Well here I am over one year into my Peace Corps Service in Madagascar, and less then a year from coming home. Reaching the one-year mark was a moment of triumph and reflection. Triumph because there were so many days and months were I was ready to throw it all in and I thought I would never make it this far, and reflection on what I have accomplished, what I hope to accomplish with the next 11 months. I have spent a lot of time in the last couple of days thinking about these questions as I am trying to decide what I will tell the program review team when they show up on my doorstep tomorrow morning.

Peace Corps has three goals; providing technical assistance, teaching the world about America and teaching America about the world - more or less. I would say I have been much more successful at goals two and three. I have never felt qualified for my job, why am I, a city girl, trying to teach farmers how to farm and that feeling of inadequacy has probably led to a lot of the issues I have faced with my work situation. If I felt like I knew what I was doing I would be much more willing to put myself out there and ask people to take risks and change the way they have been doing things for generations. But as it is asking a subsistence farmer to change the way he farms his rice when the prospect of one failed crop means the difference between eating and not when I am not really convinced I know what I am doing is a little too much for me so I have turned my sites to other projects.

So what have I really accomplished? I have educated hundreds of people about HIV/AIDS and have plans to continue with this work. I convinced a number of farmers to spend their Saturdays planting Moringa trees only to have them all die when it started raining (not sure why that happened, you would think trees like water). I convinced one family to try using natural methods to control the bugs eating their plants and am working on others. I have started building fuel efficient cook stoves, though only two have been finished a number are in the works, and I have hiked a lot of miles to a lot of meetings that no one ever showed up for.

I spend a good part of every day playing with children or talking to the people who live near me. Showing them that us crazy white people are pretty much just like them, we have similar wants and needs though we might go about getting them in a little bit different way. I think I have also managed to convince a couple of people that the USA is not the wonderland they seem to think it is, and no it is nothing like those action movies they all love so dearly. We have poverty and a whole host of other problems. Thus I have accomplished some of goal two. As for goal three...well I think I will be accomplishing that one pretty well when I bring Mbola home with me.

I look forward to the next eleven months I plant to continue the small projects that I have started and try and establish a base of community members who will be eager and willing to work with the volunteer that replaces me. I have been told many times that a lot of the "work" of the first volunteer at a site is to prepare the community for the volunteers that will follow. I would much rather be able to point to something tangible at the end of my two years, and I will continue to try and accomplish that something but at the same time I am going to do everything in my power to make the transition easier for the person that follows me, no one needs to go threw what I went threw my first six months at site