My site visit! (email on 4/3/08)

Mbalatsara!!! (OK, apparently there is a dialect within the dialect of betsimisaraka, within the language of Malagasy....thats the third greeting Ive learned, but now its the right one! geez!)

So I'm stuck back in Tana (the capital city) on my way back to training from my site visit!!! I don't have much time, but here's the breakdown. folks:

- I flew from Tana to Maroantsetra, a cute little beach town that sort of, kind of, sees tourism, but mostly they are either the high rollers who come through on five star prepaid tours around the bay and the small islands around it, or they are hardcore trekkers who managed to make it all the way up to the town by boat or bush taxi on a ridiculous road. But its great!!! So then the group of us split up and went to our separate villages surrounding Maroantsetra (3 of us). Me and the volunteer (Rachel) I'm replacing biked the 24km there on a beautiful sand road that sometimes runs along the beach!!!

- Stayed at her house that night and the next, which will soon be my house. Its got 2 little rooms, one she keeps as a public place and one is just hers. Its made of wood for the basic framework, with a tin roof and walls made of grass-ish stuff. So cute!

- The weather was very warm and humid, and it didn't rain in the 3 days I was there!! ...The no rain was apparently very unusual.

- It was a whirlwind tour of the village and surrounding village. I met the heads of the womens group and men's farming group, the environmental club that the volunteer runs with high school aged kids, the principal of the middle/high school, and a ton of random neighbors and of course, was always followed by a pack of children varying in age. It's like being the pied piper all day long! Overall, the people seem very very warm and welcoming. I think I may have already inherited a grandmother! There are kids who already began helping me with language and were already all smiley and cute and not scared because I'm white. Thats definitely an advantage of replacing someone who is already posted in a village, rather than starting new.

- Culture shock again...the village is in a completely different part of the country. The people are more in-your-face and loud, its kind of great. They're subsistance farmers, and don't have much, but when a kids gets a piece of bread or something, they break it into as many pieces as they have siblings, and put it into their pocket to give to them later. Seems to be even harder times than the village I live in now. They're such cuties though, and seem smart.... some of them know their Lemur species like nobody's business!!! I've already gotten some ideas for projects that people talked to me about while I was there. YAY...a jumping-off point! Peace Corps is only ever in a village for about 6 years ( 3 volunteers), and I'm the last one in mine. I'll have to kind of tie up the loose ends of other people's projects, and make sure the most important new projects get done first. It's like a relay-race!

- Oh my god... I'm going to live by a tropical beach! It's incredibly beautiful & I can't wait to go see the undisturbed rainforest. It's definitely got a ton of vegetation around the village, but the rainforest that's barely been touched is about a day's hike away. I'm so so so excited!!

Gotta go, but I hope everything's good there. Love!!!