We’re spending our last night in the guest house at the Margaret Okari School tonight before moving along to the Masai Mara. We spent about eight hours a day recording many different student singers in lots of different variations. We recorded large singing choirs, smaller vocal groups, duets, soloists and even some songs written by Grimis and our friends. We could not be more excited about what this album is shaping up to be and the good it has the chance to do for the Okari School and these amazing kids.
The school and the Andover Youth Services crew also wants to give a huge thanks to those people from back home who donated education supplies, art supplies and clothes to the students and thank Pete’s mom for the special dolls she made for the kids.
The past three days with the students of the Margaret Okari School have been really profound. These kids are unbelievable in their enthusiasm, their spirit and their wisdom. At some point there will be time to collect all of our thoughts on this experience, but for now, a few enlightening tales from Africa:
***Yesterday Andy went down to a tree on the Okari School land with a number of the students and their music teacher Jared Andamo. Mr. Andamo told the assembled group, Only those of you telling stories can stay; the rest must go now. Andy said a little girl got up and said, I have a story, God can count all the hairs on your head…Thank you.
***Grimis has assembled a small All-Star group of singers who helped us record two of our newer songs, “Four Years” and “White Apples and the Taste of Stone” as well as a song by a friend of ours, “Melanie,” and a Paul Simon cover. Their ability to grasp the songs and sing them with such love and conviction is startling. Their sweet accented English sounds so pure and untouched. It is really beautiful. Also, it seems like every single kid in this school has an incredible sense of inner rhythm. They are loving the beats Pete has been dropping on the congas.
My favorite moment of the recording sessions came today when we taught a small group Paul Simon’s “Born at the Right Time.” It was very moving to hear these students, most of them orphaned after AIDS took their parents, singing the words Never been lonely/Never been lied to/Never had to scuffle in fear/Nothing denied to/Born at the instant the church bells chimed/The whole world whispering/You’re born at the right time. The reality, it would seem, is that these kids have most certainly been lonely and fearful and had very much---friends, family, material goods---denied them. But spending a few days with these kids made it clear that the words to that song couldn’t ring truer. And where do myself and our crew fit in? I’ll let Paul Simon say it best: Me and my buddies, we are travelling people.
***Peg Campbell and Glenn Wilson, both past visitors to the Okari School, advised us as to what a force of nature the school’s founder Kwamboka Okari is and they were very right. This afternoon she took us to visit the village elders a little ways down the road from the school. We went to a man named Tom’s house and walked through his backyard into his home where five very old men sat on wooden chairs at the back of the room with a number of younger locals sitting on stools around the room.
Tom welcomed us and we all ate the bread and drank the sodas we had brought. Then the elders spoke to us through translators. One old man said that when he was growing up if he saw a white man coming, he would run in the other direction. He never imagined a day when white people would come into his village as revered guests. The younger people’s respect for their elders was palpable. Many of the elders spoke of their desire to visit America. One said he wanted to travel to America and pick up his education where he had left off in Kenya decades ago.
The concept of America among the students and villagers is fascinating. I wonder what many of them might think upon finally arriving in our country and seeing a land of shopping malls and super highways? Theirs seems like an America of the mind just as our conception of Africa was an Africa of the mind before we came here and saw some of it for ourselves.
***A little girl came up to Pete today and said “Are you leaving tomorrow?” “Yes,” said Pete. “We will miss you very much.”
***Our friend Mark is going to be really psyched that a cadre of Kenyan school children now know all the words to his song “Melanie.” They even asked me to write out all the lyrics for them to keep. They now know where Nantucket is.
***Bill brought one of the elders a poster of President Obama. The villagers all erupted in applause and two old men rose and cheered. Bill had promised to bring a poster back upon his return to the village. “You are a good man,” one of the elders said to him. “You kept your promise.”
Lots of photos and videos to come…stay tuned. Off to the Masai Mara tomorrow to see more beautiful sights and get up close with some animals.
