Bug off, malaria!

When you live in a country like Madagascar, malaria is no longer some abstract tropical disease that affects people thousands of miles away. It is very real, and it is very serious. Mosquitoes are more than just annoying, and every bite can be a potential killer. In fact, malaria is the number one killer in Africa—not AIDS, not malnutrition, but malaria. That’s why a large focus of our work as Peace Corps volunteers is all about malaria education and prevention, even if we don’t work in the health sector. And because April 25^th is World Malaria Day, the month of April becomes our busy season when we try to blitz the country with educational messages and awareness events.

Ever since last April, when I learned that I would be serving on the southeast coast of Madagascar, I knew that malaria work would be an important component of my work in Vangaindrano. Although there is malaria throughout the country, it is widely concentrated on the east coast, while it is not very prevalent in the cooler highlands region in the center of the country.  At our malaria event last year during Pre-Service Training, I was able to speak with a USAID representative about the mosquito net distribution program that was scheduled for my area in December 2012. USAID, along with several other aid agencies, funds a massive net distribution plan for the coastal areas every few years. In 2012, the focus was on the Sud Est, and so in early December, every town in my region received a distribution of free mosquito nets for each household.

Because so many people in the area received nets in December, I decided that for World Malaria Month this year, I wanted to do some programming in my town about how to properly care for and use a mosquito net. I thought this would be good follow-up on the distribution from 4 months ago, and reinforce to people that it’s vitally important for them to use the nets every single night, and to take proper care of them so that they’ll last for a long time. So in February, I applied for special project funding from Peace Corps to cover the costs of an event, and I worked with Peace Corps Madagascar’s malaria initiative coordinator, and my region’s malaria campaign volunteer coordinator, to plan out a great event for my town.

This past Saturday, we set up a booth in front of the Vangaindrano post office, which is in a high-traffic area in my town’s market, and got to work spreading educational messages about bednet usage and care. Two of my neighboring volunteers, Yu and Jeremy, came to help out, so it was great to have some extra manpower. Festooned with banners and posters about bednets and malaria, our booth quickly attracted a large crowd of curious people. Throughout the morning, we held demonstrations on how to repair holes in a mosquito net with a needle and thread, which ensures that mosquitoes can’t get in. We also demonstrated how to properly wash a net, using just bar soap and water (not detergent, which is too strong), and how to hang it to dry in the shade so that the fierce sun won’t disintegrate the insecticide that each net is impregnated with. And, we showed how to easily transform a rectangular net into a circular one, which is helpful for people who don’t sleep on a bed, or don’t have a good ceiling to hang a net from. For each of these activities, we had different onlookers come participate to demonstrate how simple each of these tasks were, and this caused riotous laughter and spirited engagement from many of the people watching. We were also joined by Max, a Malagasy health workers at my town's private hospital, so it was really good to have a community member join us. It ended up being a fun morning, and as I stood on a pedestal in the middle of my town’s market, speaking about malaria, in Malagasy, over a microphone, it was one of those moments that reminded me of how far I’ve come as a volunteer in the past year.

Me, Jeremy, and Max (a local health worker) holding up a net in our booth. The banner behind us says "Fight Malaria" and lists the towns in the Sud Est region which are all hosting Peace Corps anti-malaria events this month.

Jeremy and Yu hold up a net that the woman in the center repaired using a needle and thread.

Yu talking to the crowd about malaria symptoms and what to do when they're spotted.

This little girl is really cute and says my name as "Semolina". She was eager to participate, so we had her show that repairing nets is easy enough even for kids to do.

Yu and a local woman showing how to wash a net with plain bar soap and water.

Me on the microphone, narrating the net-washing demonstration.

Showing the crowd how to use an adapted circular bednet.  We were assisted by Max, a health worker at my town's hospital. (Note the malaria mural in the background, which was done by a group of PCVs last year, just before I arrived!)

After a lunch break, we got back to work handing out informational pamphlets in the market area. Each of these pamphlets was a mini-handbook for how to spot the symptoms of malaria, and how to treat it before it becomes life threatening. Although pamphlets are a dime a dozen in America, and you’ll always find people foisting them on you in the street, they are a lot rarer here. In fact, reading material in general is hard to come by here, so people were grateful to be receiving them, and I quickly ran out of pamphlets after people ran up to me asking for them.

