Healing Through Music

In the beginning of the war on Gaza, I was displaced from my town of Beit Hanoun at 3 a.m. We were running, without shoes, without anything. We arrived in Jabalia, near Gaza City. I was not thinking about music; I was just running for a safe place.

In the winter of 2013, Project: Music Heals Us Founder Molly Carr shattered a glass bowl into her left hand on the eve of her concert tour, halting her performing career. In the months that followed, she enrolled in a nursing aide course through the American Red Cross and was assigned to work with Ruth, a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient who, staff warned her, hadn’t spoken in years. The advice she received was practical: get in, get the job done, harden yourself to the screams, and get out.

She knew that the care and attention all people need required something more. So she sat down, held Ruth’s hand in silence, and Ruth, the woman who had not spoken in years, turned and began speaking in complete sentences.

Molly came back every day of that residency. On the last day, she promised Ruth that she would return, and bring her viola next time.

Ask any Bogotano about their perception of Colombia’s Chocó Region, and you’ll likely hear that it is a dangerous and remote place, visited primarily for whale-watching. These inter-regional biases are not uncommon—decades of armed conflict have disrupted networks of community and social cohesion, fragmenting them and threatening the practices that sustain communal life. And though a shared sense of Colombian identity exists, each of the country’s regions maintains a distinct cultural character that is often rooted in music.

Before traveling to Chocó, my perception of Colombia’s outer territories was similarly close-minded.

In this Reuters special report, young people in Gaza share how music offers them hope and eases their fears in the midst of war.