Akory aby e!

Hey everyone! 'Scar update.

We moved in with our fams on Thursday, and they're pretty sweet. My house is just down the street from Ankoba Beach, like you step outside and smell the sweet ocean breeze...ahhh yes. Beauteous. There's a wooden gate that you open up to all these wooden shacks with chickens and dogs running around and a bunch of little kids and people doing their laundry - all my aunts and cousins and various extended family, I guess. Then you walk past all this and right up to my house which is pretty nice. It's a two-story house with real walls and a roof and tiled floors and all that. But it's kinda weird cause my bed is on the first floor, a.k.a. the living room/dining room and right next to the kitchen and bathroom. The rest of the fam sleeps in their own rooms upstairs.

My mom's name is Claudine, she's a midwife that is like always working, but when she's not she takes me out for a THBa lot, which is pretty great. (THB = beer, and the Malagasy are convinced that their beer is the greatest in the world. It's not.) There's 16-year-old named Momo (Clermond) and a 10-year-old named Marco. They're my bros. Marco doesn't speak any French except "où est la viande?" and Momo speaks pretty well but isn't very talkative to me. Claudine's cousin Steve (he has an uncle in Minneapolis who named him) who's 21 is really the only person that hangs out with me a bunch, he speaks French really well.

Pretty much every meal is zebu and rice. (Zebu is the cattle here.) Sometimes it's pasta that strongly resembles Ramen noodles. With zebu. But I still have baguette with fromage (La Vache Qui Rie) for petit-déjeuner.

Classes are going well, it's really easy. We go on tons of field trips, right now we're learning about the mining of titanium dioxide that this Canadian company QMM is doing in Tolagnaro (Fort Dauphin). They're destroying tons of littoral forests, but with promises to restore it...we shall see...

Other than that, it's still really hot... and I still haven't seen a lemur. A couple chameleons, though, and some pretty cool bugs. (mosquitos and flies not included in the "pretty cool" category.) And mango season is over, which is really really really sad. But the akondro's are still delicious, so I'll survive. Mmmm akondro/beurre à arachide/confiture d'anana sandwich... that's what my lunch was today. Yumtastic.

All right, gonna go get some a THB with a couple friends now, hope you are all doing well in the States or whatever country you might be in...

love karebear

Oh and I went to church yesterday. My family's Lutheran, and it was almost the same as any church in the States, except in Malagasy so I understood none of it. I was the only white person there, so I think the preacher/pastor/whatever you call him was looking at me the whole time like "who is this crazy vazaha" but I was towards the back so i'm not sure. Vazaha is like foreigner/white person, if I haven't clarified that yet. It's not an insult though. It's funny when tons of little kids on the street yell "Bonjour Vazaha!!!" at you like a thousand times and then run and accost you to buy their silver bracelets or shell necklaces. You just gotta say, "Aha. Azafady" (No, sorry), and then repeat it a thousand times when they are super persistent.

And I walk along the beach on my way to school. So that's pretty tight. How's the snow in Wisconsin? Haha. Just kidding I miss Beloit a lot.

Bye again!
Veloma e!