He woke up on the hard-packed dirt floor of his make-shift cardboard box hut as he had so many times before to the sound of a woman’s terrified screaming. Sabiiti, only eight years-old and living on his own, looked through the opening of his hovel to see the source of the screaming being dragged from another stained and barely standing hut by her hair, her arms and legs flailing in a vain attempt to ward off her attackers. Three men in bedraggled military uniforms, belts festooned with an array of weapons â€" guns, knives and machetes â€" laughed and jeered at the woman as they hauled her into the open.
Inside the hut they were dragging her from, a boy younger than Sabiiti, watched in horror as his mother was taken by the men. His eyes wide, his expression one of shock, confusion and ultimately resignation, the boy, at the tender age of six, understood that this was the last he would ever see of his mother.
During the Ugandan Civil War, this scene played out countless times leaving hundreds of thousands of children orphaned and on their own in the vast slums of Kampala and other cities. Their stories are heart-breaking and plentiful, the atrocities perpetrated on them horrifying and inhuman and yet, even in the squalor of their existence, some of these children have risen above the abject poverty to come to greatness with the help of the African Children’s Choir.
Last night I had the opportunity and privilege of attending a performance of this remarkable choir. Consisting of children between the ages of seven and twelve, from a cross-section of poverty-stricken African nations, the African Children’s Choir offers the hope of a meaningful, rewarding and fruitful life to the children who participate. The group operates several schools as well as the choir and provides a safe learning environment in which students can learn to be the next generation of leaders to a new and better Africa.
The children perform with such energy and joyfulness it is impossible to not be swept along with the performance in a mixture of African and Western songs. The smiles of these ambassadors are beautiful and infectious. These orphans and street children, taken in by the Choir, have more life in them than their small bodies can contain. Their voices merge into a single resounding voice of hope and love and purpose.
Having come from such overbearing poverty that many of these children went days between meals, slept in the dirt and filth of the ghettos and were cast out by their own people, it is hard to imagine that since the Choir began in 1983 many have gone on to become doctors and lawyers and meaningful members of society in Africa. But, that is the success of the choir; it is not just a group of beautifully talented children singing to grateful audiences across the United States and Europe. It is also an organization which strives to help the most vulnerable of Africa’s inhabitants â€" the forgotten children.
For more information visit the Choir’s website at: http://www.africanchildrenschoir.com.