Back to Summer Camp

5/15/13

Manahoana daholo!

I am back again to tell you all about my 2 weeks training the new volunteers back at the training center in Mantasoa.  Although looking at the “views” on my blog since the beginning, looks like I am writing for a very select audience now haha.

So anyway, I was a little nervous training the new volunteers because they are all under the new agriculture framework; there are no more community economic development volunteers like me, they were folded in with environment.  So the trainees spent the first 5 weeks pretty much only talking about improved farming techniques and small animal husbandry.  They Dan and I come in to teach bookkeeping, recordkeeping, costing and pricing, and assigning an agri-business feasibility project.  All of which was pretty much in the classroom, when prior they had been spending a lot of time outside.  I know that I would have been snoozing by the end of the week.

But to their credit (and I guess to mine and Dan’s) they were still pretty engaged by the end of the week, asking great questions.  All of the sessions seemed to go pretty well, even though we were flying by the seat of our pants some of the time.  I have said it before and I will say it again, communication is not Peace Corps’ strong suit.  But we survived and I think the trainees learned a lot.  The best was the project, where they got to apply business concepts how they would in the field, literally.  They each had to talk to a host family and find out about their income generating activities and give advice based on questions they asked in Malagasy.  Overall I think it was a success, even after PC cut one of the sessions.

But enough about the actual training, on to the fun stuff!  The real reason I wanted to be a trainer haha :P just kidding.  So the first week I was training with Dan, a fellow CED volunteer, and Corey, Tisa, and Raf, all health volunteers, which was the sector of the other half of the trainees.  Each sector has 18 this round.  So even though we had to spend a lot of time preparing sessions and evaluating how sessions went, we still had time to play hilarious games revolving around Jurassic Park (which resulted in a “how many dinosaurs can you name?” poster board, as well as a “did you know…” board), introduce the new vols to “cards against humanity,” a hilarious politically incorrect version of apples to apples, and write mahay-kus (haikus) about training and beyond to share at the talent show put on by the trainees.  Complete and total hit.

World Malaria Day also fell during my training weeks, and Raf, the Malaria Coordinator, helped the trainees put on a great festival for Mantasoa Village.  This included a mosquito piñata, which was absolutely terrifying to watch with the several hundred kids in attendance.  Corey, Tisa, and I also gave the trainees their stage name—Bougie Stage.  This comes from the word bourgeoisie, because this stage was getting fancy.  They had a milk frother for tea and coffee, drank wine, which I didn’t even know Mantasoa had, and (though not their fault really) were the first stage with access wi-fi.  They were pretty pleased with their new name, and have really taken it to heart.

The second week, I trained with Meghan (health) and Dan (environment).  That week saw the introduction of an epic blanket fort created by the trainees for movie watching and Nintendo simulator playing, a great capture the flag game, the very stressful language test for trainees, preparation for final presentations, expired jell-o found in the games cupboard (still tasted good), a giant bowl of popcorn to celebrate the end of the test, a bonfire and s’mores, presidents and assholes card game, and a few decent dance parties.

Overall, I had a great time really getting to know the new volunteers.  If I hadn’t been a trainer, I might never have met some of the ones who live far away.  Now I have “zandry” (younger siblings) who can be great friends for the next year and beyond.  Excited to really welcome the 5 new highlands regioners at the next VAC in June!

Love,

-Sarah

Easter With My 'Gasy Family

5/13/13

Hello again!

I am still a bit behind on my blogging, but I am trying to catch up now.  So going back a bit to Easter and Easter Monday (which is also a holiday in Madagascar).  I promised Claude and his wife Adalene (from my silk co-op in Amboalefoka) I would spend Easter with them like 6 months prior, and every few weeks Adalene would jokingly ask me where I was spending Easter, just to make sure I remembered.

So I headed out to their place 6 km from my town on Saturday morning to spend the weekend.  Claude’s brother and his family came out from Tana as well.  They were very interested in learning all about me and the things I do here, also about America.  It was really difficult to get the wife to stop talking to me in French, but she got it eventually.  They also had an adorable daughter around 8 and a son in his early teens (who was very shy and off playing with Claude’s son, so I didn’t see much of him).  We spent most of Saturday watching TV and chatting and walking a little bit around the fields.

Sunday rolled around and we got up early to head to church.  I had no idea, but Claude is the organist at church.  They have a little catholic church near their house and the church has a basic electric keyboard.  Claude doesn’t play anything fancy, mostly just chords, but I was still really surprised to learn he was the keyboard player.

