Girma Yifrashewa will never forget the exhilaration of receiving his own piano. It was a surprise gift – and a mammoth task to have it shipped to Ethiopia. He then had an anxious wait at customs for two months and a logistical headache to get it home.
So when the Pharo Foundation came up with the idea of raising funds in London to buy a piano for a girls’ boarding school in north-west Ethiopia, the musician quickly got on board. Pupils at the Homosha school in Benishangul-Gumuz state now have their teaching piano after an arduous journey reminiscent of that of Yifrashewa’s own first instrument almost 30 years before.
“Music has helped me to live my dream, or I can even say live beyond my wildest dreams,” he says.
Yifrashewa has had a remarkable international career, playing at New York’s Carnegie Hall in June, and is now director of the Ashenafi Kebede performing arts centre at Addis Ababa University.
Last month, in a hall packed with students and their families, he played a combination of European and Ethiopian music on the piano, which had finally arrived after leaving London on an eight-hour flight in early August.
It then spent several weeks in a customs hall before reaching Pharo Foundation’s Addis Ababa office, where it sat until the road from Addis to Homosha was reopened after being closed due to attacks by anti-government forces. The piano finally reached the school after an 11-hour journey by van.
The foundation’s head of education in Ethiopia, also a musician, contacted one of the few piano tuners in Ethiopia, who agreed to be flown in to restore the instrument’s sound after the journey.
The Homosha school opened in 2020 with capacity for 250 pupils, in a region where fewer than half of all girls are in secondary education. Musical opportunities in the region are scarce but now a local pianist will be teaching regularly at the school.
The foundation is also working with Addis Ababa University’s Yared school of music, Ethiopia’s only formal music college, to design an innovative piano class for the girls.
Bethel Tsegaye, Pharo’s country director, says: “The school’s purpose is to provide opportunities to girls from a remote part of Ethiopia to access a high-quality and free education. Some of the girls come from households that have suffered from displacement due to the civil war and some are orphans.”
Once pupils had met Yifrashewa after the concert and queued up for their first opportunity to try the piano, he reflected on his own musical journey and his first piano in 1995, when he was 26.
From an early age Yifrashewa played the kirar, a traditional harp-like Ethiopian string instrument, and studied at Yared at 16 before going to the Bulgarian state conservatory in Sofia, until the fall of Ethiopia’s communist regime in 1989 ended his scholarship. A Christian group stepped in to fund the rest of his studies in Bulgaria, and gifted him his first piano, a Petrof upright, on his graduation.
“The piano was sent to Ethiopia by plane by the Irish Christian Brothers and it arrived before I did, as I had gone back to Bulgaria to pack my belongings,” he says.
“I was very discouraged that this first instrument, which I considered my most precious item, was detained for two months at the customs. It was considered a luxury item and I was asked to pay a huge amount by the customs.
“I did not know when it would be released and therefore the uncertainty was even more disappointing,” he recalls.
He hired a van and took the piano to his parents’ home in Addis Ababa’s Kotobe area.
“It was a big celebration for the entire neighbourhood, as everybody knew what a distressing experience I had. The piano was damaged as it had been left outside, but I was still happy to have it. I finally found a piano tuner who was visiting from Nairobi and he fixed the instrument for me.”
It was 25 years before he got a grand piano as a professional.
“That was in 2020,” he says. This piano had a less eventful journey, with Yifrashewa’s fame bringing many sponsors who helped deliver it. But he still has the first instrument that meant so much to him.