3+ months, heck yeah

They say the first three months are the roughest, and though mine weren't bad at all, I'm still patting myself on the back for surviving them.

Here are the two most interesting things I've done in the past month:

We handed out medicine to everyone in the commune that prevents "ongobe," aka filariosis (sp?), or elephantitis (of the feet and ankles specifically i think - the name in malagasy means big feet). This was totally nuts because there's two types of medicine and one of them the dosage depends on age, but people were picking up medicine for everyone in their family so we had to explain how many pills each person needed to take, but loads of people aren't literate so i was drawing little pictures to show people which of their children needed to take which pills. AND lots of people don't really know their age, so we had people saying "um...22?" and I would be like "No, I'M 22... you are at least 35." Well, I wouldn't actually say that, but I was pretty skeptical of some people. Fortunately the dosage is by loose age group, so we could ask questions like "Do you think you're older or younger than 40?". One day I went with one of the Malagasy health workers to another village in the commune to give medicine to the kids at the primary school. For most of the kids there were at least 3 pills to take, and most were too young to swallow them, so they chewed them all! And there's no nice pink chewable kids version of these pills, we're talking big white chalky pills. It was really something watching all these kids with mouths full of pill dust, and only looking mildly inconvenienced by it all. I would have been gagging.

Faharoa ("second"), last week I went to an education volunteer friend's site (about 3 hours from my site) {just want to mention that there is a dance version of alanis morissette "uninvited" with a different female vocalist playing in the internet cafe right now} to teach 5 two-hour classes about AIDS (all in Malagasy!) with my friend Haddy, a health volunteer from the stage before me (so she's been here for more than a year) . It was exhausting (monday we taught for 6 hours straight) but so great to be working hard (have i mentioned things are very slow at my site?) and so useful for me to watch Haddy in action because she's super good at Malagasy and teaching. I finally mastered most of the AIDS vocabulary and because we did the same lesson 5 times, by the end I felt pretty comfortable with the material. I was SO nervous for the first class. It was also awesome to hang out with Haddy and Maribeth (the ed volunteer), whose site is in the rainforest and is gorgeous. I'll try to putsome pictures up when I'm in Tana or Fianar again.

Now I'm off to buy snacks for my taxi-brousse ride to Morondava, where I'm going to help my friend Eliko teach about AIDS in the ambanivolo around Morondava... and to hang out at the beach and see baobabs. If I survive the 12+ hour brousse ride. Blah.