Serendipity

I'm not 100% certain where I'm going with this final project but I'm excited about going there. I especially want to learn about the 1,000 year old Malinke culture. I'm a little apprehensive about actually playing those drums though.....
Every day while my students trickle into class, I play music from a different culture. They all come in, sit down, and immediately begin writing in their journals. I like to watch the faces of the students whose language is emanating from the CD player. There’s always a wistful smile, and a faraway look as if they’re being taken back to place that’s so far away it’s from another life. And then they beam; a proud beam, from ear to ear. They always seem so excited and grateful that someone in this strange land is interested in something, anything, from their past lives. I’ve amassed quite a collection of music: Chinese, Burmese, Thai, African, Brazilian, and even chants from Tibetan Monks. So when Abubakar, a Darfurian, walked in and handed me a CD by the Three Rivers Jenbe Ensemble, I just thought it was another interesting CD from another country. I didn’t know it had been recorded right here in Fort Wayne. I was even more surprised a few weeks later to find that I could combine my love of music from various cultures with a better understanding of what it means to be creative within a community such as TRJE.
I’m planning to take advantage of the service learning option in order to learn about community creation firsthand. I think such a creative community will be fascinating and service learning really appeals to me because I can learn through active participation. Not only will my participation help fulfill actual community needs, it will help me to further understand the concepts we are studying in class. To be able to see community and creativity at work in real-life situations and to become a part of that real-life community will benefit both me and the community I hope to become a part of. I have always wanted to be a participant observer, not simply studying a subject, but being a part of what I’m studying. Any of the scientific research and writing I’ve done was conducted in a more detached way.
The service learning site that I will use is the Three Rivers Jenbe Ensemble, which is a Cultural Education Forum of the Fort Wayne Dance Collective. The Three Rivers Jenbe Ensemble explores music, dance, and song of the Malinke people of West Africa. TRF students also learn about various other cultures of West Africa in order to develop their own strong family and community relationships. The Ensemble consists of over 20 local young people (ages 7 to 17) who have recorded several CDs and performed at more than 200 venues. Not only does the group express themselves through music, they are very creative writers as well. While exploring their website, I discovered a section entitled: Creative Expressions of TRJE students. They write not only of their lives today but how their ancestors have influenced their lives, something very insightful for such young people. Their writings inspired me to explore one of the goals of this class, and that is to understand how language constructs identities, both personal and social, private, and public.
The potential audience for my text will be teachers, students, and any members of the larger community who would gain insight into themselves by studying a culture that may be very different than their own. This information could be especially valuable to parents who are struggling for ways to guide their children through the maze of adolescence and who firmly believe it takes a village to raise a child. The TRJE community promotes meaningful inter- and intra- family relationships, things that many of today’s children so desperately need but search for in all the wrong places. It is the belief of the TRJE community that young people will gain valuable insight into their own cultural identity in America by understanding the link between their African American culture and the 1,000 year old West African Malinke culture. I would like to promote community awareness of this support group for young people.
The constraints that I’ll have to consider in undertaking this project are the obvious constraints of participating in a musical/dance/storytelling community when I am not skilled at any of those things. I will truly participate as a learner, and that I think, will be the most exciting aspect.