A Song in Your Heart

You know we moms are good at multi-tasking. So if you’d love to…(a) get your kids dancing and clapping,
(b) educate children in Africa, and
(c) put a song in your heart,
…have we got an event for you! The African Children’s Choir is in town, and although this wonderful group of kids has sung on Ellen! and with Josh Groban, it’s a success story with very local roots.

More than twenty years ago, a human rights worker named Ray Barnett left his Fraser Valley home because he wanted to witness, first-hand, the reports of 150,000 children starving in Uganda. The suffering was rampant, but on that trip he drove a small boy to his village and listened as the young one sang the whole way. If there was only some way he could bring the hearts and faces of these children to the West, Ray thought, he was sure people would respond.

And so the concept of the African Children’s Choir was born, and the choir had its world debut in Vancouver in 1984. By the time the group returned home, it had raised enough money to build a school. Over the intervening years, one choir grew to three touring groups, who travel from community hall to church to stage, billeting with local families and entertaining adults and kids alike with traditional African and contemporary songs, leaving joyful hearts and tapping toes wherever they perform.