“I was the only girl at the Escola Agrària de Alfarrás, among 90 boys, I had a bad time, I had gastroenteritis for a year.” These are the words of Imma Roigé Porqueres, one of the many women who are joining the Dones Transformadores project with which the Government Delegation of Lleida makes visible and documents the lives of women from the rural world in the agricultural sector, in the arts or in any sector.
She has dedicated many years to growing organic vegetables in Algerri and bringing them to her clients’ homes, including products from other farmers and ranchers in the Cistella de la Imma, as she calls it.
“We make direct sales to fellow farmers who have always bartered. We have a small network of producers from Maresme, Tarragona and Lleida” explains Imma. These days his garden produces chard or tupinambos, a tuber similar to a potato.
“They were very hard years, first because I was not an adult, I dressed as ugly as possible, with overalls. I couldn’t bring out femininity to go unnoticed any longer. The second one was better,” she recalls of the time when she was the only girl in school. Some of those boys are now her friends.
The environment was tough, he arrived when he was 18, there were kids there from 14 to 18 or older. It was an agricultural Vocational Training school. When I arrived there had been no women for a long time, there were only those, years ago, who attended the specific courses of a few weeks organized by the Agrarian Training Service. “Since the school statutes stated that it was mixed, they had to accept me, they had no choice,” she says.
She went to second grade at the Lleida school where she did first grade and where she was also the only girl. “Studying in Lleida she went home to sleep, she wasn’t so noticeable,” she says.
In Alfarràs she was an intern. This is how he remembers it: “Every two rooms shared the bathroom, which was in the middle. I was alone in a room with two bunk beds, four beds and I shared the bathroom with the infirmary, there was never anyone in the infirmary.” After their first year at the agricultural school in ’88, in the second year, girls were already arriving.
He studied as an agricultural specialist in horticulture but he liked the garden more and has always worked in the organic garden. For years he cultivated seven hectares of garden with a partner.
He has always been within agrarian activism defending food sovereignty. He is a member of the Payesa Assembly. She now combines the making of baskets with training and dissemination on what she calls “the balance of a soil without chemistry” and she usually advises people who want to make family gardens, she likes to consider herself a tutor. “My maxim,” she says, “is to take care of the earth to obtain food that heals us and I am convinced that it is true that the plants that can help us the most on a daily basis are those that we have 50 kilometers around us.”
She has written three teaching guides on school gardens and wants to be a garden monitor in educational centers and continue making baskets with organic and local products, provide training in organic farming and continue training in biodynamic agriculture and natural cosmetics. With Imma there are now eighty women in the Dones Transformadores project, a network of female empowerment and sisterhood that continues to grow in Ponent.
