mbola misy!

"Our lives teach us who we are." -Salman Rushdie

Trying to get photos from the wedding; mora mora (slowly slowly)... On top is the ladies cooking lunch, we had four - five large pots going at any one time... The bottom is a traditional partof a muslim wedding, with the women clicking sticks together to accompany the music. Beautiful colors!

My fellow PCV Jennie and I went to a new house (trano voo voo) party in Mahajanga, and impressed everyone with our gasy dancing skills.. and by impressed, I mean "we gave them the gift of laughter". Peace Corps.

All my love from Mad, xoxo chan

salaam aleikum

sorry as usual about the length between blogs, to add to the confusion, I am going to skip over my vacation north (which was AMAZING, will get to that soon), and dive into the wedding that took place in my town (specifically in my backyard) the other day. I live in a little gated compound with my host family (ooh fancy, I know), and their son came up from Antananarivo for three days of wedding related festivities. Not only were there lots of new people and faces, but as this was a Muslim wedding I was able to get a crash course on two cultures at once! Multitasking at its finest.

The first two days were fun and filled with lots and lots of food... I winnowed more rice in these three days that in my entire stay in Mad so far. The best was that every half hour someone how to comment on how gaga I was over the amount of rice (which I hadn't noticed until they pointed it out), and then they would all laugh... over and over. Rice and beans and coconut, freshly slaughtered beef - a friend gave me a raw chunk to season with salt and then cooked it over the coals for me.. I managed to only eat about half of it, as visions of tapeworms danced in my head.

The third day was the actual ceremony, so we ate breakfast (tea and bread), prepared lunch, and then headed to the outside of the mosque to watch the procession of the men from the mosque back to the house. Everyone was wearing their finest lamba, bright colors and sequins sparkled as we walked together and clacked wooden sticks. Back at the house I sat through a couple hours of a ceremony in mixed Arabic and Malagasy, followed by more food, and traditional dancing. I took a break around 4 to go watch the boys play soccer, watered my garden, ate dinner, and just when I thought things were winding down (around 8), I heard singing in Arabic. Out beneath the tent sat two lines of men, singing and doing a traditional Islamic dance, while the women congregated behind and did their own chorus and dancing. I got to join for three hours of this (of course we ate bread and drank tea as well, wouldn't be proper without food), and I would have to say that it was the highlight of my time in Peace Corps thus far.

xoxo chan

The lost blog...

This was a whole blog I typed up in July and though was lost forever when the computer crashed.. turns out that google blog is smarter than I am, and auto saves drafts. Technology. A bit old, but covers my vaca north.
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Sorry about the delay, hope this blog catches you up a bit on life in Madagascar... I had IST training at Lake Montasoa in May, and while it was good to see the other volunteers and share stories, it didn't really send me back to site with the information that I was looking for, so I returned in a bit of a funk.. plus, fater slacking on speaking gasy for two weeks, I was much less mahay, which never makes for a good return; ('mahay' is sort of the equivilant of 'to know'). Luckily, I only had a few weeks before I took off on my first vacation/business trip to the north.

Met up with two fellow PCV's, Sara and Nicki, in Mahajanga and celebrated Nicki's bday in style - brochettes by the ocean, WC soccer, and many a lukewarm THB (Madagascar's own Three Horses Beer, written in english but you pronounce the letters in French.. go figure). Headed north to our friend Katie's site, where we added another chatty vazaha to the crew, causing the taxi brousse passengers to comment on how much we talked. Hit Diego and had a meeting with Sun For Life, an NGO that works with the Moringa tree, is very interested in collaborating with Peace Corps Volunteers, and sent us away with a cadeau of 17 kilos of seed!! Very exciting. My counterpart at site wants to start a tree club, so hopefully I can interest him in Moringa. Next stop: Brit's site for some cookstove building, tree grafting, and World Cup soccer watching. Luckily, her neighbors provided us with a 48 hour party (aka loud music blaring all night).

Back to Diego - met up with a few PCVs who were on their trip before they left the country, having finished their 6 month tour as Peace Corps response vols. Crashed in a beach house for the night, then hopped down about 100km to Ankarana, a national park with lemurs, chameleons, tsingy (awesome limestone rock formations), and BAT CAVES! The caves were amazing - I'm sure that it's not good that we were able to do what we did, but we got to climb waay back in the caves and scramble around. There were spiders that inspired Nicki to develop a new fear, sparkling rock beds, creepy noises, and no other people around.. not something that you can usually experience at a national park.

Fahatelo: Ankify, aka my new favorite place ever. Three days, two nights in a beach house, swimming in the ocean, eating delicious brochettes, manioc and coco... are you noticing how much food is mentioned here? Our trip was the northern madagascar brochette sampling tour. Sara and I walked to the Port to Nosy Be for breakfast and met a guy who had knoa former PCVs in the area.. he showed us the path and even took us by his house -to the surprise of the people there. Not every day you show up with two white girls in small town Mad.

After Ankify we headed back to Mahajanga, and then I went home, the end of a great trip, but luckily I had a big event in town to get me right back into the swing of things - my Gasy Parents' son was getting married! Three days of celebration, all in my backyard.
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Since I already wrote about the wedding I'll cut out now... lots of love to all! xoxo tiz