As the old saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Such a point rings with powerful truth when you learn about Paraguay’s Landfill Harmonic Orchestra for the first time.
While our current climate is tense and rugged, there still exists rays of sunshine to fill us with wonder and hope and carry us through.
And no matter our circumstances, music has a way of surrounding us, lifting us, and bringing meaning to our experiences that words fall short of.
Meet the Recycled Orchestra. They’re doing an amazing thing: they’re making music with instruments made out of literal trash.
In 2015 an eye-opening documentary entitled The Landfill Harmonic made its rounds for the first time, introducing people to a slice of life that many couldn’t even imagine.
The story centers around Cateura, Paraguay. This is a slum-town that is on the outskirts of Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, and the entire town is built upon a landfill.
Life is very different in Cateura.
It is the largest garbage dump in the South American country.
The 2500 families that live there make their living by separating garbage for recycling. Often, the youngest people living there are responsible for collecting and reselling the garbage. There is no electricity or running water, and the water supplies are extremely polluted. Every day is marked by poverty, and every day the citizens scour the landfill for food while buying and selling the trash for mere cents.
Environmentalist and musician Favio Chavez visited the area as part of a recycling project.
Upon his arrival, he was shocked by the appalling and unthinkable living conditions. While the recycling project failed, he decided to stay behind to address the atrocities.
And what he did was make a difference.
He quickly realized the grim fate that the youths of the town were continuously being dealt. Most children were destined to grow up working in garbage, just like their parents. He realized that the children had been left on the absolute fringes of society, somewhere in between mountains of trash—and this would not do.
Chavez decided he would give music lessons to the children to enrich them.
He revealed in an interview:
“Here in Paraguay, social conditions often limit the ability to dream. If you’re born in the wrong place, you don’t have the right to dream. When I was young, music was the first thing that gave me a sense of purpose.”
But the children had no money for instruments. And this is exactly where innovation came into play.
In Cateura, a violin is worth more than a house. So Chavez did what everyone else did: he went to the landfill.
He went in search of anything he could find useful to help fulfill his vision: oil cans, spoons, forks or bottle caps to make instruments out of.
But he was not a craftsman, so he enlisted the help of a local garbage collector, Don Cola Gomez, to help him improvise the landfill instruments.
Together, they’ve turned oil cans into cellos and violins, water pipes into saxophones and X-rays into drumheads. The results are remarkable and outright inspiring.
News of Chavez’s music lessons traveled quickly, and more children showed up than he had instruments for.
But together they worked through it, and he was able to give the children hope. Quickly, the landfill orchestra gained media attention and traction. With interpretations ranging from Bach to Beethoven, the orchestra was no sooner given concerts spanning the entire globe.
Check out this amazing story for yourself in the video linked below!
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