The Gift of Music

National Public Radio listeners are familiar with the term “driveway moments.” It’s an apt description for those rare situations when a listener is so riveted by a story that leaving the car will just have to wait.

Most driveway moments last a few seconds. Liz Shropshire’s driveway moment has endured for four years. She was so moved by NPR’s details of atrocities in Kosovo, she opted out of a four-week vacation to Austria in search of some small way to help in the Balkans. Shropshire—who graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah—never imagined her monthlong volunteer stint would turn into a focused relief effort using music to help kids cope with life after war.

In a place where clothes, medicine, food and even roofs are scarce necessities, music may seem like a luxury.

“Why music in a place where kids are still playing in uranium tailings?” asked Texas resident Joanna Brooks, Shropshire’s longtime friend and chief grant writer for the Shropshire Music Foundation. “You can’t just feed bodies—you have to feed souls. Parents want to take their children away from the pain and the violence of their everyday lives.

“It works because people need it. They need to be uplifted, not just edified. People need something to live for, not just survive.”

The foundation:

The path to public service began early for Shropshire (she calls her mother, Dian, the “most giving person she knows”), but her epiphany came during a trip to Northern Ireland in 1996. Wandering through a Protestant section of Belfast, she came across a young boy smoking a cigarette, who “couldn’t have been more than 8.” Despite his youth, his eyes made him look “so old, like an old man.”

“That’s when I decided I was going to help kids that were affected by war,” Shropshire said. “But I thought I’d write a symphony about it or something.”

After BYU, Shropshire earned a master’s degree in music from the University of Southern California, with the idea of composing movie scores in Hollywood. But some advice she heard from her father had never faded: “Whatever you choose to do with your life, do something that will make the world a better place,” Ed Shropshire told his only daughter as she left for college. Composing music seemed selfish.

“I don’t want to say she’s a save-the-world person, that sounds kind of bad,” said Shropshire’s younger brother Ed, 40, who lives in Provo. “But she’s always just been one that has wanted to help others and be more concerned about taking what she has and giving it to others.”

The Hollywood lifestyle eventually took its toll on Shropshire. She left to work with inner city youth in Los Angeles, a four-year stint she found “so emotionally draining, I don’t think I wrote any music.” She moved on to teaching music, privately and at three Catholic elementary schools.

But the inner-city job was another key step on Shropshire’s path to Kosovo. Again, it was a child who provided inspiration. The boy was 12 and had been bounced through foster care. Angry and emotional, there were times none of the other teachers could control him.

“The only thing that would calm him down was that ‘Cats in the Cradle’ song,” Shropshire said. Whenever needed, she and the boy would head for a quiet corner and sing. Shropshire was beginning to see that music, and her love of it, wasn’t so selfish after all.

The spark

Shropshire’s connection with Kosovo began in L.A. in 1999. She was driving to a piano student’s home when she heard a life-altering radio program.

“I’d always wanted to go some place and help. I used to think I would end up in India helping Mother Teresa . . .” said Shropshire, 41, during a recent trip to Utah to visit her brother. “When I heard this report, I already had this plane ticket taking me to Europe—and so I thought: ‘Instead of just going on this vacation for me, I’ll go help someone else instead.’”

She sought out volunteer options and came across a group called the Balkan Sunflowers. After discussing the idea with a friend, her original plan to “help the women carry water and play with the children” gave way to music.

“I was talking to my best friend about this and she said, ‘Liz, don’t be stupid. Don’t just go to go. Go over there and do what you could do best. Take a music program to these kids,’” Shropshire said.

With money raised by a church group and various donations from instrument manufacturers, she ended up with nearly $5,000 in harmonicas, penny whistles and assorted other instruments and supplies.

“I thought I was going for four weeks and that was it. Then I’d go back to my regular life,” Shropshire said.

The Balkans:

Kosovo was the site of a brutal war in which the majority ethnic Albanians were devastated by the Slobodan Milosevic-led Serbs. By the time Shropshire arrived, displaced Kosovars were returning home from refugee camps in Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia.

Shropshire left the United States with several thousand dollars and loads of instruments, but traveling with eight bags on three different airlines left her with $200 by the time she reached Gjakove, a town of 60,000 that has become headquarters for the foundation’s efforts in Kosovo.

