Ready for Site Vist,

Hello I am in Tana, the capital of Madagascar. Faith and I are waiting for the Cyclone to blow over. In a few days we will check out our site and talk to the current Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). We will be near Mananara. We are totally stoked.

Training is going great. We love our host family. Our little two story house over looks rice fields is comfortable. It is a nice 30 minute walk to class. So we get plenty of exercise walking to school then back for lunch and back to school four days a week. The other days we have various projects to keep us learning the language and culture.

The people here are very friendly and eager to help us learn. The population where we are training is about 500. There is a few schools where the kids attend. Everyone works hard in the rice fields or in their garden. Once we know more about their day to day life I can describe it better.

Our diet is pretty simple here, We eat a lot of rice. Actually we get rice three times a day. I thought I ate a lot of rice in the Macro diet! Malagasy are the largest consumers of rice in the world per cap. Our host mother is an awesome cook and we eat it up with a lot of appreciation and love. We have fish, dead cow, eggs, pancakes, fried potatoes, lots of beans and a wide array of veggies. Everything is fresh and home cooked. It is awesome. We supplement our diet with Madagascar chocolate, but we stear clear of sugar usually because we get plenty of sweet with the seasonal fruits.

The language is coming right along, we are studying all the time. Faith seems to be a natural. We meet our site partner who is a Vanilla farmer. He suggested many projects, but we will see when we talk to the local community to see what they want to do. It appears to me that the community has made an investment to get a PCV so we contribute to the well being of the community. They have set us up in a house and are willing to teach us what is needed.

Some of the projects that we will look at are chicken or duck raising, tree nursary, finding buyers for local cash crops (vanilla, cloves) working with local coops. Introducing new rice growing techniques. We are very excited.

We went out into the city on our own last night. It was great to walk around in the big city and talk to the locals, bargin in the market, take a taxi ride and ditch beggers. It got nerve racking dealing with the hugh scores of people in small places, but we managed and will be better prepared next time. As our language skills strengthen we will get more comfortable.

Till next time.

Tom