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One of the biggest culture shocks I experienced was RICE. Malagasy people eat more rice than any other people on the planet. It's eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all over the island. When I lived with a Malagasy host family for one month during pre-service training, I thought the rice thing was a joke but day after day it kept coming and coming and honestly it takes some getting used to to go from eating a grain (sandwich/pasta (I'm no chef)) based diet to a rice based diet. Rice IS the meal in Madagascar. Of course, other food is eaten with the rice. This food is called the loaka, which means side dish. It might be some beef, some pork, some chicken, some turkey, or some fish, along with a veggie based dish like, a popular one, cucumber and tomato slices bathed in vinegar and salt and pepper. There's an accurate quote by ancient Malagasy king saying RICE IS LIFE or something like that. All of the rice took some getting used to, but after two years, I became quite fond of eating a gigantic bowl of rice topped with my favorite loaka, beans with fatty chunks of beef mixed in. You can tell the new PCVs on the island by how pathetic they are at eating rice. After two years you can easily polish off a huge heaping bowl. Oh rice was a big shocker, but of course my experience was WAY more diverse than this, more than I can do justice to here. In the capital on more than one occasion I dined in some fancy French fusion restaurants on food that would have cost a fortune in Paris but cost little in Madagascar, a former French colony. I also didn't cook rice for myself often when I was living alone at site in my town. I had access to more fresh produce and fruits and meats and fish than I have ever seen in my life, much better selection than anything available to me in the U.S. Fantastic fruits that I had never heard of like litchis. Huge avocados that didn't cost a penny. Sometimes lobster or crabs that didn't cost anything. It was diverse.

So to wrap up, the Malagasy people aren't exactly the most culinary people on the planet compared to what you hear about peoples in South America and it is true that mouth watering food wasn't really truly part of the experience of living in my town although there were exceptions. However, it was a quirky part of the culture that I came to love and appreciate and brought me closer to my Malagasy friends as they gradually saw me eat more and more rice. I liked to think that this made them respect me more, which I say in jest as they were some of most good humored people I have ever met and we often made rice jokes and joke jokes and had many great times together. I can't really do justice to the experiences I had. On more than one occasion I traveled to villages so remote that a car hadn't passed by them in years and years and encountered people living in real poverty who gladly and without hesitation offered what little they had to eat, more than rice, to me and my volunteer or NGO worker friends. Mada is one of the poorest countries on the planet so it was difficult to learn that so much of the country subsisted off white rice, which is devoid of essential vitamins and nutrients. It keeps you alive but it doesn't seem like ENOUGH, although I saw plenty of locals show more energy than myself on long treks even though I was powered by more than just white rice. Once, one of my students invited me over for lunch to his house. He was particularly persistent in his drive to learn English and he was also a student I had to try hard to like, I hate to admit, because his English was so scattered and he was so stubborn in his attempt to try to speak as much as possible with me. So I accepted his invitation and came to the little shack he lived in with his sister while they attended school, their parents living 80k away in their hometown south of Farafangana where our school was. It was only rice that we had that day, topped with ramen noodles (imported from China), mainly on my behalf. This was all he had to eat most days (while I was eating pretty), and yet he would show up to my class and hang around after class and show such dedication to learning English from me. It broke my heart. His name is Kim Ruddy. He doesn't have an email or Facebook or anything so I don't know what has happened to him in the past year but I will remember him forever and I hope he will remember me. We became friends and I'd invite him over for lunch at my house sometimes, which he was overly honored by. Such a good guy. A good island. A good people. Good memories. The students there just want the same things students here want, to go to a good college, get a good job, get married, have kids, and have a good life. That's it. Sometimes it's as surprising to note how similar we all are.

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Learning a lesser known language in a poor country is not without unique difficulties, chiefly among them being there are not a wealth of Malagasy language resources (books, cds, etc.) available to you or even in existence. Your chief resource becomes the people around you that you come to know. You are learning a language for oral communication, not to write it extensively or read extensively. So getting out and speaking to people as much as possible and jotting down unfamiliar words and then trying to find out the meaning, through a dictionary or more talking, and then studying these words--this becomes your main study system. I gradually found more materials as I was in country, and better materials, especially for grammar, so I think this is slowly changing for future volunteers. After two years, I tested out at "low advanced." I could understand a great deal and talk about a variety of subjects using varied structures, but I still lacked a firm grasp of the three voices that Malagasy uses, something that is very different from English, as well as made little mistakes, etc. At a certain point my language started to fossilize and it was hard for me to figure out what I needed to do to keep getting better and feel that I was progressing. I took my final language ability test in my region's dialect, which is another factor in language skills. There are different dialects of Malagasy spoken in different regions of Madagascar and there is a "standard" Malagasy that is spoken in the capital area (historically the center of political power and money) as well as schools/official functions to a great degree. This is something that it takes living on the island of Madagascar to appreciate and something I try to emphasize to anyone: Madagascar is VERY diverse, not only in terms of its flora and fauna but also in terms of its people. One count of the number of tribes that call Madagascar home is 21. I had four different tribes that lived in my town at least. They have been living next to each other for a long time and their dialects, to me, were very similar. To me. One of my friends would do impressions of the different local tribes and then I could see big differences. The people that I talked to in my town often definitely made things easier for me when we spoke by avoiding a heavy use of dialect. In the end, learning Malagasy and bits of dialect of Malagasy was a great privilege. It's one of the only SVO languages in the world! They say for example "eat RICE I" ("mihinana ny VARY izaho" or in the Antefasy dialect "mihinany nge VARY iaho.")

