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Adams Musical Instruments - Together in Music
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Adams blokfluiten in Kenia

26 Oktober 2016

De Duitste muziekdocente Lena Frenken benaderde ons enkele maanden geleden voor sponsoring van een muziekproject in Nairobi, Kenia. Ze was daar afgelopen zomer voor 2 maanden als vrijwilligster aan de slag voor MYTO (Mathare Youth Talented Organization, een organisatie die projecten organiseert voor kinderen. MYTO beheert enkele scholen en een kliniek in Kenia. Adams ging graag in op haar verzoek en stelde 30 blokfluiten beschikbaar voor haar project.

Adams sponsors thirty recorders that travel the world

My name is Lena Frenken and I study mathematics and music in order to become a teacher. During summer this year, I travelled to Nairobi in Kenya for two months to do a social project in Mathare, the second biggest slum in Nairobi. I worked with the organization MYTO (Mathare Youth Talented Organization), which develops music and dance projects, a school and a clinic to help the people living in Mathare. The music and dance projects are especially for children who don’t have the possibility to go to school.

Before I travelled there, I had the idea to take recorders to teach the kids some basic music elements. So I asked Peter Swinkels, who was really dedicated and decided to sponsor thirty recorders for teaching poor children in Kenya. I felt so happy and thankful about this.

I took half of the flutes to the slum Mathare, where I taught small groups of five children in the age of six to twelve. We started with a small amount of different notes and practised how to hold the flute correctly, how to cover the right holes, and repeated rhythms that someone had played.  We then continued with reading the table that was included with every recorder. With this table, the children were able to continue learning more notes, reading them in the staves and pronouncing them in the way of solmisation. Furthermore, I practised short songs with the notes that they already knew. I could see the joy and the positive energy the children spread through making music and learning something new everyday. All of them were so committed and practised a lot in the office of the organization where I left the recorders.

Besides teaching the children, I also explained how to play the recorder to the leader of the music project so that he is able to continue the recorder lessons in future.

I took the other half of the recorders to Mombasa, which is located at the coast of Kenya. I knew that there is an orphanage in Mombasa called Mji Wa Salama Children's Home. In the last week of my travels, I brought the flutes to the orphanage and again I could see very happy, thankful, and enthusiastic kids. Because there is a school included in this orphanage, they had a teacher who is able to teach the recorders.

All in all, Adams gave the opportunity to spread music, communicate without words and make children joy- and thankful in really poor parts of Kenya.

Thank you so much for offering this possibility to me, it was a pleasure!