emily+evitts+-+4

On a cold﻿ spring morning a Vietnamese girl was seen burying something in the ground. That girl was Kim. Though she may have looked suspicious to some people she was only planting lima beans. The garden she started was more than a place to grow vegetables. It was a place for people to feel safe. It was a place for people to make friends, and most of all it was a place where the race problems of Cleveland started to dissolve and disappear. Kim may not have known it at the time, but she was starting something that would change her entire neighborhood.

Kim plants lima beans in an abandoned lot where she thinks that nobody is watching her, but little does she know that a lady named Ana is watching her through her apartment window. Ana suspects that Kim is planting a weapon or drugs, so she takes matters into her own hands and decides to check it out. After finding out that they were only beans, she watches Kim come every morning to water her plants. One morning Ana discovers that the plants are wilted, so she sends a guy named Wendell down to water them. As he is watering them he turns around to find Kim watching him. Wendell shows Kim a better way to water her plants and then walks away. The next day he saw that Kim had done what he showed her and was then enspired to start his own garden. Wendell starts a garden in the lot and people see him and decide to start a garden also. They decide to help clean up the lot. They decide to dedicate their crops to family members. Kim had a certain person in mind when planting her crop. She dedicated her crop to her father. Kim's father died three months before she was born in Vietnam. He was a farmer back home. The day she planted her beans was the anniversary of her father's death. She snuck out early that morning so she wouldn't wake anybody. I think that was a great reason for Kim to plant her crop. As you can see, Kim did one small thing for her father and it changed the neighborhood. This story does a great job of showing that one small thing leads to another thing, and another thing, and another thing, and comes out in an end prouduct that benifits everyone. I think that all neighborhoods should try this experiment and see if it helps.