ANOTHER ONE!!!

Hello again. This time I'm in Antsirabe, on my way to site. I'm traveling in a Peace Corps car, with 2 other volunteers (that's right, not trainees, VOLUNTEERS) , Ryan and Katie, and the director of the PC Mada health sector. We're in Antsirabe for 2 nights, while Katie is installed at a site near here and we do all our shopping. We're all new sites (i.e. we don't inherit the furnishings of the last volunteer) so we bought sooo much stuff. Example: yesterday I bought 6 different types of bucket. Life becomes very bucket-intense when you don't have running water, or a dishwasher, or laundry machine, or toilet you can use at night.

Before I talk more about installation, let me back up and describe tuesday, which was amazing. Our swearing-in ceremony was in the morning, at the US ambassador's palatial residence. I made my kabary (speech) in Malagasy, and there was a translator standing next to me, saying my speech in english!!! (a complete surprise to me; I realized as I began my speech that he wasn't going anywhere (he had been translating the previous speaker into Malagasy) and that I had to pause to let him do his thing every few sentences). I had given our country director a very rough english translation of my kabary to give to the ambassador, but somehow the translator had a copy of my kabary (in Malagasy, i think) that he was holding, and he had a very eloquent translation that I think was a bit sappier than what I actually said (embarrassing), and at one point he actually got ahead of me, so he's lucky I was paying attention him and noticed, or else I would have paused after my next bit but he would have already said it and that would have been awkward. I couldn't stop grinning at him while he was translating because it was so weird to have him translating me into English, when I speak English. But I think the speech went really well, so I was very happy. After my speech our group did a really silly presentation in Malagasy about different health topics. My bit was an interpretivedancepoem about AIDS with 2 other trainees. Basically I made a very serious speech, and then made a fool of myself immediately afterwards. it was great. And it was all filmed for Malagasy television.

Health '07 with Boda, the director of our sector, and Bill, the country director

After the ceremony and a reception we got to hang out at the ambassador's houseand swim in his pool and eat amazing chili and desserts. then all us new volunteers went out to eat and then to a dance club and stayed up way too lateand then woke up way too early to say goodbye to each other for 4 months and then head off with our installers to our respective sites.

today ryan and i are hanging out in antsirabe while katie gets installed, then tomorrow we'll head to fianar and do a little more shopping there. I still need a mattress and maybe a table and chairs. We'll stay at the peace corps house there for 2 nights because we dont want to arrive in my banking town on the weekend because my bank wont be open. So i wont get to site until monday. i am excited and terrified. Duh.

i dont know what the internet situation is in my banking town yet, so it might be a while before i post again. also i think im going to have a new mailing address there, but the one i told everyone before will always get to me eventually. it's just the PC office in Tana.

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