Due to political unrest in Madagascar, all Peace Corps volunteers have been evacuated. I'm staying in South Africa until tomorrow when I fly to Morocco for a little vacation. After that it's back to New York to wait for a new peace corps assignment.

This is the landscape outside of Mandritsara

This is my very first wild (ish) lemur.

I just got back from my site visit, where I got to go to Madritsara and see where I'll be living and working! I also got to meet my site mates (the married environment couple and the education volunteer) and the girl that I'm replacing. Madritsara is beautiful and I'm really excited to be going there. So far everything seems great.

It took two days to get to site by Peace Corps car, about 22 hours of being in the car total, with an overnight stop in one of the towns along the way, where I got to stay with another volunteer who had been down training us at CBT for the fist two weeks of training. It was really nice to see her again. The next day it was on to Madritsara, through the town where I'll be banking (about 6 hours from my town - when the road isn't cut during the rainy season, December-March). The road was a little hairy, but the four wheel drive Peace Corps jeep was able to make it though where many other vehicles got stuck.

After all that travel, I only had 2 full days at site, but I did get to meet a lot of different people and get a little bit of a sense of the town. Overall it was really wonderful and I'm really looking forward to getting to site and starting a life there. I think it will be really nice to have other Peace Corps volunteers close by, and I'm looking forward to starting a garden. I think I'm also going to keep chickens (for eggs) which should be really exciting.

Other than that, there is an Alliance Fraincais in Mandritsara, and I'm hoping to take classes there to keep up my french (maybe I'll wait until my Malagasy gets a little better to start). I think that may be it for now, we'll be staying here in Tana at the volunteer house until Wednesday when we head back to CBT. Thursday we'll have a big Thanksgiving celebration - but I will be missing you all quite a bit on Thanksgiving. From there its only about a week more at community based Training, then we have a thank you party and head to the Peace Corps training center to do some last minute sessions on things like logistics of getting paid and bike maintenance before swearing in as official peace corps volunteers on the 10th of December.

I think that's all for now. I'd love to hear from all of you, by any means really, e-mail snail mail or phone.

Love,

Liz

Since I know you are all probably really worried about how my election day went, I figured I’d let you know. Since Madagascar is 8 hours ahead of the east coast, the election was called at about 7 am here. Which is coincidently about 2 hours after I get up in the morning to go get water and get myself together for school which starts at 8. I was preparing breakfast when the Malagasy news announced that Obama had won, and I got to watch Mccain’s concession speech over breakfast (dubbed in French). I then rushed to school, where me and the other trainees huddled around a radio transmitting the BBC, so we got to hear Obama’s speech in English, with the picture on the tv muted because it was dubbed in French. It was really powerful, and we really felt great at that line about people huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world.

We then proceeded to have a day of training, followed by a nice little American celebration at the cheese factory where we had a beer and toasted the next president of the United States.

So while some of you may be disappointed (two cousins and an uncle in particular) I have been keeping Vegetarian here, which is surprisingly easy. I have however been eating Bananas and Mangoes. While I still don't like bananas, when my host family presented me with them on the first day, I didn't know how to say/ didn't want to say that I don't like them. So it may shock you all, but I've been eating them almost every day. and I've actually started to like Mangoes - they are amazing here and I eat them all the time.

as for other things to report, I think I already described the day to day a little bit, but as for info on my host family they are wonderful. I love spending time with them, it's my host dad Lucien, my host mom Noro and my host sister Lolita - she's 7. It's been a real challange language-wse, but it's also an exersize in realizing how little verbal language is actually important. so much can be communicated without words. It's been really great to feel like I'm starting to actually be useful in the kitchen, now my host mom will actually run out to the store and leave me cooking, which is really fun. I also get up early so I can help get water, which is a really crazy process for us, because we carry all the water we use for cooking and cleaning in buckets and old moter oil containers.

I should really be going, sorry for the incomplete info- the internet here is a little too slow to upload photos, maybe someday.

I miss you all, and love you all.

So I’m writing this entry from the Peace Corps training center which is about an hour and a half away from the community based training site. We came up here last night to get a little break and blow off a little steam. The building we are staying is is beautiful and it feels a little it like a summer camp. They used to have the trainees live here for the first 10 weeks of training until they switched to the community based training model where we live with host families and all come together during the day to train. Here we have running water, electricity, toilets etc. I think it would be really hard to adjust to site after spending 10 weeks training here!

Today is October 19th, but I won’t be able to post this for another three weeks when we go to Tana. Our Training site is about an hour and a half away from Tana, the capitol. (since antanarararivo is a really long word to say, every one – gasy included abrev’s it to Tana). I’m living with a family that consists of my host mom and dad and their 7 year old daughter. My host dad, Lucien, and my host mom, Noro, and their daughter’s name is Lolita. My host parents have al little farm, with two cows, a sheep, and a whole bunch of chickens. They really do eat rice for 3 meals a day here – which has taken a little getting used to. Though I really do like rice, and I’m not sick of it yet though many in my training group have.

