Sary = Picture

A building in Tana, the capital.

This was taken during our Re-Instatement Workshop. The Education PCVs were finally able to do some fun cross-sectoral activities. Here we were learning how to double-dig a garden and then mix in manure.

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I'm back in Tana for a day after visiting the new trainees at the training center in Mantasoa. The 36 trainees were transfered here from Niger, but all seem in good spirits despite all they've been through. They will be installed at their sites at the end of January, and one SED (Small Enterprise Development) volunteer will be my site partner:) One of the new trainees is also from Holland, MI, so we talked about Hope College, Russ' and the Tulip Festival!

Tomorrow I'm headed back towards my site and will spend New Year's Eve in Vatomandry at my friend Megan's site. I'll start teaching my classes again on the 5th of January.

For Christmas, I was in Ambatodrazaka with Megan, Chris and Katie. On Christmas day we had sandwiches on baguettes with La Vache (a spreadable cheese) and carrot/cucumber salad since everything was closed in the afternoon. Not exactly what you imagine for Christmas lunch but tastey anyway. Thankfully there was a Chinese restaurant open for dinner that evening.

We also had the chance to visit a dance club in Ambato where it was not unusual at all for people to dance in front of mirrors by themselves. In fact, that seemed to be why they were placed on the wall: so people could watch themselves dance. Awkward. I don't want to watch myself dance; I know it doesn't look that great!

Today Megan and I spent a lot of time getting lost and trying to find our way around Tana. It was funny at first and sort of annoying towards the end; however, we were able to use our Malagasy in order to ask people for directions. That was satisfying. Somewhere in the middle of our journey Megan ended up asking a drunk man who was on his way to get his brother's death certificate and the man's wife for directions. We think they were just coming from the funeral and that the man was most likely drunk. Oops. It says a lot that he stopped to help us anway. Most Malagasy people will stop to help you if you speak to them in their language.

The main problem towards the end of our journey was that the people we were asking how to find the American Cultural Center were often confusing it with the French Cultural Center. So, we would walk in one direction for several blocks and then ask another person for directions only to be told to go back in the direction we came from. Ha ha. This happened several times before we found a Malagasy man, who had a hard time speaking Malagasy to us instead of French, but who let us ride in a taxi with him and paid for us. When we finally got to our destination, it was closed. So of course we had to walk back to where we came from to go find lunch somewhere else.

That's all for now. Sorry I couldn't post a lot of pictures. The Internet is extremely slow today and I'm getting frustrated since I've only successfully posted two pictures in 1 hr 18 minutes 58 seconds. The last few I've tried to post came up with an error message. More next time. Miss you all!

~Kinsey