Greetings new Agriculture stage! I hope you’re enjoying your last month in the States and eating as much fast food as you can (trust me, you’re going to miss it). I know someone else from my Stage already posted a very detailed blog post about packing, but I thought I would put in my two cents as well. If I could repack for my service, here is what I would pack.

Clothes:
Anything that you think is “Peace Corps,” don’t pack, pack what makes you feel comfortable…to an extent.
Stay away from white. It will never be the same color after handwashing.

Rain coat/wind breaker
Sweatshirts – 2
Jip-up jacket – 1
Jeans – 3 (you can buy jeans in country but they will never fit quite right or be the style you want)
Long sleeve shirts – 2
Short sleeve shirts – 4
Tank tops – 2 or 3
Sweatpants – 2 (lounging clothes are my favorite when I want a day of just watching tv or movies)
Underwear – at least 20
Swim suit – 1
Professional outfit for meetings or an event (business pants and nice shirt) – 2
Socks – 10
Nice outfit/dress for Swearing In – 1 or 2

Shoes:
Hiking/running shoes – 1
Close-toed shoes for business occasions – 1
Sandals/Chacos – 1

Necessities:
Shampoo and conditioner – biggest bottle you can find
Toothbrush
Toothpaste – whatever you use, probably 3 tubes
Towel and wash clothes
Any facial washes or products that you use
Waxed floss!!!

For the girls:
Tampons and pantyliners to get you though two months training, after that PC will provide you with everything
Sports bras – at least 2
Regular bras – at least 3
A pack of shavers

Electronics:
Computer
Harddrive (the larger the better, the amount of media in this country is overwhelming)
Kindle (don’t worry about buying books, there is a huge file going around with thousands of unlocked books)
Camera
Unlocked Iphone (clutch for affordable internet plans at site)
Rechargeable batteries and charger (both AA and AAA)
Ipod and speakers
Headlamp – 2 (and make sure it uses AA or AAA batteries. Those flat round ones are really hard to find here and really expensive)
2 GB or up USB flash drive – 2 (for easy transfering and when you want to print photos in country)

Random:
Sleeping bag (the winter here is colddddd)
Fitted bed sheets (double)
Pens (they sort of suck here)
Lined paper or spiral notebooks for notes and such (its only grid paper here)
Gift for homestay family (I would recommend a photo album and you can put photos in it from your homestay)
Drawstring bag for shopping in your market and easily watchable in case of pickpockets – 2 (1 for backup when it breaks)
Crystal lite packets
Nalgene bottle
Photos to hang around your house
Journal to note your adventures
Credit card or debit card (you can keep them in the PC safe in Tana but you might want some American funds for vacations and when you’re in a crunch)

If you have room:
A favorite pillow – the pillows here are not the best
Powdered cheese for mac and cheese (trust me you will thank me at site)
Any food you can fit for when you get to site
A hardcover book or two for when you are stuck on a brousse and don’t want to parade your Kindle or other electronics around
Something from home for your new home
Notecards for language studying

I don’t think I’m forgetting anything but if I do, I’ll update the post. Congrats on being assigned Madagascar trainees! This country is like none other and you will have great memories here.

And don’t forget to join the FB group. Me and other current volunteers will be giving advice and it is a great place for you to meet your stagemates.

See you in 2 months and safe travels!

Here’s a few things that I have become surprisingly good at while in country…

 

Completely bathing with a gallon of water (at most).

Somehow finagling a plastic bag out of every seller in market so I have them for home

The walk away method when I clothes shop. Works every time…always buy things for the price I want.

Getting away with wearing the same pair of pants for the entire week.  Clothes washing is hard work, and my clothes washer only comes once a week.

Calling someone’s bluff on prices in a market. I may be white, but I know that those onions are a quarter of that price.

Budgeting. I can live off of half of my living allowance comfortable, and saving the rest (for the time being)

Using my savings and the rest of my monthly allowance on clothes and vazaha food in Fianar. Um, who says no to pizza…ever?

Eavesdropping. Oh yea, I can both hear and understand you.

Making people on my taxi brousses laugh with just one sentence…so who has the cooked sweet potatoes, I’m hungry.

Bladder control. My kabone is one of maybe 10 in my village.

Walking and not falling. However I still do trip all the time and walk into walls and corners.

