T-One Month!

July 11, 2012

YAY!!!!!!! I will be returning to the states in exactly one month!!!! Very exciting.  That’s really all I have on that subject.  Get to see my best friend get married, celebrate my birthday, see the Dark Knight Rises, watch Tigers baseball, go to Chicago and see Wrigley Field and DSP alumni, go to mmb band week (unfortunately I will be on a plane to France for the ‘bama game) eat good food, and see my parents, sister, grandparents, friends, and boyfriend.  Overall, it is going to be legen…wait for it…dary! (Yup, I have been watching a lot of HIMYM lately.  Also, there are two episodes in the second season that have some serious Peace Corps shout outs!)

SO EXCITED AHHHHHHH!!!

<3

4th of July and Fun With Exportation

July 6, 2012

First, as promised, the recount of occurrences following fetim-pirenena (Independence Day).  So we had to travel back through Tana to get home from Antsirabe.  Earlier in June I had gotten in contact with a guy named Michael O’Day through my silk weavers.  I didn’t know a whole lot of information on him, only that he was an American who worked with artisans to export products to the US.  So I scheduled a meeting with him in Tana for the Thursday following VAC.  They don’t have an office, so he told us to meet him for breakfast at the Cookie Shop in downtown Tana.  Now, I had heard rumors of Cookie Shop from other volunteers but had not yet been there.  I was ill prepared for deliciousness that was to follow.  Emma, Eric, and I arrived at Cookie Shop and spent a solid 10 minutes just staring at the menu.  I have decided it is Starbucks meets Panera in Madagascar.  There were decadent coffee drinks, smoothies, baked goods, and best of all, BAGEL SANDWICHES!!!!!  If there is one food item I miss here in Mada, it is good sandwiches.  I poured over the menu, and finally decided there was no way I could ignore the BBQ chicken sandwich with cheddar cheese, bacon, and grilled onions.  It was everything I hoped for and more.  So yummy!! So needless to say, the business meeting was already a success, before O’Day even arrived.

So, on to real productive things, not just my happy stomach.  Michael O’Day arrived, a young guy, probably mid-twenties, along with a girl named Lacee and another guy named Addison.  We all got along really well, and were so excited to hear what he was doing here.  O’Day was here as a Mormon missionary for two years, and is an alumnus of Brigham-Young University.  After finishing school, he started the Madagascar Cooperative Foundation (http://madagascarfoundation.org/), a non-profit that works on development.  They had recently decided to start a boutique in Utah called The Village Store, selling artisanal products.  They would give our artisans consistent business at a 20% markup.  And any money they make will go back into the non-profit to help with things like housing development and food security programs.  Moral of the story: EVERYONE WINS!!!!!! So that is very exciting.  One of my goals when I found out with whom I would be working was to export something, and now that seems like a very real possibility!  And very soon!!  So, best business meeting ever.  We decided to meet up again, Eric and I bringing silk samples, at the 4^th of July party for all Americans the next week at the Chargé de Affairs (effectively American Ambassador, since their isn’t one) house in Tana the next week.

So, now on to that story.  Eric and I bring around 10 scarves each to this party, and sit down to chat with O’Day et al about which ones they want as samples to send back to the US.  We start getting bombarded by people asking us if we are selling the stuff haha.  We conclude the meeting with O’Day with him saying he is going to come talk to our weavers directly about pricing and what not.  So then, we have a bunch of silk to sell!! It ended up being very successful; I sold 3 scarves and a tie, and got orders for 10 more!! My weavers saw the envelope of money in my hand and were completely dumbfounded.  I was surprised too; I had no intention of selling silk when I set out that day.  WIN!

Also, fun anecdote from the party.  It was predominantly US embassy workers and their significant others.  There was also military personnel, students, businessmen and women, and, of course, a small number of Peace Corps Volunteers.  Within 5 minutes of walking in to the party, I spot a guy with a Central Michigan University Dad sweatshirt on.  As he walks past me, of course I have to flag him down and see where he is from.  Turns out, he was born in Grand Rapids and then moved to Bad Axe Michigan, where he lives with his wife, who was in town visiting him, and daughter.  He works with the Marines on anti-piracy in Mada and Comoros (SO COOL!).  When I heard Bad Axe (a very small town in the “thumb” of Michigan), I gave a little start.  My good friend and fellow Michigan tuba player, Kyle Mooney, is from Bad Axe. I asked if they knew him, and they said, “he is like a second son!”  Cue “it’s a small world after all…”

So that was my highly amusing and successful American Independence Day.  I got to wear my incredibly tacky red white and blue Christmas sweater with the tag that says “American Pride, made in the USA,” because it was freeeeeeezing (I swear I am not a pansy, it was probably 50 degrees in the sun, plus wind)  Also, I observed that apparently all countries get pissed off and want their independence in June/July; France, US, Madagascar, and Canada are all within like 2 weeks of one another haha.

