Song for the Children
Every film needs an “elevator pitch”–a condensed description that can survive the length of an elevator ride with the film executive you didn’t expect to meet. In the U.S., connecting music (and specifically spirituals) with a humanitarian cause requires an unusually pithy elevator pitch. Americans are more used to thinking of music as a consumable item and musicians purely as entertainers. But what has struck me here in Africa is how many of the exceedingly talented local musicians we’ve met are also connected to the cause of children orphaned or affected by HIV/AIDS. To them, it’s natural. And a very high percentage of these musicians are also pastors, caring for these children and splintered families on a more daily basis.
In one of our interviews in Zambia, I spoke to man who graduated from college in the early ’80s. By 1985, many of his friends were dying of a mysterious disease that was later identified as HIV/AIDS. As a result, he is one of the few middle-aged men of his generation in Zambia. It’s a sobering thought, but he and his wife are working hard to make sure their own sons survive to middle-age, as well.–Carolyn McCulley
(The band plays for the children who attend Lighthouse Christian School in Ndola, Zambia, which is an outreach into poorer neighborhoods near Ndola.)