Twenty-two orphaned children touring Canada with a show called “Beautiful Africa: A New Generation” will stop in Athabasca this Friday at 7 p.m. at the Nancy Appleby Theatre, where admission is by donation.
The choir is part of a Uganda-based organization called Watoto that aims to rescue children and raise them up to rebuild the nation and the continent, said team leader Daniel Ogwal. All of the performers have lost their parents to war or disease and now live in Watoto’s “child villages” when they are not touring.
“The choir plays a number of roles. One is to just raise awareness of the plight of vulnerable children and women in Africa, but also to fundraise … which enables us to take care of the many more children who are not yet in the Watoto program,” said Ogwal.
He said touring also builds the children’s confidence and allows them more time with caretakers.
“When we are on the road, the child-to-adult ratio is at most three-to-one,” he said; in the child villages, it is usually eight-to-one.
As for Friday’s performance, Ogwal said, “There is a lot of singing and dancing, as you’ll expect from Africa.”
He characterized the show as both high-energy and deeply moving.
“There are moments where you are going to be greatly moved just hearing the stories of the children, but also inspired by how the children have turned out and their outlook on life,” he said. “Most of them have not had the experience of growing up in a stable family with the security of knowing they will wake up to find their parents or their siblings.”
In addition to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, which the UN estimated in 2009 has orphaned 14 million children, more than 20,000 Ugandan children have been forced to become child soldiers.
“Every time the choir comes out, it’s a new group of children,” explained Ogwal, adding that Watoto wants as many children as possible to have the touring experience to help counter their earlier distressing experiences.
The choir began travelling in 1994 with one group of children; 20 years later, six different choirs are touring different parts of the world.
Ogwal said the highlight of the Canadian tour so far has been the snow, in which the children “played long and hard until they realized it is actually cold.”
At the performance, purses, stuffed animals and jewellery made by women enrolled in another Watoto program will be for sale. Many of the women are HIV positive and often marginalized by their communities, said Ogwal. The program tries to impart a sense of dignity and teach the women how to make goods so they can earn an income. With this money, the women are able to afford medication and stay alive longer to care for their children, he said.
