10.12.20

Kibuye Music: Silent Night in 4 languages

(from Eric)

With the arrival of Mathieu Lembelembe a little over a year ago, I looked around and said to myself, "We have quite a bit of musical talent here at Kibuye now."  What followed was an idea to record a few Christmas songs amongst our team and several of our musical friends here.

Life being busy and 2020 being 2020, by the time I got around to finalizing any of the songs, many people had changed locales.  But we did manage to complete two songs.

The first is Silent Night, sung in English, French, Swahili, and Kirundi, the four main languages of Burundi.  Kayla, our American teacher, sings in English.  One of Kibuye's Burundian doctors, Ladislas, and his wife Annick, sing in French.  Mathieu, our Congolese architect, sings in Swahili, and the worship team at our local church welcomed me one dark evening to record them singing in Kirundi.  Michelle, Greg, and I came together for the music.

The second song was "Far as the Curse is Found" which I actually posted on this blog nine years ago.  For this one, I browsed my favorite carols for a bunch of lines that I thought were so good that they needed increased visibility and so pulled them altogether and made a new song.  They are 9 carols total, if you want to hunt for them.

Music sharing on Blogger not being any better than when I originally posted this in 2011, I'll just link the old video.  Suffice to say that Kayla did a great job singing background on the recording, and that the accordion made an unexpected appearance.  Email me if you want me to send it to you.  =)