Wander in any direction at the People’s Market at Rockwood and you travel the world.
Multiple languages create a unique soundtrack as people from different ethnic backgrounds bustle about, setting culturally specific produce on tables to sell.
On the surface, so many differences.
Yet so much shared humanity.
Connections and goodwill made not with words, but with a handshake, a pat on the back or a smile.
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That’s all part of the plan of this farmer’s market, which runs on Sundays through Oct. 3 in the outdoor courtyard at Rockwood Market Hall.
Several community-based groups launched it three years ago to help Black and Indigenous farmers and makers get their goods to market where immigrants and refugees could get food from their homelands.
Rockwood, in east Multnomah County, is an ethnically and racially diverse neighborhood in the middle of what’s called a food desert, with residents often having to drive miles to get to a full-service grocery store.
Patrik McDade, founder and director of People-Places-Things, one of the non-profits behind the concept, said residents need access to fresh produce and culturally specific produce not easily found in stores.
Having the market, he said, benefits resident and small farmers, many of them immigrants and refugees looking to get an economic foothold in a new country. McDade said non-profits give technical support to these farmers, many of them low-income, and help them find space to grow, often in community gardens.
Low-income customers can use their SNAP benefits to buy produce at the market, said Kyaira Flentroy, 29, with Play-Grow-Learn, which runs the market. Customers trade the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for tokens and then exchange the tokens for produce at any farmer’s table.
Mohmammad Haji Motirahman, who came to Oregon from Myanmar, runs a small farm in Boring. He brings goods — some specific to Myanmar — to the farmer’s market, selling often to refugees from Southeast Asia.
Produce specific to parts of Africa – pumpkin leaves and eggplant that looks like the shell of an egg – is also sold at the market.
“This comes from an African garden,” said Anne-Marie Urukundo, who works with Outgrowing Hunger. “It does not come from an African American garden.”
Urukundo, a Northeast Portland resident, came to the United States from East Africa.
The produce, she said, is grown in a Northeast community garden.
“Food from your motherland is good,” she said.
She, too, is a customer.
What’s sold at the market is food. But here are two kinds of nourishment.
One for the belly.
One for the soul.
“I meet others here,” she said. “I learn what they like and what their food is.”
She buys their produce.
They buy hers.
“We share,” she said. “That means we all eat with love.”
— Tom Hallman Jr
503-221-8224; thallman@oregonian.com; @thallmanjr
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