Everybody be cool this is a robbery! We're taking your cows!

HELLO NEW YORK!

And everyone else too.

Well I just got back from an AIDS awareness basketball tournament held in honor of March Madness in beautiful downtown Fort Dauphin. FD is a lovely beach town on the Indian Ocean. It was a wild success and you wouldn't believe how many people were "sensibilized" by me!

But since my time is valuabe as I imagine yours is we'll get down to brass tacks. There are a gang of bandits that live in the south of Madagascar known as the Dahalo (think Bloods or Crips except spears and muskets instead of glocks and teks). They exist for one purpose and one purpose only; to steal your cow. If you happen to get in their way... BAM! Spear to your dome! They crazy! They use a kind 'fanafody Gasy' that is like a necklace, which they believe will not only make them bulletproof, but do so by turning bullets that are shot at them into water. They ain't afraid to die and if the they got beef their boys are comin' in herds... So they live all around me, but I'm always fine because I don't own any cows. But about a month ago, there was an incident. It was a lazy Sunday night; I was tucked in around 9 pm. The sun had just set across the western mountain range and all was well. Until there was a loud commotion in the town square outside my house and I heard gunshots ring out. The next day I would learn that the Dahalo had stormed Isoanala from all sides that Sunday night. They rushed the town square where many cows were being moved through, fired their muskets in the air, and told everyone to be cool and that they were taking the cattle. So the people in the town square threw there hands in the air, but there were others lurking in the shadows... Word spread like wildfire that my town was being jacked. So the villagers around the periphery rushed to the two main roads leading out of town and formed a human blockade so that the cattle could never be herded out. The Dahalo were facing defeat. They knew it. So they licked a couple more shots in the air and scattered into the dark neighborhoods, slithering off into the night. These types of events are not uncommon, but I've got spears, and I don't have any cows, so it's all good. It's all good until I step outta line...

Then another story with a happy ending is about my neighbor boy. He's a scrawny kid at the tender age of 17. One day we were out throwing around an old ratty American football left by my predecessor in the hot noon sun, when he suddenly fell dizzy and collapsed into a seizure. I gathered he was epileptic and ran for the hospital. On the way I suddenly understood why Fosten, my neighbor boy, had never left the front porch. Everyday when I left and everyday when I got home, there he is on the front porch. His parents, apparently, will not let him out to work, study or play for fear he will break into seizure. So I get to the hospital where I work, out of breath, and plead for someone to come help Fosten, explaining that I think he's having a seizure. So first the midwife comes out and basically laughs at me. She's just all, "HUH? What's all this? Oh, Fosten? Yeah, that happens to him everyday..." she says between giggles. "Naw, Justin you don't gotta worry about that..." I get her to agree to send a nurse, who never comes. By the time I get back Fosten is recovering under a tree and his mom has arrived. So his mom proceeds to bitch me out for apparently not being psychic and already knowing he was epileptic and that hot sun provokes his seizures. So I tell her I tried to get help, at which point her and everyone around listening starts laughing. So I go home, defeated, not knowing who needs to wake the fuck up, me or them... So just by sheer luck for Fosten, the next week I get a surprise site visit from one of my bosses, Boda Ranjeva. Now, I'm not quite sure how to put this; Boda's sort of a big deal. She was the first female surgeon in Madland and is married to the current foreign minister/former defenser minister of Madagascar. So if we're ever stopped by the gendarme anywhere in the country or some garbage like that we just throw out her name and they wave us on through, wide-eyed. So she visits me, and I say, "Hey Boda, aren't poor people supposed to be able to get free medecine down at the clinic for things like epilepsy?" So I explain the whole thing to her and she tells me I did the exact right thing. My doctor was out of town at the time, so she wrote a note about this to him for me to give him telling him to give this poor boy the meds he needs for free, as he should. Now if the letter had been from some no-name, it's possible the good doctor would have just said he had to charge everybody for medecine. But because this word came from Boda Ranjeva, he quickly wrote out the prescription gratuit for poor old Fosten. So now he no longer buys his goofy meds from the witch doctor and has seizures, but gets the proper meds for free from the doc. It's my dream that he'll one day be able to leave the front porch and live life like a human being.

So there's a feel-good ending for you. That's all for now. Veloma