Kickstarter

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.