sorry for the delay

It’s been a long time since my last post and I’ve had some complaints about the lack of updates so I apologize for the lack of activity. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to get to an internet café where I wouldn’t physically grow old waiting to log in to gmail. I don’t seemed to be blessed with the patience required for online activities in the developing world. Anyway, here’s a rundown of what I’ve been up to in the last couple months.

Tamatave Bike Race

At the beginning of October I headed to the east coast for the annual Tamatave bike race and a week of HIV/AIDS sensitizations. It was a lot of fun. There were a bunch of other volunteers there so I got to meet some new people and catch up with friends from my stage. I also got to learn how to do things like give condom demonstrations, so that was a blast. It was a kind of weird experience at the same time though. I first got my invitation for Peace Corps around this time and I started reading a bunch of blogs of environment volunteers from the stage before me. They had all just been to Tamatave for the bike race and everyone seemed so settled into their lives in Madagascar. Finding myself at that same physical point in my service was strange since I still feel like I’m just getting started and, most of the time, still pretty clueless. Though, it was a bit of a motivator to finally get some projects going at site.

My Birthday

Shortly after my stint in Tamatave I went to Antsirabe with a couple friends for my birthday. We didn’t have any grand plans I just wanted to get out of site for the day. People in Madagascar don’t really celebrate birthdays. In fact, most people don’t seem to be to sure of their actual age here. Given that, I had a feeling that hanging around my site wouldn’t make for the most exciting birthday and there certainly wouldn’t be anyone bursting into song with a cake in tow. So Antsirabe it was. Still no song and cake but at least I was with people who think birthdays are worthy of noting. We spent the day eating cheeseburgers and checking out the vazaha grocery store. For those of you back at home, going to a grocery store may not seem like the most exciting thing to do on your birthday. In fact it’s probably one of those daily errands you would try to accomplish the day before so as to avoid the hassle on your birthday. Here, however, a trip to the grocery store is something to look forward to. We’re talking can’t sleep the night before kind of excitement. On the rare occasions when I find myself in a city that actually has a grocery store I always set aside time to visit. I could spend hours just walking up and down the aisles gazing in awe at everything. There’s so much food! You have more than one option for everything and you can buy an apple even when they aren’t in season! You can even find delicacies like ketchup and oatmeal and, my personal favorite, cereal. I always relish my breakfasts in the days following a trip to the grocery store. That trip, which probably seems the most mundane of all the things I could do on my birthday, was probably the highlight of my day. Anyway, after the excitement of the grocery store wore off we decided to splurge on dinner. We got dressed up, headed to a French restaurant, sipped cocktails and dared to order our steaks medium rare (a serious risk at non-vazaha restaurants), all for the ungodly sum of 16000 ariary a person...or about ten bucks. Like I said, it was a splurge. All in all, it was pretty good, though slightly unorthodox, birthday.

Halloween

Goal two of Peace Corps is to teach about American culture. So, as the end of October approached along with the timing for our next VAC meeting, the Fianar VACers naturally decided to throw a party to teach about the great American tradition of Halloween. It was an interesting experience to say the least. The next set of pictures I send home to be uploaded online will include documentation of the event so when you stumble across pictures of a guy dancing around in nothing but a gony sack a few months from now you’ll know why. I don’t know where Ryan got his idea from but his bag of rice costume was pretty ingenious. And Brendan’s portrayal of Dr. Bruce was uncanny. Anyway, when the pictures finally do make it onto my blog, enjoy.

The Plague

I was helping a friend harvest orge a couple weeks ago when she started to tell me about someone who had died in a town nearby. I didn't pay that much attention because people die off pretty regularly here and the reason is never all that clear. Plus I was really getting into the harvesting since I was finally starting to get the hang of weilding my knife without fearing I would chop off my hand. So I was just kind of nodding and saying "uh huh" a lot as I tried to attempt gathering more and more orge at a time but my friend kept repeating the story over and over again and asking if I understood what she was telling me. After about the tenth repition I finally decided I should probably actually pay attention to what she was telling me and it dawned on me that the disease she was describing sounded an awful lot like the plague. I really hoped I'd misunderstood as so often happens and asked her to describe the symptoms one last time. She sighed and said "you know, you get a fever and then you get sores on your neck, armpits and groin and then you die after one day." No misunderstanding there. Definitely the plague. Someone 30k from my house had just died from the bubonic plague. The same one that decimated the European population in the 14th century. I guess that's how far behind the times we are here in Madagascar...still fearing the black death 700 years after the rest of the world has filed it away in the history books. I mind immediately shot to the rats that parade through my house every night and the flea bites that have become a permanent fixture on my legs. Did I seriously have to add the bubonic plague to the list of ailments to avoid during my time here? Apparently I do. Just when I thought my life couldn't get any more bizarre. I've since called up the PC doctors to find out if I should be concerned about this illness that I had since thought had been wiped out. Apparently I don't need to worry unless someone dies in my town but they sent me the meds just in case. And they told me to keep my house free of fleas and rats. Yeah right, I gave up on finding a solution to those pests months ago.


That's all for now. I'm currently on my way to a week of environmental education along with a belated Thanksgiving celebration. I stupidly volunteered to provide the turkey. Traveling with a live turkey is turning out to be quite the ordeal...