A Musical Mission to El Salvador

When a county delegation travels to El Salvador this week they'll help bring the gift of music to children in the county's first sister city.

Sixty-five community leaders and county government employees, including County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) and former U.S. Rep. Connie Morella, will travel to El Salvador today, where  with the Salvadoran state—or "department"—of Morazán.

Hungry for Music, a grassroots organization that donates musical instruments to children around the world, and Montgomery County Sister Cities are partnering to purchase musical instruments for the House of Culture community center in Perquín, a municipality of Morazán.

Hungry for Music and the sister cities program hope to raise $2,500, to buy instruments through a Salvadoran vendor. People can donate online at http://www.hungryformusic.org, or buy raffle tickets for a chance to win a $2,000 First Act electric guitar at Bethesda Big Train Baseball games and the Strathmore summer concert series shows. Folk music concert promoter Focus Music also held a raffle during its Jonathan Byrd concert on July 12.

Bruce Adams, director of the Montgomery County’s Office of Community Partnerships and founder of the Bethesda Big Train baseball team, said the idea to give instruments to Perquín came about when a Montgomery County Sister Cities delegation visited the community center last year.

"About 20 of us went down there and the mayor of Perquín, she actually took half of her city hall and turned it into a culture center for the kids," Adams said.

The mayor asked the county delegation to help the center purchase instruments to start a music program. Adams turned to Jeff Campbell, the founder and director of Hungry for Music, who agreed to help and provided the guitar for the raffle.

“I think it’s an exciting program for Montgomery County to have a sister cities program and I think it’s admirable they picked El Salvador,” Campbell said. “Because they looked at the borders in their county and they saw that the highest population of immigrants came from El Salvador."

The majority of Latinos in the county hail from El Salvador, according to the county’s Office of Community Partnerships. Salvadoran-Americans are the fourth-largest Latino group in the United States, according to the 2010 census.

"This is a huge part of the new Montgomery County and this sister city relationship has opened doors to the community, to the embassies here and to the embassies there,” Adams said. “This is really good for us, and we hope for them as well."

Adams explained the decision to buy the instruments in El Salvador: "I was thinking, ‘Can you just give me some instruments and we'll take them down there?’ and [Campbell] came up with a better idea,” he said. “You can take the money down there and you can get a lot more value for your money.”

Buying the musical instruments in El Salvador also helps boost the country’s economy and makes it easier to find certain instruments that may be difficult to find in the U.S., Adams said.

"We got a list of instruments and some of them we weren’t even familiar with,” he said. “But then we went, 'Ah, these are their instruments!'"

County government workers are paying their own way for the trip, Adams said. “This is a people-to-people relationship. This is not just a government thing," he said.

Meanwhile, Hungry for Music is looking to expand and hopes to partner with other cities to hold instrument drives, including Boston and Austin, Campbell said.