Word: guards
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...gray and rainy Saturday, five young men are gathered at the Body Guard music studio in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. The modest one-story building has only two rooms and no sign out front. Inside, the walls are lined with a velveteen fabric, the floor is covered in shag carpeting and there's minimal sound equipment - just a dated computer, two keyboards, a microphone and a mixing desk. The men are recording a track called "One Love," as King Fisher, the studio's founder and father figure to all the musicians who pass through it, sits at the computer...
...Thankfully, there are people like Body Guard Studio's King Fisher, whose real name is Emrys Savage, working toward peace - and doing it with music. "When you go to a club and the music says, 'Go down, go down,' people go down," says Aruna Hakim Dumbuya, a.k.a. Wahid, one of the musicians at Body Guard on the rainy Saturday. "And when the music says, 'Come up,' they come up. If you say 'Make peace,' people will make peace...
...handful of artists are utilizing music's important social role to sing about postwar reconciliation. Songs of peace regularly drift out of Body Guard Studio and are sometimes heard on the radio. Musicians often also spread their message to the countryside through a United Nations development program called Peace Tours, which takes groups of artists and singers to rural areas to talk about peacemaking...
...Fisher's politics, and guidance, appeal to all the young men who go to Body Guard. None were left untouched by the civil war and all appreciate the studio as an outlet. During the fighting, says Fisher, "all the progress young people should have been making they couldn't because nothing was working...
...Fisher says Sierra Leoneans need to forgive each other and hold the people who caused the most harm accountable. Many of the songs that come out of the two small rooms at Body Guard Studio are about corruption and greedy politicians - some of the biggest obstacles to true development. In Freetown, there are signs of progress. The city has a relatively functional municipal electricity grid, cheap and easy public transportation, and a budding democratic government. But, as the song "One Love" recognizes, Sierra Leone still has a long way to go before the animosity that enabled war to sweep over...