M7 Singing to Elders

     Great. This is just fantastic. I've been assigned to present a traditional African song to a village elder that I met today. I had no potential at singing a song. He told me to write just a nice call and response song that includes me singing. I'm terrible at singing. One time when I was 8 my mom asked me to sing a song for her. Every neighbor on our block knocked on our door to ask what the terrible sound was. Anyway, I was thinking on how I was going to pull this song off. I was supposed to present it to him in 2 days. The thoughts I had were all terrible including just going up there by myself or finding people to create a band with a couple instruments.
     Another one of my ideas was to just blow this all off and go back to my normal life. This way I was sure to lose my job. I finally decided on maybe finding a couple people with some musical talent to make our music maybe a little bit good. Door to door felt like the best idea with my short time limit.The first door, a little girl came to the door, looked up at me, and before I could say anything ran back into her house crying. I waited at the front step for about two minutes and decided to just leave because no one else was coming. What a great way to start things off, I thought to myself.
     From their on out, I didn't get one person who even was going to think about joining me to sing. I walked back home, miserable and wondering if anybody was nice in this town. I was grimy with sweat and dirt. As I was walking through my front door, a sound caught my ear from one of my neighbors houses. It sounded like a musical instrument, so I turned to go back where the sound was coming from. It was a house that I had skipped, and the noise kept getting louder, so knocked on the door. The music stopped and someone opened the door.
     They agreed to sing with me! They had already been practicing a really good call and response song too. There were three of them all playing instruments and I would sing the song. One of them was going to play the marimba, the other a bell, and another the drums. We practiced the whole night perfecting the song for the elder.
     We were ready. Today was the day we would perform. I had memorized the lyrics and felt very confident to sing with these guys. I didn't care how bad my voice sounded. All I cared about was that the elder would like it and sing the response along with the crowd. The stage was set as we walked onto it. We sang and danced for 20 minutes with the crowd responding to us. At the very end of the song, I finally saw the elder muttering the response to himself and I could tell he was very pleased with my performance. Finally, I was glad to be in West Africa.