Dear supporters,

We recently received an approval notice from USCIS for our application for pre-approval for P-3 visas for Sorie Kondi and his two bandmates. Although the timing of the approval shows that the processing times on USCIS.gov have no bearing to reality, the fact that the petition was approved without a request for additional information was somewhat encouraging.

A phone call to USCIS revealed the following: USCIS doesn't consider it to be an error or fault on their part that it took so long to process the application that we had to cancel the tour for March/April. The dates of the pre-approval cannot be changed. We have to start over, and submit a new petition, with complete documentation, and pay the $325 fee again.

We can only hope that if we apply soon, that we will have enough time to have the visas in time for an October tour, and that the 2nd application will be approved just like the 1st one was. The only difference will be that SXSW won't be on our itinerary, so we won't include a support letter from the festival.

Once we receive pre-approval for a 2nd time, each band member still must apply and interview in person at the US embassy in Freetown, separately, each pay a $140 machine-readable visa fee, and can be approved or denied for visas separately. So we still have several hurdles to jump. However, from our research, there is no legal reason for the consul to deny anyone in the group visas. But in actual fact, the granting of visas is at their personal discretion.

The benefit of postponing the tour is that we may have the opportunity to add more dates to the tour, and that we have several more months to fundraise to ensure all 3 band members can buy plane tickets.

Thanks for your unwavering support. We will keep you posted on any developments.

The Sorie Kondi team

To our dear supporters or to those considering becoming supporters:

We've reached our target! (and even surpassed it a bit)

I hope you have had a chance to watch the video in our first update posted on January 22nd. If so, you will have a sense of Sorie Kondi's gratitude and excitement about reaching our target.

As you probably know, Kickstarter only collects funds if the project target is reached. If one falls short, all the money is returned. I suppose this encourages people to think carefully about their budget. We of course did this, but we struggled to determine an exact figure for a several reasons. First, Sorie Kondi is a collaborative musician. He *could* come and perform solo, but he would prefer coming with a couple of other musicians who can provide backup vocals and some percussion accompaniment. But we had to ask ourselves if we wanted to be ambitious and risk losing everything and not being able to send Sorie Kondi at all, or be conservative and just set the target at a bare minimum. We decided to be conservative. The other reason was that since we expected some donations to come from within Sierra Leone, which is a cash society, we reduced our Kickstarter target to account for our Sierra Leonean supporters' contributions, which cannot be made by credit card. Finally, as you all know, plane tickets do not have fixed prices. They go up and down. How could we know what we'd have to pay for a plane ticket after the Kickstarter campaign ended?

The good news is that plane tickets are still at the same price level as they were a month ago. The bad news is that we haven't done as well fundraising within Sierra Leone as we had hoped. What can one say? It is a poor country, with a lot of causes needing funding. We want visitors to this page know that we still can make great use of additional donations. Now that we have reached our initial target, our next goal is to buy a plane ticket for an additional musician, Hassan Kamara. If we reach a funding level of $4000, this becomes a realistic possibility. Even if we fall short, and cannot fund Hassan's travel, we can use the extra money for some additional domestic travel for Sorie Kondi. This might allow him to perform in a couple smaller cities where the compensation wouldn't be enough in itself to cover the additional expense of traveling there and accomodation. Fortunately, we have a private sponsor already committed to funding a "right-hand man" for Mr. Kondi, a musician who has agreed to be with him 24/7 and be his interpreter, but we would really like to send Hassan Kamara as the 3rd person. Together with the "right-hand man" Sorie Kondi would then have a threesome, which would be sufficient for group performances.

To give you an idea of what Sorie Kondi sounds like with an ensemble and backup vocals, here is a song from his latest album, Thogolobea, which is one of our incentives.