Band leader Sachini in a tearful appeal for help
A few months ago we applauded and cheered a Sinhala film which portrayed a village school band winning a musical competition by using kitchen gadgets and other rudimentary items as instruments, without ever realizing that a thing like that can happen away from the celluloid world.
Truth is stranger than fiction! Children of a school in an impoverished Sri Lankan farming community are doing just that, because their parents or the school cannot afford to purchase musical instruments for the school band.
This real-life story is unfolding in Kukulapola Vidyalaya in Mahiyangana, a town 253 km off Colombo, a historically important area where Buddha was said to have visited nine months after his Enlightenment.
A golden casket containing a few strands of his hair deposited in a dagoba is highly venerated by thousands of Buddhists who flock to celebrate Gauthama Buddha’s visit every January to take part in a grand religious procession as the finale to a week-long festival.
Kukulapola’s arid unforgiving terrain can be reached mostly by tractors and tuk-tuks. It was in the news recently when an elephant that came to raid the villagers’ cultivations got electrocuted. After Wild Life officers’ lack of interest to treat the injured jumbo, the good-hearted villagers forgot their perennial enmity with wild elephants and fed the ailing beast in an unsuccessful attempt to save its life.
Coming back to our main story, a girl, Sachini, who is blowing a conch shell leads the band breaks into tears when a TV cameraman asked about her school’s rudimentary band. “I feel very sad when I see smartly-dressed children in big city schools playing musical instruments which we cannot afford. I have no words to explain our sadness. May be, we don’t get such facilities because we are poor,” she says in between tears.
The band members who make music with coconut shells, empty fish cans, plates, spoons, bottles, biscuit tins and sticks were waiting to welcome a dignitary who was coming to the village to open a water scheme and to hand over a house to someone, according to the producer’s brief TV clip which has gone viral.
Though we don’t hear the band’s music in the video the producer says their music is commendable.
Kavindu who has two fish cans hanging from his neck appeals to people to help them buy musical instruments. “We have the talent and skills,” he says. “But we don’t have opportunities and required means to achieve our ambitions.”
The cameraman who focusses on torn canvass shoes the students are wearing, questions how can their parents buy their kids musical instruments when they cannot even provide their basic needs.
“When we see the children of powerful people who attend big city schools play with modern musical instruments we feel so sad,” says another student.
A few weeks ago Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe who is facing a general election, promised to open a gym in every village. Some wonder whether this is an empty promise, interpreting it as an election gimmick. A man has to eat three square meals a day before working on dumbbells, commented a newspaper columnist.
The phone number to contact if there is someone willing to help the poor school kids is 0762806888. Don’t dial 0 at the beginning of the number if you are calling from outside Sri Lanka. Please verify before you make a commitment. – newstrails.com
