Homeless veterans learn more than piano from volunteer

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - They sit at the piano and play slowly, one hand each. Occasionally, a wrong note rings out. No worries. This is a safe place.

Not many years separate teacher and student in the lobby of the Manchester Apartments, adjacent to the Hoosier Veterans Assistance Foundation.

Nancy Hart, 52, has traveled from southern Indiana to give music lessons to Angela Darwiche-Smith, 55, and other residents of the facility, which helps homeless veterans get back on their feet.

Hart makes the two-hour trip to Indianapolis about once a month, but she hopes the lessons are lasting, even when she's not around.

"When you're learning a piece of music, you will stop," she tells Smith, who is tentative in her play at the keyboard. "You need to understand it's not that you can't do it. You can do it, but you have to keep pressing through.

"And you go back and you repeat until it's smooth without stopping." Hart adds. "Then add the next measure and the next. Your mind has to constantly be looking ahead."

It's a lot for Smith to take in, but this is only her third piano lesson. Still, she touches her heart afterward and says, "I feel it here. It is healing."

But she is impatient. While Hart is teaching her to count the notes and learn octaves and memorize finger positions, Smith wants to get lost in the melody.

"I want to hurry up and hear the music. That's where I gotta train my brain. My brain is not a strong muscle."

After nearly 20 years in the military, including seven months in Iraq, Smith came to HVAF after losing the home she shared with her daughter and spiraling into depression and alcohol abuse. Since August, she's been living in the Manchester Apartments, one of several HVAF facilities that provide temporary housing to veterans in need.

Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the divorced mother of seven is slowing putting the pieces of her life back together.

She doesn't have a lot to say about her time in Iraq, where she served as a cook and chaplain's assistant, except this: "(Being in the military) was a lot of pressure, but you don't really realize it at the time," she said. "When it's all over, it's like 'where's everybody at; what do I do now?' Being here has blessed me to be able to start again," she said. "I can find things that make me feel like life is worth living again."

Things like piano. She never took lessons as a kid, but the Ellington upright in the lobby of her Downtown apartment building intrigued her.

So when fate brought Hart and Smith together, it was the beginning of something neither understood.

It was a billboard about HVAF serving homeless veterans that first caught Hart's eye, before it brought her to tears. "These people should be the last people who don't have a home," she said. The owner of Musical Resource in Madison, which offers music lessons and piano tuning, initially approached staff at HVAF to offer to tune their piano.

Residents became curious, and it wasn't long before Hart began offering free lessons to anyone who was interested. A last-minute cancellation gave Smith her chance at the keyboard.

The two women play softly, simply. It's slow-going as Smith picks out the notes while Hart keeps count. "Great, great. You're doing great."

It's all about timing,' she tells her student.

"So when you're playing music, you're counting and not listening to the sound?" Smith asks.

When counting becomes second nature, then you can get involved in the music, her teacher says. It's all about building a foundation.

And just like learning the piano, Smith is trying to rebuild the foundation of her life. She plans to go back to school, perhaps to get training for a job in a hospital.

For her part, Hart's next goal is to get a large enough keyboard and earphones for the Manchester Apartments so her new students can check out the instrument and practice in the quiet of their rooms and build on their skills. Repetition and consistent practice are key to their success, she said.

"They have to trust me," she says. "When I do my part, they'll do theirs. We're trying to build things up, to show the importance of learning and the emotional benefits. It's uplifting."

As the two finish their lesson, they hug tightly.

"It means a lot, an awful lot," says Smith. "You need little distractions when things look bleak. Your world looks like it's falling apart, you feel like no one cares and you're expendable and you need something."

That something is a piano and a teacher willing to give her time to help others. Hart, who has worked with Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health on music therapy programs, plans to keep a journal on each participant to track their development. Currently, she has three students through HVAF, and three more veterans have asked about learning to play an instrument.

"Music is a huge outlet for our veterans," said Debra Des Vignes, vice president of communications at HVAF of Indiana. "They feel and see that someone cares and that they can grow and do something unique and positive through music."

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Source: The Indianapolis Star, http://indy.st/1qRUiSf

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Information from: The Indianapolis Star, http://www.indystar.com