Posts Tagged "music in poverty"

Trash vs. Treasure

Posted by Pat Stewart on Jun 3, 2013 in My Blog, Think About This | 1 comment

I’ve recently moved from my NC hometown of 68 years to Florida to be closer to one of my daughters, my son-in-law and two little grandchildren.  It was a huge decision to make the move and one can certainly imagine the downsizing I had to do to settle into a 2 BR, 2 B apartment.  Months of de-cluttering and that continues now that I am here seeing that I moved too much with me.  During the months of preparing to make the move and then actually doing it, I’ve thought a lot about “what do I REALLY need?”  The American society is very much a consumer society, but some of us here and certainly a lot of us around the world live on much, much less.   Some of us are more creative than others…we all have our own skills and talents.  I recall that when my older daughter was in elementary school and I would determine she needed to be sent to her room for “time-out” discipline, I would go to her room to talk with her about why she had been sent there and most times I would find a big surprise upon entering.  The child that had misbehaved had transformed herself into a happy, delightful child who had dumped out her trash can and created new things with her trash.  Such an attitude adjustment…not by the vehicle her mother had intended, but a solution anyway. There is a place in Cateura, Paraguay where a little town is built on top of a landfill.  The people of the little community ravage through the trash surveying what others have tossed away and making use of their finds by either selling them for some amount of income or by making things…putting THEIR creativity to work!  The children of Cateura are well at risk of falling prey to gangs and becoming involved with drugs.  Music teacher Fabio Chavez started a music program for the children hoping to give them something else of interest and to which to belong.    The instruments the children use as they learn the beauty and universal language of music are instruments made of trash from the landfill.  Soon, other children wanted to engage and the Landfill Harmonic orchestra was formed. So, again, but in a much more dramatic way we see that one person’s trash truly does become another’s treasure…and, perhaps, a...