Weird Monday (originally posted on facebook 11/27/2013)

One month from tomorrow I fly to Marrakesh to see my boo!! And also to eat lamb and eggplant tagine and couscous royale. Luckily I have a super busy December which means the month should go by pretty quickly. I will be posting pictures soon from the music festival with a few words, so hold tight. But I would also like to take this moment to tell you about the interesting day I had on Monday.  
So my project manager on the child protection project I am working on is an imam. And I accompanied him to a meeting to visit the federation of Koranic teachers where I was the only person in the meeting who was not an imam. The meeting was also held in Wolof, which, thanks to the large amount of French vocabulary and my three months of Wolof classes, I was able to take a few notes.

As weird as all of that seemed, the weirdest thing was what happened after. My supervisor dropped me off near the French high school because I was late for my choir rehearsal where I helped the tenors with their pronunciation of Girl from Ipanema. That was weird. Something that seemed so mundane in Paris, like going to choir rehearsal, seemed so out of the ordinary in Dakar. I am sure it will soon be apart of my new normal, I mean, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, this boy gotta sing, and a little piano in there too if the mood is right. 

The night ended oddly as well. As I was waiting for a bus that never came, a woman who got into a taxi, told a bunch of people, if we were going her way, to get in. She paid for the taxi and spoke English, and told me she was neighbors with the founder of the Tostan. Small world. 

So next week there is a big lobbying day in Dakar with the Koranic schools we work with throughout Senegal, a special visit with a partner from the US on the Heifer project, and my first real mission to visit all the regions where the Child Protection Project is in place to do follow-ups after the lobbying day. And then it's Marrakesh.