Following the success of the symphony orchestra concert featuring several numbers by world-renowned Austrian composer Gustave Mahler two months ago, Galyani Vadhana Institute Orchestra is back with another musical performance to pay tribute to HRH the late Princess Galyani Vadhana, the great patron of Thailand's classical music arena, at Mahisorn Hall, SCB Park Plaza on Thur, Sept 3 at 8pm.
The orchestral concert will feature the world-famous classical number Piano Concerto No. 4 by Ludwig Van Beethoven, Andante Festivo for the orchestra of Sibelius and Symphony No. 4 of Mendelssohn.
It will be performed by Thai pianist Jamorn Supapol, who was granted a scholarship by the late Princess to take two short courses on piano performance with Jean-Francois Antonioli in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2004 and 2005.
Jamorn is currently a lecturer at the Department of Piano Performance at Silpakorn University's Faculty of Music.
The conductor will be Britain's Leo Phillips, who has worked with such famous leading European orchestras as London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Europe.Tickets cost 200, 500 and 800 baht and can be purchased from Thaiticketmajor booths. For ticket reservation, please call 02-262-3456 or visit http://www.thaiticketmajor.com.
Thai pianist Jamorn Supapol and British conductor will perform in a classical concert held in memory of HRH the late Princess Galyani Vadhana at Mahisorn Hall, SCB Park Plaza, on Thur, Sept 3 at 8pm.
Friday, August 28, 2009
CHORAL CONCERT
Mahidol University's College of Music presents a choral concert featuring Johannes Brahms's German Requiem (1868)at its music auditorium, Salaya campus, on Wed, Sept 2 at 7pm. The concert will repeat at Assumption Cathedral (near the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok) on Thur, Sept 3 at 8pm.
The Mahidol Chamber Choir will join the Mahidol Symphonic Choir to perform German Requiem , the largest choral piece ever written by Brahms. The German Requiem , more than other requiems, provides hope and consolation in times of darkness and despair.
Written for a large chorus line, orchestra and two soloists, the Requiem will be performed in a four-hand piano version with Bakhtiyor Allaberganov and Yoshimi Matsushima at the piano. The solo parts will be sung by two students from Mahidol College of Music - soprano Sasaya Chavalit and baritone Tulanan Narasetapisarn.
The concert also includes Song for Athene , a choral piece written in 1993 by John Tavener. The performances will be
conducted by Dr Henri Pompidor and Dr Randal Buikema, choral directors at Mahidol University.
Tickets for the Sept 2 performance cost 200 baht (100 baht for students), while the Sept 3 concert cost 300 baht. For more information and reservations, please call 02-800-2525/34 ext 153/5 or visit www.music.mahidol.ac.th/muc.
The Mahidol Chamber Choir will join the Mahidol Symphonic Choir to perform German Requiem , the largest choral piece ever written by Brahms. The German Requiem , more than other requiems, provides hope and consolation in times of darkness and despair.
Written for a large chorus line, orchestra and two soloists, the Requiem will be performed in a four-hand piano version with Bakhtiyor Allaberganov and Yoshimi Matsushima at the piano. The solo parts will be sung by two students from Mahidol College of Music - soprano Sasaya Chavalit and baritone Tulanan Narasetapisarn.
The concert also includes Song for Athene , a choral piece written in 1993 by John Tavener. The performances will be
conducted by Dr Henri Pompidor and Dr Randal Buikema, choral directors at Mahidol University.
Tickets for the Sept 2 performance cost 200 baht (100 baht for students), while the Sept 3 concert cost 300 baht. For more information and reservations, please call 02-800-2525/34 ext 153/5 or visit www.music.mahidol.ac.th/muc.
LIVE TO LOVE CONCERT
Popular crooner Kamala Sukosol and her talented family are back for an annual charity concert entitled "Live and Love" which will take place at Kamolthip Ballroom, Siam City Hotel on Fri,Sept 4 at 6:30pm.
Organised by Siam City Hotel, Ramathibodi Foundation and Singha Corporation, the charity gala dinner/concert features Marisa Sukosol Nunbhakdi, Krissada 'Noi' Sukosol Clapp,Daranee Sukosol Clapp and granddaughter Natalia Sukosol Briones.
