ISBN: 9781481430951
With Thorntree Prep’s theme this week being “Recycling”, we shared a short story about the Landfill Harmonic at our Book Club Hour today.
The Landfill Harmonic (otherwise known as “The Recycled Orchestra”), is an orchestra made up out of children of all ages playing instruments made from recycled garbage. Cateura is one of the poorest slums in South America – a town in Paraguay built on a landfill. There are almost 20 000 people who live in Cateura, on less than R30 a day, and the people spend around 14 hours a day picking through the trash to find things that can be recycled and sold.
Our story, Ada’s Violin by Susan Hood, was about a girl named Ada Ríos, who (as it was with kids in her town) had no foreseeable “good” future; an environmental engineer, called Favio Chávez, who used his passion for music to make an enormous difference in the lives of the children of Cateura, and a ganchero (recycler), Nicolás Gómez, who used his skills to make useable instruments to help offer a better life to the children of Cateura.
The Lesson Objectives were that
- small acts of kindness and following your passion can open doors to a whole new world for yourself and for others.
- goals are reached through hard work and perseverance.
- there is always hope, and it depends on our own thoughts.
Favio Chávez had to solve several problems in order to create the Recycled Orchestra, but he didn’t give up when it got tough!
“They had discovered the surprise waiting in the landfill. Buried in the trash was music. And buried in themselves was something to be proud of”.
Today the Landfill Harmonic performs world wide, on their own as well as with other bands like Metallica.
It is a truly amazing and inspirational story about hope for a promising future, showing children the possibility of rising out above unfavourable circumstances.
