I am the chairman of the service project at my church (St. Michael's in Wayne, NJ). This service project is part of the church-wide program we have been planning for this fall, which is called "Better Together". This program is part 2 (we did part 1 a year ago) of "The Purpose Driven Life" program, which is based on the book by Rick Warren. This service project will involve the entire membership of our church (we hope), which is about 140 people. The project will be to help, in every way we can, a shelter for battered women and their children.
A few of us on the committee had a long meeting with the shelter director a month ago. She told us some heart-wrenching details of what these women and children have suffered and their many needs at the shelter. The director said the shelter survives solely on donations (which are never enough) and desperately needs whatever help we can provide. These women, and sometimes their children, have been physically abused by their husbands, some of them so badly that they ran away from their own home in the middle of the night and never returned, because if they stayed they didn't know whether they would live another day. If one assumes (as I did until today when I read postings on this message board) that Luka was a battered woman, then these women were living the kind of life that the song Luka hints at.
Since most of our membership is not familiar with shelters, especially this kind, we are currently constructing a video to explain the project and motivate our members to volunteer to help. It occurred to me last night that the song Luka might be perfect for this video (until now no one on the project committee had considered putting a song on the video; the video is strictly non-professional, and is being created by a few of our church members who have video cameras). This video would be shown only to our church membership, and only for the purpose of motivating our members to volunteer to help the shelter (in many different ways -- we are amateurs but this effort is highly organized).
The purpose of this post is to ask Suzanne Vega for permission to use the song Luka in this video. This message seems out of place on this board, but the web site instructions seemed to indicate this is where it should be. I pray that Suzanne Vega will actually read this message and react favorably to it. Thank you for providing a forum for me to send this message to you.