A few weeks ago, I posted a short message on here, but it seems to have disappeared, so here is the newer, longer version:

On the morning of February 22nd, my service was officially “interrupted” and I left Madagascar. I landed in Boston late on the 24th after flying through Mauritius, Paris and Amsterdam. Since I left almost all my belongings at my house back in ‘Gascar, I made this two day trip with only a small carry-on backpack. And so, at each customs check-point, I was questioned:

“So, you’ve been in Madagascar since September 28th?” “But this is all your luggage?” “Why do you have two passports?” “And why are your clothes all ripped up?” “You were in Colombia last year? Why are you flying through Amsterdam?”

This was understandable considering my situation. My responses, though, didn’t exactly make the interrogations end any quicker:

“Well, there’s this political coup... and I left all my stuff there...” “One’s a personal passport, and one’s government?” “These are the only clothes I have, I wear them everyday...” “My good friend is Colombian, and I didn’t buy this plane ticket,  so I’m not sure why I’m going through Amsterdam...”

I won’t go into an explanation of the complicated political unrest in Madagascar - If you’re interested in how it happened, and what happening currently: you can google “Madagascar” under News and learn all about the coups, the back and forth between the president, the mayor of the capitol and eventually, the military. 

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Now we’ll jump back to January: 

Despite the lack of electricity, television and radio in my village, we got word that there were rallies in the capitol, run by the mayor and aimed against the president. Then we heard: buildings in the capitol had been looted and burned, people had died inside the buildings, the mayor was attempting a coup against the president. For days, conversations in the village revolved around the “tabataba” (commotion) in the capitol and the soon-to-be rising food prices (food distribution centers, owned by the president, were looted and burned). And the Peace Corps rumor-mill (a surprisingly powerful and fast thing) was turning, and I was on the phone every night with other volunteers, waiting for official word on how this was going to affect us, our sites and the country.

After a week of not completely understanding what was going on, but hearing that some volunteers were “consolidating” into groups, I was called and told to pack a small “emergency bag,” and to sit tight and wait for more information. A few anxious days later, I received a message to get on my bike.

I biked to a fellow volunteer’s house and stayed there for two nights. She had electricity, so we spent plenty of time on our phones, turning the rumor-mill (there were gunshots? where? are we being evacuated? to where? how serious is this?). Then, the two of us got a taxi-brousse ride to a gas station outside the capitol, where me met up with a jeep and traveled to an old Peace Corps training compound a few hours outside the city. Although there were several consolidation points setup, to better prepare for possible evacuation, I was at the largest (over eighty volunteers waiting each morning for more news about the unrest). 

Consolidation: While it was nice to re-connect with volunteers from my group and meet other volunteers, consolidation lasted 18 days. That’s 18 days: away from my village, speaking English, socializing, staying up past 8 pm, not having fleas (finally), eating something other than rice and beans, and thinking a lot about my experience thus far and my future in Madagascar. 

Although the political unrest continued to grow in the capitol and was spreading to other major cities, after 18 days, Peace Corps needed to make a decision. We were told de-consolidation was next, and we would all return to our posts. Some volunteers felt their posts would always be safe, despite urban unrest, other felt they couldn’t return to their posts anymore. I had my own situation: Before all this, the doctor I had been assigned to assist at the clinic had been relocated by the ministry of health, because my village “no longer needed her.” And it’s true, there are plenty of villages and towns and cities in Madagascar that need a doctor and don’t have one (and my village was doing relatively well in terms of health). For me, that sort of meant being on my own, and having even less work to do. As it was, I was only at the clinic a few hours a day during the week, on those days when people showed up, and when it wasn’t raining...

Throughout this consolidation period, and especially when de-consolidation was announced, volunteers were offered “Interruption-of-Service.” Because of the unrest, and the way things in Madagascar had changed, and would likely continue to change, volunteers could opt for a sort of “voluntary” evacuation. The U.S. gov’t (and Peace Corps) didn’t want to force anyone to stay in a situation they felt uncomfortable with - the country was changing, and so volunteers would live by some added rules, including daily contact with Peace Corps and curfews and travel-limitations when visiting bigger towns, the capitol, etc. With the Interrupted Service status, a volunteer would leave country with some benefits, like health coverage, as well as the option to re-enroll with Peace Corps later on and start service in a new country. 

