Cristina Vazquez, a Roma teen who grew up in a Madrid shantytown, never imagined herself playing the violin.
But today she is first violinist in an inventive orchestra bringing together two dozen disadvantaged youths, using instruments made from recycled materials.
Her violin is made from colorful soda cans, while a string bass has a skateboard for its body, and drums are made from plastic barrels.
Photo: AFP
The project, dubbed “Music of Recycling,” aims to breathe new life into discarded junk while also benefiting youths from disadvantaged backgrounds.
“I am really happy, because it has changed my life a lot,” said 18-year-old Vazquez, her eyes gleaming.
She hesitantly joined the orchestra at age 12 when it was part of the curriculum at her school in the southern district of Vallecas, one of Madrid’s poorest neighborhoods.
Photo: AFP
Today she teaches younger members of the group.
“The orchestra has really opened me up to the world... I had never even gone to the center of Madrid,” she said.
“I don’t know if I will become a professional musician ... but I want to keep giving classes to young children.
Photo: AFP
“It fills you with pride when a young girl comes up to you and says: ‘When I grow up I want to be like you.’”
Luis Miguel Munoz, 18, credits the orchestra with keeping him on the straight and narrow in a neighborhood like Vallecas, which has a high school dropout rate.
“Instead of meeting up with friends, I preferred to listen to music, play it, and little by little it became a way of life,” he said.
Photo: AFP
Belonging to an orchestra is like “being in a family, and doing what pleases us most,” said the bleach-blond Munoz, who sports a goatee.
Music “allowed me to escape life’s problems,” said Munoz, who sees himself becoming a professional flamenco percussionist.
The project is run by Spanish environmental group Ecoembes and is inspired by Paraguay’s Cateura orchestra, made up of musicians from a slum who play instruments made from materials found in a rubbish dump.
After Ecoembes invited the Cateura orchestra to perform in Madrid in 2014, the group decided to found its own similar ensemble that same year, said Victor Gil, the director of Music of Recycling.
“Why not here? We have social and economic problems,” the Argentinian said.
The ensemble put on its first concert just four months later and “the kids could not play more than four notes,” said Gil, who plays the bass made from a skateboard.
Now after having performed in cities across Spain, “we already have four boys studying in scholarships at music schools and public conservatories,” he added.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has put a temporary halt to performances. A concert planned for last Thursday in Madrid was called off at the last minute because of soaring COVID-19 infections in Spain.
Meanwhile, more than 100 children are taking music classes from members of the orchestra as part of the project.
The instruments are created by luthier Fernando Soler, a third-generation instrument maker, from cans, wooden boxes, cutlery and parts of discarded instruments.
He said he tries to make the instruments as close to their “normal” shape as possible so the children won’t have difficulty playing regular equipment in the future.
Soler hopes he will soon be able to restart his workshops on making instruments, which were suspended because of the pandemic. He said his dream is to see one of his pupils become “the luthier of recycling of the future.”
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS