Na-na-na-na-na (Otherwise Known As “The Jesus Song”)
January 16th, 2008
There’s a song the children at SEAM sang to welcome us on our first day, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main hall as they do, clapping their hands while one boy steadily beat his hand against a drum – a drum, it turns out, that Stephen gave the children as a gift. On his last day, the children sang this same song as a farewell to Rick, who stayed just a week.
It’s a devotional song to Jesus, a lovely one with such a sweet melody that it stays in your head for hours. We hum it on our way back home in the evenings, and even find ourselves unconsciously singing it as we set the table for dinner. But without knowing the Tamil words to go along with it, we reduce the hymn to a series of “Na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na…”
We liked it so much, Stephen suggested we ask the children to teach it to us. And so Monday night, I sat with the older girls and had them transcribe it for us. They sang it line by line, as one of the girls wrote it down in Tamil script in my reporter’s notebook (all the way in India, I still can’t seem to put down the reporter’s notebook). Then they transcribed it phonetically into the English alphabet, so we could sing along with them.
I explained to the girls that we were doing this because all of us volunteers loved this song so much and wanted to be able to sing it with them. They were wide-eyed and so thrilled at this. Here we were, coming all this way to help them with their English…and we were just as interested to learn their Tamil. And when I told them how, because we didn’t know the proper words to the song, we all went home singing “Na-na-na-na…,” they laughed hard and exchanged jokes with each other in Tamil. And then, they joined me in a round of “Na-na-na-na…”
A few mintues later, they sat on the floor, cross-legged. And with the volunteers all clustered around my notebook, we did our best to sing along…
Anbu Yenravar Yesuvanavar
Yesuvanavar Inru Thonrenar….
