Asakiyume mita

On September 20, a TV crew visited Mermaid's Hands, and some of the kids showed off various aspects of their daily life, including tending floating gardens. People in Mermaid's Hands didn't always make floating gardens--Silent Soriya gave them the idea. She came to Mermaid's Hands from Cambodia.

I first learned about floating gardens from a PDF from an NGO called Practical Action--the PDF was about creating floating gardens in Bangladesh. Here's a webpage about the project, and here is a page where you can download the PDF. (That first page has a link to a project for growing pumpkins on sandbars left in the wake of monsoons--cool.)


Making a floating garden bed Source: Practical Action, "Floating Gardens."




The people who live on and by Inle Lake in Myanmar also have floating gardens. Here, for instance, is a floating garden of tomato plants (photograph by Ralf-André Lettau, via Wikimedia Commons):




And here's a floating garden on Tonle Sap, in Cambodia (Photo by Dennis Jarvis on Flickr):




ETA: And here, courtesy of the floating garden tag on Tumblr, are some floating gardens from the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, MD, USA (Source)


When I live in a floating house on the tide, I'm going to have a floating garden.

If you live in Mermaid's Hands, sometimes you walk to the mainland across the mudflats, sometimes you take a dinghy, and sometimes you wade. On September 3, Em and her sister waded:

The water was not quite knee high as we waded over. We had our shoes tied together by their laces and slung around our necks so we didn’t have to try to fit them in our backpacks.

In some communities in the Philippines, kids weren't so lucky as to have dinghies for the days when the tide was high--they would swim-walk a half-mile of open water to get to school, with their books wrapped in plastic and balanced on their head:


Source: Peter Shadbolt, "Yellow boats bring hope and education in the Philippines where the school run can be a swim," CNN, May 20, 2014.

When a Filipino blogger found out about the situation, he established a foundation that provides schoolboats. Now the kids can go by boat to school:



Here, meanwhile, are Em and Tammy, setting out for school. The houses of the kids in the Philippines were on stilts; Em and Tammy's house sits on a raft.



I realize Tammy in this picture looks rather like Em in the icon, whereas Em looks different from how I've drawn her in the past--because her hair is different in this picture ... and because I have very limited ability to make a person recognizably the same from picture to picture if I change cues like hair. (Also, Em in the icon is by Kelsey Soderstrom, a professional artist, whereas I'm a rank amateur.)