Joining them will be Thai vocal superstars Rudklao Amratisha, Dolchai Boonyaratavej,Tanee Poonsuwan and Suteesak Pakdeeteva - judge of the popular television talent show,The Star .Suteesak, who is head of the music department at St John's College, will lead the school's award-winning choir in a magical performance of His Majesty King Bhumibol's composition,Klai Rung .He will also join students and instructors from the Aree School of Dance Arts in a
special performance choreographed by the school's director - Acharn Aree Sahavejjabhand.
As always, the real highlight of the concert will be watching the exuberant Kamala perform. Together with special guests and family,the diva will serenade the audience with many of the hit songs, ranging from jazz to bossa nova, Broadway and pop; not to mention her own inspirational hit,Live and Learn .Proceeds from the concert will fund the purchase of advanced medical equipment for the new Somdech Phra Debaratana Building at Ramathibodi Hospital.
The Somdech Phra Debaratana Building Project was initiated by HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej with the aim of enhancing the hospital's capability for public health-care services.
The new state-of-the-art medical centre has four missions - public services, education,research and health promotion. The ninestorey building will be endowed with wellequipped facilities to deliver a high standard of healthcare in the South-East Asian region.
Scheduled to open next year, the facility will comprise 350 beds,16 operating theatres and 14 Intensive Care Units, along with specialised services, such as stem cell transplantation, minimal invasive endoscopic surgery,elderly care, child development and complicated disease management.
There is no sale of the concert tickets, but donations are appreciated. Tax-deductable donations of 100,000 baht or more will allow you a royal decoration; while the donations of 200,000 baht or more will entitle you to a medallion from HM the Queen, plus a mention on a plaque inside the building and hospital patient room.
For every donation of 20 million baht or more, you will receive an honorable mention plaque in the building's main donors hall, as well as a medallion from HM the Queen.
To make a donation or to enquire about the concert, please call Siam City Hotel on 02-247-0123 ext 1917/8 or Ramathibodi Foundation on 02-201-1111.
Organised by Siam City Hotel, Ramathibodi Foundation and Singha Corporation, the charity gala dinner/concert features Marisa Sukosol Nunbhakdi, Krissada 'Noi' Sukosol Clapp,Daranee Sukosol Clapp and granddaughter Natalia Sukosol Briones.
Joining them will be Thai vocal superstars Rudklao Amratisha, Dolchai Boonyaratavej,Tanee Poonsuwan and Suteesak Pakdeeteva - judge of the popular television talent show,The Star .Suteesak, who is head of the music department at St John's College, will lead the school's award-winning choir in a magical performance of His Majesty King Bhumibol's composition,Klai Rung .He will also join students and instructors from the Aree School of Dance Arts in a
special performance choreographed by the school's director - Acharn Aree Sahavejjabhand.
As always, the real highlight of the concert will be watching the exuberant Kamala perform. Together with special guests and family,the diva will serenade the audience with many of the hit songs, ranging from jazz to bossa nova, Broadway and pop; not to mention her own inspirational hit,Live and Learn .Proceeds from the concert will fund the purchase of advanced medical equipment for the new Somdech Phra Debaratana Building at Ramathibodi Hospital.
The Somdech Phra Debaratana Building Project was initiated by HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej with the aim of enhancing the hospital's capability for public health-care services.
The new state-of-the-art medical centre has four missions - public services, education,research and health promotion. The ninestorey building will be endowed with wellequipped facilities to deliver a high standard of healthcare in the South-East Asian region.
Scheduled to open next year, the facility will comprise 350 beds,16 operating theatres and 14 Intensive Care Units, along with specialised services, such as stem cell transplantation, minimal invasive endoscopic surgery,elderly care, child development and complicated disease management.
There is no sale of the concert tickets, but donations are appreciated. Tax-deductable donations of 100,000 baht or more will allow you a royal decoration; while the donations of 200,000 baht or more will entitle you to a medallion from HM the Queen, plus a mention on a plaque inside the building and hospital patient room.
For every donation of 20 million baht or more, you will receive an honorable mention plaque in the building's main donors hall, as well as a medallion from HM the Queen.
To make a donation or to enquire about the concert, please call Siam City Hotel on 02-247-0123 ext 1917/8 or Ramathibodi Foundation on 02-201-1111.
Keeping the faith
On the Sunday morning when Naomi Davis first sang gospel for an audience, in the woodframe sanctuary of Mount Coney Baptist Church, Harry S. Truman was president and Martin Luther King Jr. a precocious teenager graduating from college. Naomi was 6, a farm girl from the outskirts of Midway, Alabama, population something like 500, nearly entirely black.
