Get your marimba on

TUXEDO — The Maru-a-Pula Marimba Band of Gaborone, Botswana, in southern Africa, will appear as part of the Tuxedo Performing Arts programming at Tuxedo Park School on its 2016 USA Tour on Tuesday, April 19.
The group will perform two free public concerts at the school at 2:30 and 6:30 p.m.
“I would like to have people here experience this and get to learn firsthand about the school and the students' lives,” said Tuxedo Park resident Sue Heywood, who is coordinating the event. “The music is very entertaining and dynamic. This is an exciting event, very unusual for Tuxedo.”
The band is comprised of 11 students traveling with three staff members, including its principal, on a cultural tour of sharing music and exchanging ideas and experiences with students in schools and colleges on the East Coast, including the Taft School, Deerfield Academy, Milton Jazz Academy and Roxbury Latin.
The tour and public concert finishes at Harvard University.
Maru-a-Pula is a co-ed independent day and boarding high school, one of Africa’s premier academic institutions, educating students to become future leaders who are also socially aware and committed to serving their communities, according to Heywood. The school has 742 students, with 64 percent of the student population being Botswana citizens. The rest are expatriates from 35 different nations.
The school currently has 20 AIDS orphans in the school on full scholarships and aims to increase it to 40 next year, Heywood said, adding the tour “is critically important for the orphan scholars, with every dollar raised through the 2016 U.S. concerts going to the Maru-a-Pula Orphan Scholarship Fund.”
While the concerts are free, scholarship fund donations are welcome.
To register, call 351- 3473 or 351-4737, or email to: info@tuxedoperformingarts.org.
- Nancy Kriz