Rachel had dinner with her Malagasy counterpart while she was visiting Voloina and staying with Maya, the volunteer Rachel is replacing. The Malagasy counterpart is a man, married with two kids and two dogs, who lives very near Maya’s (soon to be Rachel’s) thatched hut. They had rice (eaten at every meal by most Malagasy) and shrimp and some sort of cooked tree leaves or maybe some wild vegetable like clover–I did not understand clearly. The meal was sparse because the wife was ill with malaria and the Malagasy counterpart did the cooking.

The two dogs that live next door (I think the counterpart’s dogs) are a comfort to Rachel because they bark whenever anyone comes near the huts. She thinks one of them has worms and will try and give it something for that from her homeopathic kit when she returns.

While she was in Maroantsetra Rachel met a researcher from Harvard who is a student of Rachel’s professor Dan’s Harvard colleague–the professor who took over from Dan when Dan moved to Brandeis. Rachel met the professor (I think his name is Glenn) at Dan’s son’s bar-mitzvah last May and they had talked about Madagascar. She was excited to meet one of Glenn’s students and be able to talk about life in the Boston suburbs while in deepest and darkest Maroantsetra!

Then–small world!–Rachel met the professor himself along with a contingent of his students (and, I think, the researcher whom she met in Maroantsetra) at a park near Anjiro or near Maromanga (?)–a protected forest on the central East coast, anyway–where Rachel spent several days at the end of March with the other volunteers. The PC volunteers arrived a little early and the Harvard professor and students were a bit late in leaving the park, otherwise they would not have crossed paths!