Migrant children in Trinidad learn to play steelpan

(Trinidad Guardian) Flee­ing a coun­try rid­dled with po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic in­sta­bil­i­ty, most Venezue­lan mi­grant chil­dren have had to grow up be­fore their time.

One Non-Gov­ern­men­tal Or­gan­i­sa­tion (NGO), the La Ro­main Mi­grant Sup­port (LARMS), to­geth­er with Miss T&T World Tya Janè Ramey and the Gold­en Hands mu­sic in­sti­tute are try­ing to mit­i­gate the ef­fects of the painful tran­si­tion from Venezuela to T&T and are hop­ing their ef­forts will as­sist in in­te­grat­ing the chil­dren in­to so­ci­ety.

 
The group have start­ed a pan-train­ing camp for 15 Venezue­lan chil­dren at Gold­en Hands in San Fer­nan­do and Ramey spoke to Guardian Me­dia about the project yes­ter­day.

“This is the first ses­sion of Project Es­per­an­za, where we have in­ter­ac­tion be­tween the chil­dren of the LARMS group and Trinida­di­an chil­dren al­low­ing them to as­sim­i­late and ac­cul­tur­ate in­to T&T,” Ramey said.

“I be­lieve that our cul­ture pro­vides that space to do both—our mu­sic, our pan is beau­ti­ful, our agri­cul­ture and these are some of the ways that we are go­ing to be us­ing to mend and see to­geth­er­ness and uni­ty with mi­grant chil­dren and T&T.”

Ramey, who heads off to Lon­don in De­cem­ber to com­pete in the an­nu­al Miss World pageant, said this project is the ba­sis for her “Beau­ty with a Pur­pose” el­e­ment of the pageant.

She said al­though many Trinida­di­ans still have reser­va­tions about ac­cept­ing Venezue­lans, the coun­try needs to come to­geth­er to nur­ture the mi­grant chil­dren.

“My slo­gan says “Project Es­per­an­za: Build­ing bridges not walls.” I re­al­ly grew up nur­tured by a com­mu­ni­ty and I see all the ben­e­fits, all the el­e­ments my com­mu­ni­ty of Five Rivers brought—my in­volve­ment in Best Vil­lage, my in­volve­ment in phil­an­thropy—it all helped to frame the per­son I am to­day and it was on­ly nat­ur­al to help these peo­ple who are on­ly a few miles away to help them in this en­tire trau­mat­ic tran­si­tion that they are in.”

She wants lo­cals to look past the dif­fer­ences in cul­ture and lan­guage and ac­cept Venezue­lans.

For Fran­ka Hills-Headley, the own­er and man­ag­er of Gold­en Hands, this project is one close to her heart.

She too called for ac­cep­tance and bet­ter treat­ment of mi­grants say­ing, “We have to un­der­stand it is a two-sided coin, sure we may feel strange to see so many strange peo­ple here but imag­ine how they feel to be some­where com­plete­ly new, how strange they must feel. At the end of the day, we must all keep in mind: peo­ple are peo­ple. For­get every­thing else.”

LARMS co-or­di­na­tor Ang­ie Ram­nar­ine said the project was part of the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s cur­ricu­lum for mi­grant chil­dren with an in­ter­est in mu­sic. She said the chil­dren were elat­ed at hav­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty and had fall­en in love with the steel­pan.