This sounds like a really worthwhile event; the 28th at the Domino Room.

"Live With Purpose, Party With A Cause"

Rarely does a night of live world beat music and fine art in Bend directly improve the lives of several desperately poor children living half a world away. “Live With Purpose, Party With A Cause,” a fund raising event for locally based grassroots nonprofit Vima Lupwa Homes, promises to deliver on both. Sunday, October 28, at the Domino Room, master African drummer Obo Addy and his band headline an evening of music and art, a silent auction and raffles of cool schwag. Silent Auction and raffle items will be available for viewing and bidding beginning at 6:00, with pre-concert music featuring local slide guitar wiz David Bowers beginning at 6:30 PM. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. Doors open at 6:00 and music begins at 6:30 pm.

Click through to read entire press release

Proceeds from the evening go directly toward meeting and sustaining the daily basic needs of children living in their new home, the Vima Lupwa Home. Ensuring the children’s continued health, providing education and job skills, maintaining their garden and chickens for their own food as well as for income, providing bicycles for transportation and supporting their new bicycle repair business, are all components of Vima Lupwa’s plan to make the home self-sustaining over time.

21-year-old Central Oregon Community College student and Bend native, Malerie Pratt, founded Vima Lupwa Home. “She’s not one of those super-liberal weeping heart people that’s all talk, no action,” Joyce Boone, Pratt’s high school English teacher, recently told The Bulletin. “She just believes in people and that’s why I think she’s been so successful. She thinks, ‘What do they need and how can I get it to them?’”

For details or to make donations, visit http://www.lupwahomes.org

Tickets are available downtown Bend at Douglas Fine Jewelry Design in St. Clair Place on Minnesota Ave., 541-389-2901, and at Thump Coffee at 25 Minnesota Ave., 388-0226.

The Domino Room is located at 51 NW Greenwood Ave. in Bend, phone 388-1106.

:: ABOUT OBO ADDY
Rolling Stone magazine wrote that the rhythmic layers in Obo Addy’s music “never compete but rather continually unfold and transform.”

Lynn Darroch wrote in Portland’s Willamette Week newspaper that “Obo Addy’s original music is some of the most interesting jazz writing in the country today, combining the traditional polyrhythmic percussive framework of Western Africa with the melodic and harmonic approach of North American jazz.”

And by virtually all accounts, Obo Addy is one of the key originators of the seminal musical movement now known as "world beat." This prominent member of the first generation of African musicians to bring their traditional and popular music to Europe and America has been performing internationally for more than 20 years.

In 1996 Obo Addy became the first African born artist ever to receive the National Heritage Fellowship Award by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor a traditional artist can receive in this country. He currently teaches music at Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

For more about Obo Addy and his music, visit http://www.oboaddy.com

:: ABOUT VIMA LUPWA HOMES
Barely of legal drinking age, Bend native, Malerie Pratt has already made a huge difference in the lives of a handful of Zambia’s more than one million orphaned and/or abandoned children.

Partnering with a Zambian social worker and mother of two, Violet Membe, Pratt opened Vima Lupwa Home in the small town of Luanshya, Zambia in December 2006. Now 10 of some of the most impoverished and abused children live there.

“The intent is to raise the children as a family,” Pratt said in the interview. “A family not raised as Westerners, but truly embracing their own Zambian culture, values, and religion.”

For more about the Vima Lupwa Homes project, go to http://www.lupwahomes.org or call 541-420-9634.