Hotel Lesson and a death in the family
Hotel lesson not learned
Saturday night I was on the Net thinking that I should find a hotel. David told me, he was staying in tamatave that night. It was dark and I was not going to ride the twelve K back to his site. I didn’t learn my lesson from the other night. I still didn’t make a reservation. I thought I could get a room at the Lionel, but I forgot about the wedding that was in town. I checked the hotel and of course it was full. I stopped off at a hotel close to the internet place thinking I could get lucky, but they were all booked up. They did save me a trip across town and gave me Marotia’s phone number, but yet again, they didn’t have a room. Then I turned around to the desk guy speaking French to me. After some back and forth, me telling him I don’t know French speaking in Malagasy, he finally understood that I didn’t speak French, we got on the same page. He would let me sleep in the upstairs common room if I got out by 6:00 am, for 10,000 AR (5 bucks). It sounded good to me, so he pocketed the money and I got a nice place to crash, win-win situation. I got up at 5:30am, hung out for a little bit downstairs and left. He made sure that I was gone before his boss showed up. The term he used was “Tsy ambara in-telo” meaning “don’t tell a third person”.
Death in the family
Here is a little story that happen a couple of months ago. Our pet lizard died. He was not really a pet. He ran free eating anything sweet. He particularly liked honey, but would nibble on fruit. It was a tragedy waking up and going into our “kitchen”, our other room, and finding our lizard friend in a bowl of water. It looked like he drowned, he was dead. We were saddened because he was a source of entertainment and beauty. Without effort, we provided food. Where there is food …. Sure enough another lizard moved in.
In other house animal news, we had a mother mouse move in. She would make a terrible rack at night. We finally found her nest in our cupboard. I reinforced the structure to discourage her return. We didn’t know at the time that she had a litter. When we found it we decided to move the younglings outside. She only moved three, the other three died. For a short while they were part of our family.
Hey Just checked out your website! Looks great! I am a PCV in Lesotho and I have set up a WIKI for the volunteers in the Southern Africa Region. You should check it out at
www.wikisarvn.pbwiki.com
If you want you can pass this site on to friends and family members. It will hopefully become a home for all of us volunteers! Let all your fellow PCV's know about it too. All the best
Jason Samuelian
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