On our first full day in Buenos Aires, we performed an outreach concert at the Colegio del Buen Consejo, a private girls school near La Boca, one of the slums of the area. We sang our tour repertoire for nearly 250 girls, ages 5--18, in the chapel of the school. They responded with a lot of enthusiasm, especially to our native Colombian Andres Torres '09, who was translating for Jeff. After the concert we didn't get to talk much to the girls (the H1N1 outbreak and our group's poor overall level of health made people uneasy) but the director of the school was very appreciative of our visit and performance. She emphasized the importance of music in the education of the girls, all of whom are from poor families and are sponsored to attend the school. She explained that music is integrated into the rest of the curriculum so that they can learn a skill to be proud of, while making huge gains intellectually. It was a fun concert overall and a great start to tour. The "Power of Song," as the title of our potential documentary seems to be, seemed very apparent in that school building as we could see the girls at the second floor windows, overlooking the barbed-wire-topped walls around the school, waving goodbye to our buses as we pulled away.
In this post, rising sophomore Ben Robbins talks more in-depth about our outreach concert at a Buenos Aires school.