Internet, At Long Last!

Hello all!  At long last I have internet!  You’ve waited a while, so I’ll try to give you a lot of material.

First off, I am great.  Aside from learning the language, life is pretty easy-going.  Training takes up most of my days, but it’s not terribly difficult.  Weather’s great, food’s great, I have tons of cool people around me (my departure group, or “stage,” pronounced like “massage”).

Madagascar is like its own continent, and every part of it is beautiful.  Each region (and there are many) has its own wildlife, culture, and dialect.  You could travel here for years and not get sick of it…I imagine.  Fun fact: Peace Corps Madagascar is #1 in volunteers extending their service, and has the lowest rate of volunteers leaving early (ET-ing).  SO, you might not see me for a while.

The view of Madagascar flying in was amazing.  The landscape is carved with hills and rivers and fractal-shaped lakes and all kinds of greenery.  The scene never stayed the same for long.  My life during training is pretty restricted, so I haven’t seen Mada beyond my current town, Mantasoa.  And…it’s a lot like New England so far.  Pine trees all over, pretty temperate, no unusual wildlife (except crazy spiders!  Mary, I’m taking pics of as many as I can!  There’s one with what looks like a crab shell, and another with a shiny silver butt.  I hear on the coast there’s jumping spiders the size of your hand!).  No, I haven’t seen any lemurs yet, but it’s only a matter of time once I’m at my site.

So I arrived, had a day and a half of language training, and immediately moved to my homestay.  My family is Clairisse and Julien (Neny and Dada), and my three anabavy (sisters) Ony (16), Nomena (6), and Fasoavana (7 months).  The language barrier has made me a charades CHAMPION.  I make them laugh a lot, mostly intentionally.  They love horror movies and rap.  They helped me sew some pants into shorts my first week.  They taught me to wash my clothes in the river, which I did once before the Peace Corps told them not to let me anymore.  Possible parasites in the water.  Real bad ones.  Actually, all the fresh water is presumably full of parasites.  It’s hot most of the time, and I’m surrounded by all these lakes and rivers, yet can’t go in any of them.  But I digress.  It’s hard to express how much my new family means to me.  They’ve treated me like family from the start.  When I moved out last week, they gave me a mirror as a gift.  They know me so well.  Or maybe they want me to shave my goatee.  I’m growing a goatee, by the way.  It’s been almost a month and it almost looks like something now.  I also bought a sweet straw hat.  I’m a hat and goatee guy now.  And a handkerchief guy.

My family all speaks French better than me.  It helps bridge the gap between English and Malagasy.  It’s taken a lot of work, but I can now have basic conversations in Malagasy.  I often find myself making tri-lingual sentences, whenever I run into the limits of my ‘Gasy and French.

Here’s what you need to know about the language.  The letters C, X, W, U, and Q do not exist.  The letter Z is used pretty frequently (overdue recognition of its potential!).  I believe they compensate for the lack of letters by making their words massively long.  For example, “sky” is habakabaka and “think” is mieritreritra (6 syllables).  Almost all of the verbs begin with the letter M and end with either A, E, O, or Y.  I tend to get lost somewhere in the 3-6 syllables in between.  Despite all this, it’s not too difficult of a language.

Oh yeah, just for clarity, Malagasy (Gasy for short, pronounced “gassy”) refers to the language AND the people of Madagascar.

Gasy kids are awesome, because they don’t care if you can’t speak well.  They just want to be your bud.  I took out a Frisbee at a playground, and a group of about 6 kids quickly amassed to over 20 to play with me.  Unfortunately, the Frisbee broke after about a half hour.  FAMILY: send me some Frisbees!  Minimum 3, and durable!  And if you ever send me packages, lie to the post office and say something cheap and boring is inside of it, like socks or notebooks.  Otherwise there’s a decent chance it will be stolen.

The food!  I’m surprised and happy to say that it’s all good-to-great!  Lots of familiar foods: beef, pork, chicken, fish, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados, onions, corn, etc.  There’s loads of weird and delicious fruit here too.  By the way, I totally didn’t realize that grenadine is an actual fruit!  A big pile of rice is part of nearly every meal.  Mada consumes the most rice per capita than any other country in the world.  Suck it, Asia!  My Neny made me pancakes!  Luckily, I brought some maple syrup as a gift and blew their effing MINDS.  Gasy people love sugar, and this was like a whole new WORLD of sugar.  Even more than sugar, they love salt.  There’s heaps of it in all of the food.

This week, I found out where my site is!  About a month from now, I will be in Mahatsinjony!  It’s in the southeast, nearish to the coast, but on the edge of the central highlands.  This means: temperate climate, less bugs, less mosquitos, and a diminished risk of Malaria!  Also, I hear ringtail lemurs are really common there, so…life’s pretty great.  I’m only 5km from another PCV, and there are 5 or 6 more within 2 hours of me.  I’m also <25k from a big city, Fianar, where there’s a Peace Corps house (MEVA) with wifi and showers and real toilets.  My site and the ones near it are brand new; they’ve never had a PCV before.  Which is great!  Blazing a new trail!  But I will definitely be an oddity.  All in all, I am beyond happy with my site.  On paper.  I’ll withhold judgment until I see it.

Potential visitors!: There’s an island densely inhabited by lemurs, and if you go there with some bananas, they will come to you and climb on you and eat out of your hand and friend you on facebook and invite you to all of  their parties.

Also noteworthy: most of the roads are terrible, including in the towns.  I wouldn’t recommend renting a car, and cabs can be a challenge if you want to leave town.

That’s all for now!  Internet access is still pretty spotty for me, and I’m having trouble with my smartphone.  I should mention that I lost my jacket, my belts, and (tragedy of tragedies) most of the cables to my electronics.  I forgot them on the plane in Johannesburg.  Because I am an idiot (this will be a recurring theme).  So electronically, I’m a bit limited right now.  BUT, I shall return to the interblog soon. 

Miss you all!  Send emails, keep me in the loop!