short visit to Maputo

Just before spending one week for Ictus in South Africa (Cape Town and Johannesburg/Soweto), I took two days off to visit our friends in Maputo and prepare some of the projects we are developing further the coming years. I have met with the two teachers of the Escola Nacional da Musica of Maputo who will from April to June 2008 come to Belgium to follow a workshop learning how to repair wind instruments (Bernardo) and pianos (Feliciano). Anselmo - who followed a piano-workshop in Antwerp in 2006 - was also there. Here we are all together: The most important result of this short visit is that the French Embassy in Maputo has engaged itself to organise a scholarship for Anselmo Chissaque, if he is accepted as a student at the ITEMM in Le Mans in France (Institut technologique européen des métiers de la musique: a wonderful school training technicians and tuners of pianos). Anselmo is now introducing his candidature to start a training of one year at ITEMM from September 2008 on. This is really a dreamed off step forward in our partnership with the Escola Nacional de Musica, the music school of Maputo (!): Anselmo will then be the first trained piano tuner of Mozambique. This will surely strenghten the capacity of the repair workshop which we helped install at the music school and will also make sure that the quality of the pianos in Maputo will be improved. It was also very special to be able to visit the repair workshop at the Escola Nacional de Musica. They succeeded to refurbish that part of the building wonderfully well, even including putting on a new roof on top of it, all thanks to the budgets Music Fund received for this partnership from the Belgian Government. The workshop is clearly very well kept and functioning. Our experts back home, Pol De Winter and Joris Buysse will be - as I am myself - happy to see that the school - as well as the students who followed the internship in Belgium - are taking all this so seriously. It is indeed very motivating for the continuation of our partnership. Finally, I met again with Mrs Ines Da Costa, who is the head of the Music Department at the University of Maputo and promissed her that we will from March 2008 on also start to collaborate with them, by sending our experts to teach one or two days instrument repair at the University as well. We hope to be able to send a donation of music instruments for both the Escola Nacional de Musica and the Music Department of the Maputo University sometime in 2008 or 2009. We are now working on finding partners to be able to cover the tranportation costs of this.