At site

Hello all,

Have been at site a little over a week; oh where to start? First, I guess, I updated my address and phone number, and added a short wish list as requested-- see sidebar. I should be checking email about every 2 weeks but would also love to hear from people by snail mail! And, long shot BUT--if any of you folks I know happen to be in Northern Madagascar, or really anywhere in the country, let me know! You can crash at my place or we can travel around if my schedule permits. There you go/ the official invitation.

OK, so site: I was able to help install the other two new volunteers in my region, nice because I got to see their sites and travel around the area a little. My site, properly called Anjangoveratra, is hot and beautiful. Lots of crazy vegetation growing off the side of the road like papaya, vanilla, oranges, mangoes, and bananas. Plus of course lots of rice fields.

The day I got here my installer (French influence--someone official from the Peace Corps has to introduce us to the community) had me give two speeches. In Malagasy. The first to 20 community VIPs and the second to 200 schoolkids. Yipes. But I guess they went OK because the installer jokingly offered the equivalent of 5 bucks, a lot here, to anyone who could speak English as well as I could speak 'Gasy, and no one stepped forward.

My house consists of two big concrete rooms at the community storage building, which might sound weird, but it means my house is about double the size of the average bamboo and palm house in the village and vastly more secure from cyclones and robbery. No electricity, or course, and I haul water from a well about 50 meters away.

So far my time has consisted mainly of

1) trying to figure out how to run a household here, and that's not easy, let me tell you! With the number of little chores I have to do, it's no wonder so few people here live alone

2) Walking around my community, trying to get people to call me Rowan (or 'Roy-Anne') instead of vazaha, which means white foreigner

and 3) Trying to convince people that I'm American, not French, and that no, America is not in Europe. For all our self-aggrandizing on the world stage, people here know surprisingly little about the States.

My community has been really kind so far, sometimes overly so--I barely have a moment to myself and they have and overly flattering idea of what I can accomplish in the next 2 years. In the interests of fairness; I should probably list a few annoyances, because of course there are some--

1)Ants and cockroaches; the bad part of me (the part that's not an Environment volunteer) wants to douse the evil little buggars with poison--but if I can defend my reaction, I had a 3 inch cockroach fly into my face last night. That's one species I'm OK not conserving!

2) Kids--an expected annoyance, but it's hard to stay composed with 30 kids whispering and staring as you go about your chores. I bear them as long as I can and then shoo them away--still trying to feel out where to set boundaries.

3) It's late autumn, and it's still hot. Hmm. Summer should be interesting.

OK, gotta go, hope to hear from you all eventually, email or otherwise!