Merida #5

Santa Cruz

After some time winding through hairy mountain roads, we came to the relatively isolated village of Santa Cruz. From the road we could see a fabulous mural painted along the front of the eight year old nucleo. There is a small staff here including a director and secretary. They have one orchestra of children aged 7-17 years, and students had been playing their instrument for 6 months to 2 years. 250 students attend this nucleo altogether, with a piano studio, orchestra, choir, and early years classes.

We met one of the few non-Venezuelan teachers and one of the few more permanent visitors to the program here. Kyoko Kato from South Korea (KOICA/JICA) is working with the Universidad de Los Andes to help train teachers from village nucleos at the centre of town. She talked to us about the frustrations of feeling far from the main Merida nucleo; the musical culture there, the resources and much larger teaching staff.

Although it was a Friday morning, there were many students at the nucleo. Apparently they had been told that there would be guests and had been excused from school. The full orchestra was set up to welcome us and played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The children then split up into groups and the Fellows joined them to teach for the rest of the morning.

Beverley and I went with the 6 cellists ranging in age from 7 to late teens; Osiris, Crismar, Wilmer, Ariam, Oriana and Darkis. After a few warm-ups it became obvious that the two youngest players also had the least experience and so I took them to another room to go through the part for Ode to Joy. Crismar had played for 9 months, Osiris for less. We worked for about 30 minutes on this part, when the seven-year old Osiris lost interest and was very concerned about the possibility of missing lunchtime. It felt bizarre to see an El Sistema student lose focus!

After lunch I did some work with the children’s choir, a small group of seven to ten year olds. Again this was a very different experience to the well-disciplined choirs we had visited elsewhere. We played a few warm-up and rhythm games, and I taught them a simple Tanzanian children’s song. Concentration levels were pretty low and I often had to coax students away from whatever distractions there were in the room. One of these distractions was a piano where one of the boys sat down to play and was joined in by the others singing along. It made me think that, with a lack of teaching staff, the students were probably quite used to just hanging out around the piano.

The director of the nucleo gave us some background about the village (population around 1000). A few years ago severe flooding destroyed much of the infrastructure; housing, roads, electricity and quality water supply were affected and there are still many issues which are not getting resolved. We noticed that there was no running water in the kitchen and bathrooms at the nucleo. As a result, according to the director, there is a negative atmosphere in the village. Public school teachers are often ‘not well’ or ‘going to the doctor’, and the nucleo is treated as a babysitting service by families, where discipline has got worse.

I got the impression that life in this village for the students was more unsettling than in other communities we visited. It is more of a challenge to maintain discipline and routine when children are not exposed to it elsewhere in family and school life. Despite its eight years, it appears that the El Sistema culture that we were becoming familiar with is not established here as much as at other nucleos. This sort of situation and the distance from the Merida town centre is an example of the challenges of taking the program to the villages as part of the Simon Bolivar project.