FROM RECORDER TO TRUMPET TO AOTEAROA ...

THIS follows the other piece I posted earlier today.

In 2010, if you were in our small village, you would hear at least two people playing the descant recorder.

I was one, at the bottom of the village. I usually blew the Chinese-made wooden one I bought at Wirui Trade Store in Wewak in the late 1990s.

(I am self-taught in that woodwind instrument. That is the same one that I have in my portrait pic in Facebook, and shown in the pic below. I bought another Suzuki plastic one for K12 a few months ago.)

Up the gentle ridge that rose up on the other side of the village was my younger cousin GW, who would also play his.

 Photo: My Chinese-made wooden descant recorder.

In those days, GW accompanied a group of church boys in a brass band from Nuigo settlement, when they went out to play when invitations came. (It is my opinion that many of those boys were self-taught.)

GW told me a lot about his time with the Nuigo boys playing in the province and up into the Highlands of PNG where invitations came.

A few months later in 2010, the brass band boys were enlisted in the PNGDF at Moem Barracks (in Wewak, East Sepik) and sent down to Goldie Barracks (outside Port Moresby) for military training. (They were recruited because of their skills in music.)

After the completion of the training, they were sent back to Moem Barracks where they were based.

Now, GW is in Aotearoa (NZ) for training.

It seems he is also in a Tok Pisin class.

What a way to go … from the recorder to the trumpet and now receiving professional training.

(I told him that when he comes back he will teach us too.)

POINT: The basics in learning anything are usually within reach – learning to play the recorder or guitar, or learning to write using the pen and paper, learning another language, etc – but sadly many of us do not work on the basics in learning where we are and with the available resources.

TIP: Try to focus on skill in the remaining months of the year and be committed and passionate in learning it.

(You can teach yourself some of those skills.)

In a few years you never know where such acquired skills will take you.

Cheers.