With her older siblings Hattie Mae and Annie Ruth, Naomi performed throughout her childhood in the Davis Sisters, harmonising on I Got Over and Nearer, My God, to Thee . They went from church to church, played at Baptist conferences, did shows from a radio station in Tuskegee, Alabama.
For decades to come, Naomi Davis could envision no life except singing.That vision lasted through day jobs and different states, through marriage and motherhood; for a time in the 1960s,she cleaned houses in two shifts before doing a soul show at a Brooklyn club called the Night Cap.
Through it all, one thing eluded her - a record album. As 78s gave way to 33s, as LPs surrendered to CDs, as iPods and downloads emerged, only a few singles attested to the musical existence of Naomi Shelton, her married and professional name.
Then, a few weeks ago, the obscurity ended, and in an unlikely way. An independent label, Daptone, with its diehard audience among the young and hip,released the first album by Shelton in a gospel career that began 60 years ago.Along with a series of live shows, the album,What Have You Done, My Brother?has won acclaim from writers in American Legacy magazine to The Wall Street Journal to the music blog Brooklyn Vegan."I never gave up," Shelton, a discovery at 66, said in a recent interview."I claimed from the age of 6 I'm going to be a singer. So I stayed out there. I kept my faith. And I felt in my spirit that something has got to give."
For the 20ish audiences that hear Shelton and her group, the Gospel Queens,at Manhattan clubs like Joe's Pub and the Fat Cat, her music arrives with a deceptive sense of newness. Deceptive because it is more like a time capsule from gospel's heyday, recently unearthed and pried open.
"Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens are definitely traditional, and they are singing out of a tradition that's been around for a very long time," said Anthony Heilbut, author of the 1971 book The Gospel Sound and a producer of award-winning gospel albums."You would've heard people singing like them back in '61,'62."
Shelton and her sisters grew up modelling themselves on the gospel quartets that were almost always male, like the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Nearly half the songs on What Have You Done, My Brother?are gospel classics like Trouble in My Way and Jordan River .Still, in the manner of musicians from Wilson Pickett to Aretha Franklin, Shelton also crossed over into black pop music built on gospel roots.
Leaving home after graduating from high school in 1958, Shelton took her dual musical personality to Long Island,then Miami, then Long Island again,and finally Brooklyn, working as a maid by day and singing soul music at night and gospel on weekends.
Not until 1999 did Shelton meet the pianist, Cliff Driver, who would become the bandleader and arranger for her three surrogate sisters who make up Gospel Queens. The same year, she and Driver cut several funky singles for the Desco label, with 41st Street Breakdown and Wind Your Clock building cult followings.Through Desco, both met a young white man infatuated by classic soul, Gabriel Roth.
Roth went on to found and develop Daptone with his partner, Neal Sugarman. The label burst onto the musical radar with the revivalist soul of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
When Roth turned his album-making attention to Shelton four years ago, it was with the inclination of recording "message songs" in the style of the Staples Singers or the Impressions. They cut an entire CD's worth in a session in June 2005, but came away disappointed with the results. They tried again in January 2006, and once more were left to conclude that, as Roth recalled,"it just didn't feel right."
Shelton, meanwhile, was starting to wonder about leaving gospel altogether.She told Driver,"If this doesn't get moving, I'm going back to R&B." To which he replied,"Just sit tight, things gonna change."
So they did on June 20,2007, when Roth started recording Shelton and the Gospel Queens doing what their name promised."I'd been worried that if we did a gospel album, we wouldn't reach much of an audience," he recalled."But I realised I had to let her sing gospel."
With her older siblings Hattie Mae and Annie Ruth, Naomi performed throughout her childhood in the Davis Sisters, harmonising on I Got Over and Nearer, My God, to Thee . They went from church to church, played at Baptist conferences, did shows from a radio station in Tuskegee, Alabama.
For decades to come, Naomi Davis could envision no life except singing.That vision lasted through day jobs and different states, through marriage and motherhood; for a time in the 1960s,she cleaned houses in two shifts before doing a soul show at a Brooklyn club called the Night Cap.
Through it all, one thing eluded her - a record album. As 78s gave way to 33s, as LPs surrendered to CDs, as iPods and downloads emerged, only a few singles attested to the musical existence of Naomi Shelton, her married and professional name.
