Aloha. I love this university. There is such an amazing spirit every time that I come here, and it reminds me of the MTC. I believe it is because of the unique mission that the school has. What an amazing place ”I wish so much that I was a graduate of this school.
Now about myself. In 1999, ten years ago, I was living in Los Angeles. All of my education is in composition and I was working as a composer [and] as a music teacher, when I heard about what was happening in Kosovo. Now a story that I heard on the radio talked about how the Serbs were trying to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of all the Albanians. Now what they would do is go into a village, force the women and the men to separate, and then the women were told to leave and to walk to another country. The men and boys, meanwhile, were rounded up. Some of them escaped, many of them were killed, and many of them were taken to prison. The women had no place to go. They were told to leave their own country and to go to a refugee camp in a neighboring country. The conditions in the camps were horrible, but the worst thing was that they did not know what happened to their husbands and sons, their fathers, their brothers, and there was no communication to find out what was happening.
This radio program was interviewing these women, and they were talking about this, and how scared they were, and how they were just praying that the men in their lives were alive. Well, I had heard about this and was actually planning a backpacking in Austria that summer. So I thought, I am already going to Europe, I might as well go to Kosovo instead and help out. I had no idea where Kosovo was; all I knew was that it was in Europe, and Austria was in Europe, so how far apart could they be? That's how a lot of plans have happened in my life that have turned out very well.
I decided to go, and I found this volunteer organization, and the way that it worked was that you paid your way to get to the country and then you gave them some money when you arrived to cover your accommodations. You lived with them, and then you participated with their programs. And they were working with the children that were living in the refugee camps, so I thought that this would be a really great thing to do.
I was talking someone about this, and they offered to give me some money to help pay for this. I said, "Oh no, this is not what this is about. I am just doing this instead of going on vacation. It won't cost anything more than it would cost me to spend a month in Austria." This woman said, "No, you do not understand. My husband and I have been talking about this all week, and we want to go too, but we can't go. So we'd like to give you some money so it's like we are going with you." I said, "Well, let me think about that, because that is totally different from what I was planning."
I went home that night and was talking to my next door neighbor, who was a friend of mine from the singles ward in Los Angeles. I said, "I don't know what to do ”I don't want to take money from anyone." She said, "Liz, don't be stupid. Don't just go to go, do what you do best. Take a music program over there to the kids." So my singles group in L.A. started holding fundraising events; my ward got really involved, I started contacting instrument manufacturers, and I ended up going with about $5,000 worth of musical instruments. The instruments that I chose to go with are the harmonica and the penny whistle [holds them up]. The reason I chose these instruments was because they're simple. Anyone can learn to play these instruments, but you can also play complex music. Also, they're small, and I knew these children were living in camps, and they would at some point have to walk home. I wanted them to have something that was small enough to put in their pocket, and no one would be able to take it away from them.
I arrived in Kosovo in August 1999, and the war had been over for a few weeks, and so everyone had returned back to Kosovo. But when they got there, they found that everything had been destroyed ”absolutely everything: the streets, the schools, the homes, everything. And if you were lucky enough that your home was not destroyed, you had to be careful because things might be booby-trapped inside of your home, so most of the people living in Kosovo had to live in camps even after they went home. And the camps inside of Kosovo, instead of being tents, were just buildings. Any building that was standing could be a camp, so people moved into factories, churches, schools, and hotels.
The camp that I went to first was a brick factory. There were about 350 people living in this brick factory; three of them were men ”the rest were women and children. These women were all waiting and hoping and praying that the men in their family were still alive. I went to the camp the very first day, and I saw hundreds of children outside, just playing, and fighting, and making weapons out of things that you just wouldn't even think you could make weapons out of. I brought a volleyball and I started playing volleyball with the kids, but they kept fighting. I said, "You guys have to stop fighting, or I'm going to take my volleyball and go home." Of course, I said this in English, and, they didn't speak English, so I don't know if they really understood what I said. Then, we played a little bit more and they would fight again, and I would say, "You've got to stop fighting, or I'm going to go home." We did this about nine times, and after about an hour-and-a-half I said, "Ok, that's enough for today. I'm going to take my ball and go home, and hopefully tomorrow we'll do better." I started leaving, and as I was leaving, a woman ran out of one of the rooms in the camp and grabbed my hand. And she started leading me around and taking me around on a tour of the camp ”I think”because I didn't understand what she was saying to me. She showed me a big garbage pile, and she showed me their outdoor toilets, their one spigot of water for 350 people, and then she took me back to her room. And inside this room all the women of the camp had gathered, watching this strange American lady that was out there playing with their kids, and they wanted to meet me. And there was a seventeen-year-old girl there who spoke some English and she translated for me and told me about their lives. And as I got to know these women, I noticed there were a lot of these seventeen-year-old women there with them, and there were a lot of groups doing programs for the young children and for the boys, but there was nobody doing anything for these young girls”they were sort of invisible.
