Afghanistan's Funniest Mulla Afghanistan's Oldest – and Funniest – Mulla Helps Canadian Children Learn to ReadProceeds from Nasrudin Birthday Event to Help Provide Books for Disadvantaged Kids TORONTO (October, 2006) – Canada's finest storytellers and musicians, together with a "top-secret" U.S. propaganda film from the 1950s, will be featured at a benefit to celebrate the "birthday" of Afghan folk hero Mulla Nasrudin, on Saturday night, November 18. The Mulla's antics, in a vast corpus of colloquial jokes, have kept the people of Afghanistan and many other countries in stitches for centuries. The "party," to be held at The Yoga Sanctuary, 2 College St., Suite 306 (3rd Floor), from 8:30-11:00 p.m., is sponsored by the Institute for Cross-Cultural Exchange (ICE). Proceeds will help provide books featuring Afghan tales to disadvantaged children nationwide. ICE (www.iceeducation.org) is a new Canadian charity that addresses family literacy and promotes understanding between cultures. In its first year, ICE donated more than 5,000 books through such partner programs as the YWCA, United Way's "Success by Six," Frontier College and Calgary Reads. The books are published by Hoopoe (www.hoopoekids.com), an imprint of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (www.ishk.net), an educational nonprofit founded more than 35 years ago. They contain beautifully illustrated renditions of traditional stories from Afghanistan, collected and adapted for children by Afghan author Idries Shah. Told for centuries throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, these stories address universal themes such as building self-esteem, persistence when facing adversity, and exercising thoughtful observation over hasty judgment. They also promote multicultural awareness, providing a positive representation of an important but little-understood culture, teaching us what we have in common and what we can learn from each other. But Hoopoe's tales do more than instruct and entertain. According to a growing number of educators and psychologists, as Teaching-Stories (the name given to the literary genre, which is all but unknown in Western cultures) they also help develop higher-level thinking skills. Similarly, Nasrudin's multi-dimensional jokes have delighted and provoked thought in young and old throughout Afghanistan for centuries (www.ishk.net/mulla_nasrudin.html). But many other nations, in addition to Afghanistan, also claim him as their native son. Actually, nobody really knows who he was or whether he existed at all. But that's not stopping us from celebrating his birthday. For more information about this event, please contact: The November 18 benefit will feature:Mulla Nasrudin, starring in "Tomorrow May Be Judgement Day", a top-secret propaganda film from the U.S. Information Service, [vintage 1952] George Sawa, an internationally acclaimed Qanun master and ethnomusicologist who received Egypt's highest lifetime achievement award in 1995 for contributions to Arabic music. Dan Yashinsky, storyteller, co-founder of the Storytellers School of Toronto, Jane Jacobs Prize Recipient (1999) for work making storytelling a part of community life Lorne Brown, traditional storyteller & singer, co-founder of the Storytellers School of Toronto; Vice President, Canadian Society for Traditional Music Sandra Carpenter-Davis, teller of epics, myths, folktales and family stories to people of all ages. Celia Lottridge, storyteller, award-winning author, co-founder of the Storytellers School of Toronto and Parent-Child Mother Goose Program Aubrey Davis, storyteller, award-winning author who has told Afghan and Middle Eastern tales across Canada and the US Judith R. Cohen, internationally acclaimed singer, instrumentalist & ethnomusicologist, specializing in Judeo-Spanish Sephardic songs Beirdo Brothers: The Zaniest musicians in Canada. They've performed for Canadian Armed Forces, the Elephant Show and countless others for 27 years. Suzanne Meyers Sawa: A drummer who has studied Egyptian stule drumming in Alexandria. Veronica Niehaus: A lead dancer with Rhythm of the Nile Dance Company. She will perform an authentic Upper Nile Saidi Dance. |