By Joe Lee
Last month, we helped release a book called "Please Listen, This is My Story." The Chinese-English bilingual book contains lyrics and descriptions of the songs that were sung in the concerts that took place at Hong Kong in early July. The concerts were hugely successful. A great sum of donation was raised and several hundreds of people attended the meaningful event (over 700 attendees in one concert alone).
In the early stage of preparing for the event, I already knew this would be big. Many people from different parts of the world were involved. Some got to get on stage. Many more worked tirelessly behind the scene for long days and nights prior to the event. As for me, I was deeply honoured to be entrusted with the task of doing the graphic design for this unique book.
To be honest, it took me quite a while to come up with the idea that led to the final design of this book. In the beginning, I started by reading the lyrics, which were originally poems composed by Violin. In the early drafts, some of the Chinese poems were not translated into English yet. Because of my illiteracy of reading Chinese, I had to rely on dictation softwares on my computer to listen to the original text. Of course, the computer cannot fully mimic the way an actual person speaks. The computer managed to do a decent job in pronunciation but as expected, it scored poorly in conveying emotions. Nevertheless, the monotonous dictation still deeply moved my soul simply by the powerful words of the poem. As I wrote before in the preface of the book, the poems evoked memories of the places and people that I had encountered during my past missionary trips to the third-world countries. I recalled the moments when my heart was overwhelmed by seeing the needs of this world I recalled the faces of the countless children who dressed in rags and could not smile.
After reading and listening to these poems, I had an idea. Instead of just inserting photos to accompany each poem, how about just letting the children speak for themselves? We may not understand the literal words that they write due to the differences in our languages, but I believe that pictures are universal and do not require translation. Hence, the use of children's illustrations matches very well with the title of this book "Please Listen, This is My Story". For the songs, you can listen to their stories. For the book, you can see their world through their eyes. It is an idea that combines the best of two worlds to deliver an even more powerful message.
It is not an easy idea to execute at all. Think about all the collaborative efforts and resources required to collect drawings from children in different parts of the world! Of course, I wouldn't dare to think of such an idea without some decent amount of prior work. When the mission team visited the Children's Home in Nepal in 2011, we came up with an activity for the children to do two drawings based on two different topics. On the first set of drawings, they drew about their lives in the past when they were in the villages before coming to Kathmandu. This is very interesting because the things that they drew were very different from what I had have accustomed to seeing from children in first-world countries, such as here in Canada. No super heroes. No video game characters. No big comfy homes with nice cars parked in front of them. Instead, I saw drawings of them tending the buffalo, shepherding flocks of sheep, harvesting the land, and filling large buckets of water at the well to carry them back to their mud dwellings. All of these occurred under the scouring sun which rose above the pointy snow-capped Himalaya mountains. These simple drawings provided an invaluable window of looking at what kind of labourous lives they experienced in the past.
On the second set of drawings, they drew about their present lives after being received to the Children's Home. Let me clarify that we didn't instruct them specifically to draw only happy things in the present and only sad things in the past. They were welcomed to draw whatever they wanted to, as long as they relate to those two fairly broad themes. But the resulting difference between the two was staggering. They drew themselves wearing colourful uniforms going to school with their classmates in the morning. They drew themselves playing basketball in the gym. They also drew themselves singing and praising the Lord together with their hands lifted high. It is deeply satisfying to see that not only they could be fed, be educated, and excel in sports, but also know God as their everlasting Father.
Finally, we also needed some drawings from the children in Africa so that we can also tell the stories from their perspectives. Unlike the drawings from Nepal which were already scanned and stored in my computer since the visit in 2011, we had to request new ones from Africa. Thankfully, it could be easily arranged because there was an existing drawing class for young children by Light and Love Home at the Mamelodi slums in Pretoria, South Africa.
The drawings from this part of the world were very different from the drawings from Nepal. For example, the dwellings which were built from corrugated sheet metals were drawn a lot closer to one another. Also, the overall colour palette was primarily based on earth tones, which actually reflect their drier landscape and informal built environment. Even though the setting that was depicted was less than ideal, yet I could still sense the happiness from the children by the way they drew themselves. Perhaps, it was because they were doing these drawings under the love and care of the big-hearted volunteers of Light and Love Home!
I may be a bit biased but I think both the CD and book are awesome! So if you haven't purchased them yet, I strongly encourage you to get them soon! Remember, all the money that you pay will proceed to the Light and Love Home Worldwide Charity Funds with 0% administration fees. This is made possible because the project was done purely by volunteers.
