By Rita Field-Marsham
It is a characteristic of Kenyan culture to do group singing: at church, at school, at social gatherings…For example, at school recess, Precious Blood girls casually gather into an extracurricular singing club to rap and reinterpret their favourite songs of the day. They tackle songs about difficult subjects, but even those that touch on their lives, like abuse, they handle with relaxed smiles. When I showed the posted video of them singing to Naomi Gaskin, a friend and voice psychotherapist, she explained that: “Singing space can be one of those transformative spaces where you can take trauma form outside your life and transform it into experiences that have value and meaning and they become not just negative parts of who you are”.