Woman carries a bowl full of water in preparation for a meal

In Uganda women do a great majority of the household work including, but not limited to, the cooking, cleaning, harvesting, caring for the children (and their husbands) and fetching clean water each day.

“Wisdom”

Elder in the village of Opucet, Uganda

i met this young woman while exploring the city of soroti. i was trying to get a look at what she and the other women were doing and upon approaching her she warmly explained that they were making friend sweet potatoes. who knew? not only are sweet potatoes a different color in uganda (more white or pale yellow like a regular potato), but they are also just as if not more delicious. i bought four huge pieces for less than $1USD.

The village of Opucet, Uganda

"pure and natural beauty"

while visually stunning, the women of uganda possess something so much more -- against all odds, and without the luxuries that we take for granted each day, they are resilient, powerful, capable and confident

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25589709

Of the estimated 70 million people killed in World War Two, 26 million died on the Eastern front - and up to four million of them are still officially considered missing in action. But volunteers are now searching the former battlefields for the soldiers' remains, determined to give them a proper burial - and a name.

Olga Ivshina walks slowly and carefully through the pine trees, the beeps of her metal detector punctuating the quiet of the forest. "They are not buried very deep," she says.

"Sometimes we find them just beneath the moss and a few layers of fallen leaves. They are still lying where they fell. The soldiers are waiting for us - waiting for the chance to finally go home."

Nearby, Marina Koutchinskaya is on her knees searching in the mud. For the past 12 years she has spent most of her holidays like this, far away from home, her maternity clothes business, and her young son.

"Every spring, summer and autumn I get this strange sort of yearning inside me to go and look for the soldiers," she says. "My heart pulls me to do this work."

They are part of a group called Exploration who have travelled for 24 hours in a cramped army truck to get to this forest near St Petersburg. Conditions are basic - they camp in the woods - and some days they have to wade waist-deep through mud to find the bodies of the fallen. The work can be dangerous, too. Soldiers are regularly discovered with their grenades still in their backpacks and artillery shells can be seen sticking out of the trees. Diggers from other groups elsewhere in Russia have lost their lives.

Marina holds up an object she has found, it looks like a bar of soap, but it is actually TNT. "Near a naked flame it's still dangerous, even though it has been lying in the ground for 70 years," she says.

Many countries were scarred by World War Two, but none suffered as many losses as the Soviet Union.

On 22 June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest and bloodiest campaign in military history, aimed at annexing vast areas of the USSR to the Third Reich. St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, was one of his main targets. In less than three months, the advancing German army had encircled the city and started pounding it from the air.

'They were killing us like flies'

Mikhail Zorin cried when he first saw the gun he was expected to use to repel the German invasion. "It was so big and heavy," he says. "I was scared, how was I supposed to shoot?"

It was an antiquated model from the Tsarist days - and shortages meant they were only given one between two.

The 18-year-old Zorin endured nine hellish days fighting in Nevsky Pyatachok - the tiny strip of land by the Neva River where 260,000 Soviet soldiers died trying to break the siege of Leningrad.

"They were killing us like flies," says the 90-year-old. "There were corpses lying all over the place. The ground was mashed up by bombs and shells and we simply weren't equipped to fight back."

But attempts to take the city by storm fell through, so Hitler decided to starve it into surrender. For more than two years, the Red Army fought desperately to cut through German lines.

Olga and Marina are working near the town of Lyuban, 80km (50 miles) south of St Petersburg. Here, in an area of just 10 sq km, an estimated 19,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in just a few days in 1942. So far the diggers have found 2,000 bodies.

Ilya Prokoviev, the most experienced of the Exploration team, is carefully poking the ground with a long metal spike. A former army officer with a droopy blonde moustache, he found his first soldier 30 years ago while walking in the countryside.

"I was crossing a swamp when suddenly I saw some boots sticking out of the mud," he says.

"A bit further away, I found a Soviet helmet. Then I scraped away some moss and saw a soldier. I was shocked. It was 1983, I was 40km from Leningrad and there lay the remains of a soldier who hadn't been buried. After that there were more and more and more, and we realised these bodies were to be found everywhere - and on a massive scale."

