Picture this: it's spring and a cute baby bird has just hatched. It's growing little by little and has been nurtured by it's mom for a few weeks now and life has been good. But all of a sudden week 6 hits and boom! Mama bird is shoving that little Birdy out of it's nest with no support thereafter. Birdy better learn how to fly pretty quick or things with go downhill fast for poor little Birdy.If you were able to picture that then you have a pretty accurate representation of how last week felt.
I think I've said it before but the transition to living in Madagascar was fairly smooth for me. My host family is great and super patient with me. I have an amazing group of fellow trainees. I haven't gotten the case of the double dragging* yet*. The town we're in is friendly and use to having foreigners in it . We're surrounded by great support staff. We haven't had to travel yet etc etc. In short life has been pretty easy for us this far. In fact many people would argue we actually get babied at times. Others compare our lives to the Truman show which at times does feel like a pretty accurate description. But then the week of site visit comes and all that we once knew was whisked away from us as we loaded onto a bus without any PC staff and headed to the capital city, Antananarivo. We arrived in Tana a little before dark but found out our bus driver thought we were getting dropped off at the PC office not our hotels so we had our first experience of trying to communicate directions to places none of us have actually ever been to. When it came time for my group to get dropped off the driver said he had passed our hotel but traffic was too heavy to turn around so we we unloaded on the side of the road and headed in the direction he said our hotel was (none of us had actually seen the hotel though or even knew how long ago we passed it so we had very little reference points). We walked for a while and tried asking people if they knew where it was but each time got conflicting answers and so we were basically walking aimlessly for almost an hour until we found a number for the hotel and thankfully the manager spoke English and said he would come try to find us. Eventually we were indeed found and made our way to our hotel and found food nearby. As I was enjoying my first non-rice meal of pizza and gelato I couldn't help but think to myself, we're definitely not in Mantasoa anymore...
The next day trying to meet up with my host mom was equally as crazy as the day before. A taxi picked up me and another trainee from our hotel and we were accompanied by her host dad and we were dropped off at the taxi brousse station. We had made plans to also meet my host mom there but after 45 minutes of her still not being there I began to get worried. The city was crowded and noisy and was completely overwhelming to me. I had absolutely no way of contacting her and didn't really know where I was going. Eventually the host dad started wandering around and found her at a different brousse station and so once reunited I loaded my luggage and happily left the city.
*Double dragging- suffering from diarrhea and vomitting at the same time
*Yet- because it's bound to happen eventually
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