By Our Reporter
As part of the Fête de la Musique (World Music Day) celebration, the French NGO Voices Without Borders (Voix Sans Frontères – VSF) together with Children of Peace Uganda and Alliance Française Kampala are organising a children’s concert slated for this evening(June 14) at the French School. In honor of the youth, Eddy Kenzo will grace the stage with the Ghetto Kids to close the night. The event will also feature a performance from Giovanni Kiyingi Kremer.
Voices Without Borders (VSF) and Children of Peace Uganda is a project focused on using music as a tool of repair and resilience for the children and adolescent escapees in the Bidi-Bidi camp-Uganda and former LRA abductees in northern Uganda’s district of Lira.
Singing is a way of enabling the youth to find joy and the energy to surmount the trauma and shock of exile and displacement. VSF believes in the power of the song to repair and enhance resilience. Song liberates the person to find what is essential, to feel that one inhabits the body despite the wounds and traumas. To learn to breathe for song is to exist in a different way. Song can be the process to self-repair and resilience.
As Boris Cyrulnik said, ‘resilience is a means for the body to resist pressure, and regain the former self. This is both physical and psychological. Psychologically, resilience is the capacity to live and succeed despite adversity.’
VSF seeks to establish a practice of choir song thereby enabling the youth to find joy and the energy to surmount the trauma and shock of exile and displacement.
Eddy Kenzo has been invited to this concert in recognition of his use of music as a tool to uplift the ghetto children in Uganda.