There was little time in the heat of battle to bury the dead, says Valery Kudinsky, the defence ministry official responsible for war graves.

"In just three months the German death machine covered more than 2,000km (1,250 miles) of our land. So many Red Army units were killed, wiped out or surrounded - how could anyone think about burials, let alone records of burials, in such conditions?"

Immediately after the war, the priority was to rebuild a shattered country, he says. But that does not explain why later the battlefields weren't cleared and the fallen soldiers not identified and buried.

The diggers now believe that some were deliberately concealed. The governing council of the USSR issued decrees in 1963 about destroying any traces of war, says Ilya.

"If you take a map showing where battles took place, then see where all the new forest plantations and building projects were located, you'll find they coincide with the front line. Nobody will convince me they planted trees for ecological reasons."

If you crouch down in the woods near Lyuban, a series of grooves in the earth can be clearly made out.

"They actively planted new trees on the battlefield - they ploughed furrows and put the trees exactly in the places where the unburied soldiers were lying," Marina says.

She recently unearthed a helmet and in order to find its owner, the team had to uproot two nearby trees.

'He promised he would come back'

I will never forget the story of 21-year-old Khasan Batyrshin, writes Olga Ivshina.

Khasan went missing in 1943. His family contacted the government every year asking for information about him, but the answer was always the same. "No data found. Soldier missing in action." But the Batyrshins never gave up. Even at the age of 105 his mother repeated: "He will come back. He promised me. He will even move mountains."

We found Khasan last year near Nevskaya Dubrovka. The bodies of those killed there were just put into pits made by falling shells. It was one of the last days at the dig. Everyone was tired, but Khasan inspired us. We found his ID tag. It is always a miracle, because many soldiers didn't have them at all. And even those who did often didn't fill them in.

The piece of paper in his tag was neatly pencilled in. It was not easy to decipher, but after four hours, Khasan got his name back.

When his family got the news, the first thing they did was visit the tomb of Khasan's mother to tell her. She had died a year earlier.

"When we cleaned away some clumps of earth from the roots we saw two hands tangled up in them. Then we found a pelvis and some ribs between the roots. So we think the whole soldier was underneath the roots and the trees were growing on top of him."

But how could anyone - farmers or workmen - get on a tractor and plough over land littered with human remains?

"If they refused to plough a field because there were corpses or bones in it, they'd just be sacked," says Ilya. "If you lost your job in those days you were a non-person - you didn't exist. That's what life was like in the Soviet Union." Plus, it was less than two decades after the war. The workers had endured far worse horrors, he says.

There are horrors for the diggers, too.

Nevskaya Dubrovka, on the banks of the River Neva, was the scene of one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Leningrad siege. The Red Army fought tooth and nail to secure a narrow stretch of river bank in an attempt to break the blockade. Hundreds of thousands of troops, used as little more than cannon fodder, were slaughtered.

Diggers discovered a mass grave in the area last summer. The soldiers may have been thrown into the pit by their comrades or local villagers as a hasty form of burial, or even by the German Army, anxious to prevent an epidemic among its troops.

"There must have been 30 or 40 soldiers in there. Four layers of people one on top of the other," says Olga, as she sits by the campfire. "But the skeletons were all mixed up and smashed. Here you have a head - there a leg…" She pauses and stares into the fire. "Once you've seen that, you'll never forget it. You are no longer the same person you were before."

Going back to city life and her job with the BBC Russian Service is sometimes hard after a few weeks in the forest. When her friends in Moscow complain about not being able to afford a good enough car or designer clothes, she feels alienated.

"Everything seems so pointless - even my job as a journalist - and sometimes I think, 'What am I doing?' But here, on the dig, I feel we are doing something which is needed."

For Olga - who sang hymns to Communism in her primary school, then learnt about profit and loss at secondary school - volunteering as a digger also provides a moral compass in confusing times.

