(MENAFN- The Peninsula)
Washington Post
The violin's quaver steadied and swelled through the gloomy concrete staircase, escaped through the wire mesh and soared over the packed-dirt playground before dissipating in the acrid smoke drifting in from the smoldering dump site next door.
It was the last day of class before Ghetto Classics broke up for Christmas, and 14-year-old Steve Otieno was practicing his Christmas carols for his final performance of 2024. Undeterred by the demolition of his home last month, the floods that devastated his neighborhood in Nairobi this year, or the eye-watering stink of burning plastic all around him, he stroked the strings to coax forth each note of "Joy to the World.”
"Music makes me feel calm when I'm stressed,” he said shyly. "Some people have drugs. For me, it is music.”
Steve is one of thousands of children from the poorest neighborhoods of the Kenyan capital who have been introduced to classical music by Ghetto Classics.
The organization was set up in 2008 by Elizabeth Njoroge,a classically trained singer who studied pharmacology at her parents' urging but longed to return to music. A chance encounter with a priest trying to fund a basketball court at a Catholic school in the Nairobi slum of Korogocho inspired her to raise money for the first class of musicians there. They chose the name "Ghetto Classics” to highlight their roots.
Maurine Kweyu Mukabana, 19, has studied violin for two years. "When I watched people playing, I felt good, so I wanted to feel the same,” she said. (Photo by Malin Fezehai for The Washington Post)
"Everyone deserves to have the power of music in their lives, no matter where they are born,” she said.
Now Ghetto Classics provides lessons to about 1,000 students, who feed three orchestras, a choir and a dance group. Njoroge raises funds to support its expanding programs.
Ghetto Classics works in schools and community centers in Nairobi and Mombasa, but its headquarters is in the St. John compound in Korogocho, where a church, school and community all share space. A tarmacked basketball court and a dirt field for soccer are enclosed by a sagging chain-link fence and scraggly trees; on one side of the compound, the children have planted a garden to try to filter out the choking smoke.
Ghetto Classics has performed for former president Barack Obama, first lady Jill Biden and Pope Francis. Alumni are studying in the United States, Britain and Poland. They include one determined pianist who learned to play by watching videos and repeating the motions on a piece of cardboard on which he'd drawn keys.
The lessons provide a refugee for students suffering from hunger, domestic violence and crime, said violin instructor David Otieno,who is not related to Steve. He joined the program a decade ago as a student; now he's one of 45 graduates working as paid instructors.
The tall, dreadlocked 29-year-old credits Ghetto Classics with saving him from the neighborhood gangs. He witnessed his first homicide when he was still in primary school, and as he grew up, the gangs sucked in friend after friend. His teachers became so worried he'd be killed, he said, that they collected money to move his mother and six siblings to a safer neighborhood where he could continue his music.
Back then, he said, the group shared 10 violins among 30 students. Now he has his own instrument. Once shy and fearful, he has played in Poland, in the United States and at State House, the Kenyan president's home in Nairobi.
"The violin gives you a voice,” he said. "It makes you talk to people you'd never otherwise talk to.” His students filed into the compound bumping fists.
Thousands of kids enroll in Ghetto Classics, but most fall away. The discipline is demanding. Some end up as scavengers next door in Nairobi's 30-acre Dandora dump, a towering pile where excavators perch like storks on peaks of rubbish. One of the world's largest unregulated landfills, it was officially shut down nearly 30 years ago, but dump trucks still arrive daily to unload fresh waste.
The United Nations says local kids have high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in their blood. Some days, the stench of burning plastic is to strong that the brass section can't draw the breath to blow.
Some students become pregnant and drop out. The hallway is hung with posters on how to respond to sexual assault. A footbridge nearby has been nicknamed "Rape Bridge” for the number of assaults there. One talented saxophonist, whose departure everyone laments, turned to crime.
But program leaders aim to help when they can. One girl's mother was jailed for dealing drugs; the girl took over the business to feed her siblings. Program leaders offered to pay her rent, food and school fees if she'd give it up.
The deal has worked so far, said Peter Kuria, the social worker who supports the musicians. But the mom is due to be released soon, and they don't know what will happen. Ghetto Classics itself nearly shut down this year during a funding crisis.
Members of the Ghetto Classics orchestra rehearse. (Photo by Malin Fezehai for The Washington Post)
About a dozen young musicians who spoke to The Washington Post said their parents had never seen them perform. Some were single parents too busy working, some weren't interested, and some were actively opposed.
One young dancer and his sister sneaked into Ghetto Classics dance lessons for three years before their mother found out, music director Erick Ochieng said.
When she discovered the deception, she stormed into a lesson, cursed the instructor and beat the children in front of their fellow students. A couple of years and many interventions later, he said, she grudgingly permitted them to return. The boy has such talent that he has won a scholarship to study at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles.
When opera singer David Mwenje started with Ghetto Classics, his father was skeptical, he said, but he came to see him perform and was won over - a bittersweet memory to which Mwenjeclings now that his father has died.
Mwenje sang for six years, including for Pope Francis at the Vatican, before turning professional in 2021. His first audition landed him the role of Okoth - a messenger who must tell a village medicine man that his daughter has taken up with foreign missionaries - in "Nyanga: Runaway Grandmother” with Baraka Opera Kenya at the Kenya National Theatre. It was the first ray of hope in years darkened by his father's death and the covid pandemic that shuttered his school, he said.
"Through this opera, I could control all my pain,” he said. "I also love to sing 'Bring Him Home,' from 'Les Misérables,' because the song reminds me of my dad and I feel like I'm pleading with God to bring him home.”
Mwenje is one of many Ghetto Classics students for whom the organization arranged a professional mentor to provide lessons during the pandemic.
Mentors often have to struggle to make lessons work. Steve, the 14-year-old violinist, spent 18 months being coached by the Polish violinist Michal Buczkowski. After months of weekly lessons over a shaky internet connection, they discovered that the best reception was in the school kitchen. So Steve would take his violin there after lunch and show Michal his finger movements on WhatsApp.
Students still share violins, so Steve couldn't practice anywhere but school.
Buczkowski and Steve performed onstage together this month for the first time at a concert organized by the Polish Embassy in Nairobi. Steve showed up four hours early, with his mum, sister and little brother sitting shyly near the back of the empty rows of seats in the hotel's rooftop bar. As Steve warmed up, 2-year-old brother Brian clapped. "Moja! Moja!” he cried - "More! More!”
Gradually, the evening light faded. Earrings and wine glasses clinked and sparkled.
The performance began. Notes from the Bach concertos and the Christmas carols danced through the bar's red baubles and frosted snowflakes and floated out over the constellation of city lights below. After duets of "Silent Night” and "Joy to the World,” Buczkowski reached for a sleek black case. Inside was Steve's Christmas present: His own violin.
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