Then, a few weeks ago, the obscurity ended, and in an unlikely way. An independent label, Daptone, with its diehard audience among the young and hip,released the first album by Shelton in a gospel career that began 60 years ago.Along with a series of live shows, the album,What Have You Done, My Brother?has won acclaim from writers in American Legacy magazine to The Wall Street Journal to the music blog Brooklyn Vegan."I never gave up," Shelton, a discovery at 66, said in a recent interview."I claimed from the age of 6 I'm going to be a singer. So I stayed out there. I kept my faith. And I felt in my spirit that something has got to give."
For the 20ish audiences that hear Shelton and her group, the Gospel Queens,at Manhattan clubs like Joe's Pub and the Fat Cat, her music arrives with a deceptive sense of newness. Deceptive because it is more like a time capsule from gospel's heyday, recently unearthed and pried open.
"Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens are definitely traditional, and they are singing out of a tradition that's been around for a very long time," said Anthony Heilbut, author of the 1971 book The Gospel Sound and a producer of award-winning gospel albums."You would've heard people singing like them back in '61,'62."
Shelton and her sisters grew up modelling themselves on the gospel quartets that were almost always male, like the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Nearly half the songs on What Have You Done, My Brother?are gospel classics like Trouble in My Way and Jordan River .Still, in the manner of musicians from Wilson Pickett to Aretha Franklin, Shelton also crossed over into black pop music built on gospel roots.
Leaving home after graduating from high school in 1958, Shelton took her dual musical personality to Long Island,then Miami, then Long Island again,and finally Brooklyn, working as a maid by day and singing soul music at night and gospel on weekends.
Not until 1999 did Shelton meet the pianist, Cliff Driver, who would become the bandleader and arranger for her three surrogate sisters who make up Gospel Queens. The same year, she and Driver cut several funky singles for the Desco label, with 41st Street Breakdown and Wind Your Clock building cult followings.Through Desco, both met a young white man infatuated by classic soul, Gabriel Roth.
Roth went on to found and develop Daptone with his partner, Neal Sugarman. The label burst onto the musical radar with the revivalist soul of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
When Roth turned his album-making attention to Shelton four years ago, it was with the inclination of recording "message songs" in the style of the Staples Singers or the Impressions. They cut an entire CD's worth in a session in June 2005, but came away disappointed with the results. They tried again in January 2006, and once more were left to conclude that, as Roth recalled,"it just didn't feel right."
Shelton, meanwhile, was starting to wonder about leaving gospel altogether.She told Driver,"If this doesn't get moving, I'm going back to R&B." To which he replied,"Just sit tight, things gonna change."
So they did on June 20,2007, when Roth started recording Shelton and the Gospel Queens doing what their name promised."I'd been worried that if we did a gospel album, we wouldn't reach much of an audience," he recalled."But I realised I had to let her sing gospel."
Back to his roots
He is treated like a prince in Hay al-Mohammadi, the district of slums, markets,immigrants and workingclass Moroccans out of which he began to scramble as a 15-year-old,singing with one of the first rap groups in Morocco, CasaMuslim.
Muhammad Bahri, now 29, is proud of the district, which was central to popular resistance to French colonial rule, and the people here are proud of him, a kid who made it out, an old urban story.
People slap him on the back, buy him coffee, ask him about his parents and his recent marriage, and talk about their problems - poverty, the police, drugs in the neighborhood,their kids.
But it has not been such an easy ride for Bahri, who goes by the stage name of Barry, which is printed on his yellow T-shirt. His political songs,criticising a feared former interior minister and the police, have gotten him into trouble, and his performances at some music festivals have been disrupted.
In one famous song, called Driss ,he took on Driss Basri, who ran the Interior Ministry from 1979 to 1999,known here as "the years of lead".Basri was considered King Hassan II's tough right hand, his iron fist,keeping order through wide-scale detentions, repression and the torture of prisoners.
"Driss was a farmer and became a policeman," Bahri sings.
"We told him to keep an eye on the stick and then he beat us with it.Enough, enough, enough from that stick."
Later, he sings:"They gave him the keys to the safe, and he locked it in front of us."
"People were quite shocked by this," he laughed, pushing his RayBans up onto his forehead.
"But with each album I try to do a song that shocks the people."
Basri was dismissed by the current king, Muhammad VI, within months of his accession to the throne in 1999, after the death of his father. The former minister exiled himself to Paris, where he died in 2007, at 69. He was buried in Rabat, but the only member of the government to attend the funeral was the current interior minister, Chakib Benmoussa.
