cafes and bars along the river, which remind me of the River Walk in San Antonio back home. We stroll in the cool of the evening, share a beer, and chat about every topic under the rain-strewn sky until it’s time to head home.

Melaka at night

Yvonne needs to take the bus for Kuala Lumpur in the morning. She owns a condo in Melaka but commutes to KL during the week for work, where she stays at a hostel in the city. She enjoys her job in the nonprofit sector which is why she sticks with it, even though better-paying opportunities exist.

After Yvonne leaves, I return to the coffee and tea shop where she took me the first day we spent together. A torrential rainstorm soaks the streets, and I sit in the only spot available, next to the barista who is sorting coffee beans by hand.

I ask if I can help them, and we sit together and separate the good beans from the unusable ones.

I ask them about the process to make coffee. The Western way is different from the Malaysian way they explain. But, both take patience and persistence to get the flavour right.

Sorting beans at the coffee shop next to EighTEAn Tea House

It’s soothing to sit and sort, listening to the rain and talking about how the shop owners are experimenting with permaculture techniques like Yvonne. They also want to see what the land is doing and then work within this process to create products people love.

I’m still learning about permaculture, sustainability, and how not to kill my houseplants. But, I’m grateful for the perspective I gained while gardening with Yvonne in Melaka.

We can learn from the land, rather than seek to contain it. We can have patience and plant trees, even ones we will never walk beneath. We can make our homelands flourishing and livable, for us and those who come next.

Until next week,

Ash