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!

   

  

• 19

  NOV
  2009

  Posted at 16:21

  News from Bethlehem 7

  The weather is now well and truly British!  The clear skies at night mean that it is quite chilly here now, and Hannah is feeling the lack of enough warm clothes!  Fortunately, I bought a lovely warm shawl in Jerusalem and a couple of scarves, so may be able to manage for the next two and a half weeks.
   
  It’s been lovely to see our groups and individuals being able to use the therapeutic space in the sessions for creative music-making. Staff  are gradually becoming able to allow pupils to experiment with improvisation, which we think is very brave of them, as none of them are musicians first and foremost.
   
  The students are also very committed to attending their sessions.  One 16 year-old boy yesterday had asked if he could go home as he had a tooth-ache.  On being told, yes, but he would miss his music as therapy group, he immediately changed his mind! Staff were very impressed with this turnaround, as this particular student struggles with the daily routine of school.
   
  The colder weather has also given Hannah and I the excuse of finding more delicious snacks to fill us up.  Yesterday in a break we discovered a lovely little café with filled pita breads, and also bought pastries to eat with our afternoon cup of tea.  Later on this evening, our housemother Aisha will no doubt make us a pot of tea, brewed with sage, the traditional Palestinian way of drinking tea.
   

• 16

  NOV
  2009

  Posted at 11:11

  News from Bethlehem 6

  Hannah:
  After a superb midway break in Jerusalem we are back at the SOS Village and eager to continue the project. Jerusalem is fantastic; we spent most our time in the old town which combines hundreds of market stalls with some of the most interesting and beautiful sights in religious history. Jerusalem has a completely different vibe about it than Bethlehem as it appears to be thriving under constant development (at the moment they’re building a tram network), it is much cleaner and its spaciousness allows the architecture to perhaps have a larger impact. It was very busy though! The old town was heaving with a combination of tourists and local shoppers but the atmosphere, like Bethlehem, was still extremely friendly. We spent much of Saturday in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which is a church built upon the Hill of Calvary where Jesus was crucified and contains the tomb in which Jesus was buried. What I enjoy about the churches we visit here is that they often have more than one chapel and are shared by different religions. Hilariously for me, we were staying in St.Andrews Scots Guest House just outside Jaffa Gate and so coming from St.Andrews, Scotland it almost felt like a home from home!
   
  Our journey back to Bethlehem and through the checkpoint at the Wall was, this time, very quick and easy and we arrived back the village on Sunday afternoon just in time for lunch at SOS house 11, extremely tasty and reminiscent of western tradition – home made pizza! Following this Liz led two very successful sessions with our trainee Nabil and children from the village.
   
  Liz:
  We are now beginning to think about preparing the booklet we will leave here to help staff continue and develop their Music as Therapy work.  As well as containing information we have discussed in meetings with staff, this will also give them a description of activities we have used and ways in which they can build on the techniques they have learned.  I am particularly keen that staff  have the confidence to work with their own particular style; I think this will give them a sense of ownership of the work, and allow it to be sustainable and enjoyable for them.  This means it will become an integral part of their work with the children and young people in both settings.