Changing Cebu (Part 2)

My latest book, “Crying Children,” features a song. In fact, the whole story revolves around this one song. Unfortunately, I only have words, not notes. I earlier asked a friend to put it to music for me, but she has been busy.

So when the time came for me to tell the story of “Crying Children” at the Childlink Center in Cebu, I had no tune for my song. But I decided to sing the song just the same—inventing the notes as I went along. Trouble was, singing is not one of my gifts. My notes kept changing with every paragraph. And if you ask me now to sing the song again, I will have an entirely different melody.

After the story telling, Lynnie (my most gracious host) decided to give away some copies of the book and I invented (again!) a game right there. “Sing one paragraph of the song to any tune and get a free book!”


One by one the children sang the song to a lovely lullaby tune—infinitely better than mine, with much better voices too!

I wish I had time to record the songs—any of them could be the tune I have been looking for. But as in all my trips to Cebu, I had limited time. We had to hop to the next activity.

So little time and so much grace!