from Ramallah to Nablus

At noon Pol, Olivier and myself travelled to Nablus where we arrived at the music school of our partner there, Nablus the Culture. We heard several students performing and studying (piano, clarinet, trombone and ud). There were also about 8 candidates for Olivier's workshop in piano repair and tuning. The candidates for the course are coming not only from Nablus, but also from Qalqiliya and Tulkarem. Too many candidates in fact. Olivier will only be able to work with a few students at a time and will therefor be very selective. And later on we also visited the house of one of the piano-students of the school to find out about the shape of her piano at home. This piano was diagnosed in a terminal state by our piano-doctors Pol De Winter and Olivier Marie: a Russian piano in which almost all of the felt was eaten by bugs. To repair this piano would take a lot of material and too many hours of work. We will try to buy a second hand piano in Nablus, which is in a better shape, so that this piano-student can practice at home. Together with our friend Sami Hammad, we will check all the pianos at the houses of the piano-students of this music school in order to check the instruments they are practicing on at home, to see whether they need to and can be repaired, and what this would take Olivier in terms of work and in terms of the parts needed for such repair-jobs, so that we can order them for him in time. Pol and Olivier will do the same prospection work next week in Ramallah. © picking oranges from the trees in the garden of the music school in Nablus