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