Once again, my friend Jill came through with another good find. She sent this along a while back and as much as I loved the video I just hadn’t gotten around to posting it. Yesterday though, I was listening to an NPR podcast when a story about this very project popped up and I couldn’t help but be inspired once again.
Producer Mark Johnson heard a musician named Rodger Rigley playing ‘Stand by me’ on the streets of Santa Monica CA one afternoon. He was so inspired by the mans voice and the the song that he asked if he could come back with a camera and some recording equipment to capture him playing. Johnson took this first recording and morphed it into a collection of street musicians from all over the world playing the same song together. All connected though a single song. It’s a beautiful thing.
Over the past few years there has been a new brand of charitable organization helping people around the world: the microloan charity. It works like this: Individuals around the world are given small loans ($350, $500, even $1000 us) to help begin or improve a business. The money comes in the form of a small loan of as little as $25 US from many people in many countries. The individual then improves their situation and consequently pays back the loans.
Kiva is the first one of these programs I came across a few years ago, and after looking at their website they have come a long way in that time! Go take look and read the journals that debcribe each recipient and how they used their loan. There are about 2400 PAGES of recipients and nearly all of them have payed back their loans.
Mr. Obama told them: “I can’t tell you how many people have come up to Michelle and myself and said, ‘You know, I was kind of skeptical, but then my daughter, she wouldn’t budge, she just told me I needed to vote for Obama.’ Or, ‘Suddenly I saw my son, he was out volunteering and knocking on doors and traveling and getting involved like never before.’ And so new generations inspired previous generations, and that’s how change happens in America.”
He said this applied not just to campaigns but to service, like teaching or joining the Peace Corps.
“And as this is broadcast all around the world,” he added, “we know that young people everywhere are in the process of imagining something different than what has come before. Where there is war, they imagine peace. Where there is hunger, they imagine people being able to feed themselves. Where there is disease, they imagine a public health system that works for everybody. Where there is bigotry, they imagine togetherness. The future will be in your hands if you are able to sustain the kind of energy and focus that you showed on this campaign. I promise you that America will get stronger and more united, more prosperous, more secure — you are going to make it happen, and Michelle and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
K’Naan is a Somali-Canadian Rapper and Poet. He left Somalia at the age of 14 to come to the US and then on to Canada. During his youth he witnessed terrible things: murder, rape, continuous violence. His story, at least to someone like me- US resident, middle class, white – is like something out of a movie. Can I really relate to what he’s been through? At first glance probably not. But if you dig a little deeper his story is also universal: Out of hardship, out of darkness, there can be beauty. There can be love, and there can be light. It’s just your choice to find it right?
African rapper K’Naan once blew up half his school with a hand grenade. Now he’s using music to push for peace. Jane Cornwell met him
Somali rapper K’Naan fired his first gun at the age of eight. At 11, he found a hand grenade, detonated it by mistake and blew up half his school. At 12, he was running through the streets of Mogadishu after seeing his three best friends shot dead.
As the civil war escalated – it rages in Somalia to this day – he saw riots, rapes, mob rule. He watched his neighbourhood turn from a coastal idyll to “The River of Blood”, named by the UN as “the worst place on earth”. His mother walked through gunfire to the US Embassy to get her family a visa. K’Naan Warsame was 14 when they left in January, 1991. Theirs was the last ever commercial flight out.
I thought for quite a while about whether to include this video and his story on this blog. After all, this is a blog about positive uplifting things. But I also know that often, the people looking for something uplifting are also the ones peeking out from sort of darkness in their lives. I guess the point is: Sometimes the darkness makes the light even more potent, even brighter than it would be alone…
“I want to show that change doesn’t have to be loud and famous, that struggle can become power,” K’Naan says. “And whether it’s the hip-hop crowd or high school kids, everyone seems to get it.”
In the years since his leaving Somalia K’Naan has spoken before the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 1999 he performed a spoken word piece criticizing the UN for their failed aid missions to Somalia.
more info about K’Naan can be found here and here and here.
With the end of the holiday season coming on I’d like to share a story about something amazing B (my husband) and I experienced this year:
Metropolitan Ministries is a local community service that helps homeless and disadvantaged families. Every year they have a food drive to help deliver and serve holidays meal to THOUSANDS of families. We’ve donated money and food every year, but after hearing about how many of the food banks in our area were nearly empty we decided to volunteer a few days too.
Just before Thanksgiving there was an urgent announcement on the radio and on the news: There was going to be no meals for thousands of families. The interview with Morris Hintzman, the President of MM, was heartbreaking. People who had previously given donations were now signing up for assistance for the very first time. There were thousands in need… many on the verge of becoming homeless.
We arrived at 7:30 am to help accept food and donations. What happened over the next 4 hours was nothing short of amazing. There were hundreds of cars coming through the drop off tent. We opened trunks to find twenty or thirty turkeys. People wrote thousand dollar checks and refused to accept a receipt. The thing that amazed me was the variety of people. It didn’t matter if they were in a BMW or a beat up truck, each one said nearly the same thing:
“We heard it on the radio,
we saw it on the television,
and we are bringing what we can.”
Even though nothing donated was for me I felt like a modern day George Bailey.
