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A wide-brimmed straw hat covers Daniel Woodham's sandy hair, shielding his tanned face from an early evening sun that's still bright and hot.

In a few moments, he'll surrender the hat to a petite Montagnard woman enrolled in his English class. The woman works alongside two others, pulling weeds from rows of eggplants, peppers and herbs. Their daughters enthusiastically help Woodham drag fistfuls of bamboo from his truck to the garden. The bamboo will be cut into stakes to prop up tomato plants.

Woodham's two professions -- English teacher and farmer -- merge on this plot of land, just past the Guilford County line on East Wendover Avenue. The 45-year-old vegetarian, humanitarian and world traveler good-naturedly cajoles the women while they work, testing their English, with questions::

"What is this vegetable?"

"What is this tool?"

Or:

"What are you doing?"

Woodham soon hopes to turn this garden over to the women. They live nearby and could easily tend it, feeding their families with what they produce. In doing this, Woodham hopes to empower them. It's a recurring theme in his life. Food production. Social justice. Exploring other cultures.

Throughout his life, Woodham has found ways to use his farming skills to help people in India and Guatemala, the homeless in Oregon and now Montagnard immigrants in Greensboro.

"It's how the universe has led me," he says.

* * * * *

Woodham's curiosity about other cultures began in second grade with his first international friend: Pierre, a little French boy.

"He had this bicycle from France that had no speeds, and (it) could go super-fast," Woodham recalls.

He collected international stamps and exchanged letters with a pen pal from Liberia. Woodham was drawn to things that differed from his surroundings in upstate New York.

He went to college mostly because "it was the thing you did after high school," to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania to study chemical engineering. But campus life was a disappointment to him. His peers seemed more interested in keg parties than philosophical discussions. He started to lose interest in college until he took courses in Buddhism and Indian cultural music. He explored the teachings of Gandhi, who advocated pairing theoretical studies with hands-on practice so that communities could be self-reliant. Woodham also was drawn to the Indian leader's lifelong commitment to nonviolence and empowering the poor.

That led to a semester abroad in India.

"That just rocked my world, and made me change from a lethargic, pessimistic guy to someone who cared about Gandhi and social justice," Woodham says.

After that, he studied organic farming at Alabama's Southern Institute for Appropriate Technology, which offers a curriculum for people pursuing Christian missionary work in Third World countries. He then transferred to the School for International Training in Vermont. Now called World Learning, it's still a campus with mostly students from abroad. He spent half his senior year working in Bangladesh for CARE, a humanitarian organization dedicated to fighting global poverty; the other half of it, he worked for an Indian agricultural specialist in western India.

A post-college graduation trip out west landed him in Aprovecho, a residential research center in Oregon where Woodham learned more about small-scale organic farming. From there, Woodham went to Portland, Ore., where he taught English to homeless Latinos. He also started a therapy program teaching homeless, mentally ill people how to garden.

"Food, international (travel and study) and social justice all ties in for me in my life," Woodham says.

About 1992, while on an anti-nuclear march, he met a woman from Belgium. In Belgium, he taught English. And gardened. They traveled throughout the Americas, spending most of their time in Guatemala and Bolivia. Again, Woodham taught English and food production.

He eventually returned to Portland without the girlfriend. He worked with people undergoing mental health crises. And resurrected his garden therapy program.

He moved to North Carolina in 2004 to be near his parents. It was just a matter of time before he found land to tend and a new population to help.

* * * * *

First came the gardens.

Woodham discovered the Greensboro Farmers' Curb Market and started receiving weekly produce from a local organic farm. The next year, his own garden yielded so much lettuce, he started selling it at the market. He enjoyed the fellowship with other farmers and his customers so much, he began farming more.

His business, NIMBY (Naturally in My Back Yard) Gardens, resurrected the 1980s acronym that stood for "Not in My Back Yard." His recycled usage of NIMBY turns it into a positive message about the importance of gardens and eating fresh, local produce.

Woodham started teaching English at the Montagnard Dega Association about two years ago to supplement his farming income. Until then, he knew little about the Montagnards, who lived for centuries in Southeast Asia. The term means "mountain people" in French. American soldiers depended on them during the Vietnam War. Because of this, Montagnards spent more than a decade in the jungles of Southeast Asia fighting for their right to exist. The first group of Montagnard refugees -- mostly men -- started coming to Greensboro in 1986. Now, the state's Montagnard population is about 10,000, the largest outside of Vietnam.

MDA Executive Director Ysiu Hlong (pronounced E-see-you Long) says farming is a skill passed down through the generations. Many of Woodham's students, such as Nhoan Kopa (Know-ahn Cuh-pah), were farmers. Kopa worked on a rice farm in Vietnam where people gladly take any job because so few exist.

"... Hard work," Kopa says of farming. "Too much work."

Kopa's classmate, Hbec Kdamnie (Beck Kuhdah-knee), worked on a farm with her mother after high school. But she left the fields after a few months to learn tailoring.

Hlong says even young Montagnards with office jobs in the city do farm work on weekends.

"When they go home, they still do farming. It's our tradition," Hlong says.

Woodham wanted an outlet for his students' skills, so when he was able, he hired some to help him. Or he pays them in kind.

The thing about Woodham is that his enthusiasm for gardening is infectious. He didn't have a lot of land, but people offered theirs for him to farm. He had as many as five plots at one time. And he has this way of persuading people to help him. That's how Woodham and his Montagnard students ended up working in Luke Whitten's garden off East Wendover Avenue. "Daniel, he recruits a lot of people to go farming with him. He's good at that," Whitten says. "If he ever says, 'Do you want to go shovel horse manure?,' be wary."

Woodham met Whitten at the State Street coffee shop where Whitten works. The garden next to the house he rents with his girlfriend goes mostly untended. So, Whitten offered it to Woodham and his Montagnard students. Woodham wants the Montagnard women near Whitten to take charge of it.

He won't have time to tend multiple plots as he has done in recent years. He will soon manage an organic farm at Goat Lady Dairy in Climax. The dairy's owners say they've wanted one for some time now and hope to launch a Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, program this spring.

In a CSA, customers buy seasonal produce directly from local farmers, which they receive weekly. Woodham anticipates that garden will require more labor and plans to hire his students. He promotes their skills to other small farmers, too.

And he believes they're capable of more. Down the road, Woodham wants to help Montagnards start their own small-farming or landscaping businesses.

"In these hard economic times, many of them don't have jobs," he says. "There's a need for employment, as well as a need for socialization and making them a part of the Triad."

Contact Tina Firesheets at 373-3498 or tina.firesheets@news-record.com