Listen To Those Beats in Barquisimeto, Venezuela

On February 22, 2024, Sister Maigualida del Valle Riera and Medical Mission Sisters in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, will celebrate nine years of MMS’ Latidos programme. 

Originally, Latidos Fundacion ("The Beats" or "Heartbeats") was created as a music and arts group to keep children and young people, aged 3-17 years old, away from violence and drugs on the streets. It has since flourished. Today, this exciting programme involves 1,200 children and young people from some of the city’s most deprived ‘barrios’ (shanty towns). Through music and arts, MMS’ documented results demonstrate how this lively initiative: builds childhood resilience and wellbeing in Barquisimeto; develops children’s musical talents; and helps young participants to hold on to their aspirations for peace, as they bring hope and good cheer to others through their concerts and street performances. 

Latidos was founded after a social and economic crisis in 2010 plunged the majority of Venezuela's citizens into acute poverty and hunger. Ten years later, COVID-19 started causing a new human crisis - psychologically and emotionally. As UNICEF’s Executive Director has observed, the country’s women and children will bear the scars of the pandemic for years to come.  In late 2023, two grants were received, with gratitude, from a UK-based charitable trust and Mission Development Center in Philadelphia, USA, enabling Sister Maigualida and her team of volunteer teachers to start implementing a new range of exciting activities with Latidos.  However, they never foresaw then that a new variant of the virus would sweep across the country in 2024. The funding is already helping them to protect the children against this new wave of COVID-19. An additional sewing machine has been purchased and used to make 1,200 masks, each bearing the organisation’s logo, and there is strict use of masks and hand sanitisers during all rehearsals and other activities. Water, which due to shortages in the city must also be purchased, is also enabling the instruments to be thoroughly cleaned after use to prevent spread of infection. This includes many new instruments that are equipping 165 more children from even poorer areas of the city to learn to play music - whether using a keyboard, percussion instruments or the guitar.

Adaptations have been made to Latidos’ recording studio which now offers a creative, well-equipped space for the children to record their songs, poems and messages of peace. Currently, they are rehearsing new songs to record. This includes two young people performing ‘rap’ music to tell their life stories, one song about the Medical Mission Sisters being sung in English, and four other compositions on different themes. We hope that the recording will be ready for you to listen to in April 2024. 

Participation in two local radio programmes also continues to offer a vital space where Latidos can bring messages of hope, life and peace to a country where many people continue to experience hopelessness and grief. Through researching "models of hope" to share on the radio, six selected children are playing a significant role in rebuilding communities and shattered lives at a desperate time, when the double-edged blow of poverty and a new variant of the virus hit very hard. The radio broadcasts offer a unique opportunity for the children to grow in self-confidence and belief and to feel empowered. For example, after careful research, Carla chose to tell radio audiences across Venezuela about the inspiring story of Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai and girls’ education, and another child explained why she finds Mother Teresa of Calcutta is an inspiring role model.   

Each child involved in the radio programme wears a specially designed T-shirt, not only to help him or her to identify with it, but also to publicise the broadcasts locally in order to increase audience numbers. 

We thank our generous donors very much for helping this group of very talented, but ‘hidden’, children, living in one of the world’s poorest places, to restore merengue, salsa and other rhythms to life in a country and continent where many continue to live through sorrow and pain.

Gracias!