One of Predient Eisenhower’s ideas, encouraged by St. Paul resident Louis Hill, was to use people-to-people exchanges to get folks in the United States and in its wartime enemy, Japan, to see each other not as faceless enemies but as human beings with mutual desires for peace, security, and all the other essentials of human life: food, shelter, family, culture, happiness, and health. Eisenhower and Hill concocted the idea of creating “Sister City” relationships between U.S. and Japanese cities, with citizen committees from the Sister Cities organizing exchanges and sharing with each other. Fittingly, the first “Sister City” relationship was between Saint Paul, Minnesota and Nagasaki, Japan.

Over the years, Sister Cities International grew, and the concept of Sister City relationships between the United States and Japan expanded to embrace relationships between other cities in other countries. By the time Jeanne and I started organizing the first Songs of Hope project, Saint Paul had relationships with the Sister Cities of Nagasaki (Japan), Changsha (China), Modena (Italy), Culiacan (Mexico), Lavaiikamp (South Africa), and Novosibirsk (Soviet Union). Some of these relationships were older than others. All had local committees which met regularly, though some were better attended and more active than others.

As I say, we were lucky. Through the Sister City relationships, Jeanne and I met a lot of people who believed in the power of face-to-face exchanges across borders to build friendships and promote peace. We met a lot of people who loved the diversity of cultures in the world and who relished the richness that cultural differences might bring to their lives and to the lives of others. As we introduced Songs of Hope, there was some natural skepticism, but much more often, we were greeted with enthusiasm, energy, and a real, “I get what you mean” reaction when we described the benefits that the project could bring to the participating youngsters and their audiences. It was a great joy for us to meet so many caring, generous, imaginative, and globally-visioned people of all ages, and from all walks of life. Had Songs of Hope never happened, meeting all these people would have made the effort worth it!

At the time, Jeanne wanted to produce a children’s recording that would be made half in the United States and half in the Soviet Union, with kids from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. traveling to each other’s countries for  collaborative studio work here and there. It was nice idea, but the fates intervened, and a series of events prevented Jeanne from putting the project together.

A little while later, in 1987, Jeanne and I began talking about doing the project ourselves, but then the fates intervened again, this time with the rise to power of Michal Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We didn’t entirely give up the idea of doing an international project with kids, but we did let go the idea of a United States-Soviet Union collaboration, since the Soviet Union no longer existed and relationships between the countries were improving without our help.

Then, in the summer of 1989, during drinks at the home of Jim Scheibel, who was then running for mayor of St. Paul, Jim mentioned to us that too few people in St. Paul were aware that the city had six interesting Sister Cities around the world. While we were discussing this with Jim, he vowed that, if he were elected mayor, he would look for ways to make St. Paul’s Sister Cities better known.

Well, Jim Scheibel did get elected mayor, and Jeanne and I held him to his vow with an idea that occurred to us during that conversation at his home. The idea was, simply, to produce a children’s recording not with U.S. and Soviet kids, but with kids from all of St. Paul’s Sister Cities, from cities in China, Japan, Italy, Mexcio, Russia, and South Africa! Of course, Jim being the internationalist that he was, he got very excited about the idea, and eagerly put the prestige of the mayor’s office behind us.

Jeanne and I call those first years the years of smoke and mirrors because, believe me, we were making things up all the time. It’s not that we didn’t have relevant experiences to bring to the project. We did. It’s not that we didn’t spend hundreds and hundreds of hours planning the project in minute detail. We did. But Songs of Hope was an incredibly complex undertaking and we were busy selling the concept to many, many diverse people in the community, including a host of potential funders, supporters, and participants. To get things started, we did dozens of presentations and talked with scores of people. and no matter how well we prepared ourselves, we were constantly surprised by unexpected questions and we found ourselves continually in the position of having to create answers to questions sometimes insightful and perceptive, but at other times bizarre or downright screwy. Sometimes very bizarre! Hence the smoke and mirrors, an English language expression for magical trickery.

Wait a minute, you say. Didn’t you write above that the first project was to be a children’s recordings? Believe it or not, yes, that was the original idea, to do a recording with kids from St. Paul’s Sister Cities. Then where did the Songs of Hope concert tour come from, you might ask. Blame Sue Gens, currently the executive director of the Minnesota State Arts Board, for that change. It was Sue who suggested to us that we should share the international kids with the community while they were here, perhaps by presenting a concert of their songs.

We thought that was a great idea so we started planning for a studio recording AND a concert. However, the first Songs of Hope project ended up being short on money, so we had to choose betwen one or the other of the two arts projects, and guess what? That’s right. We became more excited about doing the concert than producing the studio recording.

With that last, big change inspired by Sue, the fully formed idea Songs of Hope came to be.

Bring kids from other countries. Put them all in a dorm together. Have them rehearse with each other, learning songs and dances from each other’s countries. Put them on stage to share their cultures with the community. Encourage everyone to learn from each other by sharing and living and playing and talking and working and performing and being together. The idea worked so well that we’re still doing essentially the same project today - with a zillion enhancements and improvements, of course - some twenty years later!

The official beginning of everything was April 10, 1990, the day when our nonprofit was incorporated. That was a long time ago, but I remember us becoming very serious around that time about doing - I mean, really doing - a Songs of Hope first project.

Lots of people have asked us what made Jeanne and me want to do Songs of Hope. The answer I always give is that I don’t know for sure. Both of us had traveled in Europe as college students, and we both had a strong sense of how much those travel experiences had shaped us, and had shaped our values. We both liked the idea of working with kids. We both liked the idea of giving a global experience to kids at a young age. 

There was something larger at work, too. Jeanne and I shared, I think, a notion that the world was on the edge of big changes. Technology was bringing people closer. National economies were becoming more interconnected and interdependent. People of many countries and ethnicities were moving more freely across borders, mixing with different people in new homes. The Berlin Wall had come down. If you lived in the United States, you could suddenly travel freely to Poland and Hungary and Russia, countries once out of reach. Asian countries were changing, growing more propserous. A sense of hope was in the air.

We weren’t naive. Both Jeanne and I knew that problems don’t get fixed overnight. National rivalries, greed, ethnic conflicts, racism, and other global plagues would continue. New crises would arise. However, we did feel a hopeful optimism. We shared a suspicion that the shrinking of the world would create new opportunities for cross-cultural understanding through people-to-people communications and sharing.

It’s hard to remember how things were back in 1990, twenty years ago. When we started organizing the first Songs of Hope project, most of our overseas communications were by mail, telex, or old-fashioned telephone. We actually had to debate whether we should spend some of our little money on a fax machine, since it didn’t look like many of our friends in other countries would have easy access to a fax machine of their own. There was no internet back then. No emails. No Facebook. It never occurred to us to create a website because such a thing didn’t exist.

And yet, people were eager to make friends across borders. When we introduced the idea of Songs of Hope to people in other countries, we were pleased to discover that parents of kids were excited by the idea of giving their chirldren a chance to experience the larger world. Perhaps they sensed what we did, that the world was changing, and with the changes would come opportunity and new ways of living and thinking.  

In the coming blogs, I’m going to write about the early years of Songs of Hope, about the new friends we made from Russia, China, Italy, Mexico, Bosnia, Ghana, and other countries, and about - if I get up the nerve - some of the more colorful adventures and misadventures of those crazy, exciting, early years when we used passion to disguise our inexperience and we had only dreams to keep us going when nothing else could.

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