In the end: some chose to interrupt service and began the process of leaving, some returned to their sites, and others waited to be assigned to new sites in safer parts of the island (in some cases, waiting for reassignment until just before full evacuation). 

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Many of you are probably surprised that I opted out early, considering my other posts on this blog and what my Malagasy life was like, but: 2009 began in strange, unexpected ways. I lost a close friend (the woman whose home I rented a room in) when my house was struck by lightening on New Year’s Day. Soon after that, I lost another friend, a neighbor, who fell down her well. And then, of course, my doctor (and best friend) left, and my day-to-day life became something I wasn't sure I wanted for another 22 months. The idea of returning to my village after consolidation, with little to no work to do, with the political situation worsening, and with the added stress of thinking re-consolidation and evacuation could happen any day, well, it didn’t sound right to me. 

My site was “just outside” the capitol city, which meant it took anywhere from 4 hours to a day and a half in a taxi-brousse. When it takes a day and a half, it’s because part of the road has literally fallen into a rice paddy. This means no food, no water, sleeping in an overcrowded van and waiting. But in terms of transportation in Madagascar, this is still a fairly quick trip. My trips to the capitol had to be frequent: for supplies, money, Peace Corps business stuff, and some sanity-saving time away from village life. Returning to my site would have meant severe limitations on when I went to the city and where I could go once I was there - not to mention the protests, looting, city-wide curfew and public shootings. 

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Soon after I interrupted my service and came back, all of Peace Corps Madagascar was evacuated to South Africa, where some volunteers were re-assigned to other countries, to start the Peace Corps thing over, and some returned to the States. Once the military became involved in the mayor’s coup, the US embassy, all non essential personnel, non-profit groups - all of them evacuated. All of this happened quickly, and sadly, Madagascar has now been kicked out of the African Union and a lot of foreign aid is suspended - it basically went from a mess to a much bigger mess. 

If I had returned to my site for those few weeks, been bored out of my mind/anxious about the growing unrest, and then evacuated: I’m sure I would have taken the same interrupted status as I did originally: the idea of starting a new 27-month service in a new country, learning a new language and culture, etc... not so appealing to me right now. 

I could probably go into further detail on my thought process, why I decided over the course of consolidation to return to the States rather than to my village- but I think it would be an even longer post and I would have a difficult time expressing it all clearly and succinctly. There wasn’t a single reason I decided to leave - a lot of things changed for me before the unrest began, and then all these small reasons came together at a bad time. 

On my flight home, I kept thinking: had things been different, had I been posted in a village with more pressing health issues, had it been a larger town with things to do in my free time, had my doctor not been relocated, had I been posted further from the capitol, etc, etc..

I did enjoy living in my village and the relationships I formed there, but in terms of being a health volunteer with three months of intensive language and technical skills behind me, I wondered if 22 more months there weren’t worth it in the end. I was in a very small community (just over five hundred people), a community that the Ministry of Health didn’t think needed a doctor, where the health clinic was utilized and the people were in good shape, using family planning, getting vaccines, etc...    In the end, I’m glad I went to Madagascar and am thankful for the time I spent there. But, I’m happy to be back and hopeful for what will come next for me. 

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Had I stayed in Madagascar after Consolidation, and had Peace Corps not evacuated, I probably would have updated the blog by now with some absurd stories from my life. So here they are:

Back in January, before my Doctor moved, she invited me into the capitol with her for a few days, to stay with her mother and brothers, and to attend what I believed to be a “doctor convention,” as well as their family reunion. Their apartment was very nice, with electricity and a television and dvd player, and grapes growing out on the porch. 

