The Serenata Children's Choir performs in a full-house concert “Touching Hearts, Touching Lives” at the auditorium of the American International School of Jeddah. (SG photos by John Pamintuan)OVER the past six years, the Seranata Children's Choir has been entertaining the Filipino community in Jeddah with their upbeat and nostalgic music. The kids of overseas Filipino workers performed their sixth concert this year on Feb. 10 to a full-house audience at the American International School of Jeddah. As in their past concerts, the children got hearty rounds of applause and occasional standing ovations as they sang a repertoire of 11 English and Filipino songs that included the Tagalog classics “Sitsiritsit” and “Leron Leron Sinta”. The choir was joined by the two-year-old Serenata Chamber String Orchestra, which raised the curtain with a repertoire of five songs in violin and cello. The orchestra's repertoire opened with “Sugar, We're Going Down” and ended with “Singing in the Rain,” with a medley of Filipino folk songs in between. The choir, consisting of children from different Filipino schools in Jeddah, broke a hushed silence when it entered the stage – after the orchestra's performance – with “The Big City Sound”, a five-minute tableau of the “Theme from New York, New York”, “Walking to New Orleans” and “Hooray for Hollywood”. From their opening number, the children sang their way to the hearts of a mixed audience – which included diplomats from the Philippines and other countries – as soon as dusk fell in Jeddah and up to the late hours of the night with nobody seeming to care about the passing of time until the curtain had to fall with the finale number “Heal the World”, a song written and sung by the late pop icon Michael Jackson and described by the organizers as a “song (that) speaks directly to the heart, evokes hope for a better place if we make a little space and give a little chance for love to glow”. Serenata chairperson Charo Y. Hipos led this year's concert under the musical direction of Sylvia de los Santos, one of the Serenata's three founding members. The program was emceed by Ahjid Sayas and directed by Ruth Tolopia. The concert's title “Touching Hearts, Touching Lives”, aptly describes what the Serenata has been doing over the years since its founding by de los Santos, Desil Manapat and Louis Bautista in 2005. The children have been touching the hearts and lives of people not only with their music but also with the funds they raise yearly for the marginal communities back home. The beneficiaries of this year's concert are four college scholars of the Bantay Bata Edukasyon Project. The past recipients were the landslide victims in Southern Leyte in 2006, four public schools in remote areas in Camarines Sur, Bohol, Marawi and Maguindanao in 2007, a Muslim organization in Cotabato City in 2008 and seven other scholars of Bantay Bata in 2009 and 2010. “We are doing this for a cause,” said de los Santos, a music teacher and the choir's musical director, in a phone interview from her home the day after the concert. “We do not go to the stage to reap glory for ourselves. We are doing this to entertain but most of all to help people or groups that need help. All of this for God's glory.” Aside the yearly concert that always falls within the first three months of the year, the Serenata children have been singing their way to people's hearts in various occasions where they have been invited to perform. A month or two before each yearly concert, they hold a mini-concert for the runaway Filipina workers taking shelter in a halfway-home at the Philippine Consulate General in Jeddah. Serenata was born after de los Santos saw a segment of the ABS-CBN television network's program “The Correspondents” that featured “Kayod Kwela”, a semi-documentary about the hardships undergone by children in some remote areas in the Philippines in their quest for education despite their families' poverty. “I wept while watching the program. Tulo luha ko (My tears fell),” she recalled. “I was then teaching piano lessons at home to a handful of Filipino children and had so much time in my hands so I thought of forming a children's choir. That was how Serenata was born.” With the idea, de los Santos sought out Manapat and Bautista, who, by coincidence, were also toying with the idea of forming a charity organization to raise funds for marginalized communities in the Philippines. “Desil and Louis had already left for Canada, but their ideals have lived on with the Serenata,” mused de los Santos. Serenata, as a non-stock and non-profit organization, has had at least three chairpersons since its founding in 2005 and has since been trying to instill discipline among the children within its fold as part of its mission. “Aside from promoting Filipino cultural values, Serenata seeks to create an environment within the organization whereupon members can imbibe the values of discipline, humility, teamwork and charity, while witnessing music's purpose of proclaiming what is pure, beautiful and noble,” said Sayas, the concert's yearly emcee who takes a key part in the preparation of each concert. Romeo Reyes, father of 12-year-old choir member Paula Christine Reyes, sees the group as a “very good vehicle to instill in Paula the value of discipline and awareness that we cannot be an island by ourselves.” De los Santos recalls that there had been cases – albeit few – when some parents pulled out their kids after they felt that their children had not been given stellar roles in the concert like being in the center or singing solo. “We always instill in the minds of children the core human values that we believe in and that we are doing things not for one's personal glory,” said de los Santos. “But if a parent has another idea, if the parent thinks that Serenata is just a gateway for his or her child stardom and does not believe in discipline, then we might as well let the child go, although we will surely miss the child,” she said. “Personally, I believe that success is not just about going to the top, but also about how you handle yourself and your relationship with others when you have reached the top.”
