Last few days home

I leave for DC on Monday morning. All of a sudden the reality of Madagascar set in. This week was about getting things ready, making trips to various stores for various necessities, sorting out finances, saying goodbyes, finishing work and FINALLY seeing the movie "Madagascar". This was largely out of peer pressure, as I would tell someone what I am doing with the Peace Corps and the common reply being "Have you seen the feature animated motion picture "Madagascar" where four pampered animals from New York Central Zoo escape and find themselves in Madagascar under the scrutiny of Lemurs?" Well, I can now say yes, yes I have. And in fact, that movie was neither entertaining nor educational, but thank you for asking. The bitterness should be a good indicator of how often this question arises. So that's one facet I won't miss in a few days. I've been trying to get stuff aligned, organized, and mentally prepared for Madagascar, but let's face it, how ready for this can I be? The highlight of my day being a successful packing job (which is immaculate) hardly prepares me for whats about to happen. I'm about to become completely knowledgeless, so we shall see how much of a sponge I can be in the 10 weeks of training before I save Madagascar. Anyways, not much to report in the quiet before the storm, I just keep searching the news and crossing my fingers to make sure there are no new political coups happening that would make Peace Corps can the project. And it seems to be stable at the moment. Yes, Madagascar. Politically stable, American friendly Madagascar. One last thing, in my last post I told a few lies. 1) my training won't actually be in Tana, but a village of about 10,000 outside of Tana. 2) Under the impression that I was going to be in Tana, I provided everyone with a false address. The address given was to the central happenings of Peace Corps, but my real address can be found in the column on the right titled "wish list" where letters can gladly be received. This is likely the last post that will happen in the U.S., so I will keep you informed next from Africa.

Madagascar: see you in 2 weeks

I'm headed to Madagascar in less than 2 weeks. If you didn't know that I'm leaving yet, I'm terribly sorry. So here are the deets in case you are curious. I found out in the end of May that I would be headed to Madagascar with the Peace Corps as part of a Community Health Project, which came to a surprise to me, as the whole time I thought I was headed to western Africa to teach English. But I'm waaay more exited to go to Mada, M-car, or whatever slang name has the best ring to it. Community Health sounds pretty interesting to me, especially considering that I plan on going into medicine post Mada. My primary duty there will tentatively be to improve the nutrition and health of young mothers and children, but this is by no means my only role in M-car, as it will likely change and I will pick up a second project. But before I save the world, theres some bureaucracy stuff that needs to be done. On Monday July the 19th I fly out to Washington DC for a day-ish for a process they call staging. What happens here is I will meet other PCVs (peace corps volunteers) headed to M-ASCAR(that's a catchy one!) and we get a very rough outline about what we are expected to do, fill out lots of paperwork, sign life insurance policies, take vaccines, malaria pills, all trivial things.. The following day we all get on a plane headed directly to Jo'burg, South Africa, which is a leisurely 17hr flight. From there, the following day we fly to Antananarivo, Madagascar. It's the capital city, but lets call it Tana from now on. Tana will be my home for the 10 weeks following during the training stage. There I will be living with a host family and some other trainees, with days filled by learning Malagasy, the language of M-car, Culture, Health Training and so on. That about has you caught up with my happenings, and I will try to keep this thing up, but I don't really know about my internet reliability, so we shall see what happens. While internet is no guarantee, snail mail is how all the cool people keep in touch in M-ASCAR, so if you would like to say hey, during my training for the first 10 weeks I can be reached at:


Taylor Rutledge, PCT Peace Corps
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 12091
Poste Zoom Ankorondrano
101 Antananarivo
Madagascar

And in the case you were wondering what Madagascar and Africa is like, Karl Wolfe provides a very accurate documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BkVbgy0jf4