This past Saturday Tasha and I went to the New York Bandura School for a bandura workshop led by Teryn, our WBENA liaison, and Zoya, a member of WBENA. Unfortunately for Tasha, her wrist kept her from playing, which was my good fortune as I got to play Stanislava, Tasha’s bandura who many of us met last semester. I ended up having so much fun! The bandura is fairly heavy and requires you to hold it up with your thighs, which is harder than it sounds. I did play the violin 8 years so somewhere in the recesses of my brain I know how to read music. I was surprised how quickly reading music came back to me when I had an instrument in my hand. The music has both bass and melody parts, which you play simultaneously. By the end of the workshop I was playing the bass with my left hand and the melody with my right all while reading music. It was exhausting but such a rewarding experience to connect me to our project.

This evening me, Tasha, and Lini spoke with Nadia Tarnawsky, a bandurist and folk singer, who we read about in an article by Dr. Ostashewski. We have officially moved onto the women’s history portion of our research, which has me really excited! Our conversation was AWESOME. Nadia was funny and candid with us and had some really powerful things to say. Unfortunately we forgot to enable to transcribing software, so Lini and I will be doing it old school. I am totally in awe of the generosity of the bandura community. I hope we can get the site to a point where the interview can eventually be featured in full. This semester has felt hard at times with the state of the world, a long winter, and life in general and I haven’t felt as consistently invigorated by school like I did last semester. But tonight I feel like I got a much needed boost in morale.

Last week Alex wrapped up her development training with Lini and I. She is such a patient and kind teacher and I know more about coding than I ever have. It’s starting to feel less intimidating, but right now I am happy just to watch how its done. I feel so lucky to be working with Alex, Lini, and Tasha this semester and I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.

I still haven’t managed to launch our social media sites, but I am hoping tomorrow after presentations we can get everything ironed out to make our first posts! Here is our Bluesky – I think the kids say “watch this space”.