THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 23, 2008
(lovely photo)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/world/americas/23venezuela.htmlLos Teques Journal
Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program
By SIMON ROMERO
LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — When Nurul Asyiqin Ahmad was taken seven months ago
to her cell at the National Institute of Feminine Orientation, a prison
perched on a hill in this city of slums on the outskirts of Caracas,
learning how to play Beethoven was one of the last things on her mind.
“The despair gripped me, like a nightmare had become my life,” said Ms.
Ahmad, 26, a shy law student from Malaysia who claims she is innocent of
charges of trying to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Caracas to Paris. “But
when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place.” Ms. Ahmad plays
violin and sings in the prison’s orchestra.
In a project extending Venezuela’s renowned system of youth orchestras to
some of the country’s most hardened prisons, Ms. Ahmad and hundreds of other
prisoners are learning a repertory that includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains.
The budding musicians include murderers, kidnappers, thieves and, here at
the women’s prison, dozens of narcomulas, or drug mules, as small-scale drug
smugglers are called. The project, which began a year ago, is expanding this
year to five prisons from three.
“This is our attempt to achieve the humanization of prison life,” said
Kleiberth Lenin Mora, 32, a lawyer who helped create the prison orchestras,
modeling them on the system that teaches tens of thousands of poor children
in Venezuela classical music. “We start with the simple idea that performing
music lifts the human being to another level.”
Few nations have prison systems as much in need of humanizing as Venezuela,
where 498 inmates out of a total population of 21,201 were killed in 2007,
according to the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a group that monitors prison
violence.
The women’s prison, the scene of gang fights and hunger strikes by inmates
in recent months, is not immune to this violence. But it is not all bleak.
Inmates have free access to the Internet. They can pay to use cellphones. A
commissary sells soft drinks and junk food.
And now INOF (pronounced like the word “enough”), the acronym the prison is
known by in Spanish, has its orchestra, which most of the more than 300
women incarcerated here opt to avoid. But the 40 or so who have joined find
themselves enmeshed in an experience that was unexpected in their lives in
prison and in their lives out of prison.
“Before this my music was reggaetón,” said Irma González, 29, a street
vendor serving a six-year sentence for robbery, referring to the fusion of
reggae, hip-hop and Latin pop that is widely popular in Venezuelan slums.
Now she plays the double bass. Her proudest moment, she said, was when her
four children, ages 14, 13, 10 and 9, recently came here to watch her play.
“When they applauded me, I finally felt useful in this life,” said Ms.
González. Like other participants, she hopes to reduce her term by playing
in the orchestra, which judges may consider the equivalent of hours of
study.
Officials say it is too early to tell whether the project will improve
overall conditions here and at the two prisons for men where it started, in
the Andean states of Mérida and Táchira. No stars have emerged like Gustavo
Dudamel, the 27-year-old from the youth-orchestra system named as the next
music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
For now, the project, which receives $3 million in funding from President
Hugo Chávez’s government and the Inter-American Development Bank, takes baby
steps. It staged its first public performance last month in Teresa Carreño
Theater in Caracas. And it insists its participants hew to a few specific
rules.
For instance, no one can threaten the professors, many of whom are drawn
from the youth-orchestra system. Everyone must speak clearly during
discussions in the daily practice sessions. Everyone must stand up straight
and take care of his or her instrument. Smoking and chewing tobacco are not
allowed.
The orchestra at INOF is one of the most cosmopolitan in Venezuela. Many of
the inmates are foreigners arrested on drug-smuggling charges. Women from
Colombia, Spain, Malaysia and the Netherlands play instruments or sing in
the chorus alongside Venezuelans.
“I drain away my bad thoughts in the orchestra,” said Joanny Aldana, 29, a
viola player serving a nine-year sentence for kidnapping and auto theft.
Like some of the other inmates, she is imprisoned here with her child, a
2-year-old daughter. Still, she despairs sometimes.
“There’s the pain of my children, of having destroyed my life, my youth,”
Ms. Aldana said.
Perhaps no amount of music can make up for such loss. Perhaps that explains
the fervor with which some of the women play their instruments or sing. It
is not uncommon to see one of them shedding a tear when a certain note is
struck.
For Yusveisy Torrealba, 18, that moment comes when the chorus sings a few
words from “Caramba,” the folk song by the Venezuelan composer Otilio
Galíndez performed with the cuatro, a four-string guitar. Ms. Torrealba was
caught in April taking cocaine on a flight to Orlando, Fla.
In her soft voice, she sang these lines for a visitor one recent afternoon:
Caramba, my love, caramba
The things we have missed
The gossip I could only hear
Between the rocks of the river.
“Caramba,” she repeated quietly, as if contemplating how much time remained
in an eight-year sentence that began last month. “The only thing keeping me
together is this music.”
Sandra La Fuente P. contributed reporting.
========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
http://www.walterlippmann.comhttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/"Cuba - Un Paraiso bajo el bloqueo"
========================================
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
