I was always fascinated with flight and birds and just looking at the clouds flying by. With a kite, it's fascinating to have something that's so far away and yet it responds to your control, because it's tethered by the string in your hand. It's just beautiful.

When I was very young, I started making chocolate leaf kites: we put a little bamboo across the chocolate leaf—which is the cocoa leaf—and tie a string at the tip of the chocolate leaf, where the leaf come off the plant, and then fly it.

One day, my cousin, Johnny, made a kite from tissue paper with a coconut palm spine. When I saw him do that, it was so breathtaking to me! And I remembered what he did and I started doing it, myself. And then I realized that I had a knack for making kites. It was like a gift I have inside.

When I first started flying kites here in New York, in the Bronx, and in Central Park, I never normally see a lot of Caribbean kites, like what I fly as a child growing up. So what happened, one day in 1998, I came to Prospect Park to celebrate my niece's birthday, and I notice I hear that humming sound like from the Caribbean kites—it sort of sounds like a motorcycle engine—so I look up and I see like about 20 Caribbean kites flying! They were just flying and dancing and snaking in the sky and making that sound. The sound is from a piece of fabric or paper that we put on the top of the kite where we bow it, and make a tension on it, so in flight, that little piece of paper vibrates and makes that sound. So, when I see all those Caribbean kites, I was like, "Whoa, that's my kind of kite!" I didn't know there were Caribbean people in New York City continuing that tradition! But they were flying a different type of kite from how I made kites in Jamaica, 'cause each Caribbean Island have their own individual tradition, their own different way of making even the same kites. So I started coming here to Prospect Park, and I moved to Crown Heights and I made Prospect Park my home field.

I do kite-making workshops all over the country, for a living. Mainly I do workshops for the past three years for the Brooklyn Public Library system, in different branches all over Brooklyn. It's geared toward children, but anyone can participate; sometimes I have school teachers, who come and learn about it so they can teach their children. I want to see little kids' eyes—it reminds me of when I was a child and I was so fascinated with flight and and kites and birds—so when I look and see a child who has that thrill and that drive, I see myself! So I'm eager to give a child the knowledge, so one day they might take it to another level.