WINDHOEK– Today and on Monday at 19h30, students of the Martin Luther High School (MLH) will give a concert at Goethe-Centre Windhoek.
The seven students aged from 14 to 18 years are selected members of the choir of the Martin Luther High School in Okombahe. Within the scope of the preparations for a music exchange with Germany, which will take place in Lünen from April 30 to May 24, they rehearsed a wide repertoire of gospel and traditional songs from Namibia and South Africa, which they will present here in Windhoek.
Since 1988 the MLH maintains a school partnership with the Geschwister-Scholl-Gesamtschule in Lünen, Germany. There are frequently organized joint projects and the schools visit each other on a regular base. Mercia Ebrecht, Coordinator of the partnership project and German and English teacher, visited Lünen as a student of the MLH with a theatre project in 1993. Together with Andrew Buys, maths and computer science teacher at the MLH, she will accompany the seven students to Germany. During the three-week stay, several concerts have been planned, a lot of them together with the choir of the Geschwister-Scholl-Gesamtschule. Next to the valuable experiences and impressions of the journey, Ebrecht and her students will bring back some trombones to the MLH, which will be a present from their partner school.
Since 2008 MLH belongs to the network of the PASCH-schools and is supported by the Goethe-Centre Windhoek. PASCH stands for the initiative “Schools: Partners for the Future” and has been launched in 2008 by the German Federal Foreign Office. Within the scope of this programme German language classes are promoted at excellent schools worldwide. The Goethe Institute supervises 500 PASCH-schools all over the world in the national education systems of more than 100 countries, supports them financially and assists them in introducing or developing German as school subject.
Both concerts here in Windhoek are supposed to fund the T-shirts, which will be produced of African textiles, for the stage performances of the choir in Germany. The entrance for both concerts is free. Instead there will be donation boxes, so that every visitor can donate an amount in his own discretion.