Music as Therapy

Project Peru

 Music Therapists Carine Ries and Andrew Darlison travelled to Huancayo on the 22nd July to deliver a 3 week introductory skill-sharing project for local staff and children at 'Tinkuy Peru'.

Carine first approached Music as Therapy International in 2010 to discuss her interest in developing work in Peru. She had spent time volunteering with a Peruvian charity, ‘Tinkuy Peru’, in Huancayo in 2006 and had worked as part of a team to set-up an education project for children from disadvantaged backgrounds in some of the poorest areas of the city. Huancayo is about 300 km, or a 7-hour bus ride away from Lima and is situated in the Rio Mantaro valley, in the central highlands of Peru. Although Huancayo is the cultural and commercial centre of the whole central Peruvian Andes, many children live in extreme poverty and difficult family circumstances. Not only is class division a problem in Peru, but also governmental aids are more likely to reach urban areas, which leaves people in some Andean mountain regions with very limited access to education, social, and financial support. You can read more about Carine and Andrew's personal journey on the blog here or on the Facebook page she has set up for the project.  Andrew has also set up his own blog here.

 

The Tinkuy Peru mountain school offers football, bastketball and volleyball as well as for English tuition by visiting volunteers (mostly from the US or Europe), among other activities.  It is open to any child committed to engaging with education through the classes it provides and it appears to provide a thriving and important opportunity for children to socialise. Children attend either in their half day when not required to be at government school or in some cases, instead of whilst some other children work rather than attend the government school which also has no resources to support children with special needs.

 

After the first few days, Carine and Andrew were able to identify that the music sessions would help the children meet the following objectives;

 

• To develop communication
• To develop social skills
• To build self-confidenc
• To explore and express emotions
• To encourage listening, watching and waiting

 The children seemed hungry for the music sessions and there were only three absences during the two and a half weeks that the groups ran for. From the beginning of the visit the children presented as being polite and welcoming, often greeting Carine and Andrew at the entrance to the school to help carry the instruments inside. It was only after several days that they began to learn how difficult many of the children's family backgrounds were beyond what were obvious signs of poverty and material hardship.

The children responded to the music sessions offered with predominantly quiet enthusiasm. Often this quickly developed into very expressive, playful interaction through the nonverbal medium of music. The children's joy during sessions was reflected by their continued attendance, their quiet excitement when it was explained that the therapists would be leaving the instruments behind and their spontaneous offer of support and encouragement to the staff that were being trained.  The staff seemed to thrive with the opportunity to learn new ways of interacting with each other and the children through music.

 We are now confident that those members of staff trained in the sessions and those teachers attending the evening workshops will be able to adapt the key principles of music therapy demonstrated and support each other to develop their own therapeutic music sessions. We hope that these new ideas will be digested and nurtured in the weeks and months ahead and in some form bring real value to the children living there.

Equally important, as we learnt from the Director and staff at Tinkyu Peru, this project brought an additional benefit:  Overseas volunteers have been visiting and working with the children at Tinkuy Peru without considering the sustainability and long-term impact of their contribution. At times, this had resulted in some difficult and possibly damaging experiences for both the children and the overall health of Tinkyu Peru as an organisation. The Music as Therapy International skill-sharing project offered, for the first time in the history of Tinkuy Peru, a sustainable project aimed at working alongside and empowering staff, rather than solely focusing on the short term needs of the children. The idea of a sustainable project that helps the staff to help themselves and the children they know best, within the community they know better than anybody else, is an idea that Tinkuy Peru valued and thanked us for sharing