Music as Therapy

Showing posts for November 2009 - Show all posts

• 27

  NOV
  2009

  Posted at 16:37

  News from Bethlehem 9

  This week has been very busy indeed.  It is a Muslim holiday here at the moment, so the schools are closed until Tuesday next week.  To compensate for missed days, we have made up some sessions over the past few days, and will be trying to ensure everything is tied up neatly by the time we leave.
   
  Preparing the handbook for staff is our priority at the moment, although it’s a bit difficult to concentrate!  Some of the children who are here in the Village without families or friends to stay with over this holiday are being very boisterous, and keep rushing in as they don’t understand why we are working today! In fact I’ve just been given some sweets to keep me going by a kind little friend.
   
  Talking of food, we’ve been given some amazing meals here in the Village. Earlier in the week we had Cabsa, a rice-based dish containing various spices, sultanas and roast almonds together with chicken.  We have been given the recipe, and also a quantity of spices to enable us to (hopefully) reproduce this when we go home. Another hit was a famous dish called Musakhan.  This is again made with spiced roast chicken, and served on large round pizza type breads called taboon.  It has a sweet fried onion topping made with sumac, a spice derived from the plant of the same name that is deep purple. We recommend it, although beware, it is very filling!

  
   A social worker at SOS village and a music teacher (below).

  

• 22

  NOV
  2009

  Posted at 11:38

  News from Bethlehem 8

  Hannah:
  Yesterday we celebrated the 60th birthday of the SOS organization and we had a great day! The children all went away for a picnic with the SOS school whilst at the village we gathered with the mothers, the aunts, all the people who work for SOS Bethlehem and the Principal and deputy principal of the SOS School to celebrate something that is no doubt being celebrated all over the world. We listened to speeches by the directors here at the village and a visitor from the Ministry of Education in Bethlehem (give me a couple more months of my Arabic studies and I would have understood every word!), ate lots of cake and then all went outside to release 60 balloons painted with the SOS logo into to sky. Seeing everyone celebrate together really highlighted the closeness of this village which has a fantastic family feeling running throughout.

  
  

  
  After a morning off joining in with the celebrations we decided to compensate for all the cake we had eaten by hiking up the hill to Yasser Arafat Street. There we visited Valentine Music Shop and bought many instruments we had decided upon for both the SOS school and the village. Now that we have got to know the staff that we are training very well Liz and I had a play with the instruments in the shop to decide which ones would be most beneficial and how they could be incorporated into the training. We’re really looking forward to adding these to the collection and using them in our upcoming sessions.
  
  Outside our sessions and once all is finished for the day one of the things I enjoy is visiting the houses with my clarinet and having some fun with the children. Having made the mistake initially of trying to entertain ten children in one go I have now got a great system of playing with one child at a time! Yesterday I visited a little friend who is very ill this week and having spoken with his mother we thought a little music might cheer him up. With my clarinet and a couple of the quieter percussion instruments (!) we spent about twenty minutes playing and improvising together and had a few funny conversations in our usual broken Arabic/English way!