Recent Happenings

Well, I would love to be writing about how great everything is right now- and there has been a lot of excitment lately with the Winds of Change concerts and Laura Hassler (MwB Int. director) visiting from the Netherlands. However, right now I am just pretty much exhausted from all of it. We had 4 concerts in 4 cities in 4 days (with 4 after-parties) which was all a bit much. That took place from Thursday thru Sunday (6th-9th) leaving me pretty much useless by Monday. I accomplished pretty much nothing, sort of slept in, but then the weather was weird and unusually warm- so my body just really couldn't figure out what was going on. Yesterday, I was on my way to feeling more normal but since Laura, her daughter, Wendy, and Michael were all here there was lots to meet and discuss. Not that I can even really contribute much yet to all the talk, but there was a lot of information that I needed to sit and absorb. This meant that I was fully occupied from 10:30ish when I finally straggled into the office until midnight. And then I needed to get here at 8 AM today in order to let the accountant for the Music Bus into the office. And, as always with any NGO, there are various funding issues right now for our programs. So while that doesn't directly affect me, it does make the atmosphere here rather gloomy.

All the new information is very exciting and seems to offer a lot of new tasks for me to participate in/take charge of/organize. Right now though all I think I really want is a nap- but even last night I couldn't sleep because there was so much going on in my brain with all the new stuff- funding, applications, cross-cultural differences in business, politics between the MwB Int and BiH, requests for me to come work in Alkmaar at some point and requests to come to Srebrenica. Yeah. So. Overload.

On a happier note, the Winds of Change concerts were very successful and a lot of fun. My one particular task was to get people to give us their contact information so we can let them know about other MwB programs and future WoC events. Due to my lack of language skills this was only minimally successful, but it was at least an ok start to something. Hopefully I can expand on what I managed this time in the future. I also did odd-jobs throughout the tour which will probably also increase with the next round of WoC- possibly even receiving the very official title of "Production Manager" but we shall see. I guess it depends on how useful I actually manage to be.

Getting to travel around with the group was a lot of fun- like being on a glorified high-school band trip except this group involved professionals and extremely talented students. Willem van Merwijk (conductor/music arranger/sop. sax player), Jaume Gavilán Agulló (trombone), and Srdjan (singer) all came from the Netherlands to participate and the rest were students from the Music Highschool and Music Academy here in Sarajevo. It was great being around lots of people close to my own age and I often felt like I should probably being doing more "work" and less socializing. I suppose I'll be making up for that now.