First, the “convention” in brief: The “doctor convention” was at an old French hotel outside the city. There was one giant room with a stage, and then a white marble patio outside. We arrived at 8:00 am. There were 600 doctors from all over the Analamanga province, and then me. That’s 600 Malagasy people, mostly women, dressed very well, and one tall hairy pale guy with ripped clothes who didn’t speak Malagasy so well. So, it was weird.  First, there was an hour of Catholic church-service. Then, awards were handed out to doctors, for their work in 2008. My doctor received an award for malaria prevention, as there were no cases of malaria reported in my village last year (Stranger, since we do no malaria prevention education at the clinic. There are almost no mosquitos in my region, and no one uses a mosquito net. Plus, in villages in the highlands, everyone is in their houses with all the windows shut long before sundown anyway).  Then, from around 10 am until 8 pm, six hundred doctors ate pig, got completely drunk and danced to a horrible band that played “YMCA” and “Hotel California” about a dozen times each.

That night, I watched a documentary on saving sea turtles on the BBC with my doc’s mom, whose constant commentary was: “Why are they saving them? They shouldn’t be saving them. They’re delicious, they should eat them.”

During this trip, I also finally solved the mystery of “ooly-voo.”  Throughout December, every few days my doctor would bring up this thing: “ooly-voo” and ask me random questions about it. I’m not sure why or how, but it got to the point where we talked about this “ooly-voo” thing so much, and I apparently liked it and American people like it and Malagasy people like it, and ooly-voo is just so amazing, that I couldn’t ask her what it was. Then, when we were at her mom’s apartment, she showed me some magazines and DVDs very proudly, because they were about “ooly-voo,” which it turns out, is just how my doctor pronounces “Hollywood.” Wow.

The family reunion:  My doctor had to get her hair done. I had to go to the bank. So we decided we’d meet at her cousin’s at noon for the reunion. The doc’s mom and brothers would meet us there too.

I’m sitting in the public taxi-be (a mini-bus) on my way from my doc’s mom’s place to the bank. I’m at the window in the back row, and have my backpack on my lap with my arms resting on it. I notice that the man sitting next to me is reading a newspaper but leaning awkwardly into me and glancing at me sideways. I look down between us, because I feel something, and he pulls his hand out of the side of my backpack and is holding a switchblade. We make eye contact. He stands up, folds the knife, puts it in his pocket, takes a step back, jumps out of the bus and runs down the road. I yelled “mpangalatra!” (thief!) and everyone else sort of screamed. Turns out, he had left three big knife gashes in my bag, while it was on my lap. We pulled over and everyone in the taxi-be was very concerned that he had stolen my money or my nice vazaha (European) things. Well, that guy picked the wrong vazaha bag to knife into, as all I was carrying were a pair of pants and a jar of honey. I had literally no money. I was on my way to the bank.  And of course, it took me a few minutes to explain to everyone in the taxi-be why a foreigner was riding around the capitol with no money, with just a pair of pants and a jar of honey, and why he was speaking malagasy. 

I finally got to the reunion, right at noon. There were about forty people at three long tables in a fairly small room, and lunch was being served. My doctor, her mom, or her brothers weren’t there yet. I said hello to a few people, and was told to sit at one of the tables. Strange enough, no one seemed to notice that I was not Malagasy but that I spoke Malagasy, and even stranger: no one seemed to care that I was clearly not in the family. I guess I assumed that my doctor had already explained to them who I was, so I just ate the lunch and chatted with the people sitting around me, had a pretty good time. Around 2:30 pm, the doc, her mom and her brothers showed up. Immediately, she stands by me and introduces me to everyone in the room, explains Peace Corps and how we worked together, etc. It became very clear that up until then, no one in the room had any idea who I was or why I was there. Suddenly, everyone was comfortable asking me who I was, what Peace Corps was, what America was like, etc. Possibly the most bizarre lunch experience I have ever had. 

The reunion ended with a two hour debate over who would host the reunion next year. It began sort of business-like, and then moved quickly to finger pointing and some serious debate. People were quick to point out who had never hosted it, and the accused were quick with excuses (my house isn’t big enough, i’m poor, etc) before redirecting the accusation onto some other family member. 