That’s all for now! I hope to have exciting exportation updates soon J

-Sarah

VAC and Fetim-Pirenena

June 30, 2012

Manahoana namako!

Just returned from my Volunteer Advisory Council meeting in Antsirabe with the rest of the “Mahaylanders,” the nickname for those of us who live in the highlands of Madagascar.  Every 4 months there are regional meetings of all the volunteers.  We get together and talk about various issues and provide feedback to our VAC rep.  They then take our responses to the national committee meeting.  The VAC rep for each region plans the day and location of each meeting.  This time it was in Antsirabe, and happened to fall (and by happened I mean meticulously planned for our enjoyment) the day before Independence Day here in Madagascar.  Emma, Eric, and I (The Itasy Trois^TM) headed down to the meeting on Sunday, June 24.  Got to our hotel and were reunited with Amy and Nick, the other two people from our training group that live in the highlands.  After much catching up we headed to the hotel where most everyone else was staying to say hello.  This hotel, Chez Billy, is a popular spot amongst volunteers.  I posted pictures of it from Tech Trip on facebook as well.  There are two rooms up on the roof, and many lounge chairs and umbrellas.  So that is where the 20 of us Mahaylanders spent a great deal of the 3 days we were in Antsirabe.

Sunday night we went and had fabulous pizza (well, fabulous for Madagascar anyway) and did a “speed dating” session to get to know one another.  Reminded me a lot of rushing DSP haha.  There was a carnival set up in street and people everywhere.  When your country is only 50 years old, Independence Day is a really big deal.  Monday was the actual VAC meeting, so we met and chatted about issues for a while, and then took advantage of how European Antsirabe is (founded by Norwegians) and ate ourselves silly on bread and cheese J.  That night, the 25^th, the day before Independence Day (fetim-pirenena) children carry brightly colored paper lanterns through the streets when it gets dark.  Reminded me a lot of Halloween, with the lanterns like pumpkins to carry candy.  There were also quite a few fireworks that we watched from our awesome roof location.  The next day, we decorated our roof with lanterns we had purchased from the day before.  We didn’t participate so much in the activities below, but mostly just watched and relaxed together.  There were a great deal of speeches and parades of military and school children in the town center.  And fireworks again at night.  One of our group found sparklers for sale on the street so we spend the evening eating steak fritte, drinking boxed wine, playing twister, and lighting sparklers.  Overall, a very enjoyable time.  It was really nice to get to know a lot of the people from other sectors, although now I will be very sad to see the health and education volunteers who are finished leave in August and September.  Oh well, we have a new stage coming in soon and I will be a zoky! (Older sibling).

That’s all for now, more to come on our return trip from Antsirabe through Tana and the delicious and productive business meeting that ensued.

-Sarah

Surprise Business Trip to Sofia

June 22, 2012

So, story time: how Eric, Emma, and Sarah drove halfway to Diego (look on the map, it is faaaaar) on 3 days notice.

So my counterpart, Nary, comes up to me at the office.  It was a normal day, I was just sitting at my desk that I share with Julia, a French volunteer (who is great fun and speaks awesome English) doing some research and checking my email.  Nary asks me what I am doing next week, and I reminded him that we had made plans to go visit some people interested in working with me in two neighboring towns.  Then he said, well call Emma and Eric and see if they have a program, we are going to Sofia.  Now, I begin to think I have heard him wrong, as it is a Thursday, and he said we were leaving Sunday.  Sofia is far, like really far, not the kind of place you just pick up and go to, that tends to take planning.  It is nicknamed “the black hole” because the road leading to it just suddenly stopped.  But it has since been finished and is now one of the nicest roads in Madagascar.  So I give the run down to Julia, who has been working there longer, to see what she thought about it.  She doesn’t speak gasy, so I recapped the conversation as I understood it.  She came to the same conclusion I did: I must have heard wrong.  I go to find Nary to confirm that what I thought was true, and he is working on a budget proposal on the computer, detailing who was going and where.  There was no arguing with that.  So Eric, Emma, myself, and our respective counterparts through PROSPERER, 14 people in total, prepared to make the very long journey up north…with 3 days notice.