"Sometimes you need to know that you are doing something which is important, that you are not just a piece of dust in this universe. This work connects us to our past. It's like an anchor which helps us to stay in place even during a storm."

Finding the dead is only one part of their mission. Rescuing them from anonymity is the other.

In Moscow an eternal flame burns at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the shadow of the Kremlin Wall, but for the diggers, the best way to honour those who lost their lives is to give them back their identities.

"The soldier had a family, he had children, he fell in love," says Ilya. "Being unknown is nothing to be proud of. We are the ones who made him unknown."

But discovering who they were is not always easy, especially after so much time has passed.

"The more data we can collect from the spot, the better the chance we have to identify a soldier," says Alexander Konoplov, the leader of the Exploration group. Sometimes they find old coins with the soldiers, given to them by their families. The belief was that if the family lent him a few coins, he would come home to repay the loan.

But while personal items can build up a picture of the person, they can't help find his name, or place of birth. Initials scratched into spoons and bowls are good. But the key is usually an ID tag.

Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.
Media caption There are around 300 volunteer groups in Russia searching for similar grave sites

During World War Two, Soviet soldiers' ID tags were not made of metal - they were small ebony capsules containing a small piece of paper for their personal details. Sadly, the papers are often illegible. Others were left blank because many soldiers were superstitious - they believed filling in the forms would lead to certain death.

Alexander, who ran his own business selling food products before becoming a full-time digger, is holding a bullet case plugged with a small piece of wood. He hopes that it is an improvised ID tag. But when he turns it upside down in his hand, what comes out of it is not a roll of paper, but a trickle of brown liquid.

"Sometimes we find messages with the soldier's name," says Alexander. "Some wrote, 'If I am killed, please pass this on to my girlfriend or my mum.' You can't help feeling touched by it."

Exploration is one of 600 groups of diggers from all over Russia who have found and reburied a total of 500,000 soldiers so far.

These teams are known as the "white diggers", but there are also those dubbed "black diggers" who search for medals, guns, coins or even gold teeth which they sell online or to specialist dealers. They are not interested in identifying the soldiers - they just leave the bones in the ground.

Alexander has a strict set of guidelines about how the remains should be excavated, labelled and stored. Each soldier is photographed and their location is recorded and entered into a digital database.
Ebony ID tags; a volunteer tries to decipher their contents; a grenade found in the forest Diggers Marina, Ilya and Olga
If a decades-old ID tag cannot be deciphered by the team on the ground, it is carefully packed and sent to the team's headquarters in the Volga city of Kazan.

The team's technician, Rafik Salakhiev, uses ultraviolet light and digital imaging to reveal the faded pencil marks. "Let's try to enhance purple colours on this yellow paper," he says. "We can reduce the saturation and yes! We start to see some letters…"

Once a name emerges, the diggers use old army lists, classified documents and contacts in the military or police to identify the soldier precisely and to locate surviving members of his family.

"Every new search gets to me as if it was the first one," says Rafik. Many of the relatives are now elderly and may not be in good health. "When you call the relatives, before telling them the news, you try to prepare them. Even if they have been waiting for a long time."

But tracing a soldier's family can take years - on occasions more than a decade - especially if the family moved after the war.

When, in 1942, people in First Lt Kustov's home village heard he was missing, they suspected him of deserting and collaborating with the Germans. They branded his young son and daughter traitor's children and the family were forced to leave. It took Ilya Prokoviev months to track them down.

"When we told them that we had found their father's remains, for them the feeling was just indescribable. They knew that he hadn't just deserted, that he couldn't have behaved like that, but there was never any proof until 60 years later."

From the archives, the diggers worked out that Kustov had been the commander of one of Stalin's notorious shtrafbats, a battalion made up of prisoners and deserters. Only a trusted officer and staunch communist would have been appointed to such a post.

"They had managed to restore historical truth and honour their father's memory," says Ilya. "It was the main event of their lives, I think." Kustov's children took his remains and buried them next to their mother, who had waited her whole life for her husband to return.

