Livin' like a refugee...

Neumo's was packed with 400+ people, sweating, dancing, cheering for this incredible band called the Refugee All Stars at a benefit for the Northwest Immigration Rights Project. I saw the documentary of The Refugee All Stars at the Seattle International Film Festival. It was a pretty incredible story about these guys from Sierra Leone who fled the civil war to Guinee. The civil was brutal where people were forced to kill their own family members. Children killed other children and out of a horrible sense of guilt were easily manipulated into becoming child soldiers. These refugees were musicians and came together at a camp in Guinee and started making music. These filmmakers stumbled upon them and out came this incredible film and story of this band of refugees creating music about their experiences. Incredible music. An incredible story. And it only gets better - they've returned to Sierra Leone and when they were in the State for the South by Southwest Music Festival - they were playing on the streets with the crowd after their performance with the VP of new Music for Time Warner stumbled across them and signed them on a major label the next day.

So we went to their concert. It was also Annika's good-bye, going away party - her last hurrah! Which of course made sense that it would be at a benefit for refugees and her last hurrah. She's one of those wonderful people who does everything with purpose. She was also my fast friend here in Seattle. We're so similar in so many ways - except that she's 10 years younger and has done more with her early twenties than I. We met in the hall at work (even though she was in my department we hadn't talked much) - when we started swapping malaria stories, public-transportation-in-other-countries stories, our mutual love for all things African - complete xenophies and artists who are in conflict with their art. She's my soul sister - truly. And she left for Jordan this morning for a year.