Ramble on

I'm going to be about 180 lbs by the time I leave here but I'll be able to walk and bike my ass off. Minus the brutally long and cramped taxi-brousse rides I've already written about I walk or bike everywhere. Any where within a 40km radius or so is reachable by man power only. Sometimes farther.

Myself and my counterpart are planning a a trip to Mandritsara to visit some people by bike and it's about 120km away. We'll obviously need to stay a day or two to make that one worth it. Being here has definitely made me never want to have a car again. It's very nice and peaceful walking and biking. I get a lot of good thinking done then. Just the other day I walked about 2 hours each way to visit a friend. It was great. I was a bit sore in the feet but it was fun. That's one of the pluses of the laissez faire (I have no idea if that is spelled right) attitude towards time here, no one is ever in a huge hurry. When waiting for a brousse to leave after already doing a 14 hour overnight trip this can be frustrating. But when you just want to cruise on your bike or get somewhere the old fashioned way it's a beautiful thing. I'll be entrenched in this over the next couple years. It's going to be very hard to adjust back to US or Western standards for timeliness. I'm hoping to do a multi-day bike trip before I leave the country. Maybe from my town to Tana. By my calculations that is doable in 5-6 days. That may be a little ambitious but it's the goal.

And as I continue on this stream of consciousness, being here has also taught me about ambition. Before coming here I was no slacker but I wouldn't say I was a shoot for the stars kind of guy. You don't really think of Peace Corps being a breeding ground for ambition. More like a bunch of hippies running from the real world for a few years. But us hippies can have ambition too man. In my experience, when I got here I had grand visions of what I wanted to accomplish. The Peace Corps actually does a pretty good job of grounding you during training so that nobody gets too down if they don't accomplish all of their hopes and dreams. I really appreciated that and thought it was good to remind us that development work is a long and slow progress and that, often times, the work you but in right now won't be evident until 20 years down the road. But being here, and in my town specifically, has made me realize that just going for it is the way to go. The people I've been working with thus far are so motivated to learn new things and improve it has made me want to do better myself. And it has made me set a very ambitious agenda for the next 2 years. I can hopefully get it all done but the key is, at least I think, that by being ambitious I can push the ball forward better than holding back. Even if I fail at a few things which will almost certainly happen and will be documented extensively on this very blog. The counterside to my big plans is the possibility that, by trying to do some much, I will have a lot of half complete projects here. That is definitely a possibility and a focused, well run project is certainly better than a dozen half-assed ones. I think I can run projects simultaneously that will all be focused and well managed. Time will tell. I just want to stay busy and get a lot done here. I only have a couple years to do it and the clock is ticking.