We left early Sunday morning and drove all day, all the way up to Antsohihy.  If we had more notice it would have been nice because two other volunteers from our stage, Dan and Leslie, do their banking in that town.  They also work with PROSPERER in that region.  We stayed the night there, and then the next day went and visited the PROSPERER office and some of the people they work with, such as embroiderers and weavers, and stayed another night there.  The land there is beautiful, and it was really our first chance to see somewhere other than the highlands.  The culture, the food, the architecture, and the climate all vary from where I live.  It is quite hot, there are lots of palm trees and coconuts, it is much more flat, and the houses are made more of sticks than the red clay bricks here.  Also, coconut and curry are heavily present in the food, and there is a lot of goat, which I haven’t seen at all in the highlands.  There is also a larger Muslim population, so many of the hotelys are “halal.”

The next day we drove back south a few hours to Port Bergé.  There is another CED volunteer there, Christina, who has been in country about a year.  We met her at breakfast, and then did some more visits with blacksmiths and beekeepers.  There was debate as to where we would stay that night.  We were only a few hours from Majanga, and after talking to other volunteers in country I have discovered that everyone loves it there.  Plus it is on the Mozambique channel, and I still haven’t been to the ocean since getting here.  So Emma, Eric, and I were really advocating for that.  But our rented van was getting worked on all afternoon, so we ended up just staying in Port Bergé.  So we spent the afternoon exploring the town, and in the evening watched this organized fight celebration, called “Meringy.”  There were lots of festivals and shows leading up to the Independence Day activities on June 26 all over the country.  Pretty much meringy is a bunch of boys kind of half boxing one another in kind of a dance, showboat way.  Kind of hard to explain.  The girls, however, who were few and far between, took each other down when they got in the ring.  We crashed the night with Christina and heard her stories about the region.

The next day we made the long trip back down to Tana.  We stayed at the Peace Corps Meva, and headed back home the next day to catch up on work and sleep before heading south to Antsirabe for VAC a few days later (explanation to come).  We cut the trip short, returning on Thursday morning, but the rest of the group traveled to meetings around Tana until Saturday.  Long business trip!  We also learned that they do a trip to Antsohihy and one to Fianarantsoa (south) every year.  Hopefully next time we will get a little more advanced notice so we can plan a vacation around it.

GIDRO!!!! (LEUMRS!!!!)

June 16, 2012

I have officially seen my first lemur J.  It was technically in captivity, but for my region I am going to call it good.  There is a private reserve, Lemur’s Park, located about 20 km west of Antananarivo, so about 60 km east of me.  They have about 40 lemurs, 9 different species, 2 nocturnal and 7 diurnal.  Because I desperately wanted to see a lemur before I traveled back home (I mean come on, I can’t live here for 6 months and not see one!) and a French volunteer, Camille, was about to leave the country we decided to spend a Saturday at the park.  We went via taxi-brousse from Miarinarivo, and met up with Eric in Arivonimamo on the way.  He is about 40 km from me, so about 20 km from the park.  The park fee is 15,000 Ariary (about 7 dollars, but it is quite a bit for my living allowance, as I make about 9,000 a day), and takes about an hour.  They have tour guides that speak all kinds of languages, so we got one who spoke English and French (and Malagasy, of course) and learned all kinds of fun stuff about lemurs.  For example, ring-tailed lemurs (King Julian, for those of you who are fans of the Dreamworks movies) have exactly 28 rings on their tails, 14 black and 14 white.  Also, lemurs can’t swim, so the reserve is bordered on one side by a river to contain them without the need for fences.  The tour only takes about an hour, but in that time we saw common brown, crowned sifakas, black and white ruffed, Coquerel’s sifakas, red-fronted brown, brown bamboo, mouse, fat-tail lemurs, and ring-tail lemurs.  The mouse and fat-tail are the only ones in cages, because they are nocturnal.  So, we saw all of the species they have in the park.  Unfortunately they do not have any indri, as they are highly endangered.  The nice thing about the Malagasy culture is it is fady (taboo) to kill them, which means they are not hunted.  The reason many species are endangered is due to deforestation and decimation of their habitats.  This is bad, of course, but at least you will not find gidro (lemur) on the menu of any restaurant.