I’m sure I could think of other stories, but I think this short post and the previous, longer post from December sums up my life in Madagascar. 

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Sorry that this post was longer than long. Had to get it all out so I’d be okay never posting on here again and moving on. Thanks for reading.

Currently, I’m back in Boston. I’m looking for a job, sending out cover letters and resumes and hoping to move somewhere in the near future, preferably to Portland, OR.

This blog will not be updated after this post.  I just set up a new blog, for photographs and things (some from Madagascar, as well as from other travels), and it will be updated, so check it out: 

http://tamyers.wordpress.com

-Tom

When I have some more time, I will write at length about the decision I've just made, but the short version is: I am boarding a plane tomorrow or the next day, and several days after that I will be back in Boston. Technically, I am Interrupting-Service. This will probably come as a surprise to most of you, since my life here's been quite interesting, but a lot of things have changed for me in the past month or so, including the political unrest of late (read up on that: here, or if you speak french: here)Again, I hope to write more about why I've decided to interrupt my service and return home later on. For now, hope you are all well and good and I'll be seeing you soon.

i don't have much time, so nothin' fancy.

it's only been a couple weeks since i was last on here: but one day in my village is sort of eternity so it feels a lot longer.

had a rough beginning of the year, lost two people in my village who i was already close with, and people here deal with death in a very different way than I am used to. but it was nice to already have a support system, still enjoying my town and spending time with my neighbors, etc.

not much else in terms of news: still weigh babies and squawk about health issues, still walk around with my geese a lot, still have fleas, i did get two piglets (harvey and ham-bone) and they're all right, also, it turns out in 2009: it rains everyday.

These are my geese. On the left is Everett and on the right is Pumpkin-head. They remind me of dinosaurs and I spend most of my time with them. They are surprisingly perceptive, recognize me and the three of us quickly fell into a regular routine: In the morning when I open their door, we take a lap around the house and eat some grass, then go into their pen and eat rice bran. Around noon and again at five, I open their gate, and we walk single file (Everett in the lead, followed by Pumpkin-head, then myself) to the small pond in the corner of my yard where they swim around and I laugh at them. Then we cross the yard, go through the gate to my yard, hang a right and walk a half kilometer to the soccer field. There they graze and wander around (they cannot fly, but amusingly try) and after about half an hour, we return the way we came. And of course, throughout all this, neighbors and other folk confirm my suspicions: that I am walking with geese, that the geese are eating, and finally: that we are returning home. Sometimes my dog Potsy comes along, when he is awake. At sunset, they get more rice bran before I lock them up inside their little shed. All in all, we make a pretty good team.

Sorry it's been such a while. I'm rarely in a place with electricity, and when I am, I'm usually busy doing all the things I can't at my site (eating pizza, going to the bank, doing errands, etc). Three things have happened since I last wrote in length: I visited my site, then went back to my host family's and finished up training, then swore-in as a volunteer and moved permanently to my site. So we'll do this step-by-step:

In mid-November, I met my counterpart (the doctor in my town, and my partner in crime) and travelled with her to my site, where I stayed for five nights to feel things out and get ready for the next two years of my life. By the end of my visit, I could successfully pronounce the name of the town (it's a long one). There are two main towns and 8 villages, though there are houses scattered all over the hills. While I live in the largest "town" at site, there are only about 1,000 people and it did not take long for word of my arrival to spread. During my visit, seems I met just about everyone. Five days may not seem long, but I managed to hang around the health clinic (where I now spend a great deal of my time), all five stores, the one restaurant (serves soup and bread), both schools, the government building and the weekly market. I visited three of the smaller villages nearby, and met with the president in each one. I also sat outside my doctors house quite a bit chatting with her 80 year old mother. Really enjoy her company these days, and have never met anyone so capable of making them self really burst out laughing.