Getting out of the way of cows. They’re vicious. One of the volunteers in country got mauled by one because she didn’t move fast enough.

Finding shortcuts and back ways to and from my house. I would prefer to not walk through taoka market every day on my way a meeting or my destination. There’s only so much drunkenness you can handle.

Healing myself of my sicknesses without calling the doctors. Every week, something different, but a concoction of medicine from my kit and I’m good as new…until the next one hits. Except for this foot thing, what the heck. 11 months and it just relocates.

Cooking with charcoal. And effectively using it too. My neighbors are very impressed I cook with charcoal. Thank you, thank you very much.

Using my hands to convey a sentence or an idea. By far, explaining what the FBI does and what happened on September 11th have been the most used hand gestures since in country.

December 8, 2012 marked International Volunteer Day (it feels like just about everything has their own day to celebrate). However, Volunteer Day is obviously near and dear to PCVs’ hearts. After all, we are giving up 2 years of family, friends, constant internet, unlimited texting, first world luxuries, and most importantly Taco Bell (sorry had to put that plug in there of my favorite fast food). The two main cities of Antananarivo and Fianarantsoa hosted events for IVD; I helped plan Fianar’s festivities with my PCVL Sally. We visited the City Hall and got permission to paint a mural on the side of a CEG (Elementary school) in Fianar near the market promoting environment protection focusing on the National Parks in our area. We visited nearly every non-profit organization and asked for assistance with a morning trash clean up.

The day of the event, Sally and I were both concerned things were going to go terribly wrong. Things in this country NEVER go as planned; something always comes up or something always happens. The event was scheduled to start at 8am, but Malagasy lifestyle, people started showing up around 845. We were content with the turn out until we turned around and we just saw a mob of school children coming our way, rakes, brooms, and shovels in hand. The CEG decided if we were going to paint a mural on their wall, they were going to have their children participate with the clean up.

News reporters and radio hosts turned up for the event and Peace Corps and Tea and Talk (the incredibly talented, smart, and mahay speaking University students) got some great publicity. We drew a crowd of curious passerbys who were interested in Environment protection and conservation, WINNING! And we had many ask if they could assist with the clean up and the mural because they actually wanted to help. DOUBLE WINNING!

 

(it reads “A clean village, a healthy environment”)

 

The mural is still not quite complete, we hope to finish it in the New Year, but with Volunteers and Malagasy students going on vacation and the holidays, we knew we would have to put the finishing touches on hold. I hope we can continue the interest in keeping the town clean and keeping the environment safe. And I hope that I can continue with the tradition and put on an event next year when I’ll be the zoky volunteer in the region.

 

After celebrating Thanksgiving with 37 other Peace Corps Volunteers and eating American inspired dishes (including turkey, chicken, mashed potatoes, cornbread, stuffing, guac, macaroni and cheese), some volunteers and I took a quick trip down to the National Park of Andringitra. Andringitra is off the beaten path. It involved two taxi brousses and a two and a half hour walk from the nearest village (an hour and a half to the camping grounds outside of Andringitra and then another hour to the village of Morarano that houses the offices for Andringitra Park.) Only hardcore backpackers and hikers take the time to travel to Andringitra and do the three day hike to Pic Boby, the highest peak in Madagascar.

First hour of the hike I had an asthma attack. But I calmed down, took deep breaths, and pushed through it. All I was thinking for the first day of hiking was “Heck no! I already paid for this, I will be hiking.” Scenically, it was one of the best experiences. The scenery changed from standard Betsileo of terraced rice fields, to a field of long flowing grass, endless rolling rock mountains, the “moon” (it was called such in Malagasy and really did look like the craters of the moon), “The Land Before Time” valley, a field of daisies, and so on. It was a wide range of scenery and absolutely breathtaking.

We camped at two different base camps throughout the trek, and bonded over how rude, demeaning, and tricky our guide was. “You can’t carry that because you’re a woman; you’re not strong enough”; “You know you really should have made a reservation”; “I’M the guide, I WILL tell YOU if we can make it”; “You’re too weak, you can’t make the journey” just to name a few. We fit four people in a two person tent the first night, until it got so hot and stuffy that we said “screw it” and figured out another plan.