Near Hay al-Mohammadi, in Derb Moulay Sherif,there is an infamous underground prison, originally built by the French, where conditions for political prisoners were said to be unspeakable under Basri.The new king earned much respect from ordinary Moroccans when he made a personal visit to the prison without warning; it was later closed.
Bahri's grandfather, a poet, spent time in the prison,arrested for opposition to French rule, Bahri said.
A song like Driss would have been impossible under the reign of King Hassan, Bahri said. King Muhammad has loosened restrictions considerably on the news media and popular culture, but within limits that include criticism of the king and the monarchy.
Under King Hassan, Bahri said, it was difficult to say anything, so musicians created a style, a kind of Moroccan popular music called chaabi , similar to Algerian ra, which plays with traditional folk melodies.But now there are more modern blends and stronger content.
"Here it is possible now to bark, but gently," Bahri said.
In 2003, when Islamic radicals set off a series of bombs in Casablanca, killing 45, wounding hundreds and shocking Morocco, Bahri was playing at a club 200 yards from one of the blasts.
The room was shaking, and we kept playing," he said."We thought it was an earthquake."
He soon understood differently and went into the street.
"I saw everything destroyed," he said, still astonished in the retelling.
"There were a lot of arrests, and a lot of people put into jail who had nothing to do with anything, but we had a problem of al-Qaida cells here."
His first response was to write a song aimed at alQaida called Who Are You?"You made terrorism, it was a present for Bush," he
sings, referring to former President George W Bush."Do you want peace,or do you want the politics of the CIA?"
The song continues:"You start to wear big trousers, and you grow your beard, and you wear tagia [a knitted cap].
"You speak of resistance but you are tamed monsters. If you understood the Koran, there wouldn't be bombs."
But Bahri also wrote a song attacking the international politics of Bush, called Johnny Walker Bush, Li Man Habbouch (The One We Dislike)."The blood of every Arab is not enough for me," he sings."How greedy! We sent him to hell."
Bahri left the neighborhood five years ago, but he tries to keep in touch with his parents and friends there, partly in search of material that will make his songs resonate.
"I always get my ideas from these poor districts, I read the newspapers and follow the news," he said.
"I have the feeling I can influence things through my songs."
Many of Morocco's poor are illiterate, and Bahri believes that his songs can educate and inspire."I see myself as an ambassador or a journalist,and I try to reach people who don't read newspapers," he said.
Bahri's father was an excellent soccer player who made the national team. Later, he became an engineer on the national train network. He never made much money, but pushed Bahri to get an education.
In Hay al-Mohammadi, where Bahri's parents, brother and sister still live, there are signs of rebuilding and development."Before M6,"as King Muhammad VI is known "they forgot this district," Bahri said.But beyond the market and the nearby hovels for the poor, there are some new and renovated schools,including a new sports center and playground. There are some programs to send children to seaside camps in the summer.
But poverty and illiteracy remain high here."These people were all in crisis before the crisis arrived,"Bahri said."If you don't work here, you don't eat. If you stay at home, you die."
Muhammad Mardi,66, a retired teacher, greeted Bahri and congratulated him on his marriage. Mardi was supervising three young men cementing broken tiles in front of a shop, to create a more decorative walkway.
One of the men, Khaled al-Omari,24, said he had little work and lived with his mother, who sells vegetables at the market, and four siblings."When I can, I clean fish at the market," he said."I don't even earn 50 dirhams [215 baht] a day."
There is anger, too. In the market, near the flystrewn stalls for butchered meat, a bearded vendor said in Arabic to Bahri, referring to the American journalist:"You take care of him. If not, we'll slaughter him." It was not said in a lighthearted fashion.
"Poverty is also in the head," Bahri said, then began laughing."We all need psychiatrists."
Muhammad Bahri, now 29, is proud of the district, which was central to popular resistance to French colonial rule, and the people here are proud of him, a kid who made it out, an old urban story.
People slap him on the back, buy him coffee, ask him about his parents and his recent marriage, and talk about their problems - poverty, the police, drugs in the neighborhood,their kids.
But it has not been such an easy ride for Bahri, who goes by the stage name of Barry, which is printed on his yellow T-shirt. His political songs,criticising a feared former interior minister and the police, have gotten him into trouble, and his performances at some music festivals have been disrupted.
In one famous song, called Driss ,he took on Driss Basri, who ran the Interior Ministry from 1979 to 1999,known here as "the years of lead".Basri was considered King Hassan II's tough right hand, his iron fist,keeping order through wide-scale detentions, repression and the torture of prisoners.
