I am in Tana for a couple of days, enrout to my site for "site visit" but there is currently a category 3 hurricane hitting the east coast of Madi so we are stuck in Tana for a little bit longer than we excepted, it is nice because we are learning about the city and it gives me a chance to update my blog and send a couple of e-mails.

SO many things have happened in the past three weeks I don't even know where to start, I know we have only been here for a couple of weeks but it feels like months and some days even years. I've taken tons of pictures, but in one of those moments when I truly suck at life I managed to erase all of them off my digital camera. And this was only about 2 days ago, so what I have is limited. But I will do my best in the future to not erase my pictures.

Making Donuts

  Wednesdays are my CRAZY day. They have us on this drug called Laramin, as an anti Malarial. It is the most effective ant Malarial but it can have some crazy side effects, everything from bad moods swings and extremely vivid dreams to hallucinations. The worst that is happening to me is that on Wednesday two days after I take it I start to feel like I am falling apart, and just start making donuts (PC for going crazy). But now that I know what it is I think I should be able to deal with it a lot better. So if you ever talk to me, or get a letter written on a Wednesday and I seem a little whacked out it isn't because I am actually making donuts, it is just the drugs. And to think some people pay good money to feel like this.

Where am I?

"There are very few if any situations where I can imagine myself doing what I did today, and yet I've done it. We arrived in Madi this morning got off the airplane, gave all our luggage and passports to people we had never met before (though they say they are with the PC) got in a bunch of vans. They brought us to this placed called Meva (Malagasy for heaven) which is the medical unit and PC house in Tana. We gave away all the rest of our forms of identification, handed over all our cash, got a bunch of shots and got back in the Vans to be shipped here. I have no idea where here is. I know we are semi near Tana, it is pouring rain, the roads are horrible, and I am sitting in a room writing this by candlelight. Because contrary to what they told us we never got our luggage back, so I have nothing dry and no headlamp. I am wet, exhausted and this room smells like petrol. And I have to be functioning at 6am tomorrow. I wonder if there are any spiders in this room...We saw a lot of rice paddies, and it is pretty hilly..." So those were my very first impressions of Madi. Some of them still hold true, the roads still really suck, but we are learning a lot really quickly, and I am really enjoying myself.

Anjozoro

We are currently living and being trained in a village called Anjozoro, which is in the commune of Mantasoa. The village is about 2000 Malagasy and 30 Peace Corps Trainees (PCT). We are all living in host families, mine is a very young family. The mom in the family, Fara, is only 21 and the dad, Jean Pierre, is 29. They have two children Michael, 2 years, and Ismeal, 2 months. The four of them live in one room and share one bed, I would say about a double defiantly not a queen size, I have the other room on the second floor of the house. The grandma and a boy named Felix, who I think is 11 and might be the nephew and might be the hired help live on the 3rd floor. The chickens live on the bottom floor, as well as a bunch of storage. We also have a tiny flea bitten cat, who sits so close to the fire that his whiskers are burnt off, two cows and a dog. The dog and cows never come inside. According to the sheet of paper I got from the PC my host dad is a builder, and the mom a farmer, but as far as I can tell they both farm all the time. We are just at the beginning of the rice harvesting season, so on the first two weekends we were in country I helped with the rice harvest.

Our training is an all day every day kind of thing. Typically we have class in the morning from 8am to noon, these are our tech classes where we learn about different farming methods, and improvements, and about things like how to kill and butcher chickens. Three afternoons a week from 2-5pm we have language lessons, they are intense but absolutely essential. We hoof it home for lunch, which in my case involves about an hr of walking and 45 min of eating and studying. On Thursdays we spend all day at the Peace Corps Training Center which is in the town of Mantasoa, about 25 min away in a Jeep (essential b/c of the horrid roads). Saturdays we have to write and give presentations in Malagasy to our Malagasy families about the tech sessions we had earlier in the week and Saturday afternoons and Sundays are our weekends. But we spend most of that time working with our families, so far I have built a garden, taught my family and a bunch of people I've never met before how to make compost, harvested rice, killed chickens, washed my clothes in a stream, learned to cook a meal for 12 over an extremely primitive wood stove, and done some other things which I have already forgotten. But the best part of the weekend comes on Sunday afternoons, our families go to church and the majority of the PCTs make the hike over to this extremely over priced French hotel for a couple of beers, it is the one time during the week that we truly get to relax for a couple of hrs.

The People

 

There are 30 people in my stage (training group), we have unfortunately already lost one person when dear Sara decided that the PC was not the place for her. (Sara if you read this I hope you are doing extremely well with what ever you have decided to do) We had 29 people in DC and were joined after almost a week in country by two volunteers from Guinea, the program their was canceled due to civil strife. Everyone in my stage is fantastic, we all clash every once in a while, but we are also fast becoming friends, and building the support network we will need during our next 2 years in country. PC Madi staff is amazing, I don't even know how to describe them. All I can say is that they are one of the most self sacrificing and giving groups of people I have ever met, they make this experience great on the days it could be horrible (aka Wednesday)