After more than 5000 steps, a day and a half of hiking, and countless thoughts of “oh if I fall this is going to suck,” we reached the top of Pic Boby. I have never been so excited and yet so exhausted. Of course our guide instead of congratulating us for overcoming this feat mentioned that we should have made it to the top an hour and a half ago, but we didn’t care. Most travelers take 72 hours to climb to the top, we did it in just under 35. I would say that’s a pretty mazoto of us. So take that condescending guide!

All in all, it was an extremely rewarding experience; I wouldn’t classify it as fun because the entire time I was cursing the choice to hike it. But rewarding.

The view from the top. Pic Boby is in the upper left corner with the stack of rocks.

Getting ready to go out for dinner on Thanksgiving weekend.

I’ve been in country for nearly 10 months now, and it has flown by. I would be lying if I said life wasn’t difficult and frustrating (gee haven’t heard that before in any of my posts, have you?), and I have learned so much about myself. Sounds really cliché doesn’t it, but it’s completely true.
I entered in the Peace Corps as a Small Business Volunteer (official name, Community Economic Development Volunteer aka CED). I had this mindset that I would drastically improve life in my community, both though living standards and through knowledge transfer. But, and I cannot say it better than a book I read before coming to this country, Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen,

it seemed like only yesterday we arrived secretly convinced we were going to change everything and solve all problems. Well, this country is pretty much the same. The volunteers end up having this raw and vulnerable look in their eyes.

The poverty I have seen in this country is heartbreaking. And the will to want to help change their way of life is overwhelming. But, even if the people acknowledge their poverty and the need to change, actually getting them to do so is difficult. They admit they need to change, but have such an easy going lifestyle that, well to be honest, don’t actually change one bit.

My work at site is mainly IT work. Website development, keyboarding classes, and basic computer operating classes. I work with a very talented painter who I have commissioned to do some amazing work for other fikambananas (organizations) and he is the ‘unofficial’ Peace Corps painter. You give him a picture, he can and will paint it. However, no matter how much I explain to him the importance of giving receipts either with quotes or saying the client has paid, he refuses to do it unless specifically requested. He doesn’t want to build a boutique on the side of the road, which I have recommended many times, but then is disappointed with lack of customers because no one knows of his work or that he works out of his house.

Apart from that, I am malalaka (free). My village is fairly large, but no matter how much pestering and annoying I do, no one jumps to ask me for help. I get the daily, “give me money” or “you’re here because you have money”. So I have taken more of a supporting/administrative roll as a volunteer. You need a logo created for your fikambanana to be produced and placed on labels, you got it. I help with program development (like International Volunteer Day, which was today, and a blog will be posted soon regarding the festivities), Panel discussions (what is Peace Corps and what is our goal), a step-in leader for English Club and other planned events or preperations when a volunteer is otherwise engaged and needs help.

I joked just today with another PCV that I’m more of a Public Relations Volunteer. Most of the Malagasy Fianar community and region know me as ‘the Peace Corps Volunteer’. I have gone to so many meetings with Lehibes (important people) these past few months that I get yelled at on Market Days, “Hey Peace Corps!” rather than “Look, Vazaha!” I’ve become really knowledgeable of Peace Corps Policy and Rules and volunteers tend to text me when they have questions. [side note: this is ironic due to the fact that I took an unauthorized vacation this past month, to a place with no phone network, a security check took place and I couldn’t be reached, and I got caught. And that is something I’ll always be apologetic for because I knew it was wrong before I went, and did it anyways. I’m truly am sorry PC staff that may be reading this right now. It was stupid and irresponsible.]

So as of today, I have decided my name is Christina ‘Mpanampy’ Marie Nielsen aka Christina ‘the Helper’ Marie Nielsen. Pretty fitting I think, pretty fitting.

This blog has been MONTHS in the making. I know all my friends and family want to see my house and where I live. To be honest, I was sort of a procrastinator. I painted half of my house, got lazy and then stopped. I really didn’t want to post pictures of something half finished so I decided to crack down this past week and complete what I like to call my humble living situation. In all seriousness, my house is considered quite posh by Peace Corps standards. I have four huge rooms including my kitchen, one in which I had absolutely no idea what to do with until last month. So I did what any other volunteer would do, make a walk-in closet. Yes, my shopping problem has not stopped because I moved and now live in Madagascar. Quite the opposite actually. Brand names and vintage clothes for cheap?! I like to label myself as a frippe-oholic.

