6 Aug 2010

Wow, the past month has been really busy! The beginning of July, I was still at site doing the usual…teaching about health in the clinic in town and the rural clinic 10k south of me, working with local community organizations on projects like building public wells and latrines. I got to hike to a rural village to see where a women’s group was planning to build a well since there’s no access to clean water out there and many of the kids suffer from schistosomiasis and diarrheal diseases. I am planning to help the women’s group get money to build two public wells in that village.

I also had an unexpected visit from an American traveling through Madagascar on a bike! He had actually come across some of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers who live closer to Antananarivo, and had biked northwest up to the coast of Madagascar. Then he took a plane up to Sambava and passed by my site. He was asking about the road up north and looking to visit Diego. It was really cool to have a random English speaker stop by my house on a quiet Saturday and to hear that he had seen some of my friends in other parts of Madagascar. He had all of his belongings on a small cart-thing that was attached to the back of his bike (probably a technical term for this, but I’m not a savvy biker, so I don’t know).

The second week of July I headed back down to Tana. There I had a couple meetings and business things to take care of, and then I went to Ambatondrazaka/Lake Alaotra with a bunch of other volunteers to participate in a bike tour around the lake and do some festivals to raise awareness about AIDS. We stopped in 9 towns around the lake (7 of which were Peace Corps volunteer’s sites) and taught about methods of prevention against AIDS and about what Peace Corps does here in Madagascar. We also sang songs, danced, showed videos on a projector complements of the NGO Population Services International and generally had a good time. I had so much fun partying it up, seeing another part of Madagascar and hanging out with all my fellow volunteers again. I also got to see Lake Lemurs. How cool!

Now I am back at site again. At first it was a little difficult to go back, because I knew I would miss all my fellow American volunteers dearly, but I was excited to see some of my Malagasy friends back at site and to speak my dialect of Malagasy again. The official dialect spoken near the capital is difficult! It took a few days but I got back into the swing of things. I’ve jumped back on my own bike back at site and have been visiting all my friends and colleagues and working at the clinics again. I love the weather so much better up here. It’s not quite so cold as down in Tana (it is winter here in Madagascar after all). After doing all the AIDS festivals in Lake Alaotra, I’m inspired to do one here up north for World AIDS day on December 1st.

Sometimes I feel kind of conflicted when talking about AIDS though, because we often run out of HIV tests here in Madagascar and testing is such an integral part of AIDS prevention. It’s also so hard to get people to use condoms, since most of the men here are totally opposed to them and some even consider STDs to be a sign of manliness (I guess since that means they have slept with a lot of women). Most women are convinced that their husbands or boyfriends would never use a condom if they asked, yet so many people here have STDs. I saw a newborn baby at the clinic last week with swollen/infected eyes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because the mother had syphilis. When we did have syphilis tests and were able to test pregnant women, at least one would test positive every time we tested each week at the clinic. Again, I get so frustrated sometimes when the majority of problems I see are systematic ones that I can’t change from my position as a volunteer in another country (ex: availability of syphilis and HIV tests, accessibility of clinics, availability/price of medications). Still pluggin’ away, though, and looking forward to seeing some new health and education volunteers up here at the end of September. I hope they will be good people to work with.