"It is a gift from God," Silva said. "It just came to me. When I put my hands on people, with my faith in God, things just happen."
They feel better, she said, or she tells them to see a doctor.
Already well known in her Centro de Oro neighborhood near Fourth Street and Lehigh Avenue, Silva's story is getting wider play in an oral history of local Latinos. The audio project is part of an initiative called Coming of Age, a collaboration of the Intergenerational Center at Temple University, WHYY, AARP Pennsylvania, and the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
Coming of Age grew from a 2001 national conference in San Francisco on community participation among people 50 and older. Two years later, it took hold in Philadelphia with a grant from the state Department of Aging, resulting in programs that guide older adults into so-called encore careers, promote volunteerism among them, advocate for their common needs - and collect their stories.
The Latino oral histories not only are about older immigrants, but also are recorded by them. A dozen are finished, among them Silva's five-minute audio in Spanish.
She was interviewed in her home by Manuel Portillo, 49, who came to the United States as a Guatemalan refugee in 1984. He now directs the storytelling project, and is training about 10 older Latino adults to gather more stories.
Along with teaching them to use digital audio recorders, he offers some principles of good storytelling. "Be brief," he instructs. "And each story has to have a lesson, a crisis, a resolution, a moral point to be made. They have to speak from the heart."
Isabel Silva's does. It focuses mostly on her life in coastal Luquillo, Puerto Rico, and the loss that led the widowed mother of six to Philadelphia in the early 1950s.
