It’s the middle of the night and I can’t fall asleep.
Next thing I know, I’m in front of a computer screen. On that screen is YouTube. And on YouTube is a video called “Evolution of Dance.”1
What, you’ve heard of it?
Sure you have. YouTube tells me this video has been viewed 286,488,088 times, and I know you’re in there somewhere. Wait—
Okay, make it 286,488,089. I can’t not watch it. But moving right along …
While I was fishing for another inspirational video, I experienced YouTube whiplash.† One minute Dude is twisting the night away, and the next I’m somehow watching a documentary about a poor community in Paraguay.
Yeah, quite a transition. At first, this new video is about what you’d expect to see—images of abject poverty. The community is literally located in a landfill, where more than 1,500 tons of trash are dumped every day. Broken and discarded junk piled up everywhere, and that’s home for these people.
More than one hundred residents scratch out a living by digging through the trash, looking for something that can be recycled and sold. I’ve seen it myself, firsthand, when I’ve visited developing-world countries. What YouTube can’t give you is the smell. It’s there in all these dumps: the smell of hopelessness.
It all seems broken beyond repair. But keep watching.
I soon learn that this community in Paraguay is known for something other than a landfill. Something you’d never guess, unless you’ve seen the video. This community is known for having—are you ready for this?—an amazing orchestra.
No, not your average, big-city philharmonic with Stradivarius violins and grand pianos played by the cast of the Grey Poupon commercial. No, it’s a children’s orchestra in which all the players live in the slums, right there at the landfill.
Favio Chavez, a young professional musician, happened to come for a visit. He was horrified by the living conditions he saw and that no one did anything about it. So he announced he was opening a small music school.
Before long he was surrounded by eager and willing candidates. They were ready to learn, but they had no instruments. However, Chavez had some ideas about that too. He’d met a trash picker, Nicolas Gomez, who could find almost anything in a mound of garbage. “I want you to look for a special kind of trash,” Chavez told him. “Bring me anything we could recycle into an instrument.”
But how?
Well, they made a cello from an oil can and old cooking tools, a flute from tiny cans, a drum set with old X-rays as the skins, a violin from a beat-up aluminum salad bowl and strings tuned with forks.
You or I, if we had visited, would have just seen and smelled and felt the sadness. Chavez heard—and he heard not what was, but what could be. He heard music emerging from squalor. The music of hope.
It’s now known as the Landfill Harmonic, just to show that you can be in the dumps and still have a sense of humor. Here’s an orchestra made of kids from a junkyard playing instruments built of refuse.2 You can fire up the computer and watch it right now if you’ll promise to stay away from that YouTube video about the talking cats.
You and I, we live in a throwaway culture. We’d never have thought of bringing beauty from recycling—not when Amazon.com, with shiny, brand-spanking-new stuff, is a click away. You break it? You trash it. You replace it.
Yet I go back to read the Gospels, and now there’s a sound track. The music of the Landfill Harmonic seems to play on every page. I can hear it because I know the full story, and I see the connections. Jesus left the throne room of heaven for the landfill slum of earth. He gave up perfection for brokenness and pain. And he said, “Strike up the band.” He heard weeping and wailing and turned it into laughter.
They called him a fool, a misguided fanatic. There was hopelessness all around him, but even if I gave you one hundred guesses, you’d never be able to come up with the full picture of what Jesus can do when he digs into that ugly hill and comes up with throwaway, busted fragments of life.
Kyle Idleman, The End of Me: Where Real Life in the Upside-down Ways of Jesus Begins (Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook, 2015).
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