Near the banks of the River Neva, close to the mass grave found by diggers, a Russian Orthodox priest chants prayers as he walks around the rows of bright red coffins laid out on the grass.

The children, grand-children and great-grand-children of the soldiers they unearthed look on, some quietly sobbing.

Valentina Aliyeva is here to bury the father she has not seen since she was four years old. For seven decades, the only link she had with him was a black and white photo of their former family home.

"My mother remarried some years later and everyone told me to call my stepfather Daddy. But I refused - I knew who my real dad was," she says, her eyes filling with tears. "What those diggers have achieved means so much to me. I can't tell you how grateful I am."

Tatiana Uzarevich and Lyudmila Marinkina, twin sisters in their early 50s, have travelled from the remote region of Kamchatka - nine hours away by plane. The diggers found their grandfather's ID tag in the mass grave. When they were unable to trace his family, the group put out an appeal on the evening news.

The twins' elderly mother was stunned when she heard his name - Alexander Golik - the family had searched in vain for years. His disappearance had left his wife and children destitute. "The fact that he was missing in action meant that my grandmother was not entitled to any of the financial support given to other relatives after the Great Patriotic War. She didn't get a penny and she had four children to raise," says Lyudmila.

"My mum was so hungry all the time, she begged the other kids for pieces of bread at school.

"She only remembers the shape of her fathers' hands - but she had memories of a kind, good man," says Tatiana. "We just had to come to this reburial service to visit the place where he died and accompany him to his final resting place."

The walls of the large, newly dug grave are draped with red cloth - an act of respect normally accorded only to army generals. Young men dressed in Soviet-style army uniforms form a guard of honour. Visibly moved, as coffin after coffin is carried past to be buried, some of them look up to the sky. There is a belief that birds flying overhead transport the souls of the dead.

There are more than 100 coffins - each contains the bones of 12 to 15 men. The diggers would like each soldier to have his own, but they can't afford the extra 1,500 they would need for today's service.

This is the culmination of months of work by the volunteers. It's what it's all for - bringing a semblance of order to the moral chaos of the past, and paying tribute to those who gave their lives.

In the spring they will resume their searches in the forests and fields where so many were slaughtered. They are determined to continue until the last man is found. But it could be a life's work - or more.

"There are so many unburied soldiers, it will take decades to find them. There will definitely be work for our grandchildren," says Marina. "But nature is working against us. The remains are decomposing and it is getting harder to find the bones, ID tags and army kit." The more years that go by. The less information there is.

"We need to continue to do this for ourselves, so our souls can be at peace," says Ilya. "It has become the meaning of our lives."

case study:The Great Benin and Ife kingdom of Nigeria 12th to the 19th century.

It highlights on Africans Stolen historical sculpture/Artifact now kept in British museum proves Africa civilizations long before the Europeans and western world.

you will enjoy some very interesting stories of, War, Love and the European infiltration of the kingdoms

Pardon me, this is a long documentary but if you are keen about African History, you will enjoy every second of it.

WARANI: The Saga of Ecuador's Secret People: A Historical Perspective

From:

http://www.lastrefuge.co.uk/data/articles/waorani/waorani_articles_main.html
retrieved on 5/30/15

"How can the Indians assume goodwill when we ferret them out so relentlessly? ... We approach them from the sky, the sphere which they do not control ... We are offering them unknown territory for known, a foreign land instead of home, dependency for self sufficiency, subjection to outside powers instead of resistance, and hunger where once there was plenty. (Quote from a Missionary, reflecting on his life.

For most of us, as individuals, life is defined by family and village; but on a grander scale, human migration, trade and the interpenetration of cultures are as old as the human experience. Globalization is not a phenomenon of the last decade, it is the human condition; as population increases, we need more room; the powerful relentlessly subdue the weak. Mankind has followed this universal pattern throughout history - whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas. It is happening even now, in Amazonia; outsiders arrive, engulf, overwhelm, and consume, leaving a trail of irreversible destruction behind. It is a natural evolutionary process; it seems inevitable, and unstoppable.

