Maru-a-Pula Marimba Band Benefit Concert

Botswana’s Maru-a-Pula School Marimba Band will perform a benefit concert at Brattleboro, Vermont’s Latchis Theater this coming Tuesday, April 24, at 7:30 p.m. to raise scholarship money for AIDS orphans in Botswana. Botswana has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world and currently has more than 30,000 AIDS orphans. All proceeds from the concert will go to fund scholarships for AIDS orphans to attend Maru-a- Pula School. Maru-a-Pula School is one of the top schools in all of Africa and regularly sends its students to universities across the US and UK. Many of Botswana’s leaders—ministers, businesswomen, doctors—are graduates of Maru-a-Pula.

The band has local ties through The Putney School, who will host the band while they are in town. Putney School director, Emily Jones, taught at Maru-a-Pula from 1981-1985, where she met and married her husband, Gordon, who teaches a variety of subjects at Putney. “We have continued close ties with the school since then,” says Emily, “and have watched it grow from a start as an anti-apartheid model school to one of the strongest schools on the continent.”
Tickets are $25 for adults, $15 for children at the door. Curtain is at 7:30. For more information about the MAP Marimba Band and their past and current tours, visit www.maruapula.org