As I approach my final project as Cultures in Harmony’s Executive Director, I’m feeling nostalgic and anxious. Nostalgic, because it’s been 22 years of amazing programming. Anxious, because we are about $5,500 short of our goal for Cameroon, where sopranos Tiffany DuMouchelle and Alize Rozsnyai, percussionist Steve Solook, and I will participate in the International Day of Cha Cha Music, an intense music festival in Bonakanda Village on December 30. 

$5,500, coincidentally, is 22 times $250. So, for the next couple months, I’ll be sharing a few memories from each of my 22 years of Cultures in Harmony programming. For a donation of just $250, you can be the SPONSOR of a particular year of memories, and I’ll send you a special donor acknowledgment with even more beautiful, hilarious, and/or poignant memories from 22 years of projects. 

2005

Our first project was a solo visit I made to Moldova, where I worked with UNICEF to promote their Early Childhood Development program, and Tunisia, where I taught young musicians. I remember playing a concert in Gamart, Tunisia, in the afternoon of July 7, the day of the London subway bombings. My host, Dr. Lotfi M’raihi, helped me figure out how to say, in French and in Arabic, “This concert is dedicated to all the victims of terrorism.” I remember him telling me later, “I see you not as an American, but as a man,” and I was just as flattered by him seeing me as a man (I was 22 at the time) as I was by him looking past my nationality. 

I kept a detailed diary of the whole project—the Moldova portion of that diary is at our website.

But if you DONATE $250 today, I will share more memories with you. Let’s just say that in Tunisia, I learned what a bidet is the hard way…