To avoid rambling, here are a few snippets of the last few weeks:

-          I was scammed out of $0.05 by a small child. It involved a rotten egg and some pretty high-quality lying.

-          IST (In Service Training) at the Peace Corps Training Center (PCTC). The PCTC is where we had our first two months in-country. It was great to see everyone from our stage and get fresh ideas!

-          Post-IST vacation to Mahajunga with a bunch of my stagemates. We hung out at the beach, ate lots of great food, bought lambas (the sarong-like things they use here). Visited another volunteer’s site and the park near his town. It was great to see another part of the country. And traveling gives such perspective. There are now things I appreciate about my community much more now than before. The converse is true too of course, but overall I think it makes me like where I am more, not less.

-          I bought a cat. Really, I bought two cats, one for my neighbor and one for me. Both boys, one a natural rat catcher, one a natural rat-friend. Guess which one I got? Not to worry though, he has since proved his worth.

-          On a related topic, I came home after two and a half weeks expecting to see rat poop everywhere. There was only a minimal amount, and (cross your fingers) there haven’t been rats in the two nights I’ve been home. No rats also means none of the nasty little buggies that live on rats. Hallelujah! They were absolutely driving me insane.

-          I bought $7 of rice from my neighbor. I’m curious to see how long it lasts; I’m guessing a long while. It’s approximately 13kg. However, it is still in its hull, which means that I will be pounding and winnowing it. I still suck at that, so I will undoubtedly lose a considerable amount to the chickens.

A note on the 13kg of rice: They are keeping most of it in their rice house, a little building on stilts to keep the rats out, and will give it to me as I need it. She even offered to dry it in the sun for me when I need it. This sounds simple, and it is, but I’m really grateful because in order to dry rice in the sun, you have to have someone guarding it from the chickens or put it really really far from the house. So no matter that I would be drying a few kilos at a time, I would still spend an entire day sitting there with a stick. For you who are wondering how they store wet rice without it molding – it has already been dried once, but before pounding it you need to dry it again (maybe not if you live in a dry region?) or else it’s hard to separate the hulls from the rice.

-          A favorite memory: being dared to climb eucalyptus trees by my 17year old neighbor when we went to get fence posts.

-          Hanging out in my neighbors’ kitchen with their kids and kids’ friends (5 boys ages 15-21). I learned that day that there is a difference between “go to bed” and “let’s go to bed.” Oops. As you can imagine, I heard about that mistake for days.

-          The little girl that used to hide from me/cry when she saw me (despite living approximately 100yds from me) fell asleep in my arms. Progress!

-          I told a friend that I want to start going around to other villages more often, but that it is hard to go by myself; not for safety reasons, but just for the social aspect. She agreed that I should go with someone, but our reasons were different. I thought it best to have someone to show the village to me, but she said that when I go to the remoter villages by myself some of the people shut their houses and run away. Essentially, I need someone to show me to the village, not the other way around. I guess it’s not just the kids who are scared of me.

-          The chicks that hatched from their nest in my roof all died from the cold the same night they were born. There were 10 of them.

-          Many times a week, if not daily, my first contact with another person is through my floor with the 4 year old boy who is under my house looking for a special kind of bug (ant lions, I believe). At first I was surprised to see his brightly colored fleece moving through the cracks in the floor. Now I just enjoy our morning conversation about how many bugs he’s found. I guess the 6-18” under my house wasn’t a good place to throw all the broken glass and rusty nails I found lying around.

-          I played soccer in Andasibe with our women’s team. We lost, but it was still good. It was really muddy, so everyone was falling. But let me tell you, there is nothing funnier than when the vazaha falls in the mud!