This season Anna is back at Brooklyn Grange, farming each Wednesday alongside seven other refugees and asylum-seekers as part of the Urban Agriculture Training Program, a partnership between the Grange and RIF, whose goal is to help people escaping persecution, abuse and other traumatizing conditions in their native countries. The new Americans practice their English surrounded by plenty of sunshine, soil and spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline.

Farming at the Grange seemed like a natural way to ease the culture shock of landing in a strange megalopolis — complete with a therapeutic outlet that might make more sense than talking on a couch. “Especially because some of our people — the majority coming from Africa,” explained Blacque-Belair “do not necessarily relate to traditional counseling.”

Anna, for example, had suffered years of abuse in Burkina Faso. But at the farm, surrounded by friends and sharing soup, she said it’s impossible to be depressed. Once afraid to open up, she now gives farm tours to strangers, including the 75 CSA members who come for the weekly pickup each Wednesday.

Beyond a place to practice speaking English while trellising beans and weeding beets, Flanner says the staff offers “a really positive environment, just by being ourselves. A warm and pleasant distraction from a lot of the stresses.”

The partnership has developed to include workshops, job training, resume writing with the Navy Yard Employment Center, even support in obtaining food-safety licenses.Today Jefferson, who had served in the Peace Corps in Africa, volunteers for the RIF on top of his job as farm manager for the Grange, by managing the internship program.

“We’re just here to help people get a good start and soften the landing,” says Flanner.

But he and Jefferson say the refugees aren’t the only ones who benefit. The staff and visitors have formed real connections — and these seasoned farmers have gotten a taste of unique crops, too. One of the participants brought seeds in and the team sowed them together. Sour leaves soon sprouted.

“We don’t know the names of the plants, and did not recognize them visually,” says Flanner, “but she referred to them by the name of the village they came from.”

These new flavors now appear during the daily “family meal” potluck lunch, which might include traditional rice-and-bean dishes, fish preparations, endless incarnations of okra and peppers and those unusual sour leaves. Flanner says the woman who brought their seeds is an enthusiastic cook who also “used leaves from our other crops in ways that we haven’t seen before, cooking down the leaves the leaves of okra, cucumber, and sweet potato into stews. We’ve been cooking amaranth, lambs quarters, dandelions and purslane for years, but this took it to the next level!”

Anna is also passionate about sharing her Burkinabé culture through cooking and a recent Wednesday afternoon found her flipping oblong balls of cornmeal with a bamboo spoon to make fufu, a side dish for her leaf soup, kanzaga, named for the vegetable traditionally used in the recipe back home. Now that she lives and farms here, Anna has been adding all sorts of different leafy greens to her soup including bok choy and amaranth.

She says not wasting even a leaf is a sign of respect for the food, which she learned at a young age.

“The food could be older than you,” Anna said they tell children in Burkina Faso. Now she passes on recipes — and the underlying respect — to others. It is a melting pot of culture where innovative ideas can come from surprising places, like leaves that would have gone to waste.

“We’re learning as much about these people’s cultures,” said Jefferson, “as they are about ours.”