MOOSE JAW — The African Children’s Choir is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a performance in Assiniboia that will captivate people with heartwarming performances of popular kids’ tunes, traditional spiritual songs and vibrant cultural pieces.
The choir performs on Sunday, April 20 at 7 p.m. at Assiniboia Alliance Church on 305 Fourth Avenue East. The show is one of only two stops in Saskatchewan during the choir’s three-month Canadian tour, as it marks four decades of transforming lives through music, education and hope.
Tickets are free, but donations are accepted.
The choir — part of a larger international Christian organization called Music for Life — is comprised of 18 children ages nine to 11 who come from vulnerable backgrounds and extreme poverty in Uganda and serves as a “powerful testament to the resilience and potential of Africa’s future leaders,” according to the organization.
Each child has faced significant hardship, often with limited access to education, but through the choir, they gain life-changing opportunities for education and personal growth with the potential to become “beacons of hope” in their communities.
The group’s 40 years of existence is “a testimony … that God cares about the orphans, and I think He makes that very clear in His word (the Bible),” Tina Sipp, the choir manager, told MooseJawToday.com. “And we get to join Him in that (because) we get to help the impoverished (and) the vulnerable in that.”
The choir’s longevity is also due to the generosity that people have shown and the resources they have provided, she continued. This support has ensured that the choir can send donations to schools in Uganda instead of using that money to pay for lodgings.
This support has also led to a “profound change” in the trajectory of children’s lives and their families, the choir manager added.
On average, the group performs at four churches a week, or 16 shows a month, or 192 performances a year, which, over 40 years, is roughly 7,680 shows, Sipp said. That translates into hundreds of churches hosting the shows, thousands of families welcoming African children into their homes and thousands of people sponsoring the education of 59,000 Ugandan children.
“Goodness, that’s a lot of people (who) have stepped up and said, ‘We want to help. We want to give of our resources to better the lives of someone (we) don’t even know and probably will never, ever see in (our) life,’” she said.
“I just think that’s amazing that people are that generous and that kind and compassionate to others,” the choir director added. “And I think we’ve done a good job of presenting the beauty, dignity and potential of the African child.”
The choir is performing at Assiniboia Alliance Church because it has sung there before, while organizers usually reach out to churches when planning tours to see if they are interested in welcoming the group again, Sipp said. The Easter weekend was available, so the Assiniboia pastor was excited to welcome the choir for that celebration.
The African Children’s Choir kicked off its tour on March 7 in Surrey, B.C., at the church of the group’s founder, Ray Barnett. He was on a humanitarian mission in war-torn Uganda in the 1980s when he transported a boy from his decimated home to the safety of another village. The boy sang praise songs in the car, which inspired the choir program.
The first African Children’s Choir performed in North America in 1984, while money from that tour funded the first children’s home in Uganda in 1985.
Sipp noted that Barnett’s church agreed to help him launch the choir, so she thought it was “a neat full circle” to perform there 40 years later.
“It’s a beautiful story,” she added.
