Los Angeles.  When she landed in Tanzania as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar studying development, university alumna Rebecca Corey never expected her trip to end in a crash.

But after Corey suffered injuries in a motorcycle accident, she was rushed back to the United States. Five surgeries later she found herself with a year and a half of recovery time.

During that time, Corey thought about what she learned immediately before she left and listened to the music her friend bought for her from a roadside vendor in a Tanzanian market prior to her accident.

“I was in awe, it had such a great beat and it’s just the kind of music that makes you want to dance,” she said. “From there I started researching it and I found out the music itself has a great history.”

Corey said the music that captured her thoughts was a tool used to unite the country after British rule ended in 1961.

The sounds promoted national pride after a long period of depression under colonial rule and according to Kickstarter, it is a mix of “Afro-jazz and dance music.”

Despite her love for it, Corey found one problem with the music: it sits on damaged reel-to-reel tapes and was not digitally backed up or copied to any modern form.

Therefore to document the music that helped both her and Tanzania as a nation heal, Corey’s goal is now to digitilise this archive of music from the reel-to-reel tapes so it can be disseminated online and via CDs.

Back in the United States, Corey made it her personal goal to band together with others who would help promote a project to revive and digitise the radio Tanzania archives via Kickstarter Crowdfunding online.

Anyone interested in donating can go to  kickstarter.com until February 4 to help reach the $13,000 goal that must be met in order to digitisºe the music in Tanzania. Rewards are offered depending on how large donations are, ranging from copies of CDs, digital downloads, t-shirts, and many others.

“For the past two years I have been working towards this goal of going back to Tanzania,” Corey said. “I want to go back to digitise these archives that are in danger of being lost forever.”

While raising funds for the project, Corey has also been recruiting, trying to spark the interest of other people who could help her meet her goal. One of these people is university graduate Tyler Webb, who met Corey through a mutual friend and quickly became interested in her helping with the cause.

Before graduating , Webb was on the executive board for Promote Africa. His experience with promotional projects quickly became helpful for getting the word out about the Tanzania Kickstarter campaign.

“I am doing the business and operations part,” Webb said. “I create a business plan and talk to investors to try to get the word out and make sure we can meet our goal of $13,000.”

Working alongside Webb and Corey is David Fu, who graduated from university as a finance major in 2010.

Fu and Webb worked together on Promote Africa to explore a similar project in southern Africa. Fu serves as liaison between Promote Africa and Radio Tanzania and is currently in New York trying to get the word out about Corey’s campaign.

“It would be amazing to see somthing snowball from this project,” Fu said. “Like radio India or radio China or radio Brazil. Basically it would be ideal to create a model that can be replicated around the entire world for capturing local music. That’s what I would love to see, but even if it doesn’t grow into that, getting this going in Tanzania will be a huge accomplishment in itself.”

Student Rebecca Corey suffered injuries while in Tanzania, but those experiences brought her closer to the music of the African nation.

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