11-year-old girl completes journey to sing 80 national anthems in 80 countries

WASHINGTON - An 11-year-old girl set a Guinness World Record Friday night at Nationals Park when she sang the national anthem before the Washington Nationals game against the Atlanta Braves.

Capri Everitt and her family are from Vancouver, Canada, and they put their lives on hold for nearly a year so that they could travel around the world to 80 countries so that the talented teenager could sing 80 different anthems in 41 different languages.

Washington D.C. was the final stop for Capri in her 80-nation tour. She started singing at 5 years old and learning 80 different anthems took a lot of work. How did she do it?

“It takes a lot of practice, especially to memorize them, to be able to sing them,” she said. “And a lot of the time, I got people that are native to the country to help me with the national anthem – to help me learn it and pronounce it right.”

Capri said the anthems for South Korea and Estonia are her favorites.

The family decided to do this in order to help raise awareness and money for a charity called SOS Children’s Villages.

“They provide homes for orphaned, abandoned and vulnerable children in 134 countries,” said Everitt’s mother, Kerrie. “We visited around 35 of these villages in the countries that we have been to and we have seen firsthand that they really work. They provide a mother for children who otherwise would have nobody.”

“There is so much bad news on television and in newspapers that we thought, ‘How can we create a good story? How can we do something with our daughter because she loves to sing,’" said Tom Everitt, Capri's father. "But we wanted to be something that would be really, really positive, so we got her to practice some national anthems.”

Playing off of the Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in Eighty Days,” Everitt’s mother came up with the idea for this national anthem adventure. The Everitts rented out their home and sold all of their cars to set out the next nine months for this once-in-a-lifetime journey.

The Everitts have been documenting their trip around the world on their website AroundTheWorldIn80Anthems.com and are hoping to put together a documentary showing off their experiences and their amazing story.

A portion of special ticket sales from Friday night’s Nationals game is benefiting SOS Children’s Villages.