After site-visit, I went back to my host family's place, finished up training and said my goodbyes. Thankfully, my site is not far from the training site, so I plan on visiting my host family whenever I'm able. This is me with them toward the end:

On December 10th, us peace corps trainees made promises to the U.S. government and became peace corps volunteers. On the 11th, I moved from a town called "wednesday" (the training-site) to a town called "saturday" (my permanent site). Saturday's smaller than Wednesday, with generally less to do, and market is on Saturday rather than Wednesday. I live right near the center of town, and share my house with a family of four (and couldn't ask for better housemates). I have one room on the second floor, with two verandas. My room has a great window seat, that I eat and read at, and since it's right over the road, I get to see everyone as they walk to and from town. This is a picture of my staircase, my door is on the top left:

This is the view from my back porch, looking out over the valley:

And this is what my room looks like:

I spent the first few days getting settled (built a bookshelf, a table and some other shelves, figured out how to get water, clean dishes, clean clothes, cook food and keep two geese alive), then I started following my doctor around and feeling things out. Now I spend my time at the health clinic in my town and at the SEECALINE centers in the surrounding villages. When I'm at the clinic, I give a health presentation in the morning to the people before they go in for vaccines, pre-natal consults or to see the mid-wives or doctor. Then I hang around and chat with folks about nutrition, upper-respiratory infections, vaccines, pregnancy, diarrhea, the weather, geese, cow thieves and farming. When I'm at a SEECALINE, I give similar health presentations, weigh all the babies and chart their growth, then help out with a cooking demonstration and some nutrition education. Even though plenty of things grow around here, most things are exported to places where they'll bring in more money, and people in my town eat mangahazo mostly (manioc). Some of these centers are a couple valleys over, so I get to spend the morning and afternoon biking around (pretty good deal). Weighing babies can be sort of a nightmare, as the scale is hung in a doorway and each child is forced into a plastic sleeve and then dangled from the scale. And if dangling in a doorway isn't frightening enough for a child that's almost always tied to their mother's back, being forced to do all this by an enormous, pale, hairy guy makes it so. Also, some women in the smaller villages still tell their children: if they're not good, the vazaha (European) will eat them. Thanks a lot, colonialism.

My house with some children who aren't scared of me:

Once my Malagasy is better, I'll add on some secondary projects and do more presentations, at the clinic and at SEECALINE, as well as in schools and at town events. For now, I have a lot of free time, especially in the afternoons and on the weekends. On Saturdays, I spend most of the day at the market, buying all the food that the geese and I will need for the week. People come from all over and it's a big social event. Every week I consider buying a pig, and every week I decide it better to wait. The beginning of each week I eat everything flavorful that I bought on Saturday (mangoes, pineapples, lychees, plums) before resuming my diet of rice, beans, potatoes and coffee until Saturday rolls back around. Once Pumpkin-face grows up, I'll add eggs to that list. Although my diet's boring, I'm feeling pretty healthy and it's a nice feeling to produce almost no trash.

I spend the rest of my weekend reading, cooking, cleaning the house, washing clothes, roasting and pounding coffee beans for the coming week, making peanut butter, preparing for health presentations, working in my garden (which is really coming along, I've got: beans, tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, carrots, squash and pineapple growing so far), and walking around with the geese. I am thankful everyday for my shortwave radio, and I keep it on every time I'm at home. There are some bizarre things broadcast on shortwave, including a station that I am beginning to believe exists in some kind of time-warp, as it's never played a song produced after the mid 1990's (The theme song to "Friends," Blues Traveller, The Wallflowers, Alanis Morisette, the Spin Doctors... it's pretty sweet). I also listen to the world news according to England, the U.S., China and India (all pretty different), and found a station that plays an American Country Music countdown every Friday morning, which is helping keep me sane. I also switch it over to FM and listen to Malagasy music sometimes, which is growing on me.

