Story by Ama Nipassa, Summer 2019
My grandmother is a woman I consider to be a storyteller. I remember the stories she used to tell my cousins and me growing up, and one thing they all had in common was the location. She would gather my cousins and I under the papaya tree we had in our courtyard. She told us fictional stories of perseverance and connected them to the challenges we faced that day. A lot of my fondest childhood memories happened under a papaya tree. Sometimes, while listening to those stories, we would see as ripe papayas fall from the tree and the excitement of eating the papayas distracted us from the stories.
Papayas are pear shaped but bigger, with a color range that reminds me of a Mediterranean sunset with hues of bright yellows and vibrant oranges. This is a fruit that I never tire of eating. I especially loved eating them because I knew they came from our own papaya tree. My favorite part, however, was collecting all the papaya seeds, drying them, and saving them to plant more papaya trees. As a child, planting and growing from the seeds that my grandmother and I have collected from our own garden was a large part of our gardening; therefore, the process of collecting seeds was very important to my family. We understood from a very young age that in order to have a sustainable garden, we needed to eat the produce but also give back and replenish the soil by composting nutritious and organic foods.
As a child, I was not aware of the nutritional benefits of Papaya but I was always the first to eat the ripe papayas that fell from our tree because they were very sweet. If anything, I never believed people when they would say papayas are healthy for you. To me, something so sweet could not be good for you. However, my grandmother always made sure to feed me a lot of papayas when I was having digestion problems because they contain enzymes that help break down food faster, making digestion easier. My grandfather also loved papayas because he knew that they are beneficial in preventing heart disease. Even today, I still eat a lot of papaya when cold and flu seasons are coming because I know they hold a lot of vitamin C and A, which aid in boosting immunity. These amazing benefits are already reasons to love papayas, but it also does not hurt that they taste like heaven.