City Schools Receive Musical Instruments
The Lifeline Foundation, along with Honorary Consul to Lebanon, Sarkis Abou Nehra, made several significant donations today to a number of music and feeding programs across the country. This morning, Kim Simplis Barrow, on behalf of the organization, handed over cheques in the sum of six thousand dollars each to Grace Primary School, St. Luke Methodist School, Pandemonium and Wesley College for their respective music programs. Contributions were similarly made to St. John’s Anglican and St. Agnes Anglican schools towards their feeding programs. The initiative is one that began with the Red Cross and has grown over the years to include the Lifeline Foundation. Music Director at Wesley College, Chris Bradshaw told us about their music program.
Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw, Music Director, Wesley College
“It’s a developing music program and so there are a lot of needs at this time. We’re trying to expand the program that we have where we do the wind and percussion instruments. This will particularly help in buying music stands which will in turn help to develop good posture while the students are playing. If you have good music stands, and it will also save our books. When we don’t have good music stands our books tend to break up very easily. So this will really go a long way in buying proper music stands, sturdy music stands that will last for the entire life of the program.”
Reporter
“Tell us briefly about the program, how many students are a part of it and so forth.”
Chris Bradshaw
“On any given year we usually have an average of thirty people in the band and we do age ranges from thirteen to about sixteen, seventeen. So what we do is wind and percussion instruments, so we have a concert band which performs indoors and the repertoire for indoor music. We also have a marching band where we do street marches and that repertoire and we just also started our jazz band which is a fifteen to sixteen member combo.”
Sarkis Abou Nehra
Sarkis Abou Nehra, Consul of Lebanon in Belize
“Actually this tradition I’ve started with the lady Audrey Courtenay under the auspices of the Red Cross and then we continue with madam the wife of our prime minister, Mrs. Kim Simplis Barrow in order to help the people of the country of Belize and to give back to Belize part of what Belize has given us all along.”
On a side note, businessman Sarkis Abou Nehra’s home was burglarized in December when he and his family were away. Nineteen persons have been arrested, some are out on bail, and some items recovered. Abou Nehra was asked about the home invasion at his residence on December third at the ceremony on Coney Drive. The Lebanese Consul said today that he wished he would have been here to welcome the robbers. But in the same vein, he offered forgiveness.