This is the infamous Potsy doing what he does best, just layin' round in the shade:

Everyday has its ups and downs. All this free time can be boring, as town is dead quiet during most days (everyone down working the fields in the valleys) but I've met some great people and will surely have more things to do the longer I live here. My neighbors have been especially welcoming, helping me with the geese and garden, as well as cooking with firewood and charcoal when I ran out of gas a few days before Christmas. Although I'm not far from the capitol, the road isn't great (especially if it rains), so it's nice and quiet here, no electricity and rarely any cars or trucks passing through. My transportation situation is hilarious: only one taxi-brousse comes through here each day on its way to the city, and that's around 3 or 4 in the morning. Whenever I need to get out of town, it means waking up at 2:30 in the morning and putting a candle in my window, then waiting. Hopefully, a taxi-brousse rolls into town sometime in the next hour and a half, honks a bunch and I run outside and jump in. If it's rained recently, someone else trying to get out of town calls to me from the road on their way by, to let me know the news: where the taxi-brousse got stuck in the mud and the driver refused to go further in. Then I walk a few kilometers toward the main road, with everyone along the way (most biking to the rice-fields to work by sun up) giving me updates on the location and approximate departure of the brousse. Somehow, it seems to always work out, and somehow, there are always people around in the early morning spreading the word. The ridiculous nature of these early morning taxi-brousse hunts keep them from being too stressful.

Another shot from my porch (I sit there a lot):

I am currently visiting the capitol for New Years, and will return to my site in a couple days. Didn't think Christmas would feel much like Christmas here, as it's hot and sunny and rainy- but I spent Christmas Eve with my neighbors at the church singing hymns by candlelight and then in the morning went back for the holiday sermon. I relaxed the rest of the day and found a shortwave station that played the same six American Christmas songs over and over, which I listened to for approximately ten hours. My host family from training called with the epitome of a Malagasy phone conversation. The way cell phones work here: you walk to a store, and if the store is open and if they have credit, you buy a little scratch-ticket type thing. They have a code on them, which you enter into the phone and then have a certain number of seconds to call or text messages to send before you need to go back to the store and buy more. Stocking up on credit isn't an option, as stores are always low and people are always in need of credit. This being the situation, people tend to text mostly and keep conversations to a bare minimum (no pleasantries, just the message). So on Christmas morning, I received a call from my host family, which meant all four members took turns saying, as fast as possible, the exact same thing: "Tom-ah, I hope you are settled in your town, Merry Christmas, goodbye." I barely got a word in, as they took turns shouting the same thing at me and then hung up, and I just laughed the entire time.

Well, Sunday is still the day I try and keep my phone on to receive calls. When it's sunny, I charge my phone off a solar panel at the health clinic. Recently, I've been paying someone in town to charge it off a car battery- so on Sunday from around 6 am until 8 at night (my time, GMT +3) is the time to call to say hi.

I've read most of the books I brought, twice over, and re-discovered this passage from Calvino's If on a Winter's Night A Traveler, which I like a lot: "...a local legend, it tells of an old Indian known as the Father of Stories, a man of immemorial age, blind and illiterate, who uninterruptedly tells stories that take place in countries and in times completely unknown to him. The phenomenon has brought expeditions of anthropologists and parapsychologists; it has been determined that many novels published by famous authors had been recited word for word by the wheezing voice of the Father of Stories several years before their appearance. The old Indian, according to some, is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develops; according to others, a seer, who, thanks to his consumption of hallucinatory mushrooms, manages to establish communication with the inner world of the strongest visionary temperaments and pick up their psychic waves; according to still others he is the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, of the author of the Popol Vuh, as well as of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce..."

Some other things that have happened: I ate a guinea pig (pretty good), a band of cattle thieves came through town and nabbed some cows in mid-December (big upset), I was told that my geese "have brains, but not hearts, so they make a lot of noise, but never say anything," I still have fleas, I finally found out how to make "mofo-bals" and plan to open "trano-mofo" (house of bread) upon my return to the States (I predict it will do well), and I saw an enormous dragonfly left over from the Jurassic period (but wasn't quick enough with the camera).

