I don’t know how, but the Malagasy people tend to know key pieces of US information before me. The Hurricane that hit New York, the movies that got bad reviews, heck, I barely beat some of my villagers to finding out there might have been a tsunami in Hawaii. Normally it’s something that I just laugh off and ask who their source is. However, when it came to the Presidential Election, the Malagasy people would not, repeat would not, find out before me who was elected or reelected.

I don’t have a TV or a radio at my house, so I turned to my handy dandy IPhone. Internet plans here are somewhat expensive for such a small amount of data, but again, Presidential Election, worth it. I logged onto twitter and starting at 5am, continuously refreshed my feed. If my phone could talk, it probably would yell at me, “Stop making me work so hard! I don’t even load everything completely before you make me start all over.” Oops, sorry phone. A lot of people in the States, my friends in particular, don’t understand the use of Twitter, or the terminology of twitter for that matter. However, if Twitter didn’t exist, I would be lost. That’s how I keep up to date on news, celebrity gossip, release dates of authors’ books, etc in this country.

My fellow and probably one of my best friends in country, Amy, had the same idea, so we enjoyed the company together, well with at a 350km distance. I’m not going to even begin to describe how much anxiety I was feeling, thousands of miles away from the States. All of my friends, well all of PC Madagascar, wanted Obama to be reelected, but when the polls started closing, and East Coast states were going to Romney, anxiety was high.

But…..WEST COAST IS THE BEST COAST, as one of my best friends Melissa says all the time. California represent! And while I don’t know exactly what state officially won Obama the reelection, I would like to believe California and its 55 electoral votes helped secure some of the last needed 270 votes.  If you couldn’t hear around 140 volunteers in Madagascar in the States screaming for joy when news was released, rest assured there definitely was noise.

So here’s to President Obama. Thanks for everything you have done for us Peace Corps Volunteers worldwide this past term and here is to four more.