Antefasy!

            So today everyone was put into new language classes and we started our dialect training.  There are 18 official tribes in Madagascar, each with their own dialect of Malagasy.  Up to this point all of the trainees have been learning Standard Malagasy, which is the official language and is understood throughout the island, and some of the Highland trainees are continuing to learn it since that is what is spoken there.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my site is in the Sudest. The Sudest has three different dialects, mine being Antefasy, but they are so similar to each other that all of the trainees in the Sudest are learning together.  The dialect so far seems fairly easy with just some of the
words being different.  The biggest differences in the Sudest dialect are that the verbs end in ‘y’ instead of ‘a’ and the ‘s’ in a word makes a ‘shh’ sound.  This makes some words just more fun to say.  For instance, sausage is saosisy in both Standard and Antefasy, but pronouncing every ‘s’ as ‘shh’ is just so much more fun.

            This evening I also helped prepare and cook kabobs to eat while watching the World Cup Semi Finals.  They were made of onion, green peepers, beef, and zebu hump (the muscle on the back of a zebu) and were really good.  As far as the World Cup goes, my family has a small T.V. and a satellite so I am able to see some of the games on MTV (stands for Malagasy TV but it has the same emblem as American MTV), but they are really late here due to the time difference so I have only gotten to watch a few of them.  Also, although I did not feel it, there was an earthquake here in Mantasoa this evening while I was cooking.  It apparently made the house shake for a few seconds and many of the other trainees said that they felt it, but I guess our porch just moved with the ground so I did not feel it.