The history of the Waorani of eastern Ecuador, and for that matter all of the Amazonian tribes, is sketchy, but first contacts with outsiders were often both tragic and violent. Records show that explorers arrived in the Amazon in the sixteenth Century, when Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of Francisco Pizarro who conquered the Incas, allowed some of his lieutenants to follow the river Amazon to its mouth. Of the hundreds of soldiers who set out on this perilous journey, only a few survived the debilitating diseases and hostile tribes they encountered on the way. For Indians who had never seen white people before it must have been a terrifying encounter, and they defended themselves against the unwelcome intrusion. For the soldiers, fierce looking Indians who could move silently through the undergrowth and strike without warning, usually at night, became formidable adversaries.

In spite of the hostility of the environment and the Indians, more and more outsiders ventured into the Amazon; among the first were rubber gatherers, gold prospectors, and enterprising merchants. These men, eking out a hard life far from familiar home surroundings, often became unscrupulous, plundering villages, raping Indian women, enslaving young men, and murdering others. Many Indians died from diseases brought in by the strangers against which they had no resistance. It is no wonder that, for the Indians, outsiders were bad news.

The traditional lands of the Waorani lie in Ecuadorian Amazonia, where the foothills of the Andean Cordilleras flatten out to meet eight thousand square miles of tropical rain forest lying between the Napo and Curaray rivers. In the isolation of this remote territory, the Waorani have lived as semi-nomadic hunter gardeners for many centuries. But in the course of just one generation, their lives and their homeland have changed irrevocably.

Exploration for oil began on the fringes of Waorani territory in the early 1940's, but the companies soon encountered great difficulties because of Waorani violence and hostility. In January 1942, at Arajuno, a Shell Oil Company foreman and two Ecuadorian workers were speared to death by a band of Waorani Indians, led by a man called Moipa. It made news headlines for a shocked outside world, but was only the first of many such raids by these uncontacted Indians. By 1949, a total of twelve Shell employees had been killed by Waorani, forcing Shell to abandon their operations. The Waorani had earned a reputation as a tribe of hostile 'savages', or in the Quichua language, 'Aucas'. It would be almost another decade before any peaceful contact would be made; only then would the outside world begin to understand the extraordinary and unique nature of the Waorani. It would be revealed that they were a desperate people living in fear, not just the threat from outsiders, but with a culture so embedded in violence that they were afraid of themselves.

Soon after the Shell company killings, at the end of the forties, yet more tales of violence emerged. Two Waorani girls, Dayuma and Ome, chose to come out of the forest of their own accord, in order to escape a spate of vengeful spearing attacks and killings on their families by Moipa, the same man who had killed the oil workers. The girls fled the violence, throwing themselves at the mercy of the first outsider they came across. That outsider, Don Carlos, was the owner of a tea plantation, Hacienda Ila, and he took the girls to live as his slaves. Meanwhile, in the forest, the deadly vendettas continued, with killings and revenge killings. Moipa himself was eventually speared to death by other Waorani. Once accepted at Ila, Dayuma and Ome started doing manual work. Some time later, Rachel Saint, an American missionary from Wycliffe Bible translators, befriended them at the hacienda and started to learn their language. Little did Rachel know at the time that the consequences of her action would trigger a series of events that would change the lives of the Waorani forever.

To Read More See :

http://www.lastrefuge.co.uk/data/articles/waorani/waorani_articles_main.html

PBS NOVA DOCUMENTARY 1984

Published on Aug 7, 2013

NOVA visits the Waorani Indians of Eastern Ecuador less than 30 years after their first contact with Western civilization. Left largely undisturbed because of their traditional hostility toward outsiders, a few families remain deep in the rainforest hunting game with blowguns and spears. They also cultivate gardens, make weapons and tools and maintain traditions that date back to the Stone Age.

Taken from the "When The Sun Hits Blog", July 22, 2010:

"Shoegaze? What exactly is that, anyway?" is a question heard too often. Worse still, it's a difficult question to answer! Genre definitions are never fun to do within the realm of art, but in the interest of posterity and to better understand everything about this genre (and culture), we think a brief and painless history lesson is in order.