Enjoy the pictures. You may see something you gave me before I left the States, sent here in a care packaged, or a picture of us hanging around the house. And don’t forget to take a second to see my little princess of a dog, Parasy. She makes an appearance too!

 

Oh hey there Parasy!

My bedroom is the door to the right, and my closet inside that room to the left.

my kichen complete with charcoal for cooking, and of course a chicken curtain.

the walk in closet…duh. :)

 

 

Staying contact with friends in this country is tough. There are three service providers: Airtel, Telma, and Orange. Each has a text plan, which allows you to text people, but within the same carrier only, for a reduced price. 100 or 120 ariary per text message is the rate without the plan, 300 to 400 ariary if you send a message abroad.

On occasion, volunteers will spend the 700 ariary to get 70 text messages to text their friends in country. But some friends don’t have your service. One of my best friends in country has Orange and another has Airtel. My main provider is Telma. So keeping in contact is hard, and expensive to say the least.

The other day, I spent money on a text plan, but was promptly informed by my phone (you know those Nokia phones you had BEFORE flip phones) that I needed to make room because tsy ampy toerana (not enough room) to receive messages. So I started flipping through messages to see what I could delete. I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t want to delete any of them.

When my friends and I use some of our coveted credit to text each other, it tends to be really funny messages. Ones that will make you roll on the floor laughing. So enjoy what you read below and I hope you get a mental look into the mind of us Peace Corps Volunteers. And please keep in mind, we have been in country for nearly a year or more, we have gotten awkward, weird, just not normal. If you see one
of your texts here, feel privileged, you made the list of best texts ever!

All is good! Haha so this morning I woke up myself by saying “misy
miala” out loud while I was dreaming.
(Misy miala is what you say in a
taxi brousse when you have reached your destination. It essentially
means, I need to get out)

Rockin out to one direction on my brousse right now.

Stop stressin. Take a shower. Eat more yogurt. U must do one of the 3
(this person was sitting 5 feet from me)

Ok I think part of the reason I don’t find Malagasy men attractive is because they all have really high cheek bones, right? Not western version of masculine. Yeah?

Efa harassed by tena mamo lehilahy.

Fell4 oldest trick in book omaly. Was on brousse frm ambanivohitra n
guy askd me 2beep his phone bc he couldn’t find it. I did. It was in
his pocket, now he has my#. (omaly=yesterday,
ambanivohitra=countryside, beep=call, wait a ring, and hang up)

The yogurt place is out of big bottles. Im devastated, I ho entana 2
glasses n will prb come back for another 2 later(ho entana=take to
go)

Ok so im watching the x factor us & demi lovato is talkin about her
and niall from one direction (my fave blonde one!!) kinda dating…I
really want to punch her & got crazy jealous. I think this means I
have an honest problem to god problem. I JUST LOVE NIALL SO MUCH!

Im literally depressed about it haha. Also Im dressing up as him for VAC.

No, but it is possible that u kill him bc he smothers u. I guess he wont b joining us tmw then?

I cant stop watching so you think you can dance. You have ruined me.

Hahaha, well id try to smuggle you out but my suitcase is all full.

Im the most obnoxious of music snobs! I haven’t dated a girl yet who hasn’t told me im a dick when it comes to music.

Whenever they talk about the choreographer Tyce DiOrio on SYTYCD I think theyre saying tastey oreo.

Dude! Caught a ride with a private car, he might even take me straight to your town! Yay for hitchhiking!

Dude awesome. That is so baller! U will def be the only pcv with a walk in closet!

Someone needs to call the cops. I just murdered your kabone.

Sorry im pooping and given the rarity of this occasion, im taking advantage of it

I just ate an orange pepper. Mouth will never be the same. Omg

He carried his puppy lik a celeb n bought it bottled water. (unheard
of in Mada; I get laughed at when I pick Parasy up)

Hey Christina, just checkin on ur ass. Hope ur adoptive son is well. Lol jk.

Um…my neighbors just gave me a live small lobster…how do I cook it??
>(response to text) maybe I’ll keep it as a pet. Its kinda cute.

And I stole stuff from tits who stole stuff from tara who I assume stole stuff from you, so thank you in advance for this upcoming horribly unproductive week :p

Hope you smiled at least once during that blog post. And updated countdown, 35 days until Katherine comes to visit and 122 days until
I’m Stateside.

