Sorry once again for my lackadaisicalness in posting here. I guess as I get more and more used to being here it’s harder to find things that seem interesting enough to tell everyone (and by everyone, I mean no one). But I guess that a lot has happened since last I wrote. The biggest news is that I will not be returning to Vohipeno for my second year of Peace Corps service. I will be moving to the capitol of Madagascar, Antananarivo, to work with the Malagasy Ministry of Education on a few different programs. The big one will be aiding in implementing a new national curriculum which will introduce English classes at the elementary school level. I’m really excited to be doing this job, although I’ll really miss Vohipeno. For about five months now there has been the prospect of this job and until about a week ago I still didn’t know if it was actually going to happen. This is the way things work here. Nothing is ever really for sure until it happens. So, even though I’m writing about it now, I’m not counting my chickens. I taught the phrase “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” To my adult class. They all understood that one pretty quickly. I also tried to teach them, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” It took them a really long time to get it and when they did, one of the guys raised his hand and said, “Are you calling me an old dog?” actually yes, that’s exactly what I was getting at.

I don’t know a whole lot about this position in Tana. Since it’s all been so up in the air I haven’t asked too many questions. I’m saving all that (in typical Malagasy fashion) for when I actually start the job. I know that at least one of the people I’ll be working with is lots of fun. She’s the lady that I did the teacher training with last October…I think I wrote about her a while back. Very funny old Gasy lady, that one is.

So, my big task now is going to Vohipeno and telling everyone that I won’t be coming back. That’s gonna be a long couple days of awkwardness. The thing is, I just took 30 students and 5 teachers from Vohipeno on a big field trip to a national park, and everyone had a really good time. It made a lot of people warm up to me a lot and I’m afraid now people will feel abandoned and just generally pissed off. Sorry folks. You should’ve been nicer to me while you had me. Seriously though, while there are certainly nouns (people, places and things) in Vohipeno that I will be perfectly happy to get away from there are a lot of things that I’ll miss. I’m sure that at least once in a great while I’ll have happy thoughts about my 6th graders who know how to piss me off, but do so mainly in attempting to make me laugh which they often do successfully. I’ll miss getting asked when my “happy birthday” is by my best high school student. He also likes to ask me for my “number phone.” A few times I had students over for dinner at my house. I will miss how they always pretended to love the food and would eat tons of it, but I could always tell that they were completely freaked out by it…(Malagasy people are afraid of things that have flavor.) I will miss a certain drunk someone. He may have been loud, he may have been belligerent, he may have even been a little bit psychotic, but I’ll be darned, he sure liked English! There are also those things, that, whether I like it or not, I’ll be able to experience in all sorts of places outside of Vohipeno. Dried fish, for example; it’s hard to imagine going anywhere in Madagascar without getting a healthy smell, taste, or touch of them. But dried fish or none, I got a year left here, and I’m feeling pretty positive about it.