Nablus and Ramallah

Tuesday 3rd November 2008: travelling with instrument ‘doctors’ Pol De Winter (piano), Baptiste Argouarc’h (string instruments), Christian Bertram (guitars) and Messaouda Zaouali (coordinator Music Fund) Today our team split in two: Christian and Baptiste stayed in Nablus to work at Olivier’s atelier there, and Pol came with Messa and myself to Ramallah. Christian and Baptiste worked on revising and repairing guitars and violins of the music school, while Olivier continued his lessons in piano-tuning and –repair at the workshop of Nablus the Culture. © instrument experts Christian Bertram (guitars) and Baptiste Argouarc’h (string instruments) working in the repair-workshop in Nablus Messa and I brought Pol to our partner in Ramallah, the music school Al Kamandjati, where he checked and worked on some of the pianos which Olivier had not looked at recently. In the meantime we met with our friends at the Ramallah-office of the A.M. Al-Qattan Foundation, with whom we should from this week on be working in Gaza in support of the music school which they have opened there in September. They have been able to start 5 different instrument classes in Gaza (guitar, oud, kanoun, violin and keyboard/piano) and accepted 35 students. We are now in the region with this team of instrument ‘doctors’, as we wanted to be with Qattan in Gaza from the very beginning. We are waiting for our permits though, allowing us into the Gaza strip, and have not received them yet. We hope that tomorrow Wednesday will be our lucky day and we are all prepared to travel to Gaza then, although we cannot be sure whether we will be allowed at all to enter Gaza this week. Messa and I also shortly visited the Barenboim-Said Foundation in Ramallah to see how things are going there with the music instruments we donated to them. They have problems with the baby-grand piano we donated last year, as well as with some of the string instruments they received from Music Fund in 2006, so it would be good if we could find time later this week to work there too, although this is not at all sure. Back in Al Kamandjati, the music school which viola-player Ramzi Abu-Radwan started only 3 years ago (!), we visited the repair-workshop which this music school opened and equipped, with the help of Music Fund as well as other partners of the school. There we met with the young musician Shahade Shalalda, who is now working on repairing and constructing string instruments. Thanks to an Italian luthier who came to work for some time in Ramallah, Shahade was invited for a 3-month internship to different workshops in Italy. At the end of this period he made his own violin. He is clearly very talented and would like to be able to go to London to be trained at a lutherie-school there. If Music Fund can help him, we will. Al Kamandjati also needs more music instruments. They are especially in need of wind instruments, particularly trumpets, trombones and oboes. Some of the musicians related to the school will be performing in Brussels in December, and this will be a good occasion for us to donate these instruments to them, as they will be able to transfer them themselves at their return to Ramallah. © piano-expert Pol De Winter helping Olivier Marie to restore one of the pianos at the repair-workshop in Nablus Sometime in 2009, we will also try to organise an initiation-workshop for the repair of wind-instruments for Al Kamandjati in Ramallah. Furthermore, Ramzi invites Music Fund to be Al Kamandjati’s partner in developing their music school in the refugee camps in the south of Lebanon from 2009. Al Kamandjati also continues to be incredibly active in developing new projects throughout the Westbank (Ramallah, Jenin, a.o.) and deserves all the support it can get,… also ours. It was a great pleasure to spend a short time within the walls of this organisation and its music school in Ramallah and experience the special atmosphere there and the quality and charm of the persons running this school: besides Ramzi Abu-Radwan, there are Céline Dagher, Saed Karzoun, and also our former intern Iyad Jarradat, who is now also involved in the organisation of Al Kamandjati.