Folk Fest 2007

Prince George, BC

Folk Fest is an annual folk festival in Prince George, BC Canada. Performers come from all over the world to perform. This is a weekend event attended by hundreds of loyal fans.

NUDF took this opportunity to raise funds and to spread the word about NUDF. It was a great success with newspaper and radio interviews. Below are a few pictures and a video of one of our greatest accomplishment, the phone call to Buga Village, Uganda.

Connecting to Uganda (video below)

The idea started only a few weeks earlier. We discussed the problem of making the "connection" between our North American culture and African culture, making Africa, especially Uganda, a real living presence. We were doing some promotion at the Prince George Folk Fest and decided this would be a great venue. As this was a folk festival we thought we would try to have Ogek village sing us a song from Uganda. We had just installed the first clean water well in the village and the villagers were excited. An audio and video feed from Ogek village would be great. Then reality set in. This is a village with no electricity, no Internet and no land based phone system. Not being CNN the only semi-reliable electronic connection we could make was with a cell phone.

On July 28, 2007 at 10:15pm we called Uganda. After a few seconds we became worried as the call was dropped. With hundreds of people waiting we called again. This connection was good. The rest is on the video. At the time what we did not realize or foresee was that this was a major event in Buga village. Over 20 elders and up to a hundred villagers had assembled to talk to the people of Prince George over one cell phone. They had several songs to sing and many thanks and prayers to give. We only had a short time and had to break the connection. The Prince George crowd loved it. After the first call Chris phoned again and apologized for our curt call. We promised to do it again soon.

In today's high tech world this may seem very simple and ordinary but for a brief moment the people of Prince George had connected with Buga Village. Barriers had been dropped and community spoke to community across a great gulf.