Finally, we ended our day by playing some educational games with the kids in my neighborhood of Ampasy. I was excited for this because I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had a lot of time to hang out with “my” kids. The first thing we did was talk to them about malaria, in very basic terms, and explain the importance of sleeping under a mosquito net. We also used the frame of a halfway-built house to have them learn how to hang a net properly, and how to tuck it in so that mosquitoes are effectively shut out. The kids were already giggling and laughing and having a great time, so they were especially engaged for our next activity, which was a game a la sharks and minnows. We set up two nets on opposite ends of a field (held up by adults who came to help out), and the kids had to run from net to net without being “stung” (tapped) by the “mosquito” (Jeremy) who was standing in the center. The kids had a blast and didn’t want to stop playing. And although it sounds like a trivial game, this is an example of a situation where every little bit counts—each activity reinforced to the kids that mosquitoes are bad and need to be avoided, or else they’ll harm you. Because the kids wanted to keep playing but were full of energy, I decided that a fairly simple game would be in order. So I resurrected the “parasy, parasy, moka” game that we played with the kids in Mantasoa last year! This game is basically just duck, duck goose, but with the animals transposed into parasy (flea) and moka (mosquito), again with the aim of running away from the mosquito. Once again, the kids had a blast, and when the sun began to set on our long and busy day, we reluctantly ended the game and headed back to my house.

Local kids in the mosquito net they learned how to hang.

Playing the 'sharks and minnows' game, with Jeremy as the mosquito (shark) trying to "bite" the kids!

I was nervous about hosting my first event in Vangaindrano, but at the end of the day, I was really pleased with the work that my fellow volunteers and I did. Not only do I feel like I’m a better volunteer now (because I have learned how to talk to people about health issues), but I also feel like the people of Vangaindrano absorbed some helpful information. One of the best moments of the day was during our net washing demonstration, when I overheard one of the onlookers explaining to another woman, who had just arrived, what was going on. She repeated our instructions about using bar soap and not detergent, while her friend nodded in understanding. I was quietly thrilled to realize that not only were people getting the message, they were actually passing it along. And to make an impact on eradicating malaria in Madagascar, that’s exactly what’s needed.

So now you’ve read about what I did. Now, how will you stomp out malaria in 2013?

One year later

1.     At the beginning of my service, I was clueless about bikes and considered 10km to be a long ride. But since then, I have become a bike addict and I crave the feeling of being out on a long ride (30km +), the wind on my face and my legs aching but muscles glowing. If a road is really terrible, I would rather bike it than take a taxi-brousse, because biking is more fun, and often faster. Plus, I now know how to fix a flat, change a tube, and adjust the brakes.

2.     I wear shorts more than I ever have in my life, even as a kid.

3.     Consequently, I have more freckles than I have ever had in my life—on my legs, but also on my face, back, shoulders, and arms.

4.     My hair is sunbleached at the ends and so I accidentally have that ombre look going on.

5.     I can put away a massive bowl of rice like nobody’s business. In fact, I will never look at a bowl of rice the same way again.

6.     I’m able to navigate crowded markets-- both on bike and on foot-- that would have once given me claustrophobia-induced panic attacks.

7.     I consider a 4-hour taxi brousse ride to be a “short trip”.

8.     The colossal magnitude by which I miss New York makes me realize that I am never going to be one those people who just lives there for a few years after college. I’ve realized now that it’s my home, and I can’t wait to go back to it.

9.     I have mastered the public transportation of a massive African capital city.

10. I regularly conduct business in three languages (English, French, Malagasy).

11. Foreign travel will never again be the same to me-- serving in the Peace Corps gives you the ability to exist and move through foreign cultures with much more ease.

12. I’ve turned into a cat person--- by virtue of necessity in this country. (Hate rats? Learn to love cats.)

13. I’ve never appreciated things like toilets, running water, and refrigeration so much in my life. There is nothing quite like a cold drink when it’s 90 degrees out and you’ve just biked 30km.

14. Apples and peaches are “exotic” fruit, while coconuts, bananas, pineapple, corissol, pocanelle, sakoa, guava, avocadoes, and passion fruit are my everyday fare, depending on what’s in season.

15. Speaking of which, I have never before appreciated fruit seasons so much. For they are the bringers of the avocadoes. 10 cents each? I’ll take 5, thank you.

16. I have discovered just how much better a long brousse ride, or a long bike ride, is when you have a friend with you.

17. Uncomfortable, awkward social situations don’t really feel that awkward of uncomfortable. You get used to things always being weird.

