Afghan refugees reclaim their voices with music: 'It is cathartic'

BALTIMORE -- The melody was played on turquoise ukuleles, with children beating out the rhythm on miniature drums.

“I feel peace when my family is safe,” sang the youngsters and their mothers, who are refugees from Afghanistan. “I feel peace when my friendships are strong. I feel peace when my world is calm.”

It was a simple little song, and it wasn’t always strictly in tune. But on a recent weekday afternoon in an East Riverdale community center, the kids were accompanied by a Baltimore Symphony Orchestra wind quartet and three students from the University of Maryland on violin, viola and cello — part of a workshop aimed at taking music out of the concert halls and into the immigrant communities surrounding the College Park campus.

The song made tears form in Sima Bonyadi’s eyes.

Bonyadi helped write those lyrics, which expressed her homesickness for Afghanistan, from which her family fled three years ago following the Taliban takeover. The peace song also spoke to the challenges the 32-year-old faced in making a way for herself, her husband and their three children in the United States, where the non-English speaker struggled to communicate basic information.

“It is cathartic, that song,” Bonyadi said, speaking through a translator.

“People in countries like Afghanistan sometimes have to flee if they don’t want to die. For me, peace means being able to stay safely in your homeland,” she said.

She and her children — aged 2, 7 and 11 — were participating in a workshop jointly sponsored by the university, symphony and the outreach group Sound Impact, which translates the life experiences of workshop participants into music.

For most of its history, classical music was performed almost exclusively in concert halls with pristine acoustics. But as audiences began to dwindle in the 21st century, music groups have increasingly made it a priority to demonstrate their usefulness in fixing social problems, from helping scientists study Alzheimer’s disease to — in this case — using music to teach language skills that can help refugees succeed in school and find jobs.

“Gone are the days of expecting people to come to us,” said Brian Prechtl, the BSO’s interim director of education and community engagement.

“Most legacy institutions have begun turning outward and thinking about how we can add value to the communities we serve,” he said.

Representatives of the three institutions initially met with Afghan refugees living in the Parkview Gardens Apartments in East Riverdale. The immigrants told the Americans that one of their greatest challenges was mastering English.

The Americans thought that a six-session workshop that included singing, performing and listening to music could be useful.

“There are a lot of play-based educational practices that include developing musical ‘earworms,'” said Sound Impact co-founder Tiffany Richardson.

Singing along with a tune can help with everything from expanding vocabulary to learning how to pronounce certain words, she said.

In its 11 years, Sound Impact has grown to include about 15 teaching artists — musicians who regularly perform with such organizations as the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington Ballet and Wolf Trap Orchestra.

The nonprofit serves about 10,000 young people each year and has three main projects: a cultural exchange program that brings Latin American students to the U.S. to attend a music festival, a project working with incarcerated people in juvenile detention facilities, and “time travel” workshops for immigrant communities that celebrate global cultures.

For the time travel workshop in Prince George’s County, Sound Impact and the BSO created a program of folk music. It included a selection from Bela Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra,” the peace song written by the group and two Arabic folk tunes familiar to the refugees. One was Dawood Sarkhosh’s iconic “My Land.”

“I have become homeless,” the group sang. “I have moved from one home to another. Without you, I have always been shoulder-to-shoulder with sorrow.”

In August 2023, the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, claiming it was morally corrupt. They beat and humiliated musicians and burned more than 21,000 instruments. Then, three months ago, women in Afghanistan were prohibited from speaking in public.

But on a drizzly afternoon in an auditorium in Montgomery County, the refugees reclaimed their voices.

“It is amazing to see how much enthusiasm and love the resettlers have for music,” Richardson said.

“We held the first couple of workshops outside in a courtyard of the apartment complex. As soon as we started pulling out our instruments, kids were everywhere. Women came out and were sitting on their balconies.”

And just as the project affected the refugees, it also is having an impact — possibly permanently — on the BSO musicians and the university students who have worked with Sound Impact this year.

“It becomes personal for the students,” said Jane Hirshberg, program director for community engagement and development at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. “They’re not just coming in and playing a tune and leaving.”

A vocal student wrote Richardson an email in which he described his semester working with Sound Impact as “honestly life-changing” and added that it caused him to reconsider his career path. Now, the student wrote, he plans to look for jobs working with nonprofits after he graduates.

A previous collaboration among the three partner institutions involved Latino high school students. Another project with a different community group will begin in January. The two-year pilot program will wrap up in 2025, but Hirshberg said she hopes the collaboration will be extended indefinitely.

The workshops, which regularly attracted between 30 and 50 kids, seem to be filling a need. Bonyadi said that it helped ease her culture shock.

A former middle school teacher, Bonyadi said she knew her family would have to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban passed laws that would have barred her 7-year-old daughter from receiving a formal education once she turned 12. Even her sons would have had trouble finding an institution where they could study.

”There are no schools left in Afghanistan,” she said. “I miss my home, but here, my children can go to school. I am very glad to be in this country.”