So after a very long service where the pastor got a bit mad at the congregation for arriving so late (come on man, it is Madagascar, that is the culture.  Although 2 hours late is a bit much…) we returned back to the house for a nice Easter lunch.  While it wasn’t a Petit Jean Ham from Arkansas and my mom’s potato salad, we still had a good meal that included pork, something definitely out of the ordinary for them.  We also had duck, which was delicious J.  A couple of weeks after Easter I also got a package from my mom that included Easter candy and toys, so all in all not so bad.

So the Monday following Easter is also a big deal in Madagascar.  Everyone goes on a little walk or vacation or picnic.  I spent the last “Lundi de Paques” in Mantasoa, where people come from Tana to picnic on the lake.  This time I headed with Claude and Adalene and their family to Ampasamanatongotra (say that 5 times fast) about 5 km from their house so see “hira gasy,” which literally means Malagasy song.  We paid a small fee to see large groups of singers perform songs in traditional meter and dress, set to a small group of instrumentalists including brass and strings.  There are also young men in each group that do kind of martial arts and turn all kinds of cool flips with twists, kind of like break dancing.  Too cool.  So we sat in the hot sun and drank homemade orange juice with waaaay too much sugar and snacked on fried goods.

When we got there, everyone was sitting on the ground in a big circle around the singers.  We circled for a bit and found a good spot to sit with the crowd.  A lot of people recognized me, because most of the people were the same ones who attended the women’s day activities the month before and watched me play soccer.  A few minutes after we found a good spot and sat down, a few men came over with a chair, insisting that I sit on it.  Now, there are probably 500 people sitting on the ground, and not one has a chair.  So I adamantly (but politely) refuse for a solid 5 minutes until they finally give up.  No way man, I stand out enough, haha.

It was not Ann Arbor, but it was still a pretty good Easter.  One more like it and I am home!

Love,

-Sarah

Derby Days: Saying Veloma

4/15/13

Well, the time has come to say goodbye to some of our dear friends who have serves their two years and are moving on to other things.  Jackie and Cha Cha, two volunteers who are very close to me, planned one last weekend for us in Antsirabe, a town where a lot of us from the highlands spend time.  It was also Jackie’s birthday, March 23, so we planned a little celebration for that as well.  Cha Cha and Jackie are incredibly talented at creating theme parties (they were the ones who brought us “frippe prom”).

So our party theme was “derby days.”  We decided to dress up as if we were going to the Kentucky Derby and go to a place called PMU, where you can bet on horse races happening in France while watching them on TV.  So people had gloves, big hats, the whole nine yards.  We even looked up how to make mint juleps and some people were smoking cigars.  All in all, we are very good at theme parties.  Then, as an added bonus for Jackie’s birthday, we rented a horse to take her from our hotel to PMU as a surprise.  She was absolutely thrilled, which was so great to see.

It was really nice weekend, and really great to spend time all together for one last time.  Close of service requires a week of exams and other activities, so it is spread out over a month.  Each volunteer is assigned a week, so they leave throughout the month.  So this really was our last time all together, since everyone is leaving at a different time.

I was very happy to get to know all of these people who are now leaving, and so proud of them.  Looking forward to see where they go next.  It will be very hard to let all of them go, but I know they will be happy moving forward with their lives.  And their families will be happy to have them back!

Love,

-Sarah

15 Minutes of Fame

4/20/13

One of my new years resolutions was to spend a few days out in the field really learning about silk production.  So at the beginning of March, I trekked out to a town called Morarano, 7 km south of the main road about 10 km west of my town.  This is a very small town where the actual weavers in my cooperative live.  I went there back in July with the Madagascar Cooperative Foundation to film about the silk process and we were the first white people who had ever been there.  So I was definitely still a spectacle upon my return.

I spent the afternoon talking to my main weaver, Radany, and his family about the silk process.  I watched them weave the scarves and hand roll the cocoons into thread.  Then, Radany told me I could help him dye the purple and green thread to be used in the scarves my mom will sell in Ann Arbor when she comes here in July.  Cool!  First, we started boiling water.  Then, we add a certain green leaf (for the green dye) and part of a banana tree that makes sap.  Radany told me the sap from the tree helps seal in the color.  Then we added yellow and blue chemical packets to make the deep green color.  They do some natural dying but the really vibrant colors come from packaged dyes they purchase in Tana.  They wanted to take a lot of pictures of me helping them, which was pretty adorable.  They also are not great with a camera so it took a lot of editing to get them decent.  Check them out on my facebook page!

So we finished up the dying and left the cocoons and thread to dry, and went outside to wash the scarves that were already finished being woven so they would be clean and soft and ready for sale.  There was a serious photo shoot with that as well, which the whole town seemed to be involved in.  It was definitely their entertainment for the day.  Then we had dinner and called it a night.  A rather interesting and sleepless night though.  I was sharing their one bed with their eldest daughter (they have 6 kids) while everyone else slept on the floor.  The mattress was made out of grass and plastic, which sent my allergies into an absolute frenzy.  They also left a battery powered light on all night that was right in my face and I was freeeeezing.  So all in all not the best night, but a very productive learning experience.

