So far we have had three concerts; Cape Town, Grahamstown,
& Durban. All of them have been awesome, although extremely different,
experiences.
Cape Town:
In Cape
Town we arrived at the enormous concert hall (unheated, of course) and began
our pre-concert work. The men all sang in an afternoon rehearsal while the
media team set up their cameras and cords, the ladies worked on registration
and other important concert-related details. Others prepared food, and I ran to
and fro giving sick people water and cough drops, helping Connie, and for a
while I was preoccupied with taking apart one of the staff ladies’ scarves and re-sewing
it into two because we had ended up one short.
When
the concert was about to start, we had only a few hundred people in the
audience, if that. Despite this, the men began to sing, and people never
stopped coming in late. I was helping one of the media guys on a videocamera
and was right next to the stage. The audience was very much enjoying the songs,
although they were all in English, and none were South African.
Mokale
(the South African conductor) changed places with Lou in order to direct a
South African song, and the polite applause the audience had given for the
English songs rapidly turned into cheers, whistles, dancing, and singing along
as the chorus sang Bawo, Uthando, Siyahamba,
and some of our other songs in African languages. Bawo particularly was a favorite; more than half the audience were
on their feet dancing, ululating high and shrill, waving their arms, and
singing along. It was hard not to join them! The atmosphere was infectious. The
white men in the chorus had in rehearsals been quite reserved when Mokale tried
to get them to move a bit during the African songs, but now with the audience
cheering them on, even the most staid gentlemen were swaying, smiling, and
really getting into the music.
Although
we had to skip one song due to the soloist, Gary Parks, being unable to sing (about
a half dozen guys couldn’t sing due to illness) the concert as a whole was
quite successful and raised the mens’ morale considerably.
Grahamstown:
Grahamstown
was cold. Very, very cold. It was also pouring down rain when we arrived;
everyone got quite damp, if not soaked, just on the trek between the buses and
the frigid venue. The concert hall was unheated (of course). All of the guys
were on the stage shivering in their street clothes through rehearsal, voices
were strained, everyone was stressed out. The guys with really short hair or
that were bald got the coldest, or so it appeared; Ramon with his half-knit
half-fur hat was probably the warmest.
One of
the men, Bob Taylor, who is nearly bald and shaves the rest, was sitting in the
audience just shaking. His arms were wrapped around himself, and I swear he was
an unnatural shade of blue. I was chilly myself in my concert attire: slacks
and a black blouse. My coat, scarf and hat were too damp for me to want to wear
them, so I was wearing Estee’s white fuzzy vest and was wrapped up in my travel
blanket, but I was pretty comfortable and certainly wasn’t as cold as Bob. I
walked up behind his seat and wrapped my blanket around his head and shoulder.
Instantly he said “ooooh, Bless you!” as I did so, and for the rest of the evening he proclaimed to many people that I
was ‘an Angel of mercy’.
Then
the lights went out. The mens chorus collectively gasped, grumbled, then
continued practicing. Now it was rainy, cold, wet, and pitch black. We hoped
that the power would come back on in time for the concert to start. The
scheduled time for that was only about forty-five minutes away, and the men had
not changed their clothes or eaten yet. Ariana Parks (a lovely young lady who
came along as the administrative intern) and I shortly thereafter organized the
sandwiches and fruit we had brought along from our last lodging place and
called the guys up to eat. By the time they had done so, it was past time for
the concert to start. The lights were still out, but a few people had arrived
for the concert already, so the men lined up at the base of the wide staircase
leading down to the foyer, and the audience all sat or stood on the steps.
There,
in the dark, with flashlights shining on the various conductors so that the men
could see the movements of their white-gloved hands, shivering and cold, the
chorus gave the possibly most memorable concert in history. Right as the last
songs from the first half of a normal concert started, the lights re-appeared!
Impromptu cheering rose up from the audience, then they settled down to listen
to the song Khutso (spelling?)
started up. This is a song in an African language that asks “Why are we killing
one another?” and has a plea for peace. Part way through a song a soprano steps
in singing an overlay to the music that counterparts the African side of the
song. It weaves together beautifully, and knowing what the words means while
listening to the song makes shivers go up my spine every time I hear it.
Directly
following Khutso, the chorus moved
into the auditorium in order to collect their things, and the entire audience
followed them in and sat down. The chorus saw that they wanted some more, and
arranged themselves on the platform to sing a few more some. More than ¾ of the
guys were in their street clothes, and they looked decidedly less than
professional. Lou, right as he raised his hands to start conducting the first
song stopped, leaned towards the guys and said “Well, I never thought I’d see
this sight,” referring to the attire of his chorus. They all laughed and
continued the concert. Needless to say, the last three songs that the chorus
was were rather anticlimactic, but still quite good.
After
the concert was ended, we all loaded the buses as quickly as possible and drove
2 hours to our next lodging which was midway between Grahamstown and Durban.
Durban:
By this
time it seemed like everyone was either already sick, coming down with a
sickness, recovering from a sickness, or was in imminent danger of catching a
sickness. Ariana Parks had just spent the bus ride throwing up for no apparent
reason, I had a scratchy throat, both soloist singers were half sick, and
Warren had just barely recovered from his kidney stones which he had suffered
from earlier in the trip. We got to Durban on the night of Wednesday 8 August,
and morale was extremely low. We were tired of being cold, tired of being too
hot, and tired of sleeping on the bus.
The leadership then made a very
smart move. We had been scheduled to do two
concerts in Durban on the same day; one at 10am and one at 3pm. The leadership
canceled the first concert, let everyone sleep in for a few hours, than took
everyone to the beach.
