2008 Christmas Bowl Concert - 31st August
In 2008, Christmas Bowl Concert will raise funds for aid work in the Sudan – a country home to one of the worst humanitarian disasters of our time. In Sudan, over 200 000 people have been killed, and 2.5 million people displaced. The concert will raise money to provide antibiotics, malaria treatments, food, shelter, water, and education to internally displaced people.
Local talent will be showcased at the Concert. The Cottage Children’s choir, St Hilda’s Chapel Choir and the Eneksis Vocal Ensemble will perform a varied and entertaining selection of music.
A highlight will be the World Premier performance of a new composition by local talent Laurissa Wylie, commissioned by Music at St Thomas’s. Click here for more information.
WHEN: 31st August, 2008 2.30pm
WHERE: St Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, 2 College Rd, Claremont
TICKETS: $10/adults and $5/children
Tickets available from the Council of Churches of WA on 9274 3888 or administrator@churcheswa.com.au
Common people helping common people
A little boy:
Samir is 9 and he can’t remember his father and his two brothers. It’s seems to him that he has been living in an Internally Displaced People camp forever. In the beginning, it was him, his mother and his little sister, but both are now dead in a minefield. “I miss them, but I’m lucky I’ve got Fatimah with me”. Samir is right- he is lucky- in 2003 there were 1.3 million orphans in Sudan and the number still growing.
In fact Fatimah is an old woman in her country, as she is 43 years old. The war took everybody from her, husband, children, brothers, sisters. But she found Samir and together they are building a new family -a family born in a camp.
A mother:
Saiesha Moodley, 20, is one of the 100,000 people travelling through the forests of southern Sudan trying to find some safe place to live. She spent some nights under the rain walking with her two youngest children without any help. In these conditions one night Saiesha’s youngest child, Tahir, was born. “He is healthy but the birth was very difficult,” she said. The oldest is only two.
Her two older children and her husband are dead, as are her father, mother and brothers. Now she is fighting to save the two youngest: “It is hard to carry them but I don’t have a choice.” She knows she is alone and there is no one to help her. But also she knows her children life depends on her and she decided that she has already lost enough people.
A man:
Mbarote was a husband, a father, a brother, a son like everybody in his neighbourhood. Now he is only a combatant. He’s lost everybody and everything. Now there is only the war left. He doesn’t have any story to tell, he doesn’t have any dream, he just has the rebellion. “I wake up every day, I take my gun, and I think that today may be my last day alive.”
We are here today, because of these people. War, humanitarian crimes, hundreds of deaths daily, -it is a world that seems so far away from us. But these are people like us who are suffering, losing their families, losing their dreams-and that is what we can understand and feel.
That’s why CWS, along with 60 Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox organisations, supports the Sudan Council of Churches, Sudan AID and the Sudan Social Development Organisation. In the Internally Displaced People camps antibiotics are distributed, malaria patients are treated; food, shelter, water, and education are provided. The operation also aims to equip Sudanese partners to manage it in the future.
Today we’ve joined them: common people helping common people with music.
