kww
Dec-06-2006, 9:34am
I am just doing some preliminary investigation about scheduling a mandolin workshop down here on my island of Bonaire. I would be trying to do it primarily as a charity event for the music school (Skol di Musika) and the woodworking classes in the local high-school. Our music school suffers from the same problem as most ... lack of funding, leading to lack of instruments for the students. Our average annual salary on the island is about $10,000, so most of the students are unable to afford their own.
Carpentry and woodworking are popular vocations on the island, because the market here is too small for quality mass-produced furniture. Most of the nicer homes have the shelving, cabinetry, finish trim, etc., all built from scratch from lumber brought up from Venezuela and Brazil. This makes woodworking a reasonably popular class at the high-school level. If I could get a kid interested in luthiery as a career, one could probably support himself doing instrument repair for our island and Curacao. I'm sure that most of the students would find instrument building to be an interesting variation on the usual cabinetry.
Mandolin is a reasonably popular instrument. It features prominently in Dominican music, and shows up in a lot of the Latin stuff.
All of which leads me to the basic idea: a mandolin workshop for about 10 students, building a mix of mandolins and octave mandolins. The ten students would be a mix of woodworking students that have reasonably developed woodworking skills and music students that would be having this as their first major woodworking project. The instruments would become the property of the music school, and the island gets kids with a new skill.
So now, the question: if I were to provide you with plane tickets and a week's lodging at my hotel, how much more money would you require to bring 10 kits and teach 10 kids how to build them? Feel free to respond by PM. I would provide workshop space via the school, and could get all of the finishing supplies, glues, small hardware, etc. donated by our local hardware chain. I am thinking May 2007 timeframe, but that could be moved.
Carpentry and woodworking are popular vocations on the island, because the market here is too small for quality mass-produced furniture. Most of the nicer homes have the shelving, cabinetry, finish trim, etc., all built from scratch from lumber brought up from Venezuela and Brazil. This makes woodworking a reasonably popular class at the high-school level. If I could get a kid interested in luthiery as a career, one could probably support himself doing instrument repair for our island and Curacao. I'm sure that most of the students would find instrument building to be an interesting variation on the usual cabinetry.
Mandolin is a reasonably popular instrument. It features prominently in Dominican music, and shows up in a lot of the Latin stuff.
All of which leads me to the basic idea: a mandolin workshop for about 10 students, building a mix of mandolins and octave mandolins. The ten students would be a mix of woodworking students that have reasonably developed woodworking skills and music students that would be having this as their first major woodworking project. The instruments would become the property of the music school, and the island gets kids with a new skill.
So now, the question: if I were to provide you with plane tickets and a week's lodging at my hotel, how much more money would you require to bring 10 kits and teach 10 kids how to build them? Feel free to respond by PM. I would provide workshop space via the school, and could get all of the finishing supplies, glues, small hardware, etc. donated by our local hardware chain. I am thinking May 2007 timeframe, but that could be moved.