Musequality's first grant helped M-Lisada repair their battered instruments.
Music Projects
Hooked on music
M-Lisada Brass Band, Kampala, Uganda
MLISADA stands for Music, Life Skills, And Destitution Alleviation, and its mission is to reduce the number of children living on the streets and provide opportunities to less privileged children in Kampala, Uganda. It currently provides shelter for over 75 children and serves a total of 150.
The organisation provides a safe haven while delivering education, mentoring and cultural activities. It has recently reunited 25 street children with their families. Project Leader Bosco Segawa says that seeing the joy in the faces of the reunited families is ‘like watching the sun rising’.
The story began with music. Back in the mid-1990s, a group of street kids started hanging around the studio of a German trumpet teacher. After several unsuccessful attempts to chase them away, the teacher, Christopher Kowlezyk, invited a few of them in for lessons.
The boys were soon hooked on music instead of drugs, and, in a short time, had formed their own group with dented and battered instruments supplied by Kowlezyk. Living in one room, sharing three to a mattress, they supported one another and paid their own school fees out of their earnings from the band’s occasional gigs.
The brass band is still at the heart of M-Lisada, and is its main source of income. It still rehearses in the same place as when they started in 1996 – under a large tree. Musequality has supported the band for several years, paying for the repair of their instruments (they had been plugging holes with chewing gum), enabling the purchase of a bass drum, and providing a grant to cut two CDs.
The band performed in the packed Mandela National Stadium before the Uganda Cranes v Guinea Bissau match in June 2011. In the past year 28 street children have been enrolled in brass band programmes, with six achieving fine results in ABRSM examinations.
Thanks to grants from HIPS (Health Initiatives for the Private Sector, a USAID-funded project), 16 M-Lisada children have acquired skills in sewing, tailoring, and craftwork that provide an income. M-Lisada’s new Educate project is training young people in entrepreneurship and leadership to help them start their own businesses – and a team has already started rearing and selling chickens.
Musequality has recently arranged for M-Lisada to provide brass band training to more than 30 disabled children and orphans at the Good Shepherd Home, in Kampala, funded by Bracknell and Wokingham Community Band (BWCB).
‘Well, we have already bought the bass drum and the tenor drum and it has really changed our music. We just wish you were here to hear the sound. For the past week a group of street kids came to our home and they wanted to stay with us, but we talked to them about the place not being big enough for us to stay all together so they just come for music in the evening and they go back.’
Bosco Segawa
M-Lisada Brass Band