Of Small Dreams: Verses and Melodies

I moved to Ukraine from Nigeria to pursue my love for medicine at Kharkov National Medical University where students from more than seventy countries study. I met a Ukrainian student, Mark Adamsky and wanted to be his friend. He kept running away from me but we would later curate Verses and Melodies together.

Verses and Melodies cultural project was created to help melt cultures to celebrate diversity at the university where we study. Our first event took place in July 2013 at the concert hall of our university and students from many nationalities attended. We wanted to make bold statements. We wanted to show that internationals and locals could achieve dreams by co-operation. We also ran on a near zero-dollar budget because we wanted to harness the talents of students to do things we would ordinarily have to pay huge amounts for. So, by bringing in gifted volunteers, we were able to get things done at no cost. Our montages on YouTube were done for free, the event was covered for free and our posters were designed by us! 

The Verses and Melodies logo designed by Paul Sudhakar of http://www.paulsudhakar.com/

God's grace was the single most important factor as things went bigger than our small dreams. We were able to sell our dream to Indian graphics designer, Paul Sudhakar who has designed projects for the United States'  National Space Society and he gave us design support for free. Also, Kathrin Kaisinger an Austrian who was on an exchange program in our university for some weeks to  improve her Russian (as she volunteered to teach some of our students German) found affinities with us and started joining our rehearsals. We would later find out that she sings in a band in Austria.  Binil Zack, self taught photographer and videographer also volunteered to cover our event for free. So, having those talents, combined with our university based talents helped us achieve a well packaged event and we are thankful for all those who participated. Very importantly, the administrators of our university were very supportive and being satisfied with our first event have even blessed us to continue the project.

Yet, there are things we could have done better. We promised to live-stream to the world and failed. It is also true that there were tensions even in our rehearsals. We take responsibility for everything that could have gone wrong and we have gone back to the drawing board to explore more possibilities. However, one thing we are happy about is that the major reason we started our project was to show other students that they could do such themselves. We are excited by the number of student projects and student co-operations with the university that are springing up in the school because of our example. To this new development, we say the same words Assistant Professor Dimitry Katsapov, Dean of Foreign Students at KNMU  said to us when we visited him aboutVerses and Melodies. He said, "this is very nice!"