Satterell Singh in the Community Garden in Oakland’s Fairfax neighborhood. Photo by Wanda Ravernell.
Satterell Singh is looking forward to the day the water system he is creating at the Community Garden at Ygnacio and Congress in East Oakland is ready.
Toting 5-gallon bottles from the back of his station wagon into the small lot across from Horace Mann Elementary School in the Fairfax neighborhood is wearing Singh out. “I’m invested in getting rid of this method,” quipped the son of an African American woman and a Punjabi immigrant who met in college in the 1970s.
The 2005 graduate of Castlemont High School is a former linebacker who carries the bottles with ease. He explains that, so far, everything that comes into the garden is either by his hands or one of the two wheelbarrows in the center of the patch.