hello all,

We are in Tamatav. We never made it to our site. But we did get a tour of Madagascar, boy it is an awesome country. We visited with many volunteers and checked out their sites. They were health and education, so we did not get an env. point of view, except for Jessica's site. It was in the sticks, definitely rural. She will have plenty of projects to keep her busy. The cyclone wiped out her communities rice fields and there is a lot of mouths to feed. At the same time it was awesome to see where she is going to be living for two years. Very kozy, meaning very close to her neighbors, but they are still building the house. There should build her a fence.

We are going to head home tomorrow, March 23. Back to the our host mother's great cooking and a very peacful life in our small town. We have had a lot of excitment with broken bridges, cyclone damaged travel plans and just plain hot weather. We met lots of great people and volunteers that are doing great work.

We have sent out letters I am not sure how long it will take to reach America. That sounded funny, but yes we are a long way away. We are taking advantage of the great fruit and sites. It is like being on vacation, but it gets stressful learning and using the language, but it is coming. We will be back in training in a few days. Since we have not seen our site we do not have a visual on the terrain, so it will be diffecult to place the techniques we have learned and will learn.

We know that our counter-part is a vanilla famer and vanilla brings in alot of cash. The current PCVs have helped export vanilla and we will probably help that process along with growning trees. I am interested in rice farming and ducks. I will see if the interest is still there when we go off to site. We have gotten some great tech training and I am looking forward to putting it into practice. At our host parents we planted radishes, cucumbers, greens and tomatos. We also started a compost bin. We will finish up those projects in the coming weeks and see the fruits of our labor.

We are heading to get some ice cream and have a great meal and chil at a very nice hotel. We are living the good life in the big city.

Tom