2010 - Our Twentieth Anniversary
In a few days, the year 2010 will arrive. What a New Year it will be for us! In the spring, Sounds of Hope, Ltd. will have its twentieth anniversary. In July, we will hold a Reunion of past participants from twenty-eight countries around the world.
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.