Well I am still here, are you sick of reading about Tana yet?

Yesterday evening the Saftey and Security Officer, Robert, told those of us going to the Tamatave Region that we would be leaving this morning at 7:30am, so we got all packed up, woke up earlyand hurried up and waited, about 45 min after we were scheduled to leave Robert came over the the PC house and told us we were not going. There has been massive damage to the roads, and I think a bridge may have been washed out. I am not exactly sure what is going on, we have a bit of an information void here, the people we have contact with at the PC are so busy runing around trying to figure things out so I have been trying to not  bother them too much with requests for information, we are kind of just siting back and going with the flow at the moment.

From what I understand the damage has been prety exstensi particullarly as this cyclone is following on the back of a number of others, and was extremly powerful. We have heared that it was more powerful than Hurricane Katrina. Here is a link to a NASA pic of the cyclone:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17583

The reports we have been hearing are that it has done very exstensive damage to the coast, especially the vanilla plantations (which were just starting to recover from cyclones last year) and to the roads. We have also heard that one PCVs house has been compleatly flattened, (without her in it) all PCVs and PCTs are currently accounted for, and safe. Otherwise we are just sitting around in Tana twiddiling our thumbs, over spending our Per Diems and getting a bit bored. Hopefully we will head out to site visit tomorrow morning, but as of now it is all still up in the air.  I am going to run off to study some Malagasy and then go to the Market to buy some dinner.