“We dress up in women’s clothes and parade around mouthing the words to other people’s songs.”

Pretty ridiculous-sounding job description, isn’t it? 

Forgive the obscure movie reference, but for some reason these two lines have been knocking around my head as of late. 

In an inexplicable effort to give my life of limbo definition while I wait for la rentrée, I naively agreed to join the gutsy cadre of mission managers who work in the local office. I have to be honest: when I first got here, I was not impressed at all with how things were run. The place was largely deserted almost all of the time, no one could give me a straight answer on anything, and my “sponsor” (or the Navy person who I considered my sponsor), I suspected dyed his hair black to cover up the blond tresses that would account for what I perceived to be very flighty tendencies.  

“What is wrong with these people? C’est un bordel ici!”  These are the observations coming from an outsider who has no clue what she is stepping into. 

Now I do.  

So, what does this place do?  Well, a web search will tell you that it manages all traditional and non-traditional security assistance activities in Senegal as well as coordinating host nation support, conducting joint planning, and acting as liaison for other defense matters of mutual concern. Exhale. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? If you ask me what the office does, I can now tell you certitude that it runs a six ring circus under a big top whose ringmaster has a part time job over at another circus and is hardly ever around to oversee the feats of constant visual & physical wonderment.

That’s impressive.

But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. This office, operating not really under the auspices of African Command, successfully juggles a ton of really cool (and meaningful) missions with not a lot of bodies. Each person goes to work each day fully aware that they will be asked to perform tasks that are totally off the wall (kinda like parading around in women’s finery and mouthing the words to other people’s songs).  And it’s all done in the name of furthering Security and Cooperation.  

You know what my first task was when I sat in to pinch hit for my sponsor? Commandant Megan, the prior-SWO and fairly fluent french-speaking Olmsted Scholar, who thought that the office was run by a bunch of administratively-challenged professionals- guess what her To Do list entailed? I got to call the Austrian embassy here in Dakar to facilitate obtaining visas for a team of Senegalese military officers flying to Crete for a US-sponsored exercise. And do that in French.  

Yes, you read that correctly. It’s really random, and that is the kind of short-fused tasking that I have been batting away since I first said “Yes, I’ll help out.” This stuff goes on all the time. To make it even more complex, the fact that we serve as glorified travel agents for a ton of foreigners is only one minuscule (but incredibly critical) piece of the larger puzzle. 

Now that I have been schooled by his workload, it would be an understatement to say that I misjudged his capabilities for management.  Through mismanagement of a different kind, he is rolling out of the flightsuit and into civilian attire after twenty years of dedicated service. He’s already taught me a lot about patience and problem-solving in the crazy environment of the office, and everyone is going to miss him. 

That, and his completely eclectic collection of music from the 70s and 80s. I mean, this cat used to be in a band- and he played the keyboards!
 

Okay, so I really didn’t mean to go off on such a rambling tangent, but it would appear that this is how things shook out tonight. What I did mean to post at the beginning of this prolix speech was this document:

I finally got accepted into UCAD!I Alhamdoulilah!

It would thus appear that my short time back in uniform has an expiration date. I’m simultaneously relieved and sad for this to happen. I like having a mission, but I don’t always like calling up random people in another language and begging them to help me when, if I were them, I’d hang up on me right away. 

Even though I’ll be leaving Wonderland behind to commence my master’s program, I can only hope that I’ll have learned a thing or two from these folks about problem solving, and that I can make them proud as I walk into another classroom and start to prejudge how things are run.