Monday, January 25, 2010

24 Jan 2010

I am writing this entry from the training site in Mantasoa in Madagascar in the hopes that I will have internet access sometime soon and can upload documents and pictures from my flash drive to my blog. So much has happened since we first arrived in Madagascar six weeks ago. Soon after we landed in country and drove to the Peace Corps training site, we started learning Malagasy and having technical and cross-culture sessions. Christmas and New Years at the training site was actually pretty fun. The kitchen staff was absolutely amazing and cooked a bounty of wonderful American food for us. We had a Secret Santa gift exchange as well as several dance parties. We also had the amazing opportunity to visit a national park called Andasibe, where we saw lemurs and other really amazing wildlife. We were so fortunate to have two of the senior training staff from Niger (Tondi and Souley) accompany us to Madagascar and spend the first few weeks of training with us here to help us adjust and to assist the Malagasy Peace Corps staff. Unfortunately we had to say goodbye to them soon after New Years. We gave them a very sweet and sentimental sendoff, but it was still very sad to see them go, as they were very dedicated and inspiring individuals and such amazing leaders in their community back in Niger.

After about three weeks at the training site, we were finally able to move in with host families in the neighboring villages. I was so excited to learn more about the Malagasy way of life and to converse in the language in an immersion setting. I couldn’t have asked for a better home-stay. The village of Lohomby was gorgeous, as it was surrounded with rice fields, rolling mountains, green forests and rivers, and dotted with cute, brick, two-story houses and winding dirt roads. My family was a young couple in their twenties with an adorable four-year-old daughter. They were farmers and also kept rabbits, ducks, geese and chickens in a shed on the first floor of their house. There were fruit trees surrounding their small plot and pineapples growing in the back. The food was amazing, as we usually had fresh vegetables and tropical fruit at almost every meal. I learned how to fetch water, cook over an open fire, wash dishes and sweep the house. I also went on some amazingly scenic hikes. Although it was somewhat frustrating that I was trying to learn a dialect from the north in a village where no one really spoke or understood it, Sakalava is similar enough to standard Malagasy that I could still communicate with my host family about half of the time. During our technical sessions we visited a health center (CSB) in Mantasoa, taught about HIV and STIs in the schools, built two cookstoves (fatana mitsitsy) in our village and observed a baby-weighing and health education session with young mothers at the SEECALINE nutrition center in our village.

The end of training has been so incredibly hectic and stressful. In the past week we have said goodbye to our host families at our community based training sites, given presentations in Malagasy (or Sakalava in my case), been assessed on our language proficiency, packed up our lives into trunks and bags and had several parties (fetys) to celebrate the fact that the 36 of us are finally done with training after spending three months together. I have so many mixed emotions at the moment. I am absolutely thrilled and relived that I have successfully finished my Peace Corps training and can now go to my site and start working as a real volunteer. However I am also intimidated that I will be living by myself in a new environment where I will have to establish trust and gain the respect of neighbors, coworkers and community leaders in a language and culture that is still somewhat unfamiliar to me. I also have to fly to my site and then proceed to buy everything I will need for my house before I can actually move in. Along with the excitement, intimidation and anxiousness, I am also sad to say goodbye to my home-stay family, the wonderful training staff and all of the friends I have made during the past three months us trainees have spent together. We have gone through staging in Philadelphia to home-stays in Niger to consolidation at the training site in Niger to 24 hours in Paris to three weeks at the training site in Mantasoa to home-stays in Madagascar. At last we are all going to part our separate ways after swearing in as volunteers in the capital on Tuesday. I’ll be heading up to the northern part of Madagascar near Sambava. Next time you here from me I’ll be at my site!