HITTING THE RIGHT NOTE
Charles Pekow
In August 2023, the students from Notes n’ Beats – an Ashburn-based music school – were performing a concert at the homeless shelter in Leesburg. Among the musicians was Sowmya Ramesh, a violinist.
“I noticed this girl in the corner,” said Sowmya, 15, who lives in Gainesville. “She looked like she wanted to play the violin. I let her play. I was able to meet with her family. My mom started to talk with her mom.”
That meeting proved to be fateful for all involved. You see, the girl in the corner was Blessing Amuga. At the time, she was a rising junior at Stone Bridge High School and lived in the Leesburg shelter with her mother and two younger sisters.
Blessing was struggling with keratoconus, a rare disorder in which the cornea in the eye becomes cone-shaped, causing blurred vision. Blessing has keratoconus in both eyes and likely would have eventually become legally blind.
“It causes me to have extreme migraines and to have blurry vision even with glasses,” Blessing, 17, said in a video about her condition.
Due to her vision issues, the teenager had to make several emergency room visits and missed quite a few days of school.
So Sowmya and her fellow students at Notes n’ Beats jumped into action. Surgery could correct Blessing’s vision – but her family couldn’t afford the operation nor the follow-up care that would be needed.
Sowmya’s mother, Priya Subramanian, worked her connections and eventually got in touch with Dr. G. Vike Vicente and Dr. Deepika Shah with Eye Doctors of Washington. Dr. Vicente provided the funding for the surgery on one eye, and Dr. Shah performed the operation last October. Now, all the music students needed to do was raise the funds for the second surgery and the rest of Blessing’s care.
Notes n’ Beats was founded in 2012. The kids at the academy study western music styles as well as classical Indian music. They regularly perform around the region, and they have raised money for causes such as guide dogs for veterans and school buses for students in India. Blessing Amuga would be their latest good deed.
“They feel happiness and get excited over helping someone else,” said Veena Pandiri, the school’s founder. “I don’t think they come in with that mindset, but once they see the results, they want to do more.”
The students started a GoFundMe account for Blessing and helped publicize it. And then they held several benefit concerts, including one at the Lisner Auditorium on the George Washington University campus.
“For Blessing’s show, we did a Disney medley – songs like ‘Circle of Life’ and ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno,’” Pandiri recalled.
The events raised $4,900 for Blessing, and she had the second surgery in January. Students (and their parents) from Notes n’ Beats even drove Blessing to her various medical appointments.
“I could not go outside without sunglasses and was just having really bad headaches every time,” Blessing said. “After the surgery, the headaches have gone down and my vision is getting better, and now I can even get prescription glasses that actually work.”
Now a senior at Stone Bridge, Blessing has already visited the George Mason campus and is looking at other area colleges as well with the dream of studying ophthalmology and helping people like her in the future.
Meanwhile, the students at Notes n’ Beats hope to continue to help people like Blessing through their love of music.
“Knowing that through my music, I was able to help another kid to pursue her goals and her passions, it made me so happy,” Sowmya said. “If presented with the opportunity, I know [the students at] Notes n’ Beats would take care of every child they could.”
Charles Pekow is an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Montgomery Magazine, Northern Virginia Magazine, The Hill, Washington Monthly and many other places.