Now it is winter in South Africa,
but Durban is to SA what Florida or SoCal is to the USA. It was warm outside. The water of the Indian
Ocean was blue-green and warm. Some of the distinguished old members of the
chorus stripped down to their boxers and trotted into the water. The teen boys
largely left their clothes on, but went genuinely swimming and showed up at the
Debonairs pizza place wet, salty, happy and ravenous. An Idahoan young adult
expressed his surprise at just how salty the water was, having only been in the
ocean once before, and hadn’t tasted the water then.
Didier Hepker and I did our level
best to rent surfboards and spend a bit of time getting soaked, but the shop
lady was unkind and refused to rent us boards without also selling us a lesson,
which we did not have enough time for. We settled for getting damp nearly to
the waist by wading deep enough in the surf for the waves to throw sand a
considerable distance up my dress.
We only spent a little over an hour
at the seaside, but it was enough. Ariana, though she hadn’t eaten in almost a
day was playing in the water and waves (I kept expecting her to run out of
energy and dissolve into a little unconscious puddle) and even had some good
color in her face. Our coughing and throat-weary guys were laughing and eating
milkshakes. It was exactly what the doctor ordered. Although I don’t know
whether our trip doctor actually recommended this or not.
From the ocean we headed straight
to the concert venue; a grand cathedral. It was most beautiful inside. Stained
glass, carvings, vaulted ceiling; this was built straight to Gothic
specifications right in the middle of Africa. The chorus filed into the third
story choir loft and sang from above like a mostly-in-tune angelic host. The
beauty of having a nearly 200 person chorus is that there so many people
singing the right notes that no one notices the sick people are a tiny bit
flat.
Both of the soloists sang their
pieces of the songs Go Down, Moses, and
The Midnight Cry, and they sounded
fantastic. Both songs were audience favorites, although as usual, the African songs
totally trumped any of the ones in English. Bawo
always has people dancing in the aisles.
During this concert Rick had turned
over his fancy new camera to me with the request that I take pictures, so I
prowled about the corridors and shot people to my heart’s content. There was
one little old lady who was adorable. She was small, slight, and all her
clothes looked light and draped long and slender on her. She had a thin piece
of green cloth on her head that was pinned under her chin and fell to her waist
on either side. She came in and sat down on one side of the cathedral and,
clasping a pamphlet in both hands, looked up to the choir loft with a rapturous
expression on her face.
I kept sneaking around trying to
get shots of her inconspicuously because she had noticed me taking pictures of
her a few times before, and that spoils the point of sneaking around to take
pictures.
The queen of the place was a heavy
black lady in a long dress that looked Indian-inspired. She sat like a pariah
in the back of the cathedral (which was normally the front; we turned all the
pews around to face the choir loft) and loudly scolded everyone who walked
across the raised carpeted area which was apparently a ‘sacred’ place where
non-ordained feet are not supposed to walk. I think she got tired of that after
a half hour or so, because people were constantly walking everywhere. She moved
to an area of the cathedral where seeing the platform was impossible and studiously
paid attention from thereafter only to the choir loft. Her name, I believe, was
“Pinky”. Personally, I don’t think that name suited her at all. Her manner was
that of a matriarch that knows her power over the people is absolute, and
ignores the occasions in which her authority is disproven.
We have only one concert left,
tomorrow night in Johannesburg, then we depart on Sunday evening. It is really
unbelievable that we have been here over two weeks already. At the same time,
it feels as though I have lived here forever. Two more days to change Africa.
You can help! Hint, hint.
Friends, it has been said “Ask, and
you will receive.” I have been asking, and am (not so) blissfully unaware of if
I have received since arriving in Africa or not. The truth is that I could not
have come on this trip without the rather miraculous funds I received that
allowed me to purchase a plane ticket, and there is no way that I can afford to
pay for the rest of the trip once I get back without a lot of fundraising. It
is so much harder to fundraise for something that already happened then for an
upcoming trip that one can be infectiously excited to being going on shortly.
I’ve said before that the $1,500 or
so that I did not raise before leaving could be covered by only 150 people each
donating $10, or by 75 donating $20 each, and so on. It isn’t much to you, but
it’s everything to me.
Remember that I’m not asking for
money for a trip of my own enjoyment; we’re here trying to change the world!
This entire trip is going to be turned into a show that will be broadcast on
the Trinity network, and it will be seen in dozens of countries, including
South Africa and the US.
We are here with a message of
racial unity for the entire world. A group of nearly 200 men of various races,
ethnicities, and ages. We span the age spectrum from a 16 year old Hawaiian boy
to a 86 year old Washingtonian man who has had three strokes in the last three
years and still traveled over 20 hours by plane in order to gain the privilege
of traveling dozens more hours by bus. All of this was to share the message
with the world!
One concert left to change the world.
This is going to be awesome.
Donation Information:
Checks can be made out to “OAMC” and mailed to:
OAMC
5575 Fruitvale RD NE
Salem, OR 97317-3334
(In order for your donation
to be tax deductible, my name cannot be anywhere on the check. You can include
a note that says “The OAMC member who asked me to donate is Sarah Herbert” and
it will be put towards my mission.)
HOWEVER, there is an
easier way to donate, and it's via debit or credit card. It is also probably
the easiest and fastest way to make a donation. The instructions can be found
here, http://www.oamc.org/PayOnline.pdf
And here is the link to the page where you can make the donation: https://www.wallawalla.edu/epayment/index.php/payment/
If you would like to see OAMC’s official blog of the trip,
that can be found at http://oamcnews.blogspot.com/
