Rock for Rolls event to help Sierra Leone economy
Students and the community participated in Rock for Rolls, a fundraising event, Monday to raise money for a bakery in Sierra Leone.
Coy Whittier, senior majoring in public relations and this year’s president of Aggies for Africa, said the bakery will provide bread and 20 to 30 jobs for the war-torn people of Sierra Leone. During the first half of the event, 12 groups showcased their Rock Band abilities in a competition, and later that evening Sierra Leone musician Daddy Saj performed.
“Even though the civil war is technically over, there’s post-conflict,” Whittier said. “There’s not a lot of economic stability. People still struggle to just make ends meet.”
The group is looking for sponsors to donate bakery equipment, including anything from ovens and mixers to a delivery van, Whittier said, which will be shipped to the new bakery in Sierra Leone.
“Bread is becoming one of the biggest staples of their diet right now,” Whittier said. “It’s a huge market to get into, not a whole lot of people are selling it. By 10 a.m. all the bread is gone for the day.”
Daddy Saj provided a concert for those who participated in Rock for Rolls Monday night. Saj is known as the Anti-Corruption Crusader and the Lyrical Warrior because he uses his song lyrics to educate people about topics such as women’s rights and social reform, Whittier said. He said Saj is the eighth-most popular musician in Africa.
“He’s from Sierra Leone and lived there during the 11-year civil war, the same civil war in the movie ‘Blood Diamond,'” Whittier said. “He survived all that and had to flee to Guinea so he wouldn’t be abducted as a child soldier. He started out with music as a way of having the people change how things were.”
Ann Cole, Saj’s wife, said she graduated with a degree in history from USU.
“I had a great, great education,” Cole said. “I’m not in the world of history now but they taught me how to analyze and how to articulate what I analyzed.”
She said after the civil war, the United Nations sent her to Sierra Leone to work with the government and take charge of rebuilding communications in the country, including setting up press offices for each area of the government and revamping journalism laws. Cole said while she was in Sierra Leone, her branch president came up with the idea to build the new bakery.
“We went to church and people were starving to death, literally,” Cole said. “I started buying rice to feed people but I was spending a lot of money. I thought, ‘what can we do to give jobs to these people?'”
The Rock Band competition was also part of the Rock for Rolls fundraiser Monday. The winners, a band called Neesh, beat 11 other bands and earned 1,694,000 total points on expert for their final song. Neesh, a group of high school students from Mountain Crest High School, had senior Zen Hale on guitar, junior Sam Spencer on vocals, junior Cass Christiansen on drums and freshman Shem Hale on bass.
Neesh will get their names on a list for an event in Los Angeles hosted by Shine on Sierra Leone, Whittier said. He said the July event will be a red carpet affair with another Rock Band competition attended by about 30 celebrities, including Axl Rose and Kanye West.
Troy Oldham, a public relations professor, said Aggies for Africa, Shine on Sierra Leone, a group from USU’s sociology department and several public relations students have all helped in making the bakery project and Monday’s event a reality. Oldham said the public relations students involved used the event for their final senior project.
“They’ve been responsible for planning and executing the public relations side of it, but they were more involved than most public relations students would have been in the planning,” Oldham said. “Coy (Whittier) and his group have done such a good job.”
Aggies for Africa is a USU club but also a nonprofit organization, Whittier said.
“It’s run by students, created by students,” he said. “That’s the cool part about it. It’s a bunch of students just working to raise awareness across campus in the student aspect of things, but we’ve also planned a bunch of projects.”
Whittier said Aggies for Africa and USU students will be traveling to Rwanda for three weeks in May to do research for another micro-finance project.
“What the project will do, it’ll give out loans to refugees from the war in Congo so they can start businesses, education, stuff like that and then they pay those loans back,” Whittier said. “We’re meeting with government officials, other organizations, and a university provost in order to start a relationship there.”
Aggies for Africa has weekly meetings where they discuss and plan events, Whittier said, and anyone who would like to get involved can send an e-mail to standusu@gmail.com.
“We want to open people’s eyes to what is going on and empower them to do something,” Whittier said. “We want students to use the talents they have and use the skills they’re learning at USU in a positive way.”
-rach.ch@aggiemail.usu.edu
Daddy Saj, a Sierra Leone musician, performed a benefit concert. (Cameron Peterson)