Rachel with Environmental Youth Club students at health/environment training

I’m sitting in the taxi brousse in M waiting for the back to fill to bursting with people and rice so we can finally make the trip to V/N. It’s a miserably rainy day, so despite my excellent dry bags, I’ve decided to strap my bike to the top of the brousse and tomobile it home. I got a call from Peace Corps yesterday warning that I had to stay away from the ocean as a tsunami (!) might be coming. Was told by the meek receptionist to “get to a high place somewhere safe� because there had been an earthquake in Indonesia. It rained like hell but that was it as far as I know. So frustrating having no means of learning what’s going on in the world outside of M. I hope all is well in Asia. I think by now I would have heard if M’car had been hit. It’s funny, actually. This Peace Corps warning was exactly the same as the one I received before the cyclone hit last March. Then it was totally insufficient warning and there was nothing I could do to improve my situation but wait until the water started entering my house. What a week that was!

My youth environment/health education program went well. After an HIV/AIDS presentation at the middle school in R, I was asked by the natural sciences teacher why the government doesn’t isolate everyone whose blood is seropositive, the way communities do people infected with TB or leprosy. She argued that HIV-positive people are public health threats and should at least be made to advertise their condition to the public. Not knowing the words for “discrimination� or “confidentiality,� and unable to explain properly in Malagasy, I couldn’t effectively enough address her question, except to pull out a basket of fonsy masaka (overripe bananas) and a bag full of PSI condoms in STD-educational booklets and have every student and teacher in the room practice putting them on the bananas. I tried to tell her that people infected are, in effect, victims. Individuals who insist on using PROTECTOR condoms (USAID-subsidized, 3 for 100 ariary-5 cents) however are mazoto be [very clever indeed] because they are preventing themselves from being victimized by HIV.

The national infection rate for M’car is officially less than 1%, but most don’t think that statistic is very credible. A 2003 “random sampleâ€? NGO study for seropositive pregnant mothers in communities around M’car found that 6% of women tested in S (northeast of M) were HIV positive. Shocking, but I think the sample size was too small and the study is old. Any pregnant woman infected is a tragedy, and certainly an issue that’s difficult to address in my region.