Please, please go visit the old bill to read about his day at Folk Fest on Saturday, when he managed to get free tickets for some of his Somali friends. The mainstage bill that day featured the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone (musicians who were discovered in the refugee camps, playing music on makeshift instruments) and K’naan, a Somali rapper who now lives in Ontario. His friends got to spend a lot of time with the performers, even partying with them until they had to leave the next morning!

I officially am no longer annoyed with K’naan, who showed up late to the festival and missed his first workshop and then had “no time for interviews.” Media folk like me don’t take kindly to that kind of talk, until you hear that he had no time because he was hanging out with his fellow refugees.

I’ve never in a situation like the one African immigrants face, living in a completely foreign culture. The closest I ever came was being in non-urban Germany, where very few people speak English. I found the language barrier to be unexpectedly debilitating. When I travel in English-speaking countries, I feel pretty confident about being able to find my way, but when you can’t rely on your language skills, it makes leaving the house a lot more intimidating, knowing you can’t ask for directions or read a bus schedule. So I kind of try to multiply that by a thousand to imagine what immigrants feel like when they come here from far away.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 9:44 am and is filed under travel, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.