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.

Or in English, Alakamisy is such a badass. (credit to blog title goes to my sitemate Liz)

English club is starting back up. It sort of fell apart when Savanna left. But a new education volunteer has arrived and she very much excited to start it up again. We have tried two weeks to mandray olona or receive people for our English Club classes. However, with the rainstorms we have had lately, our students have not shown up. That’s how life works here. If there is rain, a hint of rain, or the looks like there is going to be rain, nothing gets done. It’s one of those hide in your house days. Most days, I don’t complain. Especially with the rain that we had last night. Hail, constant booming thunder, and reoccurring lightning that made it seem like it was day out when in fact it was 9pm. I pretty positive my house got struck by lightning. That’s the only way I can explain the sparks coming out of my converter box and the buzzing sound as my house shook. If not, then maybe I need to be placed on some meds.

Anyways, back to the story. Liz and I have gone to the Commune building two weeks in a row in hope the students that really want to learn English will show up regardless of the prediction of rain. A little too much to ask. Once again, tsy tonga ny mpianatra. We decided to wait around a little, make our faces known so any one that didn’t know us already would see us there.

Bone, my unofficial counterpart, was playing Bol, sort of like Botche Ball if you ask me, came up to us and said we weren’t allowed to wait in my office. The Mayor is building an office on the bottom level of the Commune for me so I have some place to talk to people and make myself seen. He actually has conconcoted a layout that will include my office, a small class room, and then a room where Liz and I are going to place the books and computers we have been able to start for a project. The office is not even remotely done yet, but we were going to start having people come to it to sort of push the building process along.

“You can’t receive people in your office today,” Bone says.

“Oh, because it’s not ready yet,” I answered.

“No,” Bone’s voice gets really low, “there’s Dahalo in there.”

Dahalo is tribe of people in Madagascar who turn to violence for most circumstances. It’s the closest thing to a gang we have in Madagascar. The capture of the leader results in a cash reward of equivalent to 5 million US dollars, or something ridiculous around there, which in the States is a lot, but in this country, it’s like infinity. $1.50 for wages per person a day, $5 million reward. That will provide money for three lifetimes or more here.

So what I’m trying to say, my village of Alakamisy is a badass. End of story.

This blog has no apparent purpose, but I haven’t updated friends in a while so I thought I would post what I have been up to.

Given the perfect timing of my health, it should be no shock to anyone I was sick on Halloween and sick for VAC (Volunteer Advisory Committee, and a reason for all volunteers in a region to get together have a short meeting about PC policies, but mainly to just enjoy each others company). We timed VAC so we could have a Halloween Party…I was going to be Taylor Swift. Never happened :(. Doctors say I had food poisoning, but I call BS. Still feeling off my game even to today.

After VAC I received business days to travel down to Anja and talk to the President about possibly selling my painter’s paintings in their boutique. He paints some pretty awesome ringtail lemurs, the lemurs that inhabit Anja Park. And tourists are suckers for souvineers of lemurs they see in Madagascar.

Tara and I were able to catch a private car down to Ambalavao, a large city a little bit away from Anja. But we had to catch a bruisse the rest of the way. Anja is an extremelyyyy small town, maybe population 2000, so maybe four brousses leave from Ambalavao a day. And you don’t leave until it fills up. I’m used to long waits for taxi brousses to leave, this wasn’t going to be much different.

About two hours after we arrived, the brousse finally started up to leave. However, with small towns, everyone knows eachother, and relationships form between passengers and taxi brousse drivers. One of the passengers decided she was going to have to brousse stop four times at different stops in Ambalavao for charcoal. And then we had to get gas. But when the driver tried to start the brousse again, and with our luck, no go. This isn’t unheard of; most put the car in neutral, have some men push the car until it starts rolling down a slope and then the driver tries to start the engine again. A little unnerving when I first got into country, but now, don’t even batt my eyes. This trick didn’t work but after enlisting a random passerby, and little bit of tapping there and clanging here, the car finally started and we were on our way.

Anja is an amazing site. The park is beautiful (well what I saw from the boundaries), the guides are reaally sweet, and I saw lemurs and their babies hopping around even before the entrance to the park. I am very excited to bring my sister to the Park when she visits in December.

And USA visit countdown officially started, 5 months!!!!