When Nurul Asyiqin Ahmad was taken seven months ago to her cell at the National Institute of Feminine Orientation, a prison perched on a hill in this city of slums on the outskirts of Caracas, learning how to play Beethoven was one of the last things on her mind.
“The despair gripped me, like a nightmare had become my life,” said Ahmad, 26, a shy law student from Malaysia who claims she is innocent of charges of trying to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Caracas to Paris. “But when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place.”
Ahmad plays violin and sings in the prison’s orchestra.
In a project extending Venezuela’s renowned system of youth orchestras to some of the country’s most hardened prisons, Ahmad and hundreds of other prisoners are learning a repertoire that includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains.
The budding musicians include murderers, kidnappers, thieves and, here at the women’s prison, dozens of narcomulas, or “drug mules,” as small-scale drug smugglers are called. The project, which began a year ago, is expanding this year to five prisons in Venezuela from three.
“This is our attempt to achieve the humanization of prison life,” said Kleiberth Lenin Mora, 32, a lawyer who helped create the prison orchestras, modeling them on the system that teaches tens of thousands of poor children in Venezuela classical music.
“We start with the simple idea that performing music lifts the hu-man being to another level,” he said.
Few nations have prison systems as much in need of humanizing as Venezuela, where 498 inmates out of a total of 21,201 were murdered last year, figures from the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a group that monitors prison violence, show.
The women’s prison, the scene of gang fights and hunger strikes by inmates in recent months, is not immune to this violence. But it is not all bleak. Inmates have free access to the Internet. They can pay to use cellphones. A dispensary sells soft drinks and snacks.
And now INOF, the Spanish acronym for the prison, has its orchestra, which most of the more than 300 women incarcerated here opt to avoid. But the 40 or so who have joined find themselves enmeshed in an experience that was unexpected both in their lives in prison and in their lives out of prison.
“Before this, my music was reggaeton,” said Irma Gonzalez, 29, a street vendor serving a six-year sentence for robbery, referring to the fusion of reggae, hip hop and Latin pop that is popular in Venezuelan slums.
Now she plays the double bass. Her proudest moment, she said, was when her four children, ages 14, 13, 10 and nine, recently came here to watch her play.
“When they applauded me, I finally felt useful in this life,” Gonzalez said.
Like other participants, she hopes to reduce her term by playing in the orchestra, which judges may consider the equivalent of hours of study.
Officials say it is too early to tell whether the project will improve overall conditions here and at the two male prisons where it started. No stars have emerged like Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old phenomenon from the youth-orchestra system named as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
For now, the project, which receives US$3 million in funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government and the Inter-American Development Bank, takes baby steps. It staged its first public performance last month in Teresa Carreno Theater in Caracas. And it focuses on requiring its participants to hew to a few specific rules.
For instance, no one can threaten the professors, many of whom are drawn from the youth-orchestra system. Everyone must speak clearly during discussions in the daily practice sessions. Everyone must stand up straight and take care of their instruments. Smoking and chewing tobacco are not allowed.
The orchestra at INOF is one of the most cosmopolitan in Venezuela. Much of the prison population comprises foreigners arrested on drug-smuggling charges. Women from Colombia, Spain, Malaysia and the Netherlands play instruments or sing in the chorus alongside Venezuelans.
“I drain away my bad thoughts in the orchestra,” said Joanny Aldana, 29, a viola player serving a nine-year term for kidnapping and auto theft.
Like some of the other inmates, she is imprisoned here with her child, a two-year-old daughter. Still, she despairs sometimes.
“There’s the pain of my children, of having destroyed my life, my youth,” Aldana said.
Perhaps no amount of music can make up for such loss. Perhaps that explains the fervor with which some of the women play their instruments or sing. It is not uncommon to see one of them shedding a tear when a certain note is struck.
For Yusveisy Torrealba, an 18-year-old caught taking cocaine on a flight to Florida in April, that moment comes when the chorus sings a few words from Caramba, a folk song by the Venezuelan composer Otilio Galindez.
She sang these lines for a visitor one recent afternoon:
Caramba, my love, caramba
The things we have missed
The gossip I could only hear
Between the rocks of the river.
“Caramba,” she repeated quietly, as if contemplating how much time remained in her eight-year sentence. “The only thing keeping me together is this music.”
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