My Word | ‘We Have to Listen to the Children’

My Word | ‘We have to listen to the children’

The children in the Mattole school are busy practicing a song for our graduation ceremony. I’m the piano accompanist, so I get to listen. It’s a tiny school, less than 30 children, from 4-year-olds to high school, but they sing, sometimes, with passion and conviction. The song they’ve chosen is “We Are the World”, the Michael Jackson-Lionel Richie song from the ’80s, written to raise money for a famine in Ethiopia. “We are the World,” they sing,…