| Description: | Paraguay’s capital city Asunción dumps most of its rubbish in Cateura, once the site of a lagoon, but now the county’s largest landfill. Once refuse reaches the landfill site it doesn’t simply disappear or lie dormant. Around 2,500 impoverished families in the area work in dangerous and unsanitary conditions each day to sort, recycle and sell what they find there. Lying in a flood zone, the rubbish contaminates water supplies. Children will skip school, joining older family members picking rubbish, to detrimental impacts on their education.
In 2002 Luis Szarán, conductor of the Symphonic Orchestra of Asunción, launched a program to encourage music learning in poor communities: Sonidos de la Tierra (Sounds of the Earth). Five violins were donated to the community of Cateura, but it clearly wasn’t enough to go around the dozens of children wishing to take part. It was Favio Chavez who found the solution in local rubbish picker and ingenious craftsman Nicolás “Cola” Gómez, who studied and reproduced working instruments from whatever was available - oil cans became cellos, drainpipes and bottle tops became saxophones. Linda Adams took inspiration from this, making her own tiny representations from recycled aluminium cans. Though the instruments look a little different from their traditional counterparts, they sound like the real deal and their humble materials make them less likely as targets of theft.
In 2011 a teaser was filmed and released to crowdfund a documentary on the music school, which had now taken on a life of its own under the direction of Favio Chavez and was renamed The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. The short clip went viral, and the feature length documentary, Landfill Harmonic released to critical acclaim in 2015. As a result, the orchestra has been propelled to unforeseeable success. They’ve since supported household names such as Stevie Wonder and Megadeath, performed for royalty and a pope, and toured far and wide. The program has inspired similar schemes in Ecuador, Panama, Brazil and Burundi.
This community initiative proves that refuse can be given a second life, and that children neglected by larger society are just as deserving of opportunity; through skill, imagination and resourcefulness each can flourish.
Updated by Helen Maguire 27 th March 2024 |
