The Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay

Landfill Harmonic is a forthcoming feature-length documentary about an orchestra in the Cateura Dump, Paraguay, where child musicians play instruments made from waste materials. It shows their rise through music from a life of danger and poverty.

The video crew: Jennifer Redfearn and Tim Fabrizio shot the early footage. Graham Townsley and Neil Barrett are shooting the full-length feature doc of which this is a part.
 
Quotations from Norman Lebrecht's blog: 

Favio Chavez, director of the Recycled Orchestra, worked as an ecological technician at the dump. “One day it occurred to me to teach music to the children of the recyclers and use my personal instruments,” he explains. “But it got to the point that there were too many students and not enough supply. So that’s when I decided to experiment and try to actually create a few.”

Cateura, on the banks of the Paraguay River, the landfill receives over 1,500 more tons of solid waste each day. Poor management of the waste has caused critical pollution to the most important water source in the country and threatens the health of its residents.

There are seven different neighborhoods built around the landfill, accounting for over 2500 families living in close proximity to dangerous waste. Drugs and gangs add to the dangers.

Whole families, including children, are employed by the landfill as garbage pickers. Poverty forces them into child labour and keeps them from getting educated.

Working beside the families for years Chávez eventually made friends and became acutely aware that the children needed something positive in their lives. He began using the trash in the landfill to create instruments for the children.

Paraguay has one of the world's highest inequality ratings. For more news of Paraguayan poverty, the struggle by poor peasants and indigenes against greedy landowners, the rightwing coup against reform president Lugo, and the “green desert” created by soy monoculture -- see 

UNICEF, Web Guide Paraguay, Global Voices Online, Wikipedia, IPS, and Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) in English and en español.

Some of my heroes - Alouette Lark

Alouette Lark is a Quaker, member of Montreal Monthly Meeting.
Sculpture by Norwegian Gustav Vigeland

My Brave Hero: identity unknown

He was an unknown man in a humble position (perhaps a cleaner or porter) at one of the larger railway stations in Germany during WWII -- one of the places where the trains transporting the Jews to the camps were put on sidings, to allow military transport and freight trains to go on their way. This man heard the people in the cars calling out, begging for water – during journeys of four or more days. This man fetched water and passed it to them through the bars of the boxcars. His superiors noticed this and ordered him to stop. He disobeyed, and while still performing his duties continued for years to give water to as many Jews as he could. Many witnesses testified to this after the war. I heard of him from Jewish friends.

My Observant Hero: Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis
(see Wikipedia for more details)

This young doctor noticed, in 1847, while assisting a professor in a maternity hospital, that the ward where wealthy women were given regular physical examinations by doctors and medical students had a high death rate from puerperal fever (septicaemia aka blood poisoning, in the uterus), while poor women in the charity ward, untouched by doctors' hands, only attended by nurses during birth and recovery, rarely died. When he made the doctors and students wash their hands with chlorinated lime solution (i.e. bleach) before examining each woman, the death rate plummeted. Doctors were outraged by the young man's criticism of their methods and drove him out of the city. Yet his shrewd observation saved many women’s lives once his methods were adopted; years later, Pasteur's germ theory explained why. Semmelweis died tragically of septicaemia, when poor and persecuted by the medical establishment for his "crazy" ideas, he was locked up in an asylum and viciously beaten by guards.

My Clever Hero: Fridtjof Nansen and the Nansen passport
(see also Wikipedia)

This Polar explorer, adventurer, Norwegian diplomat and all-round amazing man became High Commissioner of the new League of Nations in 1921. Europe was full of stateless refugees who had been driven out by war, ethnic rivalries and prejudice. Without papers, they could be rejected or deported at any time. He devised a special League passport, bright yellow in colour, which was accepted by fifty-two nations, and named after him: the Nansen Passport. This enabled refugees to choose a country, settle down, work, have families, and eventually apply for citizenship. In many cases it literally saved their lives.

My Current Hero: Stephen Lewis (see the Steven Lewis Foundation)

Who else but our own Stephen Lewis who is helping the thousands of grandmothers desperately trying to raise their grandchildren after AIDS killed their children.