Fifteen first-graders encircled one of their classmates on a colorful rug in a Maryland classroom, trilling a children’s song in a language unfamiliar to most of them.
The song, “Roza, Rozeenuh,” belongs to a collection of 13 children’s songs Harris compiled. To translate them, she enlisted help from Ethiopian families, community groups and a Howard University student. She wanted the music she taught to reflect the countries and cultures her students identify with.
“It’s so important for the students to see themselves in their everyday life, and so much of their everyday life, at this age, is what’s happening in school,” Harris said. “But a lot of what we do in school is very whitewashed. . . . There isn’t any sort of a focus on the identities of the students themselves.”
Her project is poised to grow — Harris won a $4,000 grant from the Give A Note Foundation, which strives to expand music opportunities for students.
The Silver Spring teacher plans to hire a professional translator who will help convert songs in Oromo and Tigrinya, two other languages spoken in Ethiopia, into a phonetic pronunciation and an accompanying English translation.
Harris, who views music as a unifier and vessel to strengthen communities, began the project two years ago when she taught at another elementary school in Takoma Park, Md. She discovered music from places such as Guatemala and Puerto Rico but “hit a wall” as she scoured for pieces from Ethiopia.
So she built her own curriculum, a compilation of music that includes a lullaby and an ode to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. Each song is assigned a level of difficulty and includes an English translation.
Eden Kassaye, a nursing student from Ethiopia who moved to the United States four years ago and worked with Harris to translate the songs, said she hopes the music will help students whose families emigrated from Ethiopia to the United States understand both cultures.
Harris wanted her students at Oakland Terrace — which became a Spanish-English immersion school this school year and educates students from across the globe, including Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia — to recognize that “everyone’s culture and everyone’s identity is important and worth celebrating.”
On one wall in her classroom, a display proclaims: “Music is a language everyone speaks.” Another carries a world map, with names of songs written on paper and connected by string to the country where they originated. They point to Sweden and Russia, and North and South Korea, signifying countries Harris’s students have performed songs from.
At the start of class one morning with first-graders, Harris asked:
“Where is ‘Roza, Rozeenuh’ from?”
“Ethiopia,” the students replied.
“Does anyone know anyone from Ethiopia?”
Hands raised in the air.
Montgomery County officials estimate about 13,370 Ethiopian immigrants live in the Maryland suburb, about 4 percent of its immigrant population. The D.C. region has the largest concentration of Ethiopia-born people in the United States, according to a 2014 report from the Migration Policy Institute.
The Ethiopian community in the District began taking shape by the early 1980s, said Sarah Zullo, executive director of the African Community Center DC Metro, a branch of the Ethiopian Community Development Council.
As the District has gentrified, more Ethiopians have settled in Montgomery County and the Northern Virginia communities of Arlington and Alexandria, Zullo said. Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring has, in particular, become a hub for Ethiopian businesses, she said.
The region has a growing community of second- and third-generation Ethiopian Americans, Zullo said.
Some are children like Yanet Gezahegn, an Oakland Terrace student whose parents are from Ethiopia. The 10-year-old pulled a chair up to Harris’s desk one weekday morning to help translate a song about the sun the fifth-grade chorus plans to perform at a spring concert.
Yanet said her classmates are familiar with places such as Mexico and France but regard the country in the Horn of Africa as more remote.
“I just kind of get irritated,” said Yanet, who listens to Ethiopian rock with her brother. “Like, why not know about the things in Africa?”
She hopes the exposure will cultivate a deeper understanding of her heritage.
“Not many people know about Ethiopia,” she said. “If we learn songs, people will know.”
