Hi everyone! I hope your holiday season is off to a great start! I am typing this quickly on a French keyboard, so I am sorry for the errors and if I missed sending this to anyone. It is also on my blog... this is my latest entry; I encourage you all to read it when you have a chance.
www.themasoandro@blogspot.com
My mom tries to update it for me every week or so. I miss you all and wish you the happiest of holidays! I am thinking about and praying for each of you all the way over here.
Dec 17th, 2007
Hey yall! I miss you each so very much! I've been at site for about 2 weeks now and I really like it most of the time. I have definitely broken down to my mom a couple times because it's really the most challenging experience of my life, but I get through those moments and the next day, or even just a couple hours later, I feel great and remember why I am here.
My village is absolutely beautiful! I literally live in paradise. I don't really have a "typical" day but I usually wake up around 6, eat something, take my malaria meds, and hang out until school starts at 7:30 with my site mate and around 40 little 5-16 year old boys before they go to their elementary school. We practice English and Gasy, throw a ball around my front yard of bright red dirt, play cards, or just pick fun at each other and laugh a lot. I also really enjoy making homemade peanut butter… some of the boys will bring by peanuts to sell and I shell them, roast them, skin them, then pound them in my mortar with my pistol – yeah, that's right – I have a mortal and pistol! HAHA! Then I add a little sugar and salt and oil and pound away, it's a great way to get out the frustration of the begging children and utter poverty I live with. I've been making a lot of food with the peanut butter – one of my fav meals is peanut butter and hot sauce pasta, I think I may even eat it back in America. But who knows, those lines are so blurred by now. I cannot even image what it is like to be able to put something in the microwave and eat it 2 minutes later and feel full. It blows my mind how easy it is to make food at home. We have to catch and pluck and kill and clean and cook a chicken over a fire before we can even think about how "good" it’s going to taste. Anyways, I hope my community will catch on to my peanut butter making because it's a decent source of protein for them to add to their sole rice meals.
One of my other favorite stress relievers is my daily runs or hikes with the boys. The little girls are really shy still, but hopefully next time I write I can tell you about the progress I'm making with them. Before it gets too hot out, or once the sun begins to set but in the special middle time before the mosquitoes perpetrate, they take me just a few minutes away to the most beautiful places I've seen in my life, more wonderful than any scene I could have ever dreamt up. I also enjoy going to the small market and hanging out with all the women, most of whom are pregnant, I have a lot of family planning to teach, and just letting my eyes enjoy the sparkling colors of the tomatoes, the limes, the papaya, mango, crazy jack fruit that tastes like starbursts, the rice bread and coconut candies, and the flowing in the delicate breeze lambas the women all wear around their little bodies and their heads with weaved baskets and water buckets pilled high. The ground is the brightest red, even redder than Georgia clay, and the sky is huge and the blue of so many of your eyes that I miss, and the thousands of different palm trees and flowering bushes are every kind of green… but this market just bustles with life and color among the otherwise scene of blue, green and red. Sometimes I feel like these parts of my day, which sometimes go on all day, are just a playground for my eyes – it's all so new and lovely. I have never seen flowers like the ones in my village. Near the water pumps there are a plethora – I am going to send my mom home with a CD full of pictures when she comes in June so yall will all finally be able to see the graceful wonders soon! Then, on the hikes, the flowers are even more unbelievable. Yesterday we hiked for a couple hours through this dry grassland packed with huge strong zebu cows and ended up stumbling down these huge red boulders all the way to this massive lake surrounded by a swamp filled with big Australian type swamp birds, crocodiles and these lily pad/orchid hybrid flowers floating throughout the muddy green bullet-type thick leafy grass bubbles – they were huge, the size of my forearm, and bright purple with white inside full of yellow spots that looks like stars dancing inside them.
