Evelyn Esperanza

Good afternoon, my name is Evelyn, and she is my granddaughter, Ivory.

Today, we will be discussing something very interesting, and that something is the wheelbarrow. When I first arrived here to Colobó, this wheelbarrow was already here — and this surprised me because when I was young, my father would give us jobs, and one of those jobs was that you had to move dirt or carry stones because we were building our house.

But one day when I saw this wheelbarrow here — it really, really surprised me because my father gave my sister and I a job. We were to load up a bunch of rocks and move them to another place. But instead, just like my granddaughter, we sat in the wheelbarrow and began to run all over the place, when suddenly my father arrived — we got startled and earned ourselves a punishment.

But my most important takeaway from this story is that when I first arrived to Philadelphia, and started coming to this garden, Iris Brown brought this wheelbarrow and placed it here and this made an impact within me. As time went on, we could see she filled it with dirt, and filled it with plants — but in my time this was for carrying dirt, not for planting. But look at what she has done here: here she plants, it becomes a beautiful place. Every time I visit in the summertime, I tend to take pictures because I love it here, and the wheelbarrow reminds me of my childhood.

It is interesting because when we were children we didn’t have the technology we have today — we didn’t have phones to play with, no PlayStations — no — we simply played with whatever we could find and those are the memories which this wheelbarrow brought back.

Now I would like to show my granddaughter how it was that we used to play when we were children. I am now going to give you a sample of how we used to run around on the road with the wheelbarrow.

You are going to see how we used to go up and down up and down

And we are having fun. And this was our way of having fun.

This is my story, this is Ivory, and I am very happy to be able to share this story with you!