The first class that I started doing was for teenage girls. It was an amazing experience. It was so much fun. I would go to the camp every day, play sports with the kids, and then go and teach these teenage girls. Then the younger girls would start going with me, and asking me if I could do a class for them. I started giving a class for the younger girls. This class was going really well for the younger girls also, but now every time I went to the class, the boys would come up to me and say, "Lizza! Lizza! Musika! Musika!" And I said, "No way! I'm not going to do anything where I expect you to sit down and actually listen to me talk. We can't even play for ten minutes without you fighting." And they would say, "No! We'll be good! We'll be good!"
Then, one day, when I went to the camp, they did this [mimicking plucking tears from their eyes and dropping them into their hands] and this meant that they were collecting tears to give to me. When they did that, I said "Ok, I will teach you a music class if you would promise that you won't fight, that you won't talk when I'm talking, and you will practice." And these boys ended up being the best class that I have ever taught in my entire live”they were amazing. If one of these boys started to talk, the other boys would jump on them before he could even get a sentence out of his mouth. And if I was anywhere in town and I heard a harmonica, I'd turn around and it was always one of those boys. They kept those harmonicas everywhere they went.
This camp, this place that had been so full of sadness, became this place that was full of so much life. It wasn't necessarily beautiful, but it was full of life. It took about forty minutes to walk to the camp. On the last ten minutes of that walk, all you could hear were these instruments”it was amazing.
The kids that weren't living in these camps”the kids that were living in their homes or in a tent in their backyard while they were trying to rebuild their home”they didn't really have any place to go. So they all gathered at this one school that hadn't been destroyed in our city. And these kids were just sitting around, smoking, fighting”there were thousands of them. And "Save the Children" had started a volleyball program downstairs, so I went to the children and asked, "Would you like to have a music class?"
The first day, I had about nine kids in the class; that was a Monday. By Friday, I had over ninety children in that class. I ended up staying for six weeks, and by the end of the six weeks I was teaching six days a week, five classes a day in the school, six days a week, four classes a day in the camp, and everyday more children came into these programs. I gave away all of the instruments that I had bought and they still kept coming. Parents would come to me and say, "Please, let my child into the class," and so we just kept letting more and more children into these classes”it was amazing.
Then, I had to leave. I had to go home. I had seen these kids fight, I had seen children attack adults, I'd seen children play executioner, but I had never seen them cry until I told them it was time for me to leave. And when I said I had to leave they said, "No, Liz, you can't go. There is no one else here that is doing anything like this. We have people and organizations that are rebuilding our homes, that are giving us food, and we're so grateful for that, but this is the only thing that is feeding us inside. You can't take that away from us." I said, "Ok, I don't know how I am going to do this, but I promise you I will come back."
I left Kosovo, went back to Los Angeles, and was giving a fireside. At the end of the fireside, I said, "I have got to get back to Kosovo, but I don't know how I'm going to do it." A woman approached me afterwards and said, "If you would like to start a non-profit foundation, I'll be your accountant." And someone else said, "I'll be the lawyer." So they went off and did the paperwork and formed the Shropshire Music Foundation, and we've been around ever since.
Now, when Christ was talking about the last days, he said this, "Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold" (Matthew 24:7-12).
I think we're seeing this all over the world right now. And I think of all the effects of war, love waxing cold”it becoming difficult to love” is maybe the most far-reaching one. And even those of us who live in countries that are not at war have to be on guard against this hatred and this anger that wants to come to us. The effects of war on children are horrible. They grow up in an unnatural environment. But what's happened in the last twenty years is that children have gone from being victims of war to being targets of war. This is a very important distinction. It used to be that children were victims of war because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or their home was destroyed; famine often follows war, they lose parents”but what happened around the year 1990 is that the face of warfare in our world changed.
And now, through three things, children have become targets.
The first thing is land mines. Land mines are left by a retreating army in places where children will go, hoping that the children will be injured, and that everyone who will see that child when he or she grows up will know that the retreating army did that to them, and they will be afraid. The second way is through child-soldiering. Right now, there are over 300,000 child-soldiers in our world. And I am not talking about kids that are sixteen and seventeen years old that are volunteering to join the army of their country, I am talking about children as young as five years old. The average age of a child-soldier is between five and twelve. Right now, there are over 300,000 of these children who have been forced to be child-soldiers. They don't want to be child soldiers. And this isn't limited to one continent or one country, one religion, or one ethnicity. It is in 33 countries in our world.
The third thing, which is sort of the overall encompassing reason that children have become targets is because the majority of the wars in our world today are genocidal wars, which is to say you want to kill someone because you think you're better than them. And if it is based on their religion, their ethnicity, it doesn't matter”you want to kill the children as much as the adults, and so it doesn't matter. Children have gone from being the victims of war to the targets of war.
Now the last effect of war on children is that they are taught to hate. In 1st John, we read, "he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes" (1 John 2:11). This is a horrible thing to teach children, and it is so difficult for them to let go of this hate after the war ends.
