Shoulders

OK well its ten pm on Sept 26. This is Thursday. Tomorrow is the last day of the second week of my first trimester teaching English at CNELA. It has been fun. I tell a lot of jokes and I get the students to talk at lot.

I am living with Fred. He is 27 and he has a high paying job in the surveying industry. He is a boss. He works late. My second class ends at seven thirty pm and my first class starts at four pm.

I teach from a packet and original materials. So far, I have had some success with having a few plans from which I can chose. The first class is going a bit better than the second. But the second class is a bit bigger than the first, so it is a bit harder to keep everyone interested.

I am cooking a lot. There are bugs in the house, but I am starting to get used to them. I was only slightly bothered when I found a dead cockroach in my bed two mornings ago. I guess they are here because my roommate was living alone for a while before I moved in and he doesn't really clean the kitchen all that much. 

I plug some weird type of thing into the wall in the evening to repel mosquitoes. I would prefer to use a net since I have no idea what I am breathing, but I am just using a mattress with no bed frame, so there really isn't a good way to put up a mosquito net.

I started drinking beer again. The few cigarettes I smoke leave me paying the price of a sore throat the next day.

I meet with the mother and family of my roommate on Wednesdays. We speak in English mostly, but they aren't quite as good as my roommate, so I usually learn some Malagasy. The second son of the family is my age. This weekend he has his finals for a correspondence course in computer science. The last child is a teenage girl who seems pretty mature.

Last weekend I started learning Wushu from some sort of official school. The master didn't really appear, but there is probably a lot of conditioning work for me to do before it is really worth his time.

I am watching Naruto. It is OK, but I had to start with the second season, in which Naruto wears orange and black. There was an arch in which four people attacked Konoha that seemed pretty worthless. It is becoming more serious now: Team 10 and Team Kakashi have just defeated two Akatsuki.

Lastly, the internet needs to be free and stay free. The biggest problem with democracy is that voters are uninformed. The internet gives people a chance to be informed. Therefore people need access to the internet. Further, the information on the internet can neither be censored nor costly. That is way I mean when I say that the internet needs to be free and stay free.

Brooklyn

So on the day after I got back from Ambositra, I went to see a dance contest with Gaelle. The contest was for a position in a Brooklyn Arts School competition. There we many foreigners amongst the guests. We sat with a boy and his sister. I have seen the boy before, but I don't exact remember where. He must have been a contestant in the last show I judged. Anyway, there was a band playing while we waited for the contestants. I got to hear the traditional instrument, Faly incorporated into a band, instead of into a sales plot for tourists. It is cylindrical, but basically like a guitar. At first I could hear it, but not the accompanying guitar, but I learned to distinguish the guitar from the sharper notes of the Faly.

There were four performers: the first incorporated many different tribal traditions. It was the best all round performance. There were bright colors, many costumes, and enthusiastic dancers. The second group feature some boys in shiny, sky blue suits with white sashes. Their dance was a bit like some of the Tai Chi I know. I really enjoyed this, but then some big middle aged women came onto the stage and I was a bit disappointed since they couldn't really dance and their voices were pretty much drowned out by the band and the other signers who had mics. After, A beautiful young girl came out alone. She was nervous but capable. At the end she settled down. The third group I don't really remember that well. Oh yea, the second group was from the Highlands according to Galle. Anyway, I think the third group was doing a Tandroy dance. There was a mock fight over water. The last group depicted a famadihiana, or turning of the bones. There was some miming that I didnt really understand. I haven't actually ever seen a turning of the bones festival, so I guess that is one reason I didn't get the mining. this group was pretty creative with some dark cloth. They created something like a tomb, and did some visual trick with the body in which it was difficult to track which person was supposed to be dead. Then everyone was dancing.

Well, after the first two groups, there was a performance by a younger group. Two kids that must have been less than ten years old were the main singers. They had pretty big voices. Also, at every break, there was an emcee who did his best to speak in Malagasy, French, and English. His comfort decreased while using languages further towards the end of that list. He was pretty funny anyway. The competition ended with a talk by two guys from the US. It was translated into Malagasy by an internationally famous Malagasy singer. I hope someone will remind me of her name so I can listen to one of her songs. At the end, it was announced that Bakomanga won.
I walked Gaelle home with Francia, the previous president of the group that put on the English Speech contest in Trano Pokonoly. We were a bit scared to walk in the dark, but there were no buses. I took a bus back to CNELA from Gaelle's.