Welcome gifted viewers to today’s edition of Good People, Good Works, featuring the musical group Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. The Refugee All Stars are comprised of six Sierra Leonean musicians who, due to instability in their nation during the １９９０’s, left their home of Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone, and lived for years as refugees in the West African nation of Guinea.

The band started when Reuben Koroma and his wife, Efuah Grace Ampomah, met Francis John Lamgba in a refugee camp. They began making music together to keep their spirits up and their hopes alive.

The band was soon joined by Abdul Rahim Kamara, Mohamed Bangura, and a gifted teenage rapper, an orphan named Alhadji Jeffrey Camara, also known as Black Nature.

Black Nature (m): It’s hard leaving your country and going to another country that you have never been before and sleeping in a tarpaulin house, on a tarpaulin mat and the other thing is that you don’t know the language that the people speak, which is really difficult.

But you’ve just got to deal with it, because it is what it is for now. So what you got to do is that you just got to go with the flow and stay positive.

HOST: When they were relocated to the Sembakounya Camp in the remote Guinean countryside, the future Refugee All Stars members encountered US documentary filmmakers Banker White and Zach Niles along with Canadian singer-songwriter Chris Velan.
These men from North America were in Africa looking for a story that would touch the hearts of people across the world and show the beauty and steadfastness of the African people. The filmmakers followed the band for three years as they shifted from camp to camp.

Black Nature(m): The title of the documentary is called the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, or The Refugee All Stars. It’s a documentary that tells about our life and how we left our country and went to a neighbor country, lived in a refugee camp, seeing a lot of constraints, and (how) we decided to incorporate music and
forget about our traumas. And it’s music that lifts our spirit up, (Yes) and motivates the other people, our refugee brothers who have been in the same stress as we were, and to help them forget about their past.
And it talks about our life in the refugee camp, and (opened) up the opportunity for us to start touring around the world and spread our messages.

The Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars’ DVD and CDs are available at RefugeeAllstars-Audience.fm