People have asked about what I miss the most: other than you people, food (mainly processed cheese, bread, hummus, avocado and wine), as well as what I'd most like mailed to me: books written in English, as well as any kind of powder that can be mixed with water (gatorade, iced tea, hot chocolate, mac and cheese mix, etc). Well, hope everyone had a nice time during the holidays, stay in touch, mail me things.

yet again: i am in antananarivo, i have very little time to write and it is very late at night. today we officially swore in as volunteers and vowed to work here for two years. tomorrow i will move to my site and begin my work as a community health agent. when i get back to electricity (sometime in 2009?), I will hopefully post something long and interesting about whatever I've been doing. until then, i will be working at a health clinic, telling people all about condoms, family planning, malaria, malnutrition, etc. In my free time, I will tend to my garden and my animals (currently 2 geese, 8 chickens, and a wonderful dog named Potsy). Since i will be charging my cell phone only sporadically and off of a car battery, i can only promise that i will keep it on during sunday afternoon and evening (america's saturday night and sunday morning) so try and call then.

just got into tana from a week long visit to my future home. spent some time at the health clinic, around the town and in the outlying villages where i will be delivering my messages of health. it was so great that i'll write about it later when i've had time to process what just happened.

Well, it's Saturday November 8th, 2008 and I'm about halfway through training.

I've been living in a village in a valley below the training site, a little over an hour's ride from the capital city. The village is an island of about twenty homes surrounded by rice paddies and cut off from the road to town by a footbridge. It's sort of paradise. We are inland and on the plateau, so the weather is pleasant and the landscapes real easy on the eyes: very green in the valleys and domes of exposed rock on the mountaintops. This is the view from my house:

My host family consists of Dada and Mama (farmers, lovely people), my sixteen year old sister and my fourteen year old brother. We have fun together and they laugh at me often. They call me "tom-ah" (with a long pause on the hyphen) and are very patient, very generous, very hard working, very calm people. (Dada and Mama often seem to be Malagasy versions of my parents and I predict that their eventual meeting will be monumental.) We're busy folk, what with a flock of geese, some chickens and two pigs, and then all the crops we got going: rice, beans, mango, papaya, squash, coffee, pineapple, kasava, green beans, spinach, carrots, cabbage, etc. We also recently got a kitten and named it Miyel, after the noise she makes. This is our little white house:

Almost every day goes like this:

4:45 Wake up in the dark. Scratch myself for a while (I have fleas)

5:00 Clean my floor, Malagasy-style (rub it with a candle, push half a coconut around with my feet, then sweep)

5:45 Breakfast: Mush Rice, peanut butter, fruit and coffee

6:30 Wash dishes (with small audience)

6:45 Bucket Shower in a building the size of a phone booth, but shorter

7:00 Chores (cutting firewood, geese-watching or making peanut butter) (with larger audience)

7:30 Walk up to training site

8-10 Class (Language twice a day, as well as other sessions on Health, Culture, Safety, etc)

10:00 Snacky (Malagasy for snack), which is often Cracky (Malagasy version of cheet-oh's)

10:30-12 More Class

12:30 Lunch: Rice, vegetables or beans, ranonampango (rice tea), fruit

More Chores & Relax

1:30 Walk back up to training site

2-4:30 Even More Class

5:00 Back home

More Chores/Fetch Water/Hacky-sack//Help prepare Dinner

6:30 Dinner: Rice, vegetables, beans or delicious beetles, ranonampango, mango

Some Prayer, Some Hymn Singing

8:00 Sleep

In summary, my life is very similar to when I lived in India: I eat rice three times a day, do the # 2 in a hole, shower with a bucket, dress sort of foolishly, speak fairly poorly and walk a lot. I go to bed early because I wake up early. Plus, we don't leave the house after sunset on a count of the pamasavys (witches), who are naked, covered in oil and capable of doing horrible things. After dark, we don't even go outside to use the latrine (there is a thing called a "po," which is a plastic bucket, and which serves as the night-time latrine inside the house until it can be dumped at sunrise into the actual latrine outside of the house).

This is a lemur, they live in madagascar:

Wednesday is market day here, and people come from all over. It's a good day. Sunday is church day and the service is longer than long, though real relaxed. My host parents are sometimes there for about nine hours, but I am allowed to leave when I become debilitatingly hungry / bored. The service is mostly singing and the songs are accompanied by a man on a keyboard (with the keyboard set to sound like an accordion). People don't pay much attention to the sermon or the readings, and it's acceptable to go outside for some air, change seats to chat with someone new, eat candy, etc.