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-Jeremy

TAMATAVE, 20 July 2012 (IRIN) - An estimated one million people in Madagascar are diabetic, but only about half of them know it. Finding the other half presents a major challenge for this large, island nation in which 80 percent of the population live in rural areas where few people have ever heard of this chronic and potentially deadly disease.

With the country’s underfunded public health sector barely functioning, this task has mainly fallen to the Madagascan Diabetes Association (A.MA.DIA.) which dispatches its doctors and nurses to the provinces to conduct blood sugar tests and raise awareness at fairs, schools and health centres.

FULL STORY: http://www.irinnews.org/report/95905/madagascar-half-a-million-undiagnosed-diabetics

Hey there! Congrats to your interest in the health field and a volunteer organization like the Peace Corps! This IAMA is really about the experiences of my friend and I in Madagascar (did you VOTE for him!? http://woobox.com/ti3h9z/vote/for/6593294 ), and your questions are more for a recruiter, either your campus recruiter or regional recruiter, but I will still try to give you some quick advice.

To make your application stand-out, just do well in school. Get some volunteer experience, ideally in the sector you want to volunteer in, which in your case is health. Some sectors might require a minimum number of volunteer hours. I don't think the Peace Corps is very competitive unless you want to be in a specific region like Central America, in which case they might value certain skills, like Spanish language skills, and not having these skills might make you much less competitive. That's a recruiter question.

As for being open to all possibilities, I would say that in life, yes, always be open! But of course, you are you and you know yourself best, so if you are the kind of person interested in traveling to any country because you love different people and cultures, and you would be happy even if you wound up in smog filled China, then that is that, but it is okay too if you have a specific love for/interest in Latin cultures for example. Know what you want and take the time to figure out what you want. Is Peace Corps service going to help you toward what you want? I myself for example would have not have done Peace Corps if my only option was teaching in China. I know about teaching in China and I know I can find a job, make much more money, and not have an organization telling me what to do and where I have to be if I simply went over there on my own. I also know that smog is a huge problem all over the country and not something I want to deal with, so I would never choose to go to China regardless. But you might have a different opinion. You might be interested in an area of health where working in China makes perfect sense. Maybe you could then use the Peace Corps as a hopping off point to a real career if you served in China. It all depends.

As for feeling homesick, yes I did at times. Every PCV does to some degree but it depends on the person. I did always feel safe though, with the exception of a close call I had while riding in a bus. As for being well cared for, yes I did too although it's not like a lived with a family for two years. I cared for myself, well, and Peace Corps was always there if I had a problem as were people in my community.

General advice: find out what you want in life and DO IT. Good luck! Jeremy

By the way, these are my views and do not represent the views of the Peace Corps or the US government.

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One of the most unexpected things that I saw occurred at a funeral of my friend's father. It lasted three days and nights straight and my friend often called me over to his house at odd hours, 4am or 4pm, during these three days as he was deep in grief. When the body arrived from the capital at 3am or so on the top of the local transportation, a taxi brousse, everyone stopped napping in the room where the body would be taken and ran out of the house to greet it and see. Once it was carried inside, while people crowded around, I was surprised to see that it would be an open casket funeral. I was more surprised to see that many of the younger men in the family had video cameras and camera cameras and were taking photos and videos of the body and funeral proceedings. I guess this was taboo in my mind, so when I saw this taboo being broken it shocked me. Why would you want to replay such a sad event? Didn't this cheapen it? Apparently this is done in different places on the island. So the funeral went on and at one point my friend took the blanket off his deceased father and wrapped it around himself, at which point everyone in the room did not say anything or seem to move but seemed to convey that this was not to be done as one of the younger men in the family who was heading things sternly told my friend that this was "fady" (forbidden) and told him to stop and tried to counsel him. This was all very odd for me, being the only foreigner there, seeing this go on and wondering if the culture permitted it or if my friend was violating the unspoken rules of his culture and to what degree he was if he was (and should I then be associating my reputation with this individual who is allowing the death of his father to affect him so deeply that he is doing rash things and, also, taking to drinking too much, something he had given up before but is not exactly frowned upon in the culture if you are a man, at least in this situation... where are the lines in the sand where you should show or not show compassion?). Honestly, and I have never shared this with many people, I was sitting next to my friend and the blanket got tossed over my head, the same blanket that had been touching a dead body. I pushed it off and recoiled, as of course you naturally feel inclined not to touch a dead body because it might carry disease. It's the greatest taboo. But I survived and my friend survived, although our relationship slowly deteriorated as he drank more and more. He was still one of my friends who helped me with my things as I was leaving my town for good. I don't have any way of contacting him so I don't know what he is doing right now. I think in the end I did right by trying to show him the compassion that I could and by being there at the funeral. Many people seemed to appreciate it. It was one of the more out of the ordinary experiences of my life, and I appreciate that my friend and his family shared it with me. The father was a good man. I used to see him everyday on my bike ride home from school. He died unexpectedly, seemingly healthy, not too old, and some in the family, especially my friend, blamed it on black magic. It was more likely a heart attack. Don't think that everyone in Madagascar believes in such things. But in some tribes in some parts of some of the island, there are some individuals who still talk about such things, especially as they relate to people being jealous of the success of others and looking to undo them.