The next day was a national holiday in Madagascar—International Women’s Day.  There was a big celebration in the town where some of my silk cultivators live, so myself and a large number of the women and girls from Morarano took off early in the morning to try and catch a large truck on the main road 7 km away.  We got to the road but the truck was late, so I spent an hour telling probably 100 young girls about American culture and English, after not having slept the night before.  Really great experience but my brain was so exhausted!

When the truck finally arrived, we piled probably 100 young women and girls into the back of this Mercedes semi to drive the 5 km to the event.  Hilarity ensued.  We were all falling over each other trying to stand up or sit down or something, and everyone was jovial and singing very loudly.  It was really funny.

We finally arrived at the event and I was again an incredible source of entertainment.  Some high school girls immediately rushed over to talk to me, and a large group assembled to see my responses.  You can tell they were kind of the “cool” girls who wanted me as a status symbol more than a friend.  They also asked me to play soccer with them later after all of the different girls groups presented their dances.  I agreed, not knowing that meant playing in front of the entire commune with jerseys and everything.  Very official.  So we watched the dances for a little while, with everyone I knew telling me to join each group (as if I knew the choreography, I am not magical!) and then the moment arrived for the soccer game.  Everytime I touched the ball the entire audience laughed.  My dad said it was probably like watching grandma play soccer, just so out of the ordinary.  At one point the ball hit a spike over the goal and popped, so while we were waiting for someone to find a new one, I took that opportunity to let them know I had to go home and get some sleep.

But now I am famous in the rural commune of Miarinarivo II, everyone knows who I am.

Love,

-Sarah

BAMM: Blog About Malaria Month

4/17/13

Hello!  So April is Malaria Awareness Month, so I am here to tell you about malaria in Madagascar (and to earn some points for the highlands region, you are going down sud est!)

First some background and basic facts from the Malaria 101 packet provided by our highlands region malaria coordinator, Miss Kim Connor.

“How it’s transmitted: The pesky little female Anopheles mosquito, which primarily bite at night (dusk till dawn). 

Symptoms of malaria: high fever that is cyclical (returning every 48 hours or so), nausea and sometimes vomiting, sweating, chills, fatigue, headache, dizziness, sore joints/muscles, weakness

What to do if symptoms arise: Go immediately to the local doctor! Do not pass go, do not collect $200! They will administer a malaria rapid diagnostic test (RDT) and treat you if you do have malaria.

Prevention methods: Sleeping under mosquito nets (the best are insecticide treated), wearing long sleeves/pants in the evening, going to the doctor as soon as you get a fever, eliminating standing water around the house, closing all doors/windows from dusk till dawn, planting tomatoes and citronella around the house (natural mosquito repellents), taking malaria prophylaxis pills, and using repellant.”

Malaria rates in Madagascar are incredibly high, particularly on the east coast where the heat and humidity are very high.  Peace Corps is working on disseminating information about proper prevention and treatment techniques to reduce transmission and death rates.  In addition, we are teaching people about how malaria impacts no only their lives but their communities as well.  The following is information provided by Kim as well detailing how she calculated the cost of malaria in communities in Madagascar.  As an economic development volunteer, I will be trying this approach to encourage people to take proper precautions.

“Recently, my counterpart and I conducted LLIN care and maintenance consultations using Networks-created informational cards. We noticed community members were most engaged while discussing the money that could be saved by reducing the incidence of malaria (i.e., by sleeping under a properly maintained mosquito net). For this reason, I decided to calculate the amount of money spent by my community on malaria consultations and medication in 2011. I met with my the head nurse at my health post and to discuss and document the cost of consultations and routine medication prescribed for simple and severe malaria (including paracetamol), and to break the costs down by age range to closely match the age ranges recorded in the health registry.

I found out that my community spent 3,039,100 MGA on malaria consultations and medication in 2011. This number did not impress the leaders of my village as I had hoped. To visually represent this figure, I decided to present it in a culturally significant manner: using rice sacks. Specifically, one sack of rice in my regional capital costs 15,000 MGA. Calculating for transportation to my village, the amount my community spent on malaria consultations and medication in 2011 equaled 196 sacks of rice. This was an impressive figure considering that one sack of rice feeds approximately one family for one month.

Recently, I set on a journey to buy 196 rice sacks (filled with grass, I don’t have that kind of money) to visually display to my community how much they spend on malaria, which will hopefully motivate them to proactively fight malaria.”

I hope this enlightens you a little bit about the problem here in Madagascar.  Thanks for listening while we STOMP OUT MALARIA!

-Sarah