Let's start with the basics. Shoegaze is a genre of rock music born in the late 1980's in the UK, and heavily features the use of guitar effects pedals, feedback, distortion, drone and atmospheric soundscapes. This "wall of sound" approach soon caught on with a handful of bands, and a scene of like-minded musicians was born. The word "Shoegaze" was coined when it was noticed that the musicians, when playing live, tended to keep their backs turned and their eyes firmly on the ground, both in keeping with the mood of the music and to concentrate on manipulating guitar pedals and gear on the floor. Listeners soon came to call the musicians "Shoegazers", and later the term came to mean anyone creating or listening to Shoegaze music. Or, as we lovingly like to call them, 'Gazers.

The Shoegaze movement was also briefly called "the scene that celebrates itself" because of the close-knit relationships between the Shoegaze bands of the time. Rather than be rivals, Shoegazers were often seen at one another's shows, played in one another's bands, and pub-crawled and hung out together.

Pinpointing the exact moment Shoegaze was born is difficult to do, but it's safe to say that once the Jesus and Mary Chain released their first single in November of 1984, a 7 inch on Creation Records called "Upside Down", the seeds of Shoegaze were firmly sown. The Jesus and Mary Chain defined the early sound of Shoegaze with their noisy, feedback-laden songs, and influenced countless bands then and today. Creation Records, in turn, would become a major player in the early days of Shoegaze, later releasing classic gazer records by bands such as Ride, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine, to name a few.

The apex of the first wave of Shoegaze is generally considered to have occurred in November of 1991, with the release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Meticulously crafted (Kevin Shields used nineteen different recording studios and nearly bankrupted Creation Records) and unapologetically loud, My Bloody Valentine crafted what many consider to this day to be a record of genius proportions, and the absolute crowning jewel of the Shoegaze movement. Legendary stuff.

By 1994, however, the love for the Shoegaze sound had waned. Grunge music and Brit Pop had taken over the charts, and the scene that celebrated itself died quietly away. Or so it appeared. In reality, the roots of Shoegaze lived on, splintering into other subgenres, influencing the evolution of drone music, noise, and even electronic music. Today, Shoegaze lives on through hybrids of these genres, and a lot of contemporary Shoegaze is a glorious melting pot of all of these sounds.

In recent years, Shoegaze and Dream Pop music has been enjoying a renewed interest and gaining new fans all over the world. Current bands like the Depreciation Guild, Highspire, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, A Place to Bury Strangers, Ceremony, Mahogany, Astrobrite, and many (many) more are keeping Shoegaze alive, building on the classic sound and adding fresh perspectives and spins on it. Shoegaze and Dream Pop is now a vibrant scene, filled with talented musicians creating beautiful noise.

Original article: http://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/shoegaze-scene-that-celebrates-itself.html

The Wiener Sängerknaben (Vienna Boys' Choir or Vienna Choir Boys) is a choir of trebles and altos based in Vienna. It is one of the best known boys' choirs in the world. The boys are selected mainly from Austria, but also from many other countries.

The choir is a private, not-for-profit organization. There are approximately 100 choristers between the ages of ten and fourteen. The boys are divided into four touring choirs, named after Austrian composers Bruckner, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, which combined perform about 300 concerts each year before almost 500,000 people. Each group tours for about nine to eleven weeks.

The choir is the modern-day descendant of the boys' choirs of the Viennese Court, dating back to the late Middle Ages. The choir was, for practical purposes, established by a letter from Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg on 7 July 1498, instructing court officials to employ a singing master, two basses and six boys. Jurij Slatkonja became the director of the ensemble. The role of the choir (numbering between 14 and 20) was to provide musical accompaniment for the church mass Additionally, the Haydn brothers were members of the St. Stephen's Cathedral choir, directed at the time by Georg Reutter II who used this choir in his duties for the imperial court which at the time had no boy choristers of its own.

