Monday, August 6, 2012

No more pencils, no more books!


I am officially done with my primary Peace Corps assignment! I will never teach another class again! Ok maybe I shouldn’t say never, cause who knows what will happen in the future, but I can confidently say that teaching will not be high on my future jobs list. Peace Corps has made me realize that teaching is not a profession I want to pursue in America. I have great respect for the thousands of teachers in America and the tremendous job they do, I just won’t be joining them. Obviously teaching English in MADA, in a language I only speak a little of, is very different from teaching history (if I did teach, the subject I would want to teach) in English, but there are enough similarities for me to know that my skills lie elsewhere. A few of my PC friends have decided that teaching is for them after their 2 years here and are going home to get their teaching degrees. Mazatoa (means good luck).

I have about a month left, a little under, and I am just getting my life at site together. I found out a few days ago that I won’t be replaced, so now I have to deal with that. I honestly thought I would be. My school was one of the few that didn’t go on strike, I am located close to Tana, I have a big house with electricity and there’s plenty of work. The newbies this time got to have a larger say in where they live then my group did and Im sure my site didn’t spark much excitement. There is a 47km dirt road you have to go down and, since my site mate isn’t being replace until at least May of 2013, if not longer, than you would be all by yourself up here. There’s no beach or national park nearby. Faratsiho doesn’t have the cool factor that a lot of other sites have. I’m just not sure if this means they are closing my site down or if they will put someone here next time. The education sector leader is in the USA for the next week for a training seminar, so I won’t know until the week of August 13th what the status of my site is. To be fair, 4 people didn’t make it to staging meaning they dropped out after they received their site placements, so maybe I would have been replaced if those 4, or even 1 or them, had turned up. I just have a lot of stuff that I was saving for the next person that now I have to give away or take to Tana to give to other PCV’s. Good thing I still have some time left!

My trip out to Morondava was good. The world map looks spectacular, if I do say so myself, and I had a lot of fun seeing the west side of Madagascar. I ended up staying at my friend Kimballs house throughout the project, as it would have been too hard to go back and forth each day to get to his site, even though its only 30km. You just never know when a brousse will actually leave so each morning I could have waited 2 hours just to get out there. Not worth it. Shayla and Mallory, another PCV who was vacationing out in Morondava, came out to help a few days. We did the world map a little differently this time. Instead of painting by continents (for example, Zambia, South Africa and Mali are all yellow because they are all part of Africa) we painted by countries (so each country was a different color within the continent). This made is harder and more time consuming, since you had to be even more careful about paint dripping and you had to make sure 2 of the same color didn’t touch each other. Europe was sort of a nightmare, but it was a nightmare when I was doing mine by continents too. Too many small countries!

Since Kimball is so close to the Avenue of the Baobabs, we went out to see them at sunset, the best time to go. For those who don’t know, the Avenue of the Baobabs is a place where a lot of Grandidier’s Baobabs, the biggest type of baobab, happen to grow. It’s an amazing site. We were there for about an hour, hour and a half, and watched the sun set over the trees. I got some amazing photos. I am going to post a photo blog in a few weeks, after I have finished taking pictures at my site, and I will post some photos of the baobabs. If you can’t wait until then, there are some on my facebook. We also saw Les Baobabs Amoureux, a pair of baobabs that are intertwined, and the Scared Baobab, which I never relaly got the backstory on. I have heard there are a lot of scared baobabs and I’m not sure why this one was scared. It was a really interesting trip and I’m glad I got to see the baobabs.

After my week in Morondava, I went to Tana, partially for short term leave, but also because I was not feeling well. My stomach was cramping all the time and I was going to the bathroom a lot. Turns out, I had worms. Round worms to be exact, which, according to Wikipedia, are one of the most diverse species on the planet. Joy. I am took 2 de-worming pills and I have 2 more to take on the 8th. The good news is that it’s working. My tummy is not cramping and I am not making constant trips to the bathroom. The other good news is that is must have been a female worm, since there were eggs, which means that is was laying eggs and not trying to escape from my body, which would have freaked me out and scarred me for life. While I was in Tana, my friend found a worm trying to escape from his body when he woke up and dealt with it in a quiet, calm manner. That would not have been my manner. I would have screamed and woken up the whole place. Im not sure how I go them, since they are usually found in meat and I don’t eat meat all that much anymore, but the veggies I get at my hotely are cooked with meat so I’m thinking that is how I got them. I had been lucky so far, and worms are not that hard to deal with. It could have been worse.

I should be leaving site for good on August 24th, but that could change. I still have a lot of packing/sorting/organizing to do, so I have  busy  few weeks ahead of me. Plus I have to eat the rest of the food in my house, finish a few TV series, and read. I won’t be bored.

It’s crazy to think that my 2 years here are almost over. I can’t believe it’s been 2 years. Soon I will be back in America, eating whatever I want and trying to find a job. I won’t have to use a latrine every day, wash laundry by hand, or be called a vazaha. It is definitely a bit scary to return, but I am ready for the next chapter in my life to start. I have a wedding to plan (though I have it pretty much all figured out already. I had some free time on my hands over here), an apartment to decorate, friends to see, a job to find and a wonderful fiancĂ© whos time I will be monopolizing. America, watch out!

Book List
Eating Animals
When We Were Orphans
Dry
The Surgeon of Crowthorne
The Red Queen
State of Wonder

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