From trash to triumph
I was recently reminiscing about a life-changing trip that I experienced back in February of 2016. It was something that I will simply never forget.
I was invited to travel with John Maxwell along with some of his team members to the country of Paraguay to facilitate round tables to develop leaders.
We traveled all over the city of Asunción (the capital) where we taught leadership values to government officials, educational institutions, businesses, and Congress.
With the official language of Paraguay being Spanish, I was paired with an interpreter who was by my side to translate as I taught values and leadership workshops.
Halfway into our trip, there was a planned visit to a place that I wasn’t so sure of at first. Upon arriving, what I experienced left me a changed person and inspired me in a way that I had never imagined. This special destination was a place called Cateura.
To be clear, Cateura is not a town in a traditional sense. It's a slum located alongside a landfill, just outside of Paraguay's capital city, Asunción.
Every day, about three million pounds of solid waste is dumped in Cateura. Many families live out their existence by scavenging through the trash inside the landfill seeking to resell items that are found. This process involves children who are regularly pulled out of school to provide assistance in the hunt for salvageable items in the trash. During rainstorms, the landfill floods, and residents are forced to wade through contaminated water.
Shockingly, a section in the middle of this landfill has been cleared and is actually designed to serve as a music school where trash is turned into musical treasures for many of the city’s youth who have a passion for music. These were kids that don’t have much at all, but through a passion for music and a keen imagination, they saw what could be through the help of the school’s founder, Favio Chavez. To simply describe it, they turned trash into musical instruments.
Favio had a dream of providing the city’s youth with a place to come and learn how to play music. They would learn important values in life, such as responsibility, respect, and teamwork. These are kids who didn’t have much in the way of educational opportunities and most of them turned to gangs as a means for survival.
We were given a tour of the makeshift music school, which was no bigger than your standard two car garage. We were shown the unique instruments that were made for the students.
A typical violin would never be found in this area, but instead, a violin, like many in the orchestra, is created using cans, wooden spoons and bent forks. One of the ensemble's cellos uses an oil drum for its body. String pegs are created from detritus, like old cooking utensils, and even the heel of a worn-out women's shoe ends up as a part. Drum heads are made from old X-ray films. One student played a saxophone made from a drainpipe, melted copper, coins, spoon handles, cans, and bottle caps.
They were known as, “The Recycled Orchestra”.
As we sat and listened to the students tell us how their instruments were created from pulling useful pieces from the landfill they worked in, I started to realize that if you put your imagination to use, and think out of the box, you can truly do anything. They put on a little concert for us and the sound that came out of what was once trash, was even more beautiful than I could have imagined.
It's all about perspective.
Some of us focus on all that we don’t have, and some see all that they can create with what little they do have. This even includes garbage!
In that moment, my personal and professional worries diminished to absolute zero. That day, I realized that changing how we look at things can change our life too.
I sat witness to a man living in the third world country of Paraguay who was making a huge impact in the lives of children. The brilliant part of his actions relates to his ability to not allow what he didn’t have to get in the way. His success and actions placed my own goals within reach. In short, I could make an impact in my community and begin to build a business to help leaders develop their full potential as professionals and a citizens.
The best way to change your life is to take ownership and ACT. If you want to change your job, act. If you want to learn how to do something you've never done, act. If you want to take that certification course, act. If you want to start a business of your own, act.
If you want anything, act.
Start with being grateful for what you do have and stop looking for the things you don’t have in life. Focus on the things that you allow to take steps towards your dreams and the pursuit of happiness. Be a little proactive rather than being victimized by your situation.
That trip to Paraguay changed my life in so many ways. It lit a fire inside of me which began my quest to make a move and reinvent myself.
It’s been five years since I launched my own company and I owe a lot of where I am now to that visit I took to the landfill in Paraguay.
Sometimes we all need to learn how to “recycle” our careers and reinvent ourselves. Sometimes we find our best selves when we dig deep and start with a pile of nothing. That’s where imagination and hard work come in and create beauty.
Learn more about the story behind the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay here.
To your growth,
Kelly Merbler