Before becoming the Lead Facilitator of Sewa Beats, Bill spent a total of one year and a half living, working, and studying music in Africa. One of his first trips to Africa was as the leader of an ecology research project he designed to study a population of giraffe in a national park. It was then that he first fell in love with Africa, its music, and its people. Regularly returning to study music, Bill learned Swahili, volunteered to teach English in a rural school, and worked on local community outreach initiatives. He later went on to become an instructor at the world’s first international academy of West African drumming, in Guinea, West Africa. For Bill, his work as a facilitator with Sewa Beats is a way of paying forward the gifts that have come out of his time in Africa.