le travail commence

I have now been in Fianarantsoa for almost a week. The internet has apparently not been working for over a week, but just started back up today, so I'll try to describe the events of the past week in one hopefully at least somewhat concise post. I have no idea if the internet will be sufficiently fast for me to post pictures, but I'll try my best!

Friday: The original plan was for me to take a taxi-brousse from Tana to Fianar, leaving in the morning. However, Mark (my boss who's last day is today...) and Karen (his wife who heads up the Save the Old City project and will be here another year) sent their vehicle to Tana to bring a British volunteer who injured his finger and 2 of his friends to the hospital there. Apparently the medical facilities in Fianar aren't sufficient to handle a broken finger... When they were done at the hospital, they picked me up at the office, and we were out of town by 2PM. The three of them were very nice, and quite energetic. They're volunteers for a program with the acronym SKIP (i forget what that stands for), and they spend a month both teaching children about health, sanitation, and nutrition (kind of a day camp), and building/restoring areas of the Old City market. The driver, Christian, seemed glad to get someone in the car who spoke French. Despite not being that far distance wise, it takes a good 8 or 9 hours to drive between Tana and Fianarantsoa. The road is very narrow, and full of curves, so you can never go that fast. We stopped for the night and stayed at a good hotel (that was super cheap), had a good meal, and made it to Fianar by about noon on Saturday.

Saturday: Karen met me at the Old City, and walked me up to my place. I'm essentially with a host family in that I have a room in their house. It has a separate entrance and everything though, so it's more like an apartment. Here are some pictures: (if there are no pictures, i'll post them later from an internet café)

The view from my porch, which is sunny in the afternoon is lovely.

There is a little café just below me (all part of the same building), where Mariette and Richard serve wonderful, cheap food, and the best juice I've ever had (Chinese guava, fresh made). In the evening, Mark and Karen invited me to their beautiful house to have dinner with them and some of their French friends. All of the talk about Malagasy politics went pretty much over my head, but I'd imagine it will make sense at some point.

Sunday-Tuesday:
In the morning, Sophie (my upstairs neighbor, who is Malagasy and works for Karen's Project to Save the Old City (PSVV - Projet de Sauvegard de la Veille Ville), took me into town to see the market area, where she advised me to buy at hat for the sunny weather along the ocean. The market area is crowded, and full of people selling just about anything. All of the meat vendors have meat just hanging open air for people to choose, and there's a big block where they chop it up according to what people want. Live chickens, ducks, and turkeys too.
In the afternoon I met Mark to start the journey to Manakara (on the east coast), where he planned to spend a day and a half meeting with various partners there to say goodbye and introduce his replacement. I tagged along and listened as he spoke of various projects with the Minister of the Environment, Forest, Water, and Tourism (I think this governmental post has changed names every year since it was created...), the Chef de la Région, the Manakara port master, some local business owners, and others. This ERI (Ecoregional Initiatives) project is gigantic!!!
We ate a lot of good fish.

Tuesday night, I had dinner at the Freudenberger's again, with 8 or 9 of the SKIPs, which was quite nice. The British SKIPs were having a lot of intercultural problems with their Malagasy counterparts, so that was much discussed. A lot of drama for not much reason, probably caused by a couple of bad apple Malagasy SKIPs.

Wednesday - Friday have been spent at the office doing a ton of background reading about the whole ERI Fianarantsoa program. I am hopefully remembering half of what I'm reading. I'm really looking forward to this weekend - I'll walk around town and get some groceries, getting a feel for the layout of the place. (Thankfully, it's not really that big - Tana was totally overwhelming) The Brits have invited me to dinner on Saturday, and karoke on Sunday, so that should be fun.