No More Pencils, No More Books...

Well, firstly I greatly apologize for the lack of entries. Unfortunately the internet availablities in this country are worse than we all had feared! In any case, here's a quick update.

I just finished the 10 week training program and I am very conversational in Standard Official Malagasy as well as the Bara dialect. I spent most of my time in a small town called Mahitsitady, which is a rice-farming town with no water or electricity. I stayed with a great host family; Samuel and Esther were my parents, and they are in their 50s, then they had five boys, all 24 and above. Four of them were great but one was a bit of a drunk and just kind of an idiot. They are mostly all nice people in the town and not into material things at all, probably not by choice, but they don't really stress on it and I dig that. We had tech sessions and language sessions from 8 am to 5 pm every day mon-fri, and sat mornings. Then we took a field trip to Antsirabe which is a limur park, where I saw some great, giant limurs!

Here's some random facts for you all. They have banana trees which look similar to palm trees absolutely everywhere here, but the bananas are half the size of American bananas and when they're ripe they're GREEN! Also meals are composed of a huge bowl of rice and a small side dish of like beef and carrots for example. And everyone eats out if the same dish alot of the time. And you don't have drinks with your meal, you just sometimes drink the water the rice was boiled in at the end of the meal. The site I'm going to is down south in the desert and it's full of Dahalo, which are a gang of cowboys. They love to steal cows, it's so engrained in their culture, that in order to be married you have to have been incarcerated for cow theft. When I walked down the street of my town, people were stopping dead in their trakcs staring at me, because I guess they hadn't seen anyone like me before.

So I get sworn in tomorrow, I will play tennis and go swimming at the ambassador's mansion, then go out tomorrow night here in the capital, then Weds off to site. Off to the Wild Wild South; the dry, hot desert... I'll try to post more soon. Stay tuned!