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Opinion

How a refugee’s daughter is teaching hope and music to young violinists in Dallas

Lebanese-American Nicole Melki offers students free lessons and a platform to say, ‘What the world might have said about me is not true.”

The musical story playing out in the hands of young violinists at an elementary campus in Old East Dallas is chock full of sweetness and grit: Three afternoons each week, a professional musician, the daughter of a Lebanese refugee, provides free lessons to a roomful of underserved Hispanic children.

It’s the kind of news tip that invariably catches my attention, but the timing on this one was poignant. I learned of Nicole Melki’s violin instruction at Dallas ISD’s Zaragoza Elementary just as Gov. Greg Abbott was trying to slam the door last week on allowing refugees to resettle in our state.

These days, when too many narratives are rooted in fear and push people apart, what’s going on in Room 117 provides a much-needed reality check.

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The 37-year-old Melki created the Ubuntu Music Project as an afterschool program for Zaragoza students in second through fifth grades. One hour is devoted to professional violin instruction and the other is volunteer-supervised academic tutoring.

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“I want my students to become agents of their futures and to begin to tap into who they are in a new way, in a way they may not yet even have language for,” she told me this week.

Melki named her project after an African Bantu term that encompasses the idea that “when one person is experiencing something, we are all in it together.”

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Since Melki was a young teen — who lived in poverty but fell in love with the violin — she held fast to the idea of teaching other youngsters to play at an exceptional level.

In fall 2014, after she managed to raise the money to buy 12 violins, “I simply knocked on the door at Zaragoza and said, ‘Can I start a program?’” The principal at the time, Carlotta Hooks, “welcomed me and gave me a space.”

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It quickly became clear that a dozen violins wouldn’t be nearly enough.

Since then, Melki has taught about 150 students and helped a number of them achieve their dream to move into DISD arts-focused and talented and gifted middle schools.

Along the way, she also earned a master’s degree in social justice from SMU’s Perkins School of Theology and that philosophical bent is woven into her music instruction. Melki says the most powerful asset she can give students whose socioeconomic status makes them invisible is the ability to have a voice through music.

“They have a platform now ... to be able to say, ‘What the world might have said about me is not true,’” Melki said. “I see music as the sound of opportunities, the sound of options.”

Mayte Mendoza, center, listens to instructions from teacher Nicole Melki. The 8-year-old...
Mayte Mendoza, center, listens to instructions from teacher Nicole Melki. The 8-year-old says that the performances she and her classmates get to do is one of her favorite parts of violin lessons.(Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

Zaragoza counselor Kristella Longoria told me that Nicole’s teaching is “worth gold when it comes to brain development.”

Melki also looks at the children through a very different lens, and those insights often reset the thinking of staff that is more focused on academics and behavior. “She gives me qualities of a child I can’t see because she’s looking at them in a way I’m not,” Longoria said. “She’s seeing the talent and what they are capable of.”

Melki attributes her strategy to her own life story. She is a first-generation Lebanese-American whose father came to the U.S. as a refugee during Lebanon’s civil war and met his wife on the East Coast.

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Talk of higher education or a better future was not part of Melki’s childhood. “We were just trying to get by day to day.” Not until she was an adult did she make the connection between “my needing something and my mom having to go give plasma to get the money.”

Melki still gets emotional when she talks about the day her life changed: At age 11, she got the chance to participate in orchestra at her public school. Once Melki picked up the violin, she never put it down.

“My teacher would come before and after school to help me because I had such a drive to learn,” Melki said. Almost immediately, that relationship sparked a dream to become a music educator. “All of a sudden I had goals, I had a way out of the situation that my mom was in.”

Melki said she believes the resiliency that poverty created in her fueled a musical prowess. “I would watch the technique of the person in front of me and go home and mimic that. By the time I was a senior, I had made all-state orchestra.”

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Music teacher and professional violinist Nicole Melki says, “I want my students to become...
Music teacher and professional violinist Nicole Melki says, “I want my students to become agents of their futures and to begin to tap into who they are in a new way, in a way they may not yet even have language for."(Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

Through ingenuity and patience — it took seven years — she graduated with a music education degree from Southern Nazarene University near Oklahoma City.

“I’m proud of my younger self — that was really hard,” she said. “When you are a first-generation American and then a first-generation college student, there are distinct challenges.”

She continued to build her career, teaching private lessons and performing with regional orchestras. Eventually, she moved her work to Dallas and formed Ubuntu soon after.

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Melki was leading “technique boot camp” when I visited her class Wednesday. The playing of scales and snippets of musical scores was punctuated by her demonstration of spiccato and staccato bow strokes and instructions on how to get the best sound from the instrument.

“Play it louder so you make my hair fly,” she laughed with the 16 children, their faces alternately reflecting childish joy and serious brow-scrunching concentration.

Emmanuel Robles, age 9, was all business during class but told me afterward that he was having a lot of fun. What does he like best? “The beats and how playing violin keeps me on track and out of trouble.”

Raven Garcia, also 9, said that learning to play will give her a chance to audition at Greiner Exploratory Arts Academy. “And they might say yes,” she exclaimed.

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Eight-year-old Mayte Mendoza summed up what many of the kids said about their music: “It makes me and other people happy.”

Estrella Hernandez teams with a classmate for a group exercise as the two students practice...
Estrella Hernandez teams with a classmate for a group exercise as the two students practice their violin technique at Zaragoza Elementary School.(Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

Melki’s approach is grounded not just in teaching music but in creating hope. Each step of instruction lays the foundation for students to internalize high expectations for themselves and to feel the success of meeting one goal after another.

The parents of the children learning violin are almost as special to Melki as the kids themselves. They help with field trips, serve food, provide rides and volunteer every chance they get.

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Melki’s projects include a social entrepreneurship venture called Dallas Music Collective; its community events bring in money to help sustain the Ubuntu Music Project.

The core of her mission is to see music programs thrive nationally in urban school settings. Next month, she’ll present her strategies in a session at the Texas Music Educators Association convention in San Antonio and eventually she wants to be a consultant for urban districts in search of effective models.

Melki told me she’s certain some of the students she’s taught at Zaragoza will become music educators themselves and carry their own stories with them. “My hope and prayer is that they would go back into urban schools and continue to create waves of first-generation violinists.”

It’s not lost on Melki that if her refugee father was trying to flee to America in today’s climate, she’d likely not have the Ubuntu story to tell. “We refugee families are tenacious people who have survived a lot and because of that tenacity, we have a lot to offer to the world.”

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In Melki’s case, she’s not just teaching violin, she’s working toward systematic change.

For more information about the Ubuntu Music Project, contact Melki through UbuntuMusicProject.org.