I started opening my eyes and seeing that I live in my paradise – my house is full of forest and beauty, but the next community doesn't have a tree – [not] one! And the water is going away – every year is worse.

Then my husband started planting trees in the community, and the communities around ours, because my husband was the one who started this action. For years he told me, "Patty, I'm going to talk with that man that lives in that mountain, because my father knows him, and he's my friend. I'm going to talk with him and ask him to plant a hectare of jacaranda – that it's a flower tree – because I want to see flowers in that mountain."

And he was always talking things about that, and I thought inside, "Oh God, you're crazy! No, go on, talk with him!" But he did it. He helped plant three-million-and-a-half trees.

Next year, we got the people from different communities asking us to bring the trees. And next year, I started working with environmental education – with my accordion, and this old microphone, because my throat is a kind of tired. And I started with a group of volunteers from the local junior high school, and that's how we started. And we worked like that for years, with no help from outside – just our own efforts.

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