These people I am living and working with may be some of the poorest in the world, but G-d's presence cannot be doubted with this sheer beauty all around us. Even the little boys gasp and enjoy and frolic in the fairyland just down the road from their little shacks. It is so cool to be able to enjoy these moments of freedom and happiness with them when so much of their life is about barely getting by and simply trying so hard to survive. Erin, my great, laid-back, amazing with these boys, thoughtful and so helpful site mate, and I play soccer with the boys most afternoons. Well, they play, and I try to get a hold of or block the ball, I have a lot of progress to make with both the art of Gasy soccer and language. I work, too, I swear, it's not all amazing hikes and games. I work three days a week at the rural health clinic. My doctor speaks French to me, which I don't understand, still need to learn that better, too. But, despite our lack of clear communication, we've been working pretty well together. I hope it grows and improves. We give vaccines once a week with a cooler full from Diego since we have no power to keep them cool all week. He gives the vaccines and I explain them to the moms, kids, or pregnant girls. We also give out mosquito nets and explain how to use them, how important they are, and we help them clean and re-medicate them, too. A lot of my work there is while the young ladies and babies are waiting for the doctor. Gasy time makes it okay for him to be late, it's just the culture. I give little speeches and demos about cleaning water, family planning, getting tested for AIDS, preparing cheap but healthy foods, brushing teeth, mosquito-proofing their homes etc. Let me know if y'all have any fun ideas for me to teach them!
Once a week I come in to Diego. It's just like New Orleans – both good and bad points. It keeps me in touch with yall, lets me get a cold drink or ice cream, and reminds me that Madagascar is progressing and I need to work hard to help my village improve, too. Today is my first day to work with PSI (Population Services International) so next time I will tell you more about how great it is. It's an American NGO funded by USAID. Everyone who works in the Diego office is Gasy, they speak French more than Sakalava, too, so I really need to improve both languages – one for my village and one for the city. Any pointers are warmly welcome! I will be working with them and their peer educators who help empower the tons of young commercial sex workers. Diego is a huge tourist town, and everywhere you turn, you see a precious 14 year old Gasy girl with a 65 year old French man. I'm not trying to be hard on the French, it's just a fact of life here – there are many great French people here, too. Anyways, I will work on helping these girls realize that they are better than that, that they should value themselves more, and find other ways to make money. Many families kick the girls out and they have to fend for themselves and this is the easiest way. It's so sad, this sexual tourism, and I am thrilled to be a part of fighting it.
Lastly, there are a few projects I am really looking forward to making happen here. I have become friends with a couple of the big musicians here and I'm hoping to work with them in some cool ways. I am not supposed to start planning big things like this until after 3 months at site, evaluating their needs etc… But I do have a few goals that I hope work out and I know will do a ton of good. Just something to pray and think about in the meantime. Let me know y’all’s ideas… I am writing songs in Gasy with health, environment, community messages in them and Fandrama (y’all should all check him out, he's a rocking artist and also a government rep from Diego and only 28!) is hoping to be able to sing them… not sure if it will actually happen as I hope, but I wrote my first last night and it would be so cool because thousands of people go to his concerts and everyone listens to him on the radio – radio is the best way to reach Gasy people because so many are illiterate and almost none have power for TV etc. Erin and I really love the kids in our community but they fight and beg so much, again, it's their culture. There are a lot of vacant and decaying cement buildings in Sakaramy because it used to be mostly French, I would love to start up some sort of music resource center for the kids and a kind of youth development center where they can hang out when it's raining or too hot or there's too many mosquitoes outside. (There is a great model of one in Cville!) Again, I cannot really start any of these projects for a few months, but please think about them and let me know any ideas you have, thank you! Lastly, soccer and music being the biggest two things here, it would be my dream to have an AIDS/Malaria awareness raising festival with soccer and music. There are a lot of wealthy vahaza (white folks from France etc.) in Diego so I'm hoping we could charge them to come, give out free AIDS testing, mosquito nets etc to the Gasy and use the money to help with some kind of safe house for the very young commercial sex workers. There are a few really cool orphanage/girls home type places in Tana and I haven't found one here yet, so I would like to help or help start one – or even just plant the idea because these wishes of mine may be much more than I can do in 2 years in this laid-back red island. Please let me know any idea you have, thank you so much!
Finally, a very simple and easy idea you can directly help with for almost free! Whenever you go to a fast food restaurant and get a free toy, please send the toys to me here or to my mom to send me and it can be the beginning of something for the kids to play with to keep them out of the street. Thank you so much! I love and miss y’all so much! I hope everything is going great back there for you! Have a very HAPPY HOLIDAY season and know you're in my thoughts and prayers.
Please keep in touch!
xoxo,
Erin
