Y'all,

We are now PCVs. We were on national TV and will probably be in the paper tomorrow. We will try to get a copy to send back home. We are happy and excited. We had a great lunch at the American ambassador's house where the ceremony was. There were about 50 there.

We are heading to site. We are about two days travel from Tana. When the airport in Mananara opens up we will be 1.5 hours away from Tana. It might open up this year or next. No one really knows.

So, we fly out tomorrow morning, May 3rd, to Tamatave, then we install Jessica. That will take a few days. It will be fun to see how the process is. Jessica is going to have the mud hut experience. She is very brave and strong, she has what it takes to be an awesome asset to her small village. I am eager to see how it goes. We are on the other end. We are replacing awesome volunteers and great people. There are still here in country. We have talked to them at length. We have a good picture of what we are walking into. Our site is close to a very nice clean beach that is protected by a natural reef, so there is no sharks. YES, I will be swimming very often and soaking up some rays. We are in vanilla and clove country so durring season the air is very fragrent. That we are looking forward to.

We have a semi-site mate, Helen lives about 35 km from us. She will be installed before us. So we will see the process again. We will finally be settled into our new home May 13th. We are going to have 10 days on the road. I will probably not get some reading done because the roads are so bad we have to crawl in 4x4. That is one reason we are on the road so long.

Training is over, here are some images to recap our adventure.

Friends have contributed to these images, special thanks goes to Jake and Erin and Helen.

This image is us arriving to Madagascar. This demostrates Madagascar's bigest export, its soil. Because of the deforrestation the soil has vacated the premisses.



Here is the 2007 Madagascar Environment Group. We are in the middle of training and learning to the point our brain is leaking out of our skull.



Lemur from our field trip in Andosy Be.



Large insect seen in Andosy Be.



Bee keeping field trip. Loads of fun and we worked ourselves up into a frenzy, the honey was awesome.



Nat and Sarah, the PCVs we are replacing.


Faith working hard thrashing rice on our field trip to Sakay.


We all picked corn at Sakay.


Pierre on the left, Mama's brother, Papa, Mama, Faith, Tom.

View from out PCTC, Peace Corps Traning Center, aka Country Club.