“Not long after Barbara Longworth moved her house in the Algiers Point section of New Orleans, she notices a boy and girl, both about ten, tearing flowers off their stems in her neighbor’s year.
"Longworth’s neighborhood is like many others in New Orleans – full of charm, but threatened by drugs and crime, and scarred by boarded-up buildings and abandoned cars. It has lots of children but little for them to do.
“Stop that!” she yelled at the youngsters again and again, but to no avail. Did they know how long it takes a flower to grow? Had they ever planted a garden? She asked. No.
"So Longworth bought plants. She gave one to Frank and one to Lisa, their very own to take care of. And they came every day to tend them and help in the garden. In their garden.
That was the beginning.
"Now she has irises, gardenias, periwinkle and Mexican heather where she used to have nothing but weeds. The children unearthed an old brick sidewalk in her yard she didn’t even know was there.
"Then they planted flowers down the street for an old man with cancer so he would have something to look at from his front porch. The called themselves the Kids on the Point Society. They cleaned up their neighborhood; then they planted more flowers and a vegetable garden.
"People in Algiers Point are beginning to notice Longworth’s pint-sized workers. Sometimes when she gets home from work, she finds donated cuttings or fertilizer or a pack of seeds by her front door. “A garden – that’s my way of combating crime and drugs,” Barbara Longworth says.”
- Sheila Stroup from New Orleans Times- Picayune
When someone cared for us they turned our life around. The moral?
What can you do?
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