Lam Duan

Really beautiful story pointed out to us by one of our supporters:

A British musician by the name of Paul Barton dragged out a piano into the middle of an elephant sanctuary and began playing classical music to a blind elephant named Lam Duan.

Read the full story here: Blind Elephant Starts To Dance Once She Hears The Pianist Playing To Comfort Her

If you love elephants, you can also check out the Sheldrick elephant sanctuary in Kenya and adopt one.

Hammering it Out

You may remember, back in the early stages of this project, that we enlisted the help of Ocean Sole in Kenya to create hammer heads made from recycled flip-flops. The idea was to see whether there might be any locally-available materials to make hammer heads from instead of importing felt from outside Africa. 

Thanks to our new volunteer, Charlie, we should soon be able to test this out. We have no idea at all what it would sound like, but it's exciting to try. He's made amazing progress putting the Lirika action back together, though the flip-flop hammers need a little filing to make the correct size.

 

Helping Hand

Please welcome Charlie to the team. A Londoner living in Kigali. 

He's got an engineering background and wanted to get involved with the project. We're giving him the task of rebuilding the Lirika action so that we can use it to test the prototype. Marion was supposed to be in charge of that but her day job has her pretty busy so we're practising delegation. 

He's got quite a job ahead of him.

Museum of Music

Happy New Year!

We've been a bit late getting started, but we're on the move again. Updates soon.

Meanwhile, check this out. Rwanda is opening a museum of music.

Maybe we could do a display about our piano someday.