Be on the look out for the pictures I will post soon.  Also I took video, but that will have to wait until August.  Also, if you are interested in learning more about lemurs, BBC put out a great DVD hosted by David Attenborough about Madagascar.  If you live near my grandparents I gave them a copy for Christmas J.  I kept busting out information I learned from that and the guide was pretty impressed.  Did learn quite a bit I didn’t know before though!

Radio GA GA

June 7, 2012

So, I would call our market presentation a success.  I set out to be more visible in the community; just sit the in the market like we did in Ampefy and Arivonimamo and talk to people.  My co-workers had another thing in mind entirely.  First, I went to the mayor with my counterpart, Nary, to ask if it was ok to set up posters and a table and do a little presentation.  He and Nary start talking very quickly about stages and microphones and occasions and Independence Day, June 26^th.  Whooooooooa buddy. So I tell them I will be out of town for fetim-pirenena (Independence Day), which is not a lie.  They then agree to let me do it the next Wednesday, just a normal market day.  There was still talk of a megaphone, but I would put up with that (or just not use it) if that was the compromise.

So Wednesday morning, Nary tells me we are going to set up our stand in the market.  I am a little worried because we take the car, which means there are things in the back that we can’t take walking.  We get to the market, and people start unloading two tents, a banner, and sound equipment.  Crap.

So all of that gets set up, and a woman begins playing music to draw a crowd.  Then Nary starts talking into the microphone, explaining a little bit about who we are and what we do.  Emphasizing that our name is not “vazaha,” and so we should be called by our actual name.  Then he periodically handed Eric and me the microphone to introduce ourselves and explain a little more.  Then he got really into it, and started an interactive question and answer session with the crowd.  He particularly enjoyed it when he found out one of Peace Corps’ goals is cultural exchange.  So he started asking us questions about the difference in food and holidays and other differences between the US and Madagascar.  We were out there for almost four hours, and the crowd would come and go, so we probably saw a couple hundred people.  Not to mention the people who didn’t come over, but could hear us because of the microphone.

Now, the other market presentations in Arivonimamo and Ampefy served their purpose, but here is how I know we hit home on this one:

·      Several people today said “manahoana Sarah,” and they are not people I know

·      A few children said “bonjour, Sarah,” which is still better than “bonjour vazaha”

·      Three people came to see me at the Chamber of Commerce office this morning, wanting to talk about their businesses (or lack there of) and their problems.  These were not people I have ever worked with before

·      And finally, two people have told me that they heard me on the RADIO! One wasn’t even from the same town, she texted me to tell me.  There are definitely fewer privacy laws here, and no waivers to sign it seems, as this is not the first time I have been broadcast without knowing it.  The first was the song we sang in Malagasy at Swearing In at the beginning of May.  I think that one may have even aired on TV, haha.

So, definitely successful, and I am building up not only my recognition in the community, but a new client list.  That will go nicely with the new business cards I printed today—my first ones ever! I am such an adult (riiiight)

Love,

-Sarah

Homecoming

My flight home is officially booked!!

Unfortunately, I did not get the all clear early enough to book the flight I really wanted--with a 24 hour layover in Paris--but I do have direct flights from Tana to Paris and Paris to Detroit and back, which is nice.

Special thank you to my mother who put up with all of the crap on the Air France website.  It was amusing to try and book a flight all in French.  Well, more amusing now that it is over.

So, I will be back in Michigan August 11-September 1 :)  With a fabulous wedding on August 19, and a potential trip to Chicago on the 25th for some DSP<3.  Of course, I will have to visit HVSC as well, and I will be home to celebrate my (and Hine's and Jeff-fa-fa's) birthday(s) on the 15th!

Very much looking forward to it, but at the same time trying to live in the moment here because this country is wonderful and I don't want to miss a minute of it!

Mandrapihoana vetivety! (See you soon!)
-Sarah