As I walked to the university this morning, I saw the mad man standing out on his corner. His tell-tale ragged yellow shirt, wooly black hair, and all-over dusting of rusty colored dirt were there as usual, but his expression was eerily placid, almost holy in its stillness and seeming permanence. His face was lifted to the sun but not straining towards it. His eyes were shut tight as though one lapse in his effort to close ...

I went with Resaka to Fenomila’s small village on the outskirts of Tsihombe to collect honey as a volan_dalana (“gift from the road”) for a friend in Fort Dauphin. When you go to another part of the island or even the next town, more often than not you’ll find the landscape, customs, and foods changed, and the idea of the volan_dalana is to bring your friends and family a taste of your experiences from a different land. When ...

Some of the styles and fashions of Tandroy are worth illuminating. The women here wear the colorful cloth (lambas) wrapped around their waists or rolled up under their arms. Seeing the women go about their day is to witness a parade of patterns and local imagery: a village scene settled with blue huts around a cook’s bust, teal and orange urchin-spiny shapes wrapped about a washerwoman’s waist, and red herds of cattle traipsing along a vendor’s derriere are ...

Sometimes Tsihombe lives up to its name. Meaning "no room", Tsihombe can often feel very claustrophobic, like a small sphere inhabited by too many big personalities. When the heat of the afternoon settles in the sticky sweat of your clothes or slows your walk to and from the market to a dull plod, you feel like running wild and naked to the closest water source, the Manombovo River where you have to dig a hole to find water. ...

The following was from a letter written on August 26, 2007. The Peace Corps prefer that the site location of volunteers be kept confidential for safety purposes. Hello, again, Training has ended after two and a half months of intense language classes, of often silent meals with my host family, and of every kind of survival training from pounding our own peanut butter and killing chickens to how to avoid malaria. I've already seen my site in the southernmost tip ...

The following news has been taken from letters to Leslie's Grandmother Anderson and Grandparents McAbee. These letters were written 7/28/07. My training schedule has been intense, as we just finished 2 and 1/2 weeks of teaching training. For the 1st week, I was having so many discipline problems with the students that I wondered if I actually had the talent to teach. But after some advice from the trainers, I learned how to give the naughty students a ...

Sunday, August 5, 2007 Hello all, Since coming to Madagascar, there have been several instances in which I've forgotten my name; once when I scaled a mountain outside Manjakandriana, where I found a royal tomb and a lone tree on the deforested and windswept peak. Again, I forgot when standing with other volunteers in the house of a woman whose godfather had died. We offered our condolences with money and a polite hand shake, telling her in low, solemn tones ...

June 17, 2007 I am spending my first night at my host family, writing you from beneath my mosquito net. As you can imagine, it's been a busy day, complete with a 3 hour plane ride from Johannesburg to Antananarivo, a 2 hour drive to Manjakandriana, a 1 hour orientation, and my 1st night with the host family. Though there are few words between us, I can tell that these are good people. The father is a pastor, ...

The word mofo, meaning bread in Malagasy, loses even more of its bawdy flavor once you learn its pronunciation: moofoo. From the meager study of the language leading up to my in-country training, I've observed that Malagasy throws the anglophone some amusing curveballs. For one, I wondered how extremely exotic the fruit would be in Madagascar when I learned that the word for mango, manga, is also used to describe the color blue. Syntax also proves topsy-turvy, ...

It's been a month since I found out what my address as a trainee will be in Madagscar, and I've neglected to post it or anything else out of denial that tremendous changes are coming. But I love letters, as they impart an old world, romantic flair and are much more personal and intimate than a casual e-mail. So let's set some stationery on a wildly exotic, long, and potentially perilous journey (from what I hear, some ...

I keep staring, transfixed, at maps of the globe. In placing my hand on the page between my home in Georgia and the East African island, Madagascar, I find that to touch both shores requires me to stretch my fingers wide as though reaching for an octave on a piano. In less than two months I'll be Madagascar-bound as a Peace Corps trainee. Because I initially knew so little about the place, my imagination ...