Monday, April 30, 2012

yup I am still alive!


April 30, 2012
A long time without writing

HELLO!
I know it has been a very long time since I have written a real post on here!
Life here on St. Marie as a Peace Corps volunteer is going well. I’m in the 3rd week of the last trimester here, we have school all of May, most of June (except for a few days at the end when there is a break to celebrate Madagascar’s independence day) and then 2 weeks in July and then I will have officially been a teacher for one year and have been here in Mada for a year! How the time has flown. Here is a list of things that have been going on in my life:
  1. I have figured out that I really like to put things into lists. I don’t know how or why this started but it does make being a teacher a bit easier! Yay for lists J
  2. I had to buy a new phone two weeks ago. Why you might ask? Here is the sad but true story; I went on my weekly visit to the beach, which is about a 45 min bike ride from my house. When I left my house it was sunny, hot and beautiful, a perfect day to go lay on the beach with a book. I ride my bike there, get my towel, book and snacks set up, walk into the water and then it starts to rain. No big deal a little rain never stopped me from swimming and enjoying the beach. I made sure there was no lightning and continued to swim. Then out of nowhere the nice drizzle of rain turned into a downpour. I got out of the water and stood under a palm tree with all my stuff for 20 mins. After the 20 mins it was still pouring and I made the decision to just go home. I had wrapped my phone in my shirt and shorts while I was swimming but now that I was going to ride I needed to wear them, I carefully took my phone and put it into my backpack and covered it with my towel and book. I rode home in the pouring rain (I have pictures of myself that I took as soon as I got home, I was soaked) got to my house opened my backpack to discover my phone sitting in the bottom of the bag in a puddle L I completely fried my phone. I now carry my phone around in a zip lock baggie just incase there is a freak rainstorm.
  3. I have become rather resourceful here; I have always been (in my very humble opinion) pretty good at making due with what I had and using what is on hand to get a job done. Example: No clean cups? I would use a jar or better still my hands…yeah I have on occasion drank water out of my hands instead of washing a cup, I only tell this to you to point out that I am a problem solver. So here in Mada I have gotten even craftier in my problem solving abilities. I was at a hotel recently, where there was a toilet. This toilet kept running, the water in the back part kept trickling in and it was starting to annoy me. So I took the lid off the tank and attempted to move the plunger thing up so that the water would stop… bad plan, it broke! Now I had the plunger in one hand and the tank of the toilet filling with water, I knew that if I didn’t stop the water it would over flow. Well, using my super skills I was able to reattach (kinda) the plunger and get the water to stop by rigging up a kind of nail/lever thing with my bobby pin and hair tie. My bobby pin and hair tie are now a permeate fixture in a random hotel here in Mada!
  4. I had a few friends come and visit me over Easter vacation and with them I was able to discover the fine eateries here on St. Marie. I always felt weird going to a restaurant by myself but  with my friends I was able to find all good places. The best one that we discovered was a pizza place called mama santa pizza. Since discovering this place I have eaten there 4 times. Last week as I was walking to order my pizza I passes a French guy who works at the French school here and he called me over to talk. We talked for a bit and then he asked where I was going, I told him “to get pizza”. His response was “ An American girl eating pizza for dinner, that’s kinda cliché” haha it is nice to know that the good people in France know our  American love for pizza!

Well those are all the stories I have for now! I hope that life in the states is going wonderfully and that the weather is starting to warm up! Happy almost May!

Peace, Love and it is almost whale season here!

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