New Members in TEAM VAZAHA

11/19/12

We have some new arrivals to “Team Vazaha” (foreigner) that have arrived in the past month or so.  The youth center near my house run by a German man and his Malagasy wife take on German volunteers in their gap year between high school and college.  Joel and Joana, 19 and 18, are going to be with me for 6 and 8 months respectively.  We have had a good time so far.  They come to my house to cook when they are sick of eating rice and we watch movies.  Also, Pioneer band nerds, they are both from Stuttgart, so I mentioned that we were there for the 06 world cup.  I talked about the field where we watched the finals, and after careful debate using pictures on facebook from then (man I’m old, that took a loooong time) we decided that we weren’t in the same park, but we were near each other.  But it was really cool thinking that we might have been there together.  At least in the same city though J

Also, the new French volunteer living with my friend David-Pierre has arrived.  Her name is Nolwenn, and she lived the last year and a half in Ft. Dauphin in the far south of Madagascar.  She will also be here for two years.  We work together at the chamber of commerce.  We should be sharing a desk, but currently my laptop has decided that it doesn’t want to work with the wifi, so I am stuck in another room with an Ethernet cable L Fear not!! I will be in Tana on Wednesday and I hope I will be able to figure out what is wrong.

I also traveled to Tana for our VAC (Volunteer Advisory Council) meeting on November 1^st and got to meet 4 new volunteers in the near Tana area, which was pretty cool.  It is so weird to feel like you are the older sibling and know more about the place and the language than someone, because we have been the young ones since March.  Also, on my trek east (I will get to that) I met a couple other new volunteers not in our VAC region, as well as some other volunteers that have been here for a while that I did not know.

Moral of the story:  I like meeting new people, Malagasy, French, German, and American alike.

Every person I meet has a lasting impact on my life, and I have found a Malagasy proverb to represent that: "Tendrombohitra sy zavona: mihaona toa tsy hisaraka, misaraka toa tsy hihaona"

Meaning “Mountains and clouds: they meet as if they will never part, they part as if they will never meet.”  Some other volunteers and I decided we want to make highlands region bracelets that say this, particularly because it has to do with mountains.

Love,

-Sarah