I am in Kenya right now, on a trip that has been 30 years in the making. In 1994 while touring with a quartet (JOYA) during a year of volunteer service (Brethren Volunteer Service) I learned the song Wana Baraka. Incredibly appealing and easy to learn, it was immediately added to our repertoire for the remaining month of our tour. That 4-part arrangement served as a template for the 6-part version that became my first published piece, which was accepted in 1999 by Barbara Harlow at Santa Barbara.
In the process of publishing, we diligently searched for the original songwriter. I called the Kenyan embassy, I called (before non-time-lag trans-oceanic calls) radio stations in Kenya, I corresponded with Boniface Mganga, leader of the Muungano National Choir in Nairobi. Everyone seemed to know the song, but no one knew where it came from. We proceeded with publication, wishing for a way to know what to do about the songwriter portion of the royalties.
In a few years, Wana Baraka had become a bit of a hit in the choral world, and there were YouTube postings of it from all over – the first being a rowdy rendition from a wine cave in Budapest courtesy of Jonathan Talberg, but then from Brazil, from Singapore, from a Russian train station. A church choir member researching flash mobs alerted me to one of Wana Baraka at a public library in Valladolid, Spain that had over 3 million views (that would grow to 4 before it was taken down and reposted.) The LA Master Chorale’s programming of it in 2004 became the occasion of my first piece performed at the newly-opened Disney Hall, for which my dad came out for a visit.
Then there was the google search in early 2012 that revealed an upcoming performance of Wana Baraka by the Nairobi Chamber Chorus for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant at Windsor Castle. Shocked, I called my dad and said, “Do you want to go to England in May?” What a revelation to hear a Kenyan choir perform it – almost twice as slow as most choirs, for the prayerfulness of it. Those were the days of flip phones, and I almost used up all the memory recording it – thinking it would be over in a little more than two minutes, and then lasting five!
But I skipped over an all-important moment in 2008. It was the middle of the presidential campaign, and I was “all in” for Obama, having been an “early adopter,” making my own t-shirt that read: “For times like these, a leader like this: Obama 2008.” I was wearing another campaign t-shirt, the green St. Patrick’s Day O’ bama one with a four-leaf clover, when I pulled into park at Ecology Action’s training garden, two hours north of San Francisco, just off Highway 101. (I was going there to visit my friends Dan and Margo Royer-Miller who were working as training teachers for the international interns studying bio-intensive gardening techniques to take back to their countries.)
As I got out of the car and stepped through the screened garden gate, a smiling fellow – noticing my shirt – approached me with outstretched hand and said, “I am Philip Odhiambo – Obama is one of our people – we are Luo, and all of our names begin with ‘O’.” Thus began an amazing friendship with Philip Munyasia of Kitale, Kenya – made fast by weeding long rows of veggies together. In one of our conversations, I asked if he had ever heard of the song “Wana Baraka.” After singing a phrase, he sang the next back to me – continuing my impression that all Kenyans know the song.
I was so taken with Ecology Action and its vital mission and superb people that I visited twice more before Philip’s return to Kenya. Inspired, at our last meeting, I asked Philip if I might direct the songwriter portion of Wana Baraka royalties in yearly installments towards the organic gardening project OTEPIC which he and a few friends had been setting up, and which would launch in earnest upon his return home. In this way, the rightful “Kenyan” portion of the royalties could circle back to improve the lives of Kenyan people.
With the first installment of a decade’s worth of accumulated royalties, Philip was able to purchase land adjacent to his mother’s home in Mitume, an impoverished section of Kitale. Mitume Garden became OTEPIC’s first training garden. Always combining gardening expertise with compassionate vision, Philip and his ever-growing team soon began providing weekly meals for hungry people in the community. They also established an orphanage for 60 local children whose parents had passed away in the ongoing AIDS epidemic. Another early OTEPIC triumph was digging a borehole to provide clean drinking water for people in the Mitume area, and Wana Baraka support combined with several international partners toward the inspiring moment when the first water gushed forth from 72 meters below.
This week, thirty years after learning Wana Baraka, I flew into Kitale and just today had my first official tour, seeing everything with my own eyes after years of inspiring photos. It is miraculous how much Philip’s project has grown. There are now four OTEPIC gardens throughout Kitale, and any number of awesome initiatives – tree planting, intertribal peacemaking through soccer, mushroom micro-entrepreneurship, a special house for safe and hygienic births, integration of ex-prisoners into the OTEPIC team.
I had lunch today at OTEPIC’s 25-acre Sabwani Garden in their near-complete two-story conference center in a circle of 24 team members and three toddlers (with a couple of geese close by, and a roosting chicken with a nestful of soon-to-hatch eggs on top of a nearby cupboard.) We ate red beans they had grown, with Irish potatoes they had grown, with cooked greens they had grown – only the rice was purchased.
I am learning the names of Philip’s colleagues – some are easy to remember; “Immaculate”: the young woman who hosted lunch today and translated into Swahili for the team, “Fidel,” short for “Fidelcastro”: Philip’s close assistant, always helping with whatever. Tomorrow I’ll remember many more, either joining the planting team to carry bucket after bucket of compost to the new beds — or putting on my new rubber boots and helping the digging team deepen the water-retention ponds. This is next-level gardening, clearly!
A song by the folksinger Donovan comes to mind (from the film “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”): “If you want your dream to be, take your time, go slowly…Small beginnings, greater ends, heartfelt work grows purely….” Well, that’s how it works! I told Philip today, when we walked by some pumpkins, that that’s the metaphor I use when students ask me how long it takes to compose a piece. I say, “Have you ever grown a pumpkin? It takes about 3 or 4 months – that’s how long it takes to write a piece.”
Here’s to pumpkins, here’s to pieces. Here’s to two dreamers’ dreams, and the joy when they join together and grow in this green, redeeming world.
Shawn Kirchner