Hello!

Hello all! My life has suddenly been reconnected to the world via the interwebs so I will attempt to catch everyone up on the past three months. I’ve been keeping a journal, so I’ll just select a few of the entries and put it together that way.  This most recent blog entry will be at the top, so if you want to start at the beginning, start at the bottom.

First of all, thank you so much for all of your letters and news!! I miss everyone so much and I can’t even tell you how nice it is to hear from everyone. On this end, I have also written a bunch of letters to people, but I am still working on how to send them from my new site so don’t worry- they are coming!

Today I’m running an experiment in our tree nursery on seed germination rates with a couple of co-workers from SEPALI. Communicating in Malagasy is still challenging, especially when I am trying to use technical vocabulary, so I am happy to have hands-on activities that we can do together.  The staff are already experts about growing trees and rearing silk worms, but reading and writing are challenging for them, so they teach me how to prepare the seeds and plant them properly, and I work with them to set up the experiment and keep track of the process.

My counterpart speaks English, French, and Malagasy, but he encourages me to learn everything I can about the silk process in Malagasy. It is really challenging sometimes, but it will also be very useful for the long run, because I am learning about the silk process and learning Malagasy at the same time.