Team is growing daily...

When I started the project 18 months ago, I was naive enough to think I could organize it by myself, without a coordinator!
Last August, Alexandra joined me to coordinate it in Bucharest. In the meantime we have entered the implementing phase of the firebird project and there are some twenty of us, part time or working round the clock, volunteers for the most part, involved in the organization.

Irina Roncea, Romanian choreographer and assistant to Josef for this project with our girls

I have to add that each day preceding the first rehearsal day brought its load of catastrophies, enough to make you despair to a point where you could only laugh. It started on Wednesday with the company supposed to deliver the food to our centre twice a day: they suddenly could not provide us with a car anymore. The food being prepared twenty kms away from Bucharest, it meant finding an immediate alternative.

On Thursday Alexandra had the brilliant idea (or was it a premonition?) of inquiring about the date of delivery of the water supposed to be supplied by another sponsoring company: the lady in charge had simply gone on holiday forgetting to leave instructions to anyone and to this day nobody seems to have been able to do anything about it. As a result, we are still waiting and had to buy "some": considering that Bucharest is an inferno at the moment and that 120 sweating kids are drinking some 4 liters of water a day, you can measure the dimension of our disarray.
But they have now promised to deliver it tomorrow.

On Friday it went on with the parket of the gym. Having a closer look at it we discovered that it had been fixed with some thousands of nails popping their heads out of it and promising us a lot of fun bandaging bleeding feet (rehearsals being bare foot). Dancing carpets for the entire gym -for some thousands of euros- would soon have been pierced through anyway; so, there was just one solution left: get all the rusted nails out and replace them ......with as many new screws. Two carpenters did a wonderful job in a 48 hours marathon. So we thought! But Josef did not quite share our opinion when entering the gym on Monday morning. So, off he went hammering and taping the floor until he had gotten rid of his anger and considered that he could start with the first rehearsal.

I sometimes wonder where Alexandra gets all her connections, volunteers and helpers from. No wonder she called her company "If Magic"!

After all this, how could we have been surprised when on Saturday we were told that BMW, our generous transportation sponsor had a technical problem with one of the busses supposed to fetch the kids from Sibiu and Brasov. But BMW is BMW and the busses started as scheduled!

"Mais à part ca - as the french song has it- tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise...tout va très bien, tout va très bien".......and anyway, we are now immune and happy to see the kids happy!