A school bus driver in Sacramento City Schools uses music to unite students across the school district, reported KCRA News.

School bus driver Sunny Eselekhomhen reportedly grew up on a small Nigerian village that he said via the article had limited resources.

As Eselekhomhen drives his afternoon routes, he reportedly hums while singing in a foreign language. He spent most of his youth teaching and performing West African music across Africa and Europe. When Eselekhomhen moved to the U.S. he was even part of Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom act in its early stages.

Once he moved to Sacramento, Eselekhomhen reportedly started working as a school bus driver and eventually began traveling to different schools across the Sacramento City School District to teach West African music to the kids.

As a parent at Leonardo Davinci School, Eselekhomhen started a yearly nine-week drumming program for all the school’s third-grade students. According to the article, he’s taught drums and even sung in his native tongue for 14 years. The kids then put on a concert for their families and friends.

Eselekhomhen told local news reporters that he wants kids to learn music, but the deeper lesson in drumming is about “lifting people up.” He also shares stories about his life as a kid.

“I went to primary and secondary school barefoot with no sandals,” said Eselekhomhen via the article. “[During] rainy season, you just take your clothes off to wrap your books, you don’t have backpacks,” he continued.

Eselekhomhen added that some villages in Nigeria still have living conditions that could be hard for American children to imagine. He went to Africa last spring, and the village he visited, the students in that school did not have drinking water. The students there went from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. without drinking water. Eselekhomhen was inspired to start a project to build a freshwater well for a school in his father’s village.

Students, both current and former, parents, teachers and other people from across the district reportedly made donations to support Eselekhomhen’s project to build the well. A class at Miwok Middle School where Eselekhomhen’s wife works, started its own fundraiser, making arts and crafts to sell.

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