Afghan Children's Songbook Project - Preserving the Past for the Future

The Rotary Club of Needham is looking for other Rotary Clubs to partner with us on this amazing Rotary International Matching Grant project.  If you are interested, please contact Bill Paulson at 781-929-2453.

This project is to bring long lost Afghan children's songs back to today's Afghan children.  The songs were documented in the late 1960's but many of them have been lost since then in Afghanistan.  A songbook has already been created.  This project is to burn music CDs so the kids will have music to go along with the words.

Imagine hearing your favorite childhood song after decades of hearing no music.   For Afghans, whose songs were intentionally eradicated from the culture by war and oppression, hearing a familiar childhood song is a powerful experience and leaves many in tears. 

This valuable collection of Afghan children's songs, almost lost from the culture and preserved by editor and created of the Afghan Children's Songbook Project, Louise Pascale, is a gift to the Afghan culture and particularly to the children of Afghanistan.  

The story behind this songbook is a wonderful one.  About seven years ago, Louise discovered her old book Afghan children's songs that she produced while in the U.S. Peace Corps in the late 1960's.  Fearing the songs might be lost forever, she vowed at that moment to return them to the children of Afghanistan.  It was at that moment that the Afghan Children's Songbook Project began.

After years of hard work, fundraising and collaborating with an Afghan printer and an Afghan musician, over 14,000 copies of the songbook and accompanying CD, with all the songs sung by Afghan children are now in hundreds of elementary schools and orphanages across Afghanistan.  Afghan women are now using the songbook as well as a tool for literacy with the added benefit, after so many years of silence, of sharing the songs with their children.  The Afghan people are thrilled to have these delightful children's songs returned and sung again and the Afghan Children's Project continues to raise funds to print and distribute more songbooks and perhaps one day, produce a second songbook.