Shropshire passed out harmonicas and penny whistles and began holding classes, teaching the kids to play such songs as “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.”

“I wanted to have an instrument that was small enough that these kids could have. They could put it in their pocket and no one could ever take it away from them. It would be theirs,” Shropshire said.

Within days, her classrooms were overflowing.

“All of the students would tell their cousins and their friends,” said Rreza Vejsa, a Gjakove native who has volunteered with Shropshire’s foundation.

Vejsa, now 20 and a sophomore at Southern Virginia University, says her two sisters, 16-year-old Erza, now a volunteer, and 13-year-old Zana, attended Shropshire’s music classes in Gjakove.

“It seems like it’s just teaching kids music,” said Vejsa, who, with the help of the foundation, came to America to study last year. “When you look deeper into it, you see that it raises their self-esteem so high. . . . I saw big changes in the kids day by day.”

Vejsa, who estimates close to 6,000 students have been through the various programs, never left her hometown (one of the hardest hit towns) during the war, but says most children lost at least one parent. And virtually everyone lost a relative. Vejsa’s immediate family survived, but 20 of her cousins died. Refugees returned, often without fathers and husbands, to a ruined town without shops, electricity or running water.

“Parents had lost their ability to nurture. ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be OK.’ They could never say that to [their children],” Shropshire said.

Shropshire’s four-week stint was pushed to six. She came home with plans to return. As the foundation grew, she returned as frequently as possible. Now she spends at least seven months of each year in Kosovo.

The program has branched out to schools, makeshift summer camps and surrounding refugee camps, where entire families live in spaces barely big enough to serve as bedrooms in U.S. homes.

In a place known as the Slovene Camp, a particularly dire living area, Shropshire initially began a program for girls, since many of the relief programs in post-war Kosovo focused on males. But the girls-only idea didn’t last long.

“I couldn’t take a step into the camp without 30 boys saying ‘Liza, Liza, musica, musica,’” Shropshire recalled. She relented and gave the boys of Slovene Camp their own classes as well, but not without a few rules. “I will teach you, but you have to be perfectly behaved. . . . If you talk, you have to leave.”

The result of Shropshire’s work is more than simply thousands of young Kosovars with an intimate knowledge of harmonicas and penny whistles, singing American tunes and occasionally writing their own songs. As that happened, kids were able to look beyond the horrors of the past and embrace the beauty of the present moment.

Grass roots:

Four years ago, Kosovo was a regular topic in U.S. news reports. That exposure has faded, making fund raising for the foundation more difficult. But the need, even for life’s essentials, has not waned.

“The war has been over for four years, but they’re still living in refugee camps,” said Mary Youngblood of Atlanta, Ga., the foundation’s vice president of fund raising. “The refugee camp [Slovene Camp] we work with, it’s as if the war ended yesterday.”

The foundation’s operating budget has never been much, around $55,000 at its peak, but Shropshire and her team of volunteers manage to keep the program running, with hopes of expanding to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The foundation staff includes Shropshire’s family, friends and a few friends of friends, some of whom she has never met.

“She makes enough money to barely keep it going,” said Brooks, the foundation grant writer and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “We’re all amateurs. We’re truly a grass-roots project. She’ll be the first to tell you she’s a terrible fund-raiser, but we always get by.”

Still, thousands of kids are walking around Kosovo with harmonicas in their pockets.

“There are two types of people,” said Youngblood. “There’s people like me, and I’m a pretty generous gal—but the truth is I need a job, I need a home and I need my family around me.

“Then there are people like Liz. They can throw all the normal life stuff away. And you need those people. . . . She’s not in it for the money.”

One way or another, Shropshire vows to keep returning, still savoring that driveway moment.

Put that recital to use! Gather your friends together—find someone famous to join with you! Benefit concerts are a great way to raise money for organizations such as these. You’ve got the article in your hand now and CS gives you permission to make copies to bring people to your benefit concert. You can get electronic copies online at www.classicalsinger.com. Donations are the only way this important program can survive. Please support the healing of war-torn children. Hold the concert and then send the tax deductible donation to The Shropshire Music Foundation, 1123 East Torreon Dr., Litchfield Park, AZ 85340.
Spread the word and organize large-scale benefit concerts at school, in your community, club or church involved. Every little donation can make a world of difference.

This article is a reprint from the Salt Lake Tribune from Sept. 14, 2003.