A good day in the life of a PC Mada volunteer...

It's 4:30am. The house is still pitch dark. The crow of a lone rooster and the chill of the 60° winter morning air pull me momentarily out of sleep. I grab my light sleeping bag and throw it over me for extra warmth in my semi-conscious state.

At 5:30 the chorus of crowing roosters arouse me again and my bowels send me walking outside to the pit latrine to empty my "po" (plastic bucket Malagasies use as a chamber pot) and do my morning routine. As I walk the 50 meters back to the house, the village awakens with the echoes of rhythmic rice-pounding,the whining of drowsy babies and the quiet chattering of women starting their cookfires and fetching water.

It's still quite chilly, but I throw shorts and a tank top on and head out the door for my morning run. Most families are still waking up and cooking breakfast as the sun rises, so the path out of the village is almost empty. I pass a few early morning travellers as I jog slowly up the steep, 1km hill to the main road.

The wind brushes a delicious fragrance of tropical, blooming flowers as I crest the hill, bringing with it the faint memories of childhood trips to visit family in India. As I reach the tarmac, one of the small roadside shacks emits rich wafts of roasting, earthy coffee and sweet, drying vanilla, sending my thoughts back to Madagascar. I run three and a half kilometers down the southbound road over rolling hills,, past ricefields and patchy, tropical forest. Then I head back home, a sprinkle of cooling rain and a beautiful rainbow archway celebrating my return.

A few fellow villagers call out to me as I pass, and I invite them to join me, though I know they never will. Their lives are too full everyday with hard physical labor. They have no energy to spare for my purely whimsical, recreational exertion. I reach the path descending back into the village, my lungs and gut rejoicing, but my knees and hips dreading the relentless pounding of my weight on them as I jaunt down the hill in my four-year-old sneakers that have no shock absorption left to lessen the blow.

At last I reach my wooden hut after greeting my neighbors. I chug some water and take a refreshing, shockingly cold bucket bath in my 3-sided, roofless shower made of Traveler's Palm leaves. Then I bundle up with a light sweater and get ready for a morning of weighing babies and teaching mothers about nutrition and family planning. Around noon, I am back at my house. I make rice and cucumber salad for lunch and then read lawily into the afternoon qs the nighborhood kids come over to color and play cards on my porch. Some of them even offer to fetch my water, knowing they will receive a marble or a sticker as a small "thanks" for their help.

Around 3pm some of the neighborhood women come to my gate and beckon me to come join them on the soccer field. Though I'm somewhat dissuaded by the afternoon heat and tired from my morning run, I put on some shoes to go play, knowing it will be really fun and good opportunity for me to bond with the village women.

After we finish playing and I take another bucket shower, I head to the elementary school to see if any of the motivated adults in the village have come to learn English at our weekly classtime. I teach them body parts and the "Hokey Pokey," which we all thoroughly enjoy, laughing at each other as shake our left arm or right leg or butt and dance in circles. At dusk we wrap up the session, as it is too dark to see in the unlit classroom.

I take a walk through the village to buy some produce for dinner (usually tomatoes and some kind of green leaf). Then I cook before it gets too dark. I read and write letters by the light of my solar-powered lamp to pass the time and eat a quiet dinner listening to the BBC Africa News program on my shortwave radio. After I clean up and get ready for bed, I listen to the sounds of people outside chatting as they take their evening walk through the village. The faint chatter of my neighbors' Malagasy radio or a good book I happen to be reading finally lull me to sleep at around 8.