Over the centuries, the choir has worked with many composers, including Heinrich Isaac, Hofhaimer, Biber, Fux, Caldara, Gluck, Salieri, Mozart, Franz Schubert and Bruckner.

The above content from Wikipedia.

Now that that's out of the way, I'll tell you about my personal experience as a member of the world famous boys choir.

It was in 1978 when my family and I left our home in Romania to escape the tyranny of Nicolae Ceausescu. Being a Hungarian minority in Romania was not advantageous in any way, in fact it was quite the opposite. The Ceausescu regime did everything it could to make life as difficult as possible for any of the ethnic minority groups, especially the Hungarians.

Even though life was difficult in the communist regime, we had a decent life. Both of my parents were musicians in the Oradea Symphony Orchestra, my father was principle flute and my mother was 2nd viola 1st chair. As a result, I spent most of my Monday evenings in Oradea's concert hall, watching the orchestra perform. My parents submerged me into the world of music since I could remember. We often had foreigners at our house for parties... Italians, Russians, Germans, etc... what ever orchestra or ballet was in town, members often ended up at our house for get-togethers. I was always surrounded by artists, but as much as I loved the company, I never really wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be an athlete. I was drawn to sports like a fish to water, and I spent much of my single numbered years either playing soccer or roller skating. Sometimes I even did both. It might sound silly, but I became such a good skater, that anything I could do on foot, I was able to do wearing skates.

When we moved to Austria, we spent our first year inside a refugee camp, about 30 minute drive outside of Vienna, in a quiet little town called Traiskirchen. The camp was a culture shock to this 10-year old boy. My little brother was fortunate, he was only 4, and no one messed with kids that young, but a 10-year old, that was another story. All of a sudden we were living inside a gated community of people from all over the Eastern world. We were surrounded by people from India, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Armenia, Bulgaria, Nigeria and many other places. Some of these folks were nice, others weren't. You had to watch your step in the camp, and stick with your own kind, for there was strength in numbers. It wasn't unusual for a rumble to break out between Turks and Armenians, Romanians and Hungarians, etc... My parents did their best to keep me away from that environment, so they had me audition for the Vienna Boys Choir.

I didn't want to. By this time I'd made friends in the camp. I had my little gang of Hungarians I ran with, and I wasn't interested in some ninny choir thing. All I wanted was to be like every other kid. I just wanted to hang out and play soccer. It was the one uniter in the camp. But seeing as how I was 10, I had no choice in the matter. I figured I'll audition, they won't take me and that'll be the end of that. Well... it was just my luck that I was accepted!

As initially scary as the refugee camp was, being in the Vienna Boys Choir was even more terrifying. As I'd mentioned, I was 10 years old, didn't speak German, and this was the first time away from my parents for extended periods of time. The choir was a boarding school, so we lived at the palace from Monday morning until Saturday at noon, when we went home for the weekend only to return on Monday, and do it all again. For a frightened 10-year old, who couldn't communicate with anyone, my family might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Six days with out them was an eternity, but... eventually things got better.

My first few days were the roughest. I got into a fight on my first day at the small soccer field (there were two of them at that time). I was a good soccer player. In Romania I always played with the older kids, so my competition was very tough. Well... a few of the boys in the choir didn't take kindly to the fact that I showed them up, so they decided to teach me a lesson. As scared as I was of the prospect of having to fight 4 of them, it was a blessing in disguise. Once I bloodied the leader of the group, the other kids left me alone and from that moment on, no one else bothered me.

To help me adjust to my strange surroundings, the choir directors brought in a tutor, a beautiful blond Hungarian woman, whose job was to help me learn German. I don't remember her name, but I remember having the biggest crush on her and very much looked forward to her visits. Not only because she was hot, but I had someone with whom I could speak using my mother tongue.

