The Soze Project: "I AM"

For individuals that rarely travel abroad or leave their local environment, such as myself, the world can become a small place.  It can be easy to forget that there is a whole planet full of people my age that face the same everyday problems that I face, and even some that I don't.  There are some common social issues that can effect children at every end of the world.  An Africa-American child from L.A. and a child from South Africa live on separate sides of the planet, but yet they will undoubtedly both face some form of racism in their lifetimes.  However, they both have the innate ability to rise above their own social obstacles and situations, and change themselves for the better.  This is the message that the Soze Project is trying to get across in their performances.

The Soze Project, named after a professor at UCLA, takes a dozen children from LA and another dozen from South Africa and unite them to create and original play to be performed in UCLA's Freud Playhouse and Harlem's own world famous Apollo Theater.  This foreign exchange program aims at uniting children from different continents under the universal theme of youth empowerment.  The 24 children hand picked for this project, ranging from ages 11 to 13, lived together for a month before arriving in New York.  Their performance includes song, dance, poetry, and theatrical skits all created by the children with the assistance of thirteen mentors.  These children are picked through a long application process and all bring with them a certain amount of talent to share in the performance.  

I got a chance to sit in on their rehearsal the afternoon before their performance at the Apollo.  It was very impressive how composed and confident these children were.  It was even more impressive seeing how these kids from vastly different worlds were so united in their common goal.  They saw past each other's differences and were able to make actual connections with people that were so different from themselves.  One of the performers, Mazeneeko Okomna, from LA, when asked what she thought was the major difference between her and her new South African friends, she responded, "The color of their skin is different and they a little different, but there really is no difference."

I AM.  Two small words with a big impact.  It requires a person to understand who they truly are, in respect to their own lives.  Saying these words also endow the person with responsibility of taking control of who they are and who they want to be.  In today's society, children are growing up faster than they ever have.  They have to face issues at younger ages that earlier generations never even had to think about.  The mission of the Soze Project is to show the youth that they always have the power to define who they are, because they have the power to change, no matter where they are.  Director of the program, Gabrielle Noble, states that the goal of the Soze Project is to convey that "all youth have the power to change in their own capacity."