for real now

I AM SO SORRY! please don't give up on my blog. i have had almost no internet access for the past 10 weeks and something always goes wrong whenever i do -- eg power outages, google not working. Right now i'm in Tana for swearing in. My training is finally over. I go to site on wednesday.
For the past 2+ months i've been living with a malagasy family in a small, rice-farming village in the center of madagascar. In addition to our formal training in Malagasy language and the health issuyes we'll be working with, i have learne4d to:
-wash my clothes in a river

Like this

-pee in a bucket

-fetch water in a (different) bucket

My host sister Seheno demonstrates

-clean my floor with a coconut
-kill and pluck a chicken (i didn't eat it though)
-live without electricity
-derive meaning from a paragraph-length question in which i understood 2 words
-dance several region-specific malagasy dances
-eat rice twice a day, every day
-drink coffee with absurd amounts of sugar and enjoy it
And much more but I'm tired of this list format. Anyway, my host family is amazing and |I have learned SO much from them. And in return, I taught them to limbo. and play "down by the banks of the hanky panky." A fair exchange, no?

I guess I promised stories about crazy animals, food poisoning, language mishaps, etc, when i wrote that first entry. I have thrown up, but it was less than note-worthy. Worth a mention however, is the malagasy word fro diarrhea: "fivalanana," whcih our last PCV trainer called "the fiva" (if that still doesn't sound funny to you, it's pronounced "the fee-vah").

I have seen lemurs. They are amazing.

My host mama has a special noise for calling the crazy "ducks" back to the house when they waddle (very slowly) off. It's kind of hard to write, but it's sortof like "garagaragaragara, garagaragaragara..." I put the word duck in quotes because the animal in question really looks more like a duck crossed witha large melon. They move about as fast as you would expect the product of a duck and an inanimate object to move, too. I don't really know wnhy my family raises them. Companionship?

So life is pretty good right now. I get 9 hours of sleep a night, so after 2 years i should be about caught up on the sleep I didn't get at Reed. I love the peace corps and I love madagascar. I'll be chanting this to myself when I'm crammed in a taxi-brousse for 14 hours between chickens, babies, and carsick fellow passengers puking into plastic bags, on my way to site.

I love and miss you all. If you haven't written to me yet, you suck, and if I haven't written to you yet, I suck, but it's probably becasue i don't have your address, so write to me first.
MAD(agascar) LOVE,
(did everyone already think of that pun? because I'm really enjoying it right now. my standards for a hilarious joke have sunk to to the criteria: is it in english?)
JAYNE