“My life would be worthless without music,” the girl said.
And the music came, up from the garbage, through her hands and heart and out to the world. My god, she was playing a violin made out of an old can. A boy was playing a cello crafted with more love and ingenuity than I can imagine, from a used oil drum, old wool and tossed-out beef-tenderizing tools.
The brief YouTube video, precursor to a documentary film to be released in January, is called “Landfill Harmonic [2]”; it’s about a children’s orchestra in a Paraguayan village — a slum — called Cateura, which is built on a landfill. Reclaiming and reselling the trash that arrives every day is the residents’ means of survival. Real violins are not to be found in such a place; they’re worth more than a family’s home.
“There was no money for real instruments when local musician Favio Chavez started his music school in the barrio,” according to the movie’s website, “so together they started to make instruments from trash — violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates.”