In Cateura, Paraguay, townspeople don’t just live on garbage; they live with and from it. The impoverished rural community sits upon a landfill, and it is that trash that provides a source of income for those who pick it for sellable and recyclable goods. A few years ago, though, two Paraguayans decided to recycle the trash for something priceless: re-affirming the dignity of and cultivating the imagination, discipline and dedication of the region’s young, at-risk poor via musical instruments.

Eventually called Los Reciclados, or the Recycled Orchestra, flutes and clarinets are made from buttons and water pipes; cellos and flutes consist of forks, canisters and recycled strings. The result of these truly remarkable transformations is a fully functional orchestra which proves that, with a little creativity, something beautiful, fulfilling and sustainable can be forged from even the most unlikely materials and locations:

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Members of "Los Reciclados".

A recycled violin made of a metal glue canister, a fork, recycled strings and tuning pegs. A real violin is worth more than a typical house in Paraguay.

The refurbished "joints" of the clarinet.

A "woodwind" made of bottle caps, buttons and forks.

Nicolás Gómez, lute fixer and garbage picker.

Favio Chávez, the director of the Recycled Orchestra.

A Paraguayan girl practices her recycled violin.

Check out more on their website.

Source: LIFE

From LIFE: “In a lonely valley in eastern Kentucky, in the heart of the mountainous region called Appalachia, live an impoverished people whose plight has long been ignored by affluent America. Their homes are shacks without plumbing or sanitation. Their landscape is a man-made desolation of corrugated hills and hollows laced with polluted streams. The people, themselves — often disease-ridden and unschooled — are without jobs and even without hope. Government relief and handouts of surplus food have sustained them on a bare subsistence level for so many years that idleness and relief are now their accepted way of life.”

Source: Doctors Of The World

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, Africa’s inhabitant-to-doctor ratio is over 100 times that of its North American counterparts. Thankfully, organizations like Doctors of the World are taking meaningful measures to combat the dearth of doctors in one of the world’s most impoverished areas.