I think I'm the kind of person who measures her wealth by the richness of her friendships.

One day stands out for me as the most memorable of the past decade - a Sunday morning in early August of 2004. It was the summer that many partners across the city of Minneapolis came together to help build a community garden on the grounds of the McKinley Community School in the McKinley neighborhood in North Minneapolis where I lived at the time with my husband. Later the garden would be renamed the Sheila Wellstone Peace Garden, but that summer it was our McKinley Community Garden.

As soon as the garden was dug and the raised bed boxes were filled with black soil and compost, opportunities for enriching our community began to open for us. At the time I was the chair of the McKinley Board of Directors, and that summer it was typical that I would receive a phone call or a letter offering assistance or partnership with the garden that seemed to come out of nowhere. One of these letters arrived from the church across the street from the school and garden - Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church (FMBC). The letter announced without fanfare that the church had written and received a grant on our behalf to provide a summer stipend to neighborhood youth who worked in the garden. The church member who wrote the grant had been so impressed by the positive impact that summer employment in a community garden had made on her own grandson that she wanted to pass along the opportunity for other youth in our fledgling garden.

So with a little garden fund of seed money, we created a little summer work program. Soon after, another group came forward and offered a summer enrichment program to 25 of our most promising student leaders who were graduating out of the 8th grade at McKinley Community School and into high school. With this group I led weekly sessions in the community garden, teaching about planting and maintenance, composting, and water conservation with hands-on learning.

It was from this pool of student leaders that I hired my summer work crew. They would show up on their scheduled afternoon to water and weed the garden which was filled with flowers, vegetables, herbs and fruit bushes that had all been donated to the garden from various sources. By August of that summer, it was clear our scrappy garden was going to yield a bumper crop. I extended optional work hours to the work crew for Sunday mornings so that we could gather and sell our vegetables to the parishioners of FMBC and share with them the delicious results of their encouragement and support.

It turns out that early Sunday mornings in summer aren't so popular with 14 year olds for working. I only had one student who showed up on that warm Sunday morning in August to share my brilliant plan for financial success in the garden: Nidal.

Nidal and I worked our way bed by bed, starting with the green beans and basil, moving to the cherry tomatoes and lettuce. We chatted and picked, sorting and bagging the veggies as we went along. When we got to the bed of arugula, the process was the same as every other bed - I had her try a leaf of the bitter green so that she would know what it tasted like before we picked and collected the amount we needed.

It was with a bite of the arugula that everything stopped for a while. In the way that food tastes do, the flavor of the pungent green picked on a warm summer morning brought Nidal right back to her village in Sudan, to the garden that her grandmother grew. The arugula looked different, but it tasted the same. Nidal was transported – she told me how she would help gather the arugula, and how her grandmother would prepare it along with the other foods they traditionally ate.

By opening with the story of her grandmother's garden, Nidal's own story began to unfold. She shared with me vivid and pleasant memories of village life with her extended family of aunties and uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters. The story continued with the horrors that followed, when her village was raided in an attack that spared her and her immediate family but led to a life on the move for years, taking them to Ethiopia, Egypt, and finally Minnesota.

Nidal is now a sophomore in college at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and the recipient of a Gates Millenium Scholorship which will cover her expenses for study clear through a Ph.D. program. She has always told me that her greatest wish is is to return to her village in Sudan some day to bring excellent medical care and expertise in preventing and curing infectious diseases as a result of her education in the States. A typical college student changes plans often, but Nidal has maintained a remarkably determined and singular focus to use the opportunities she's received by helping others.

Like every busy student, news of college life trickles in much more slowly as new friendships and studies demand a greater amount of time, but we manage to keep in touch often, and I treasure Nidal as a lifelong friend.

My life grew immeasurably in richness during the summer of 2004, and especially on that early Sunday morning in August when I began to learn about a remarkable young woman. A little investment of sunny warmth, some tending and care has led to a garden of riches.

Every student I worked with that summer had a lasting impact on me, but with Nidal I received a window of understanding into another world, and a pathway for a colorful and generous journey of friendship.