Now for teenagers the effects of war are different. When we are teenagers we decide who we are going to be. But if you're a teenager living in a war zone, you have no freedom of movement or speech. You have no contact with your friends, and you believe that you have no power to change things. You lose your hope. You don't develop your sense of self.
When I was first in Kosovo, I didn't speak the language, and I was in these classes with 100+ children in them, and I honestly didn't know if they were coming to learn music or to watch this American lady make a fool out of herself while trying to teach them. A twelve year old girl approached me and asked if she could translate for me, and I said, "Sure, that would be great." So she started translating all of my classes that summer. Well, the next summer I came back, and instead of translating for me, I said, "Why don't you help me teach?"
And so she started helping me teach the children, and then her friends started coming to me, saying, "Could we help teach?" ”and their friends started coming. Now we had 40 of these teenagers in Kosovo who have made our program so much better. They run every aspect of our program: they teach all of our classes, they write lesson plans, they write reports, and they have gone from being victims to being the people that are changing their country. They're not teenagers that are thinking about themselves and how horrible their lives are. They are thinking about what they can do to help the children. They are changing their country.
Because of them, we were able to take our program to other countries. The first country that we picked was Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, there has been war for centuries. The war is between the Catholics and the Protestants. Right now, Northern Ireland has been more segregated than it has ever been in its history. In Northern Ireland, 95% of the children attend segregated schools. Murals, like the one that you are seeing behind me (pictured above left) are on the homes. There is a peace wall in Belfast that separates the Catholics from the Protestants; it is very easy to grow up not associating with people that are of the other religion. So what we are doing in Northern Ireland is doing programs to bring the Catholics and Protestants children together for music classes and concerts, and we have had some success, although it is our most difficult program. One of the fathers said at our concert that this was the first time his daughter had ever been friends with a protestant child. That was something that he didn't think he would see in his lifetime.
The next country that we went to is Uganda. In Uganda, the war has been going on for 21 years; it's a civil war in Northern Uganda between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government. No one knows how many child-soldiers are in the Lord's Resistance Army; the conservative figures state over 30,000, but I have also heard over 200,000, no one knows how many there really are. In addition to this, people have been forced to live in camps because their villages aren't safe. So you have 90% of this population living in these camps where they don't have enough food, they don't have enough water, and they have no way to make a living. In Uganda, we have this great group of teenage volunteers, and they are amazing. Among these teenage volunteers, there are former child-soldiers, there are orphans, there are teenagers who are still living in these camps, and yet instead of thinking about themselves and worrying about their own lives, they are trying to help the children to heal. They are absolutely amazing. And look at how happy they are, you can just see it. Our programs in Uganda have become quite extensive, and it's because of these youth volunteers in Uganda. They are really absolutely amazing, and what they have been able to do is so much more than what I can do. Children everywhere, all over the world, think teenagers are cool, so for me to teach a class is one thing, but for a teenager to teach a class, that's a lot more fun.
What I would like you to do now is to see a video of our program in action. Here are some of the children talking about it.
Now in conclusion, I just want to say that I know these things that I talked about are hard to hear, but we really need to know these things. We need to know about our brothers and sisters that are living in these situations. Jacob wrote in the Book of Mormon that we needed to think of our brethren like unto ourselves and to be familiar with all. We need to know what's going on so that we can help. The prophet Mormon is such an example to me of someone who not only gave his life for peace, but was never allowed to live in peace. He was forced to live at a time when the people had split back into the Nephites and the Lamanites. He was being hunted his entire life. His son was being hunted. His family had been killed, and yet, throughout all of this, he spent his time compiling the records that would become the We need to know what's going on so that we can help. The prophet Mormon is such an amazing example to me of someone who not only gave his life for peace, but was never allowed to live in peace. He was forced to live at a time when the people had split back into the Nephites and the Lamanites. He was being hunted his entire life. His son was being hunted. His family had been killed, and yet, throughout all of this, he spent his time compiling the records that would become the Book of Mormon. And he did this for the children of the people who were hunting him and trying to kill him. He really knew what it meant when he said that we needed to pray so that we could be "filled with this love." He taught us to pray for the ability to love. He said,
"Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever". Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father will all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure" (Moroni 7:47-48).
It's my prayer and my hope that all of us will look for the ways that we can change the world. We don't have to go overseas, we don't have to do these things that other people think are so amazing. We just have to do what we can, and if we go to Heavenly Father and ask Him, He'll tell us what it is that we can do. In the Doctrine and Covenants we read that if we desire, the Lord will show us what to do. And we will be the means of doing much good in this generation. It doesn't say if we have talent or if we have money. All it says is if we desire, we will be the means of doing much good in this generation. We can all do it.
Thank you so much for this opportunity to speak with you. I know that the Gospel is true. I'm so grateful for it, and I'm so grateful for prayer, and for knowing that Heavenly Father always listens and always answers. And I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.