ANOTHER 72

2011/04/20 ANOTHER 72

Spring Break has been really quiet.  Thankfully.  But I have done a few interesting things nonetheless.  On Monday, Brianna and I had an appointment at the Embassy to meet with a Public Affairs officer and talk about potential projects called “American Corners.”  These are small regional resource centers where people can interact with English through multimedia and reading materials, it is pretty cool.  The woman we met with gave us Blow Pops at the start of the meeting and then took us to the cafeteria to eat chicken fingers and see the Today show (which you know I love).  It is really sad how chicken fingers and lollipops are really exciting to us.

Before I tell you the rest of the day I should tell you about last Thursday though.  I was at the Peace Corps office at a meeting regarding upcoming training groups.  My APCD called me up to his office and asked Brianna and I if we could stay a little longer in Tana and do him a favor and do some interviews to help promote the Peace Corps’ 50^th Anniversary and what we do here.  He didn’t have to pull our arms to get us to stay.  So back to Monday.  While at the Embassy we asked why the head Public Affairs officer wasn’t in office because we thought he was meeting us there, and he is off somewhere in this country and so we met up with the representative from the Embassy going to the interview.  Slowly Brianna and I realized that we were about to get in it deep.  The interview was on live radio in Malagasy.  I don’t know if you can do math but I have only been here about 8 months.  Not enough to be radio rapid fire Malagasy ready.  However, luckily we had one of the best language teachers with us whispering what the heck the questions were into our ears.  So we got the questions in our ears in English then we could answer in Malagasy.  It was so scary but it was really fun and it was cool to get to represent the organization.  We were meant to go again today but luckily we found some others that are much better at Malagasy than us (one has been here over a year and the other dated a Malagasy girl so he learned up pretty quick).  On Tuesday Brianna, Brittany and I met up with this Malagasy girl who lived in DC for the first nine years of her life so she spoke English and didn’t have an accent and knew what Chipotle was.  It was the most confusing experience ever but we had a great time hanging out at “The American Cookie Shop.”  Tomorrow we are heading to Brianna’s site so I will get to see that for the first time I am really excited.  But until then its pizza and happy hour in Tana tonight!

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