As for what I do every day, we are at the Learning center from 8-5 M-F with a 2-hour break to go home for lunch. Saturdays we only have class in the morning. Training is broken up into different sessions – which include Language, Health, Technical (how to teach health messages), safety and security, administrative, and a few others like culture and diversity. My Malagasy gets a little better each day and thought it’s only been two weeks in country. The first week we spend learning Standard Malagasy, then starting Friday of the first week we got our site assignments, and started to learn dialects. All the dialects are structurally the same as standard Malagasy, but the vocabulary is different. It has been great to get a start on that, though it can be a little frustrating at times to be learning a dialect in class that my host family doesn’t speak. They are wonderful though, and have been really great about learning some of the words along with me to help me out. I’m getting to the point where I can actually communicate in simple sentences, though at this point its hard to imagine getting up in front of groups of people a few times a week to give Kabarys, which are basically impromptu health presentations in Malagasy.

My host family’s house is about a 10-minute walk from the Learning center where we have classes, and it is really beautiful so I love doing it a few times a day. Yesterday I got stuck behind few zebu yolks, so it took a lot longer, but I always leave early so I was on time anyway. It was just another one of those funny, wow- I really am living in Madagascar moments.

My host family has electricity, but no running water (which is the same as what I’ll have at site) so I get up at 5:30 every morning to help bring buckets of water back to the house, which is one of the few things I feel like I’m not totally incompetent at. Its been like being a little kid again – learning how to use a pit latrine, having someone teach me how to like a charcoal stove, or where to get water, or any number of things that are so much easier to do at home. We (all the trainiee’s) stick out like sore thumbs here, and I get greeted whenever I walk anywhere, as well as called vazaha, which pretty much just means foreigner. It’s a small community, and well the Malagasy people don’t by any means look uniform, there aren’t any white Malagasy which makes us pretty easy to pick out. This will only get more pronounces at site once we are the only one or two vazaha in out villages or towns.

At my site (which I’m purposely not posting the location of as its against peace corps policy for safety reasons) I’ll actually have three site mates. There is an education volunteer who lives there all the time, then there is a married couple of environment volunteers who split their time between two sites, mine and one about 45 Km away. I’m excited that there will be other Peace Corps Volunteers around. I think that it will make the transition a lot easier. Also I think it will be nice to be able to just have other volunteers around to talk to, trouble shoot problems and work with.

So that’s the story here, I’m looking forward to 8 more weeks of training, and I’ll be excited to get to Tana in 2 weeks to post this and buy a cell phone so all of you wonderful people will be able to call me. I miss you all, and I expect everyone to be making plans to come visit soon.

I know I promised some of you well written Anne Green Style writing creative non-fiction type blog entries, and you may get some of those before this is done, but for now I’m just going to give the standard update. Sorry If I’m boring you. Today is The 19th of October, so it’s been about 3 weeks since I left New York, and it feels like its been forever. The trip over was hilarious and ridiculous, and involved all 20 of us getting stuck in Johannasburg, South Africa for an extra night. The short version is that Peace Corps Washington switched our tickets to e-tickets fairly last minute, but gave us the wrong flight information. We all ended up missing our flight, then because we are going to Madagascar, they couldn’t get us on a flight that day, so we ended up spending another night at the absurdly nice airport hotel that Peace Corps puts people up in in South Aftrica. Peace Corps did take good care of us though, they paid the hotel bill and got someone from PC South Africa to come give us spending money to buy dinner. When we finally did get on a plane the next day, the plane (which was supposed to take off at 9 am) didn’t get off the ground until 4pm due to some electrical issue. By this point we all thought we weren’t every going to make it to Madagascar, and this was pretty hilarious. After a 17 hour flight from New York to South Africa, I was pretty sure our entire stage was going to have to defect to Peace Corps South Africa. But ridiculousness aside, we all made it in one peace, thrilled to see PC Madagascar staff at the airport who helped us though customs, helped us get our luggage and whisked us off to the PC transit house in Tana (which is short of Antananarivo- which is way to long for anyone to say). The next day was off to CBT (or community based Training) which means meeting a host family, moving in and getting our first survival Malagasy lesson.

Hello faithful blog readers – sorry that it’s been almost six weeks since I left New York, but the internet situation at CBT (community based Training) is less than ideal. Though this may be something you guys are going to have to get used to. I’ve got my site assignment – which I’m really excited about, but I likely will only have internet when I go to bank (which will be once every 4-8 weeks). As for other forms of communication I have cell phone and you all should feel free to call me. The number is 032.625.8545. To call from the US – you dial the international calling code + country code + number (dropping the first 0), which is 011 +261+ 32.625.8545. Look into is Skype, which is aninternet phone program, and the rates to a cell phone in Madagascar really aren’t bad and I would love to Hear from all of you!

There is also always good old fashioned snail-mail, while it takes some time (2-3 weeks in either direction) it is really fun to get mail. So feel free to keep writing those letters. I also left my address book at home – and while mom was gracious enough to get me all of our family’s postal addresses, I don’t have the addresses of any friends, so please please please, send them my way via E-mail, and ASAP. You can also write me a letter and include yours in the return address, though don’t expect a reply for 4-6 weeks!

I leave for Madagascar with the Peace Corps on September 28th, 2008. I'll start posting once I leave.