The Concerts!

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/