Its been quite the ride since i last updated. Moving out of my village, going on vacation to southern madagascar for christmas and new years, going to my mid service conference, and moving to the beautiful Diego-Suarez, with an ocean view from my third story apartment.
There are many things about Diego that makes it seem like I’m in a completely different country. For starters it’s a tourist city, on the coast, thus making it a much livelier place in general than the good ol’ Lake Alaotra region. But more amazingly, it’s a clean city with things like stop signs, ice cream stores, pizza places and not a single, simple, gasy hotely (hole in the wall restaurant that serves rice) in sight. I’m training myself to not be shocked by the groups of vazaha all over town (mostly old French men with young gasy girlfriends) and to not gape at the tour buses of elderly people coming into port from their cruise ships. Apparently a ship docks every Sunday evening and a large crowd gathers to watch them roll in (even in a city like Diego, there’s not much going on, on Sunday afternoons). And when I go for my morning run, not a single person points, laughs, or mimics me running by. They don’t even seem to notice or care, mostly because there are groups of young people running also, an unheard of concept in my old town.
I have two jobs at my new home. First, is as the Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (PCVL) for the northern regions. I will be working with Peace Corps to help run the regional office and transit house for volunteers, as well as working on site development, helping with trainings and just doing general coordination work for PC. My second job is with the NGO, PSI (population services international). I am still working on developing my actual work plan with them, but right now I am observing all of their education programs relating to reproductive health and HIV/STI prevention for youth and sex workers, as a general orientation to their programs.
It’s through these interactions and observations that I am quickly realizing just how different life is here. For starters, the dialect is very different, more laid back with lots of French mixed in with the Malagasy. Luckily, even when I don’t understand them, they still understand my official Malagasy and usually can help me figure out what’s being said through a mixture of official gasy, French and sometimes even English. The staff at PSI are all amazing, in so many ways. They are all so good at what they do, with these great positive attitudes, and they instantly welcomed me to the team and seem genuinely excited to have a new PC volunteer working with them. We made a program for me to do observations of the Family planning educators, the youth peer educators, and the sex worker peer educator programs over the course of the next couple weeks. At the end of it, they want me to give them feedback about what I saw and where they can make improvements. From the very first one I observed though, I was so far beyond impressed that I don’t even know what I can say at the end of it. I went with a couple women to give small group sensibilizations to women at their homes and in their communities. These women approached strangers with confidence and humor and every time gathered a small crowd of women who asked great questions about rumors and concerns they had about family planning options. The educators were knowledgeable and weren’t fazed by anything, even drunken men interrupting the conversation. They put the focus on getting women to use long term birth control methods, either the implant (good for 3 years) or an IUD (good for 12 years). PSI offers these at their private clinics, Top Reseau, for only 1500Ar (less than $1). In Ambohitsilaozana, women were pretty shy about talking about sex and were extremely hesitant to use even BC pills or the injection, and I don’t think I ever met a woman with one of the long term methods. I have already met 2 women who got IUDs after talking to one of the health educators and one of the women we talked to on the first day called us in the afternoon to go with her to get an implant.
I just found myself watching the interaction and thinking that the women here are so awesome. They want the information, and want to talk about it, and PSI is offering this really great peer educator system to provide them with that service. I am going to have to think long and hard about how I can be useful to programs that are already running so well, but I am really excited to work and learn from them and hopefully provide them with some worthwhile free labor.
And while Diego is a city, it also has a town feel, and I am already finding myself running into people daily and meeting friends. It helps that there have been many volunteers here in the past, because I am inheriting some really cool friends of former volunteers.
I have been very busy already, which is a strange adjustment from life at site in my village, but I am very excited for the year to come here in Diego.
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