New Direction?

So, I tried to add a few photos, but am having trouble. The internet keeps timing out before I can get them uploaded. Will try again later, but wanted to share a new thing I'm working on here. As I said in my description of the Malawi Music Project, the experience was absolutely incredible for me, and I have decided to try to pursue such activities full time during my time here in Malawi. I have been in contact with a music NGO based in Lilongwe (capital city) called Music Crossroads International (link here:). I first contacted them and went to visit their office back in July of last year to introduce myself and see if they had any interest in being involved with our Music Project. Although we weren't able to swing anything for the project, I have stayed in contact with them and always inquire about what they are doing/direction they are heading. So, after my experience with our music camp, I have decided that I would like to work with Music Crossroads full time in Lilongwe. I contacted the director of Music Crossroads and he said that they would love to have me come be a part of what they are doing. How can I do that from Chitipa (the Northernmost district in the country)??? Can't. It would mean that I would relocate from Chitipa to Lilongwe for the remainder of my service. So I have presented my idea to my boss, who has promised to talk about it with our country director. We have also scheduled a meeting with the director of Music Crossroads, myself, and my boss next Friday to discuss how it might be worked out. Its not a yes yet, but I feel fairly confident that it is possible. It feels so great to finally find something that I am truly passsionate about and am hopeful that I might pursue it here where it is so needed. After telling my friend Jo about it, she said,"You should write a manifesto to state your case to Peace Corps." I thought it was a great idea, but of course, didn't know how to write. Jo, without being asked, decided to take it upon herself to put to paper what we had discussed. The following manifesto pretty much sums up why I feel this project is important and beneficial here in Malawi:


Jo's Music Manifesto

It’s hard to get lost and still feel safe, to not know where you are, but to feel comfortable in not knowing, to not know what comes next but to find that exciting and right. There is something about this kind of getting lost that if you can find, it guarantees a certain comfort, a comfort that rests in the fact that the world is unfair and filled with lost, but that one can feel, and feel safe in the face of lost, in the face of a world that presents so many ways to get lost. It’s easy to feel a certain non-existence in a world that often seems to want to crush the existence of so much. It’s easy to feel numb in a world that is degrading and filled with injustice. It’s easy to lose the need for responsibility when you feel nothing at all, when you have numbed yourself to the inequalities and unfairness that composes so much of the world. And maybe that’s why feeling in the face of so much numbness, feeling real in front of the continual push to not exist is incredible, though hard to achieve. But possible and easily attainable often in art and specifically through the art form of music. In the pursuit of social change people lose their grounding, they lose faith, they lose hope in their work to preserve what so many work to destroy and not only work to destroy but succeed in destroying.

Organizations, individuals, governments, and volunteers all work tirelessly on forming ideas, on implementing plans, and on attempting sustainability of a change they see the world needs. And so much fails often because people lose their hope, they lose the energy, and most importantly they lose the ability to sustain and ground themselves and with this loss comes the loss of development. This loss leads to numbness and people assume it’s a result of their failed efforts, the result of being part of a world that often offers little and takes a lot. Not only do people lose feeling they lose the need for feeling and without that, little change takes place, inspiration shrivels and a needed creativity dies.

Music allows people to feel and not only allows but demands it. An offered escape that finds feelings even if nothing on the outside offers up any, or any reason to feel. And that gives people motivation to change. To change because they feel something for no reason, and they don’t mind the lack of reason. Music commands feeling and commands a force and with this, people have unfounded hope to instigate change and unfounded hope is the most sustainable kind. A kind of hope that is unbreakable as it unfounded in the first place; there is no way to challenge it, in the same way that the feelings brought on by music are unchallengeable therefore making music a key instigator in social change, one that grounds, prompts, and activates a way of feeling that people can work from.

In every type of work; in environmental work, in social action, in HIV/AIDS work, health, and education, there is a great lack of creativity, and a lack of sustainability. Organizing for social change does not exist in a sole pursuit of projects and proposals, but in an attempt to find grounding and meaning beyond what the world offers. And in order to do that there must be representations of beauty that exist beyond words and that provide sustainability through feeling anything but numb. One can pursue many projects, one can plant a million trees, start a thousand programs on HIV/AIDS prevention, but none of these will survive without the feeling that they survive in the face of all the injustices the world presents, and this feeling can only exist if the leaders of the projects, the programs, and the planters of the trees feel it too. To work for the environment and the world people have to learn also how to work for each other and inherent in this, is a need to work for oneself and to feel this without explanation, which often can only be done with the motivation of a song or a tune. The world presents a complexity of challenges and we fire back with a complexity of answers, but nothing will be sustained without a self-grounding that exists beyond complexity and instead in a realm of unexplained beauty and a feeling of being real.

Play to feel, feel to change, change to feel.

You rock, Jo!
I'll let everyone know how things turn out next weekend hopefully.
Peace