Celtic Music Concert in Northern Atlantia

["Sharon Henderson" <sharon@intercon.com>]

Hi folks,

	Apologies in advance to anyone who can't drive all this way for a 
concert; just wanted to bend your ear for a moment about this neat thing going 
on this coming Sunday!  For all Celtic music lovers who also love to help 
people in need, this is a can't miss!	

	Recently it came to the attention of some local folks in a big way that 
the US has far better medical service available than a lot of other countries.  
In this, the tenth year since the devastating explosion at the Chernobyl 
nuclear power plant in what was then the USSR, medicine is still incredibly 
primitive--certainly no less so than at Minsk Maternity Hospital #2, Minsk, 
Belarus, Russia.  It is ten miles from the Chernobyl site, and therefore a lot 
of the medical problems with which they deal on a daily basis have their 
provenance from the continued fallout from Chernobyl.  Lots of birth defects, 
lots of difficult births, and hardly any means with which to cure or assist.

	The hospital owns, at the moment, exactly three scalpels--and can only 
sterilize them between operations with alcohol, because the hospital's one 
autoclave is non-functional.  No x-ray machines, no sonogram machines; they 
routinely run out of rubber gloves, and so try to manage all but operations 
without them.  There are no clean syringes for injections, no means to provide 
anesthesia except overdoses of vodka; no tongue depressors, none of the sorts 
of things we regularly think of as medical bottom lines--the sorts of things 
"everybody has!".

	What does it mean to you personally?  Well, there's going to be a 
concert on 4/21/96 at 7 PM, to benefit the hospital.  It is going to be 
amazingly wonderful.  It features "Connemara," a 4-woman Celtic folk band that 
has performed all around the US, and now will be coming to McLean, Virginia to 
benefit Minsk Hospital #2. I have one of their CD's, and they are just great.  
Very mystical and yet traditional. And curiously enough, this concert comes 
five days before the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion.  Talk about 
timing .... and all unintentional!

	If you would like to attend the concert, I have tickets for sale, or 
they can be gotten the night of the concert at the door.  I can provide you 
with directions, if desired; you might want to plan to arrive early, since 
parking is something of a concern.  I'm going to bring a picnic and get there 
a little before six PM; the grounds are lovely this time of year, and there is 
a huge side yard to the church.  The price is $10.00 for adults, $6.00 for 
children under 12.  The place is St. Dunstan's Church, McLean, VA; it holds 
around 500 people, and Connemara hopes to jam the place to its rafters! :-)  
Coming in garb doesn't seem to be a problem, so one could go straight from one 
activity to another, so to speak ....  :-)

	If you cannot attend and yet would like to help the hospital, donations 
are entirely in order.  If you want to sponsor the concert, it is $50.00 over 
and above ticket prices.  (Might be a fun thing for a group to do .... )  They 
need to know by Wednesday, since the program will go to press that evening.  
Call the Church at 703-356-7533 for further information.

	BTW, just because the question has come up already in other venues: 
this is a secular concert, not a sacred one, though Connemara does have a 
couple of "religious overtone" type songs.  

	Thanks for reading,
	Meli ferch Iasper
	Ponte Alto
	(Fairfax, VA)