Departure

i have finally confirmed that i will be spending the rest of my year in senegal! after a lot of research and conference calls and emails it's set-- i'm leaving this saturday morning and will be arriving in Dakar, Senegal where i will be pursuing my project to work with the disability community. i have been in contact with some ashoka fellows there already (social entrepreneurs with initiatives to help people with disabilities) and have some friends of friends there who want to help me out once i arrive. it seems like i'll have a LOT more infrastructure there than i did in madagascar, and it seems like i'll be able to jump right in to doing what i set out to do originally. they are also a former french colony so i'll be able to continue to build on french, and hopefully also pick up the local language, wolof. so i just have a few days to get myself all packed up again and i'll be back on a plane- ready for the next unpredictable (although hopefully less politically difficult) adventure!

evacuation

i probably should have updated sooner but i'm sure many of you know by now that i was successfully evacuated by harvard last week from madagascar. unfortunately, the situation continued to deteriorate after the week of calm i wrote about... the saturday after, there was another demonstration led by the mayor that marched on the presidential palace (a few minutes walk from where i was staying) where the president had placed people to protect it. it wasn't long before the people from the palace began shooting on the crowd and ended up killing some unarmed protestors. it was a very unsettling feeling (we could see the palace from our balcony, but thankfully only the back of it) but the 3 brits and i relocated again to our refugee house. it was then that i really started to feel like it was time to leave-- not so much for the danger but for the fact that the country wasn't going to be recovering soon and the situation was only going to get worse economically. i really didn't feel like i was going to be able to have the experience there that i went there to have. so after speaking with harvard, they agreed, and i left 2 days later. i was sad to leave, but i know it was the right decision. i'm in seattle now with garth, getting myself reorganized and ready for the next attempt at a new country. i don't have much concrete information now to share, but i'll update when i know what i'm doing. thanks for everyone's concern while i was there!

a week of calm

it's been a while since i have updated, but things have been remarkably calm this week-- businesses reopened for the most part, people went to work, ministries were open. if there weren't photos for evidence i could have thought that last week was just a rumor. i had a nice week, got a bit more progress on my visa (no visa yet but atleast im covered now even though my visa is technically expired), and started getting more involved at COPH. ive started tutoring my friend hasini in english everyday, she picks an article in english and we go through it together. and ive done some other translation stuff. i think they really appreciate having someone who speaks english and hanging out at the office gives me great french practice and ive started to throw in a bit of broken malagasy. usually they just laugh. i had lunch with people in the office twice- the first meal there was a spider cooked into the pasta and the second day there was a knot of a plastic bag in my soup. both were still eaten! and i have to admit i bit into the plastic bag at first because i thought it was some kind of lettuce. one restaurant we ate at was run by a really nice chinese guy and i got to practice some chinese, even though most of my responses tended to come out in french or with a french accent. it was still fun though. i'm still staying with the 3 brits downtown (although i have to clarify 2 are brits and one is lebanese but its easier to say 3 brits) and we're planning to get out of town this weekend and go rafting so im excited, especially to get outside the city limits. in terms of politics, the situation is still unpredictable here, but i'm staying as safe and informed as i can. no one wants a crisis here so im hoping everything falls into place nicely. i had time to upload a picture from last sunday- we stopped at the king's palace on the outskirts of tana on our way back to downtown after things had calmed down. from left to right is maia (brit #1), catherine (brit #2/lebanese), me, holitiana (i was at her house last week while we waited for things to settle down), badria (friend of holitiana who stayed at the house too) and tom (brit #3) is in the front. it was a nice afternoon after being cooped up in the house for the majority of the week before.

that's all for now!