Connecting with World Pulse

Less than a month ago, a musician friend whom I had met in Mali last year, told me about World Pulse and suggested that I take a look at your website. Although there is much to look at on the site, for some reason, the first link I clicked on was Action Center/Our Programs. I could not believe what I saw while reading about Voices of Our Future! The timing and the theme are a perfect match for what I am in the midst of planning.
One of my goals is to find out more about the women behind Cameroonian rhythms and those who express themselves creatively through the bass guitar and other traditional instruments. The Voices of Our Future program can help me capture and transmit the music and stories that I will collect during my 3-month stay to research, study and document in Cameroon.

The idea for the Cameroon Rhythm and Bass Project came from meeting and listening to various talented bass players from Cameroon. Over the years I have had many Cameroonian bass teachers. The same question kept coming up -- why are there so many highly accomplished bass players coming from this one African country? And why do they tend to come from one region and from specific villages and families whereby many of the family members, including girls, women and grandmothers, all play bass? I then heard that the source of some of the rhythms originated from women washing clothes in the river. These women played upon the surface of the water to create rhythms that later became the foundations of popular songs.

My personal projects and musical pursuits, along with World Connection projects, (the non-profit I founded), have generated interest from friends around the world who ask me to write about my experiences traveling and living in developing countries. I want to use the web as a way to communicate and share my experiences, but I feel overwhelmed with the process. In spite of intellectually knowing that it is not difficult to write a blog, I have felt blocked. Reading the WorldPulse site, I feel as though I could have a team behind and beside me while I step out into this new direction to capture and share the realities and lessons of women musicians in Cameroon.

World Connection’s past projects include building a rural health clinic in Mali used mostly by women and children and conducting “the essentials of business” seminars for Mayan women in Guatemala who want to establish their own micro-businesses. In African cultures and in many developing economies so few of our sisters have an equal voice yet often bear the burden of providing for their families.

I want to use the Voices of Our Future web platform to show how women in Cameroon use their musical talents to express their creativity and to encourage our sisters to recognize and use their own talents and share them with the rest of the world.