Rachel’s Blog

I want to draw attention to this wonderful choir based in London. Called Sing for Joy, it is made up of people with Parkinson’s Disease, and their friends and carers. It was initiated by two women who were diagnosed with PD and did not want to sit back and be medicated.

I heard these women speak at a conference last year, and there was something so inspiring about them. I felt they refused to be pathologised in a way so common in the healthcare system; you are your disease. And I felt it must be so empowering to feel, as someone with a life-changing condition, that there is a way of self-medicating, that something you are doing is helping, and you’re not just sitting back and letting someone prescribe drugs for you to passively swallow.

In fact, there is something about singing which is the antithesis of ‘passively swallowing’. Singing is powerfully life-affirming; I am still breathing. This is my voice. My voice. Do you hear me? Listen.

In November I traveled with a young people’s peace delegation to Israel/Palestine. You can read all about it here. Singing was an important part of the trip for me for various reasons. The most memorable singing times happened when…

• in the olive groves near Jenin at a Fairtrade Co-operative pressing plant, a group of young men got out a drum and started singing and dancing, full of pride
• we stood at the foot of the wailing wall and listened…
• singing on the bus with our American friends… swing low, pick a bale o’ cotton, belle mambe
• humming a taize chant at the airport to stay calm during the strip-search.
• a man who we met in D’heisha refugee camp, Bethlehem, who spent ten years in Israeli prisons, who sang to stay sane over 40-day stints of solitary confinement.
• the verse from Fred Marchant’s (who travelled with us) poem ‘First Song Again’

“Trust above all the imminent return

Of the small, but persistent

Impulse to sing.”