THE CARIBBEAN TE AWORO!

Bravo! My friends, we're here, at yet another sad-to-say-goodbye end of another season of All Around This World classes.

For the last three months we've celebrated the Caribbean in all its multicultural musical glory. As we hopped from island to island we dug deep into the region's complicated past, one that has struggle and sadness at its core, but always aware that the story need not end there. The indigenous peoples of the islands faced unimaginable hardships, enslaved Africans brought across the ocean by European colonial powers endured epic brutality and the increasingly mixed peoples on all islands survived storm after storm, literal and beyond. For all these challenges faced, the prevailing mood of these islands, as told time and again in its many forms of music, is not one of remorse. The resilience of Caribbean peoples resonates in every cha cha cha, kompas and clever calypso, in reggae's hope for justice and change, in soca's celebratory soul. We emerge from the Caribbean with a love of life, sung with eyes open by those who have survived.