A Taichung-based band of musicians with Down syndrome on Tuesday and Wednesday held a free summer camp for students with disabilities using the money it raised from performances.
The band members — Chou Yi-chia (周以嘉), Chen Shu-wen (陳舒妏), Chou Tse-han (周則翰), Yeh Kuan-ting (葉冠霆), Chen Shang-che (陳尚哲), Chi Peng-feng (紀芃逢), Chan Chih-yu (詹芷瑜) and Sun Yu-yin (孫郁茵) — learned to play the ocarina with their families’ encouragement.
It took them six months to learn how to correctly cover the holes on the wind instrument to play scales, they said.
Screen grab from the band’s Facebook page
The members, whose average age is 20, learned tunes with a lot of rehearsing and passed a street performers’ license exam, they said.
They often perform outside Taichung and are invited to perform at corporate events, they said.
Since the band was formed three years ago, it has performed at centers for the care of elderly people, nursing homes and schools, band manager Lin Chi-tung (林啓通) said on Tuesday.
Through word of mouth, it has received requests to perform at private events, said Lin, who works voluntarily to teach the band.
There is a misconception among people that children with Down syndrome need extraordinary levels of care or should be “given up on,” he said.
However, the band helps spread the message that people with Down syndrome can “step outside” and learn skills to help them support themselves, he said.
Chen Shu-wen’s mother, Su Ying-ying (蘇瑩瑩), said that her daughter and bandmates decided to host the camp after noticing disabled students are “invisible” at summer vacation events.
Few summer camps are designed for students with disabilities, so they have no choice but to spend their summer at home with nothing to do, Su said.
The band has been saving the money it earned performing at corporate events, she said.
It has organized two days of activities — including ceramics, and ocarina and djembe lessons — using the NT$50,000 it has saved in the past year, she said.
The camp was open to students with disabilities from grade 7 or above and attracted 26 attendees, Su said.
Apart from helping others, the camp allowed the band members to gain more experience in social interactions,said Chou Tse-han’s mother, Wang Shu-hua (王淑華).
The band would continue to perform and do charity work to allow kindness to carry on, she said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS