So many things happened this month. It's always humbling when I get ready to do a blog post and go through and look at all that I've accomplished or helped other PCVs accomplish in the course of a month. Also, just the feeling of personal satisfaction when you finish a project is compounded when you look back on 30 days and see multiple projects finished!
First, let's take a look at the gardening results:
The Tomatoes are ripening! I now have harvested about 15 wonderful, vine-ripened tomatoes. I wish I could claim credit for this, but as I said before this guy just grows on its own without any help from me. I just reap the benefits of delicious tomatoes. Also, when I have too many tomatoes I share them with my neighbors, so now they like me a lot more than they already did.
While we're discussing horticultural life, let's observe the above pictured trees. These are baobabs. I'm not positive exactly which species of baobab, but there are 7 present here in Madagascar, and 6 of those are found only here, also two species are found only in the northern province of Madagascar where I am living and are highly endangered. This picture was taken from the road on my walk to the school. As a mark of my keen observational skill, I have walked past these trees almost every day for 7 months and just now realized that they were there. Hopefully, they will grow to be big and awesome and old like their more famous counterparts to the south.
Other things I noticed this month included a leaking on my porch. Every time it rains I would get flooded back into my house. I figured that since I fixed the roof over my house its time to fix this section of roof too. I went out and purchased tarp material with a nice red, white, and blue pattern and tacked it up over my porch. From the front of the house you can't see anything, but, underneath, it creates a cool glow in the sun, and dryness in the rain!
I also bought this unique little basket in my town this month to help store fruits and vegetables. If I leave anything like that out overnight it will get ransacked by pillaging rodents, so I hung this basket - an endemic style to my town - under my new shelf. The lid keeps all the critters out, and I can look and see what I have on hand at a glance, what a nifty convenience.
Naturally, I had bigger projects going too besides hanging a tarpaulin and basket. My kitchen table has become my primary woodworking surface, so I decided to reinforce the legs on the table so it would stop shaking so much while I plane boards on it. Here we see the new bracing beam installed under the table, and I must say its as solid as a rock now. This is good because I've got a big project in the works that I've been saving for a while. With all my tools and acceptable work stations now sorted out I can start to tackle it, and, with any luck, in the next month or two I'll be able to post the results here!
The real big project this month though was the brain child of our PCVL, a rotating barrel compost. The compost is located at the Meva in Diego Suarez for all of the PCVs and staff here in the north to use. I was recruited to do blueprints and lead the construction, and here we see myself and one of the assisting volunteers doing some geometry to place a perfectly centered hole in the barrel end.
Thankfully we were able to borrow some power tools to move the project along, or this might have taken a lot more than one weekend. Here I'm drilling out pilot holes so the board ends won't split when nailed in place while Mustafa, one of our wonderful Meva guards, observes. He was a huge help in finding tools for us to use and keeping track of all the materials as we worked.
The barrel has holes placed all around to allow air flow for the compost, and about a third of them we placed nails in so that when you rotate the barrel, the nails will stir the contents. This picture shows the PCV crew going to town with some nails and hammers.
Before we glued and nailed the frame together we did a dry fit to assure everything would work and then...
Its hammer time! I'm holding the rock behind the board to absorb the shock of the hammer hitting the nail so it doesn't just flop the frame around, but actually drives the nail in.
We used lots of glue because I've heard from many a wise source that glue is cheap, so you don't skimp on it... Thanks Dad!
And there she blows! All finished and ready to go. I don't have a picture of the last two minor adjustments I made, but one was just cosmetic (I cut down the posts sticking up in the air after the glue dried), and the other is a bracing beam on the door to give it a little more sturdiness. Other than that, this is how it looks today, ready and waiting for compost to start.
That was a great project, and lots of fun, but I can already hear people saying, aren't you supposed to be teaching? When does that actually happen? Well, it happens most weeks, but this past week we had off for a regional sports tournament. My neighboring volunteer in Anivorano Nord and I decided to host a teacher's training during the week of sports.
Here we see day one's first topic for our seminar. We invited 8 teachers and had a turnout of 4 on the first day which was good enough to keep us going. Unfortunately, no one could attend on the second day, so we pushed the schedule around and made our 5 day training into a 4 day training overnight!
Here's my co-teacher going over his plan on the first day. He paid in sweat for his desire to wear a tie, but I think he pulled it off pretty well considering it was sweltering in that classroom.
Fortunately, when we reconvened on day three we were able to move to a slightly brighter and breezier facility. Here I am leading a session on lesson planning.
The advantage of having another volunteer in the room is now I have pictures of myself actually doing what I came here for! Here two of our fellow English teachers look on as I explain how I use lesson planning to great effect in my own classes.
Alas, our teacher training was not problem free. We had already lost a day to non-attendance, but by day 4 some of the teachers started being more noticeably tardy or truant. On the last day it was nought but the two PCVs and one final English teacher. Here my fellow trainer waits in silent contemplation for a class that never turned up. Overall, the training was a success because we did have great interaction with the teachers who attended, but it was disappointing to end on such a sour note.
Now to cheer you up, at least for a little while, cute puppy pictures! Here is one of the gang of irregulars that is still roaming around by my house having a nap.
This cute little girl came to say hi while I was filling my water jug. The dogs here in this country are remarkably curious, just as they are elsewhere, but they seem even more interested in learning here because of the way that the locals treat them. No one in my region considers dogs to be pets, but rather they are just animals that exist and can steal your food if you're not paying attention.
Above, two of the puppies having a nap. As you can see they are very malnourished. Dogs here are either not fed at all, or only fed with the scraps that people can't consume themselves. As a result, they are very often massively malnourished, flea, worm, and tick ridden, and also dirty and mangy. Because of all the hardships that dogs in this country face, you'd expect that it might make them hesitant to try and learn about what goes on about them, but they still display that eagerness to please that endears them to many in other parts of the world.
My favorite girl Snow is introducing herself to the newcomers here. She was unsure at first, but now they are seasoned playmates. Although sometimes Snow can play a little too rough for their tiny frames, she's trying and so are the puppies and it is just adorable.
Snow has taken to lying on this corner of my house for some reason. I'm not exactly sure why, but I thought it was comical because she keeps throwing my wood scraps out of the way, so I took a photo.
She took a nap in my kitchen one day and I decided to test out her sniffer. I placed a cookie in front of her, as seen above, and waited to see if she'd react to the smell alone. Nothing. I then called her attention and, as she opened her eyes, she tried desperately to wriggle sideways like a snake after the cookie until she could right herself and attack like normal. Her tail wagged for a solid minute and it made me happy to see her excited and fed.
I will be returning back to my normal teaching duties this coming week now that the regional sports tournament is over, so I thought I'd leave you with this. One of my students pulled up in front of me on his bike while I was checking my phone and asked me what I was doing. I told him "taking your photo" and he instantly struck this pose which I think is perfect. It's moments like this that can make it all seem worth it, a great photo from an unexpected source, a discovery of a tree that's been under your nose all along, the finishing of a compost or training that you've been planning for so long. And I guarantee there will be more for each month that I have coming up. Don't believe me? Just watch!
