Day 31:

Today I woke up around 7, after a good night sleep. Then stretched a little, and conducted my usual routine of feeding the kittens, packing my breakfast and lunch. It seemed to be a regular day in NSWAS, while I was reading my lovely book at the courtyard, enjoying the sun shine, but nope, Halim came with a woman from the Comm department. He was holding a tray of Arabic coffee. Nice nice. He said we could start talking about promoting NSWAS in Turkey, Istanbul. Wonderful news! I can't wait to start working on it.

We had a meeting and talked about what could be done. Obviously universities and their related departments, Jewish community, Ministry of Foreign Affair, Turkish Embassy in Israel are good places to start with. It is more important, at this point, to introduce the village first. So I will try to arrange meetings, talks, even lectures at schools, foundations and perhaps mosques and synagogues. I need to talk to several people while working on my first e-mail, have to come up with an operation plan. Joseph is certainly one of them. We thought seeing Howard is also important and I was going to when we walked into my office! we had a very nice talk and a productive meeting. He thinks it'll be good if I join one of the tours that Rita organizes. It's a village tour. I've been here since exactly a month now, but I'm sure there are lots of things I don't know about here. There's group from the States coming on the 24th. I'll be joining them. She also said she could arrange a VIP tour for any officials we might be able to invite. Of course this means we need the media. Duh!

While talking to Rita, I met another person with whom I was very curious about: Anne Lemeignen. Father Bruno Hussar's wife. He's the founder of the village, remember? A petite (shorter than me) woman with white short hair, big blue eyes. I was leaning over a piece of paper, trying to read something when Anne almost pushed her nose/face between my face and the paper, trying to get my attention, or simply making fun of me. I like it. I might have disappointed her for not knowing French but she liked the way I told her the directions in French, so she thinks I'm talented and can easily learn French. (Yeah, she's French.) We'll see about that. She gave me her mobile, I'll call her soon and make up an appointment to talk about, well, anything she can tell me about the village, and her life. I'm excited.