This morning, 20 pianos are set to leave St. Louis for the long journey to Uganda. The pianos were painstakingly wrapped and strapped and surrounded by pink insulation boards and jury-rigged into a 40-foot shipping container along with 160 huge Rubbermaid tubs full of smaller instruments and shoes. And now they head to New Jersey, the first step on the long road to Bukulasa Seminary in the heart of landlocked Uganda.
For Joe Jackson, owner of Jackson Pianos, shipping pianos is nothing new—even shipping them overseas. “I move pianos,” he says. “We move 30 pianos a week around the St. Louis area. And we move pianos East Coast to West Coast. I’ve delivered to little islands in Vancouver, I’ve delivered to Nova Scotia. I’ve even sent them to Kazakhstan.”
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What’s different here is the volume. “Usually it’s like one or two,” Jackson says. “Twenty is the most I’ve ever shipped in one fell swoop.”
The impetus is a partnership with Thomas Sserwadda, a Roman Catholic priest and doctoral student at Saint Louis University. Sserwadda reached out to Jackson after hearing about how he helped supply pianos to venues around the city. Could he help with the much bigger project of sending pianos to a city nearly 8,000 miles away?
While old pianos may litter the homes of cities such as St. Louis, Sserwadda explains that they’re hard to come by in Uganda. And they’re in high demand. He sees them as integral to his ambitions for the 523 students, ages 11 to 18, at Bukulasa Seminary. It’s one of the oldest seminaries in sub-Saharan Africa, and Sserwadda sees the liberal arts—including music education—as key to their education.
“I want these children to come to the global scene of the world, purifying their talents through a really authentic education of music,” he says. “This precious gift of the pianos is going to take the keys to unlock the whole person…in truth, goodness, and beauty, music can bring it in a way where it can help the students have resilience and thrive in their own lives.”
Jackson, a firm believer in the primacy of the piano, was not one to say no.
“The reason the piano is the most popular instrument in the world is because all the keys are laid out right there,” he explains. “There’s no confusion. It’s not like a drum or horn where you’re like, Is that right? No, a C is C—no one’s gonna argue that. It’s the most easy instrument to learn on, the hardest to perfect. But anybody who plays any instrument should always have a piano, because it’s basically a keyboard for typing on music.”
In Sserwadda, he found a fellow piano enthusiast. “The piano has mathematics, the piano has psychology, the piano has an accomplishment of the piece,” Swerwadda says.
Jackson Pianos obtained the 20 pianos and fixed them up and prepared them for their journey. Jackson donated his time; the $25,000 that he and Sserwadda raised went entirely to the costs of shipping. (The Missouri Alliance for Arts Education and UNESCO both chipped in.)
If all goes well, the pianos should arrive at the seminary by May. But as is generally the case with pianos, getting them to their destination won’t be the end of the story. “One of the big things that pianos are affected by is humidity,” Jackson says. “Pianos are organic. They suck it up. They let it back out. So we’re going to have some broken parts after the first year there, and we’ll be working with a tuner down there to make sure that they get fixed.”
Jackson says maintenance of the pianos was a key to the plan from the beginning, “When Father Thomas first came to me, the first thing I said was, ‘You’ve gotta have a tuner there.’ And he said, ‘Well, can I fly you there?’ And I said, ‘I would love to fly there, but I can’t go there all the time. You gotta have someone on the ground.’”
Now that that person has been found, Jackson knows he’s entering into a long-term relationship.
“Over the coming year, we’re going to box up lots and lots of materials and parts and ship him whatever he needs to make sure that they can keep these pianos going,” he says. After all, you don’t ship 4,000 pounds of pianos on a whim—and you don’t send them overseas unless you can keep them well-tuned once they’re there. Supported by St. Louis, Jackson and Sserwadda believe they can keep the pianos playing for years, and hundreds of students, to come.