"Driss was a farmer and became a policeman," Bahri sings.
"We told him to keep an eye on the stick and then he beat us with it.Enough, enough, enough from that stick."
Later, he sings:"They gave him the keys to the safe, and he locked it in front of us."
"People were quite shocked by this," he laughed, pushing his RayBans up onto his forehead.
"But with each album I try to do a song that shocks the people."
Basri was dismissed by the current king, Muhammad VI, within months of his accession to the throne in 1999, after the death of his father. The former minister exiled himself to Paris, where he died in 2007, at 69. He was buried in Rabat, but the only member of the government to attend the funeral was the current interior minister, Chakib Benmoussa.
Near Hay al-Mohammadi, in Derb Moulay Sherif,there is an infamous underground prison, originally built by the French, where conditions for political prisoners were said to be unspeakable under Basri.The new king earned much respect from ordinary Moroccans when he made a personal visit to the prison without warning; it was later closed.
Bahri's grandfather, a poet, spent time in the prison,arrested for opposition to French rule, Bahri said.
A song like Driss would have been impossible under the reign of King Hassan, Bahri said. King Muhammad has loosened restrictions considerably on the news media and popular culture, but within limits that include criticism of the king and the monarchy.
Under King Hassan, Bahri said, it was difficult to say anything, so musicians created a style, a kind of Moroccan popular music called chaabi , similar to Algerian ra, which plays with traditional folk melodies.But now there are more modern blends and stronger content.
"Here it is possible now to bark, but gently," Bahri said.
In 2003, when Islamic radicals set off a series of bombs in Casablanca, killing 45, wounding hundreds and shocking Morocco, Bahri was playing at a club 200 yards from one of the blasts.
The room was shaking, and we kept playing," he said."We thought it was an earthquake."
He soon understood differently and went into the street.
"I saw everything destroyed," he said, still astonished in the retelling.
"There were a lot of arrests, and a lot of people put into jail who had nothing to do with anything, but we had a problem of al-Qaida cells here."
His first response was to write a song aimed at alQaida called Who Are You?"You made terrorism, it was a present for Bush," he
sings, referring to former President George W Bush."Do you want peace,or do you want the politics of the CIA?"
The song continues:"You start to wear big trousers, and you grow your beard, and you wear tagia [a knitted cap].
"You speak of resistance but you are tamed monsters. If you understood the Koran, there wouldn't be bombs."
But Bahri also wrote a song attacking the international politics of Bush, called Johnny Walker Bush, Li Man Habbouch (The One We Dislike)."The blood of every Arab is not enough for me," he sings."How greedy! We sent him to hell."
Bahri left the neighborhood five years ago, but he tries to keep in touch with his parents and friends there, partly in search of material that will make his songs resonate.
"I always get my ideas from these poor districts, I read the newspapers and follow the news," he said.
"I have the feeling I can influence things through my songs."
Many of Morocco's poor are illiterate, and Bahri believes that his songs can educate and inspire."I see myself as an ambassador or a journalist,and I try to reach people who don't read newspapers," he said.
Bahri's father was an excellent soccer player who made the national team. Later, he became an engineer on the national train network. He never made much money, but pushed Bahri to get an education.
In Hay al-Mohammadi, where Bahri's parents, brother and sister still live, there are signs of rebuilding and development."Before M6,"as King Muhammad VI is known "they forgot this district," Bahri said.But beyond the market and the nearby hovels for the poor, there are some new and renovated schools,including a new sports center and playground. There are some programs to send children to seaside camps in the summer.
But poverty and illiteracy remain high here."These people were all in crisis before the crisis arrived,"Bahri said."If you don't work here, you don't eat. If you stay at home, you die."
Muhammad Mardi,66, a retired teacher, greeted Bahri and congratulated him on his marriage. Mardi was supervising three young men cementing broken tiles in front of a shop, to create a more decorative walkway.
One of the men, Khaled al-Omari,24, said he had little work and lived with his mother, who sells vegetables at the market, and four siblings."When I can, I clean fish at the market," he said."I don't even earn 50 dirhams [215 baht] a day."
There is anger, too. In the market, near the flystrewn stalls for butchered meat, a bearded vendor said in Arabic to Bahri, referring to the American journalist:"You take care of him. If not, we'll slaughter him." It was not said in a lighthearted fashion.
"Poverty is also in the head," Bahri said, then began laughing."We all need psychiatrists."
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