In Tulear again! We are all in town tonight to have a fun goodbye dinner for Phoebe, one of the volunteers who has been here for 3 months. I'm finally getting to know everyone and they are all leaving, it's sad! We have 7 new volunteers and 2 new staff coming within the next two or so weeks though so that'll be good. I think the 2 staff are an Irish man and an American man, so that has potential.
The weather is getting hotter here, I guess it is technically Spring here I think. When I first got here it was nice and chilly in the mornings and at night, cool enough to wear sweats but still warm during the days. We had a few days of really strong wind so that the days weren't actually that warm but that just happens a few times with the changing of the seasons. Now it's hot, and it's almost getting too hot to sleep with any covers so I can only imagine how it's going to be 2 months from now right at the beginning of summer which is supposedly just suffocating here. We're in the desert, so it's dry heat that literally just bakes you alive. Who knows if it'll rain at all while I'm here. I should want it to since the country is in such a massive drought but I don't because then the mosquitoes come out and they affect me differently here than at home. My bites are like hard and just gross.
Yesterday on my dive I saw some huge batfish for the first time and several humongous decorated spiny lobsters and a huge school of cornetfish that was just amazing to see. We also saw this one huge (probably almost a meter long) blue and yellow grouper that always swims around with us when we go to this particular site (Rose Garden). It's unforunate how endagered grouper are because they taste so damn good.
Oh yeh, also yesterday I ran English by myself for the first time. It went better than expected. THere is one University of Tulear student who has been coming to stay at ReefDoctor some during the week to do his research on water quality in the village of Ifaty and surrounding villages and he is SO smart. His name is Jose, he's only 20, and he speaks Malagas, French and English- his English is probably the best of any other Malagas I've met. He took over and taught the advanced for me yesterday and he had this whole huge chart of past present future and conditional perfect simple and continuous tenses and no other Vazaha besides me even got it so I'm not sure how far he got with the Gasy students but he could do a hell of a lot better explaining it since he has two other languages besides English to communicate with them in. With the beginner's we reviewed some nouns and then the difference between singular and plural statements - like saying "There is one mango" versus "There are two mangoes." They don't have plural in Malagas so it's kind of a difficult concept for them. Then we went over "to be" and "to have" and the conjugation of those verbs with the subject pronouns. Teaching all of that was only possible because Pepin, the original English teacher, was there to help and to explain. They don't have the verb "to be" in Gasy either so without him there is no way I could have explained it. I also brought them a big bag of assorted biscuit wafer things that I decidely didn't want after absolutely gorging myself the past few days with Tulear food and homemade pastries some of the volunteers have made. Teachers always brought treats with them to my classes growing up so I figured it'd be a nice thing to do but at first I wasn't so sure because they didn't seem to know what to do with them. They were so hesitant at first to take any but eventually they were grabbing handfuls and at the end walked out with the whole bag and never offered me one. It's okay though ha.
I forgot to bring my adapter so I don't know how much more battery I'll have for this weekend which sucks but so I'm gona go now. More later.
Alex
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