By Susan Hood
The true story of children in a town built on a garbage dump who learned to play in an orchestra of instruments made from trash.
Ada Rios grows up in Cateura, a town in Paraguay built on top of a landfill, where families make their living picking through the mountains of garbage the capital throws away. There's no money for real instruments, and a violin costs more than a house there. But a music teacher named Favio Chávez has an idea: with the help of a man who can build anything, the children start making violins out of oil drums, cellos out of tin cans, flutes out of pipes. Ada gets a violin, practices, and the Recycled Orchestra grows until it's playing to crowds around the world. Sally Wern Comport's rich collage art is stitched from scraps, just like the instruments.
For the music-loving child, this makes the point that the instrument matters less than the wanting to play, these children built symphonies out of what the world threw away. It feeds a love of music and a maker's itch at the same time, since half the wonder is how the instruments got built. And it opens a window onto a life very different from your child's, with real hardship shown honestly but never hopelessly, so the story lands as admiration rather than pity.