Migrant children in Trinidad learn to play steelpan

Miss World Trinidad and Tobago Tya Janè Ramey plays pan with some Venezuelan migrant children of the La Romain Migrant Support Group at the Golden Hands Pan Orchestra yesterday.

(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.