The palace was absolutely beautiful with all kinds of modern (for the time) facilities. I've never seen such a beautiful pool, and the gym? For a sports enthusiast like me, it was heaven. I also found the food to be excellent, but looking back, I'm not sure if that's true, or I remember it to be excellent because the food at the refugee camp was that awful. Either way, I enjoyed the meals. Our sleeping facilities were also pretty cool for a 10-year old. It was almost army barracks-like, in that it was a large room with marble floors, and it had two rows of beds, about a dozen beds on each side of the room. I had to use slippers because the floor got pretty cold at night, and the last thing you wanted to do if you had to get up in the middle of the night, was to step on that cold floor.

Our days were very regimented. I remember having to wake fairly early in the morning, hitting the showers (which was also a big room with at least a dozen showers in it) and then it was off for breakfast. We all ate as quickly as possible, so we could get a little game time in, before we were off to class. In the mornings we had our reading, writing arithmetic, and in the afternoons we had our music classes. Like I said, our schedules were made out to keep us busy from morning to night. Every so often we would travel somewhere in Austria, mostly not too far from Vienna, to perform. I couldn't leave the country for any performances since I wasn't an Austrian citizen. However... I'm fairly certain that the junior members never got to travel outside the country. We were limited to performances mostly around Vienna.

I was surrounded by all of this famous musical history, and any downtime I had, I spent on one of the soccer fields. I could not have been more uninterested with the prestige that surrounded me. All I cared about was the athletic competitions. I didn't matter if it was soccer, rope climbing, broad jumps... what ever we did, I excelled at. Probably because unlike with just about every other activity, when it came to sports, I didn't have to speak any language to understand what was going on.

Our music teachers were some of the best in the world. I didn't appreciate it then, but to this day I still remember some of the lessons I was taught about how to sing properly. I could not have been easy to teach, because for most of my time there, I couldn't understand what they were saying to me, so there was a lot of gesturing going on, pointing to body parts and making exaggerated movements to show what I needed to do. Naturally everything we were taught was classical, but when it came to the piano, I entertained some of the boys by playing boogie-woogie jazz. I loved the big-band era of genre and I was much more interested in Bennie Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, than I was in Chopin and Stravinsky.

Meanwhile, I still had to spend my weekends and holiday times in the refugee camp. So... I kept as quiet as possible about where I was during the week. The last thing I wanted the kids in camp to know was that I was a choir boy.

I'll never forget my last day with the Vienna Boys Choir. My father picked me up early, and we left before the other boys, so we could catch the train to Traiskirchen. I was very excited to see him, and couldn't wait to leave for Bad-Ishl for summer vacation. It's a quiet little town in the Alps, where my mother had a gig playing with the summer orchestra. As we were walking along the road leaving the choir's property, my father told me the news that I wasn't returning in the fall. It's funny because I didn't really want to be there in the first place, but now that I found I won't be returning, all I wanted was to be back in the fall!

Luckily I was 11-years old, and I had the attention span of an 11-year old. My father took me out for ice cream, which was awesome! After about a week's stay in the hospital for low blood sugar, I ended up joining my mother in Bad-Ishl for the greatest summer of my young life, and the Vienna Boys Choir became just another memory.

At my current age of 47 I still occasionally think back on my time as a member of the world's most famous choir, and even though I didn't appreciate it then, I am very thankful to have had the experience. I was incredibly fortunate to have had some of the finest music teachers in the world, even if it was often hard for me to understand them. To this day I'm still both an athlete and a musician. It's funny... I never wanted to be a musician, yet... here I am... I've written hundreds of songs, scored music for feature film, short film, and corporate videos. I've acted in musical theater, have played in many orchestras growing up (both jazz and classical), performed with marching bands, attended Duquesne University on a music scholarship as a classical piano major/voice minor, lived the life of sex/drugs/rock n roll, all while having won scoring titles in soccer, and won power-lifting competitions and marathons. I will now embark on my biggest journey of em all... a trip to circumnavigate the globe, and I can credit much of the discipline it took and still takes to excel in everything I do, to my one school year in the world famous Vienna Boys Choir. Life is funny that way.

Story by: Attila Domos

Here are the boys performing the music of Joseph Strauss, with former music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Mariss Jansons.