Most of feel that we’d like to do some good in the world, but we don’t know how. With so many urgent problems and seemingly so little that any of us can do about them, how does one get involved in a cause?
It helps to have an obsession, a particular problem that, above all the rest, keeps you from sleeping at night. For me, it was the fact that, because they don’t have access to mosquito bed nets, 3,000 children die of malaria every day in sub-Saharan Africa. I agonized about this until I read that one bed net costs $5. Here was a number that told me I could do something about this problem. Having an impact didn’t seem out of reach.
When Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, who is also the UN Goodwill Ambassador for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, implored the audience at a concert at UCLA to “do something,” I wanted to heed him, but wasn’t sure exactly how to go about it. The answer came to me a few short hours later when I attended an after-party with crackling Senegalese sabar drumming played by some of N’Dour’s performers and local Senegalese sabar players who are well known to the African music and dance scene in Los Angeles. As a serious student of the sabar myself, many of the performers were friends of mine, and so I had the idea of putting it all together and hosting a big party to raise money to buy nets.
Photograph by Aliyah Levin
The next morning, I went online and found two small organizations that work to distribute bed nets in Africa; NetLife Africa, started by two medical students who travel around rural Senegal on bicycles delivering nets free of charge; and Netting Nations, a group based in Manhattan Beach that had recently completed a net distribution project in Ghana. I called up Netting Nations, and told Ben Kingston and Ike Stranathan my idea over coffee at Peet’s in Santa Monica. They were ready to sink their teeth into a new fundraising initiative and agreed to collaborate on Drums To Beat Malaria, a big African sabar party that would raise money for bed nets. It was a good partnership; I had access to the performers and a vision of what a sabar party looks like; they had an established non-profit with its tax-exempt status. We agreed to split the money evenly between NetLife Africa’s project in rural Senegal and Netting Nations’ project to deliver nets to an orphanage in Kenya.
The cornerstone of Drums To Beat Malaria was that everyone working on it would be donating their time, including the performers. We wanted to make sure that every dollar donated went to buy a net. Asking the drummers to work for free made for some uncomfortable moments, but the response was mostly enthusiastic. But once a few drummers signed on, more wanted to do it because they were moved by the cause and for the sheer fun of playing with so many drummers (it is normally too expensive to hire so many musicians).
Other components of the event began to fall into place. Ultra-hip Air Conditioned Supper Club in Venice donated their space and friends began asking what they could do to help. We created a website (www.drumstobeatmalaria.org) and I was invited to talk about the event on KPFK’s Afrodicia. Emails came in with offers to donate items to the silent auction. One mother from New Jersey found out about Drums To Beat Malaria and asked if it would be OK if she requested donations in lieu of presents for her son’s 7th birthday party. I got news from the Senegalese Association that because the event was taking place during Ramadan, the turnout among the Senegalese community would not be as high I had hoped (Muslims are not supposed to play music or dance during Ramadan). Nevertheless, I asked a couple of small Senegalese businesses to sell tickets, Ben, Ike and I blasted everyone on our email lists, and the list of attendees started to grow. For some reason, every French-speaking person on my list bought a ticket. People kept donating: one hundred dollars, fifteen dollars, forty dollars, and with each Google checkout purchase, I counted the nets we would buy. We offered the five booths at the club for $500 each and sold them all (one went to a big party of French people).
On September 25, a crowd of over 200 attended Drums To Beat Malaria, including film industry professionals, Venice hipsters, lawyers, Rotary Club members, artists, a hedge fund manager or two and plenty of Senegalese, mostly women who came ready to dance in traditional African clothes. I can’t remember an event in LA that attracted such a diverse crowd. By the end of the night most people, whether or not they were capable of imitating the gravity-defying solos of the African dancers, had stepped out on the dance floor. More importantly, they shoved money into several donation boxes, bid on auction items and saved lives. Drums To Beat Malaria raised enough money to buy 3,000 nets. Since on average three people sleep under one net, 9,000 previously unprotected people, most of them children, will soon be sleeping under nets that will last for 4-5 years. Many of these children would surely have died and countless others will not suffer the debilitating consequences of malarial fevers. Not bad for a night’s work.
Post-event comments have ranged from “I’ve never seen anything like that drumming and dancing!” to “Our community needs to do more things like that.”
I had fully assumed I had used up my one shot at asking any of my drummer friends to play for free, and yet all the drummers have told me they want to do it again. Pape Diouf, the lead drummer, said, “Let’s do it once a year.”
Video by Lynette Wich
(You can still donate online at www.drumstobeatmalaria.org.)
Tags: activism, africa, drums to beat malaria, drumstobeatmalaria, net life africa, youssou n’dour