What little free time I have I spend with the kids that live next door. Tafita, Santatra, Tatsila, Valysoa, Edena, Santa and Tantely make up my main crew and they are all under the age of eleven. With my current language skills, I am sort of the idiot of the group (though the best at hacky-sack) and always good for a laugh, being the humongous hairy white guy.

"Watching geese" is my favorite chore, and it means the geese (we have 14) walk to the river and I follow them. They swim and I watch them swim. When they've had their fill, they walk back to the house and I follow them back. For some reason, I carry a stick with me, though I've never had to use it. People are always letting me know that they enjoy watching me watch the geese. In fact, I attract a sizable audience whenever I stop walking long enough for one to gather, and Malagasy people love to state the obvious (and I'm growing to love and mimic this). When I lead the geese to the river and sit to watch them, people walking by will come up and say "You are watching the geese" or even "Tom-ah watches geese." This is normal here, and the appropriate response on my part would be: "You are back from the market" or "You are carrying water" or even "You are walking." At first, I assumed this was because of my language skills or because I'm a vazaha (foreigner), but it turns out that this is just how things go here. At the market you tell people they are walking in the market. Everyone is expected to say "hello" and then immediately "goodbye" to everyone they pass on the road, if not a more specific "You are walking/sitting/carrying something." It's pretty fun to tell people exactly what they are doing.

This is the mountain I see everyday:

On December 10th I will swear-in as a volunteer and move to my site, which is comprised of 8 small villages, has about 2,600 people living there, and is where I'll be living until the year 2011. I have been told only a few other things about this place: There is one hotely (Malagasy for restaurant) and not surprisingly, it is named "hotely." The people grow rice and pineapples mostly. My house is one room with a veranda, on the second floor. Beneath my house is some sort of public rice storage room. I will not have electricity, but there is a well nearby and a fenced in area for me to garden. I will be working at a local health clinic about a kilometer away and with an organization focused on nutrition which has a center about five kilometers away. As a community healthy educator, I will help the community with pertinent health issues: diarrhea, nutrition, malaria, STD's, reproductive health, family planning, immunizations, etc. In my free time, I will likely tend my garden and take care of the geese that my host father has promised me.

Recently, there has been some rain (cyclone season). Large, flying beetles called voangory appeared, and at dusk we run around on the little mud walkways between the rice paddies and catch them. Sometimes we tie strings to them and fly beetle-kites. Usually we fill a coke bottle with them, fry them in salty oil and eat them with dinner. Yes, delicious and crunchy.

Other news: Malagasy beer's pretty good, weighing other people's babies is hilarious, I wear suspenders everyday, mangoes are delicious, flip-flops are called "scooby-doo's" here and I have an orange pair with the Camel Cigarette logo on them (i don't understand it either), I have a reoccurring dream in which I travel great distances by chairlift, I saw my first lemur (at the zoo in Antananarivo), the moon looks different in the southern hemisphere (look it up), "mofo-bal" is delicious and almost a donut, I'm to move to my site and begin working, I got flea bites on my toes, so so so it goes.

Lastly, I bought a cell phone. It's expensive for me to make calls, but free for me to receive them, so it makes the most sense for people to use skype and call me if they'd like to try and say hi. To call from the states it's 011-261-332-013-072 I don't have voicemail so don't leave a message after the beep. If I don't answer my phone, I'm either not around or it's turned off, so try back later. Remember that I exist eight hours ahead of the eastern U.S., and that I wake up early and go to bed early.

This blog exists because on September 28th, 2008I am leaving for Peace Corps service in Madagascar.After 3 months of training (and learning Malagasy),I'll be posted as a community health educator for 2 years.

When I'm able, I'll post things on this website.

During training, my address will be:

Tom Myers, PCT Peace CorpsCorps de la PaixB.P. 12091Poste Zoom Ankorondrano101 AntananarivoMadagascar

Letters should take 2-3 weeks, and envelopes should be marked "Airmail" and "Par Avion"

-Tom