I realized last week that during this past summer, I was in five countries on three continents in ten weeks. I’m not counting any layovers (that would make it seven countries), though I am counting the U.S., which sometimes feels like a foreign land these days, I confess. Trips to Canada, Scotland, Guatemala, and Uganda round it out.
I met my friend Chinobay, an internationally respected Ugandan musician, 15 years ago a the LEAF festival, where we were both performing. I was about to go on stage in Eden Hall with a great band, and I heard him playing kalimba (thumb piano, also called mbira or, in Uganda, akogo) in the hallway. I immediately invited him to join us on stage for a couple of songs. That was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship. Over the years, Chinobay has said, “you really need to come to Uganda” on more than one occasion, and this year, we finally decided to just put it on the calendar. Chinobay has been doing beautiful work in Uganda with children and the arts for more than fifteen years, and has brought several touring groups to the U.S. to share African music and dance. He is also a cultural connector — helping people to understand each other across lines that sometimes separate us, and an opener of hearts all over the world.
We didn’t have a very clear plan when we decided to actually put this trip on the calendar, except the vague and appealing idea of writing a song together, doing some recording, and giving me the opportunity to see the great work that his organization is doing there. Chinobay had also told me that he wanted to start taking small groups of people to Uganda to experience the culture, and because Senderos has been doing that in Guatemala for several years, he was interested in my perspective and help fleshing out a plan. We did all of that, and things unfolded from there. We recorded a little conversation we had on my porch before the trip, if you’d like to hear what we were thinking.
M Lisada
One of the first places we went in Kampala, the capitol, was M Lisada, an orphanage that Chinobay has been working with for over fifteen years. The kids played some music for us, Bosco, who runs the orphanage, gave me a tour, I played a couple of songs for the kids, and we had some lunch. It was a beautiful time.
Chinobay began working with the orphanage to develop an arts program over fifteen years ago, and M Lisada is still the home of Dance of Hope, a touring group that has come to the US to perform several times. The kids are great musicians and dancers. So much so, in fact, that later in the trip, when we figured out we needed dancers for another project we were working on, we came back. 🙂 More on that below.
World Bridge Foundation kids
We also traveled out of town to meet with kids from Northern Uganda that Chinobay’s organization, World Bridge Foundation is supporting. These children are internally displaced refugees from violence in Northern Uganda, on the Congolese border, where ongoing violence has made it too dangerous to stay. The kids there are also amazing musicians, and they shared music with us on traditional instruments. I also got to play with some of the kids on a spontaneous version of my song, Drink Deeply, and then to teach a couple of guitarists Open D tuning.
In the interest of brevity, I won’t narrate every moment of the trip, though there are many good stories to share, but I should at least mention the two most important things —
A new co-written song
I flew out of the US on August 27, arriving in Kampala on August 28. That left just three days in the month of August for me to write a song for my Patreon community (I write a song for them every month, and because I am the procrastinator that I am, that often that happens in the last few days). A song began to emerge from images of the first two days there. That’s a bold thing to do, of course, but I checked it with several Ugandan friends and invited input as I went, and folks gave me strong and positive feedback that I had painted a fairly accurate picture of the beauty of their country. Editing is the heart of all good writing, of course, and I have done a lot of it on this song. This is just a small part of the editing process.
We recorded the song in Jimmy Mugema’s recording studio in the basement of the National Theater, and we will mix the song here in the US with my favorite mixing engineer, Chris Rosser, on October 7, 2025. I can’t wait to share it with you! Kinobe and I wrote the music together, and I wrote the lyric with a bit of input from Gloria Ojiambos, who is also one of the harmony singers on the track. The song is called “Kirungi,” which means “Beauty” in Luganda, one of the more common languages spoken in Uganda (among about 50). Without setting out to make it this way, the song ended up including five languages: English, Luganda, Ki-Swahili, French, and Lingala. We hope to release it to the public in November, and I truly can’t wait. Here are pictures of the band in the studio:
Come with us?
The last bit of news is that Chinobay and I are planning to take a group of folks with us to show you some of these things, introduce you to some of these amazing people, and hear some of this music in person, as well as going on a safari and visiting some beautiful wildlife refuges. We are hammering out some details and hoping to announce costs and registration in the next couple of weeks, so please stay tuned! The dates will be February 1 through 15, 2026.
I am deeply grateful to have somehow found myself living a life that allows for these kinds of experiences, and I wish that for you, as well. In heavy days, let’s remember that we can’t just remove a toxic story; we have to replace it with a better one.
Peace,
David
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