The Vaovao (news)

Those of you who began to pay attention to news coming out of Madagascar since I got here (or perhaps you've always been avid Madagascar-watchers) may have heard that we are in the middle of a fairly tense political situation right now. I don't really feel equiped to give a detailed update on the situation, but I will fill you in briefly on what it has meant for Peace Corps so far.

The basic conflict is between the president of Madagascar and the mayor of Antananarivo, the capitol. On monday things began to get violent and Peace Corps went into the "standfast" stage of our emergency action plan. All volunteers got word that we should stay at our sites but be aware, keep a low profile, make sure we had phone credit, check our text messages frequently, and pack an emergency bag in case we needed to leave in a hurry. Over the next few days the protests and strikes spread out of Tana to the provinces and on friday I got a call that we were consolidating, and I needed to go to Fianar, my "consolidation point." I was pretty surprised by this because I thought things were calming down, and there had been nothing going on in Mananjary and certainly nothing in my little village.

I've been in Fianar with 11 other volunteers since saturday, and right now we're just waiting to see what happens. We get daily messages and calls from Peace Corps in Tana. Evacuation is a possibility, if things get violent again, or if food and fuel prices fail to stabilize or services like banking become unreliable. A couple days ago we heard that we might be able to go back to our sites as soon as this weekend, because although protests are continuing they have all been peaceful. But yesterday the government fired the mayor of Tana and people are pretty upset about that, so things are pretty tense again, I think.

Hopefully, things will be resolved soon and I'll be able to give you the whole story of when we almost got evacuated. Sadly, even if everything was sorted out today, people have already died and much damage has been done to the country, which was already struggling before this crisis began.