18. Sometimes I feel like I could strangle a bear for a toasted bagel and cream cheese. Or a good cup of coffee. Or a decent slice of pizza. Or…

19. Internet is a luxury that I pay by the megabyte for. But when I do get to use unlimited wifi, I really don’t want to open the Pandora’s box of the internet, so I stick with just Gmail and Facebook as usual.

20. I’ve decided that listening to “I Found a Reason” by the Velvet Underground is like inhabitating a world of perfection for 3 minutes.

21. Without trying to sound sanctimonious, my eyes have really been opened to how the rest of the world lives. As a result, I have little tolerance for first-world-problem complaints. Your takeout order getting mixed up is not a problem. Neither is the fact that AT&T won’t let you use FaceTime with unlimited data.  (Sometimes the Facebook posts I read make me want to scream.) Those of us who are fortunate enough to have money to feed ourselves and our families, have access to medical care, and have a sturdy roof over our heads need to remember how lucky we are. I try to do this every day.

22. I fear that I will never again be able to speak English without peppering it with Malagasy words like mahay, fomba, simbasimba, azafady, and many others.

23. I am no longer afraid (or too clueless) to order a whole fish at a restaurant.

24. I physically cannot go to bed without scrubbing my feet. Parasy are no joke.

25. My adventurous streak has come out. When I hear about a waterfall, or a cool but inaccessible national park, my first though is “Let’s bike there!!! I want to explore!”

26. Now that I have to use a pre-paid phone, and find myself wanting to talk and text with friends much more than I can afford, I long for the days when I had a contract phone with plenty of minutes and text messages included. And I can’t believe that I would have so many unused minutes and texts left over at the end of every month. Why wasn’t I calling my friends ALL THE TIME? When I get back to America, I am doing that.

27. Also blowing my mind: the fact that I had UNLIMITED data on my iPhone plan. Again, now that I have to pay per megabyte for internet usage, the fact that an unlimited plan even exists is insane to think about.

28. I have become somewhat of an accidental vegan. About 65% of the things I eat just happen to be vegan, by virtue of the limited availability of animal food products here. Another 30% are vegetarian, and the remaining 15% contain a small amount of fish or meat. I get the majority of my protein from beans/lentils, peanuts/peanut butter, eggs, and sardines. And I’ve realized that I feel so much healthier eating this way. I mean, I’m sure the Paleo diet has its benefits, but it’s not really a sustainable way to eat, and it’s laughably impossible for non-Westerners to eat that way.

29. The things that I thought would be difficult before I got here—like health issues, feeling isolated, or having to use a kabone and fetch water from a pump, have not really been a big deal. The biggest challenges are actually ones that I’d never anticipated: figuring out how to have enough work, anxiety about not being a good enough volunteer/not having enough impact on my community, stress about interpersonal relationships with other volunteers (Peace Corps is a bit like high school at times), the constant fluctuation in my weight, and the worry that I spend too much time in my house and that I am not out there in the community enough.

30. For Easter Monday, my neighbor said she would cook for us if I bought a chicken. So I went to the market, negotiated a price, and then put a live chicken in my saddlebag and biked home. And I didn’t really find this activity to be all that weird. Also, the chicken was delicious.

Oranges and goodbyes

Time, and the rate of its passage, is an oft-discussed and frequently contemplated idea amongst Peace Corps volunteers.  As much as we sometimes complain about time going too slowly, a great many of us lament its too-quick passing as the end of our service draws nearer. And in those quiet days of daily life at site when we’ve danced into the rhythm of existence here, we often stop thinking about how long we’ve been in Madagascar, or how long we have left, because where we live simply feels like home. But then sometimes, something hits you, and all of a sudden—BAM!-- you realize that a year has passed.

I’ve just turned the page on my calendar to April, which means that I’ve been in this country for 13 months, and I’ve been at my site for 11 of those months. I was in Tana when my stage-mates and I reached our one-year anniversary in March, but that milestone didn’t really hit me until recently, when I arrived home to Vangaindrano after taking a vacation to India. I stepped off the taxi-brousse and smelled the fruit that the sellers had laid out on blankets on the side of the road, and in an instant, the sticky-sweet smell of oranges sitting in the baking sun gave me a nostalgic whiplash to last May, because the scent instantly reminded me of Farafangana and my arrival in the Sud Est. And that’s when I truly realized: I’ve been here a year.

Thinking about how much time I’ve spent here and how much I have left is an exercise that’s certain to bring about a complex brew of conflicting emotions. On one hand, I get excited when I think that I only have one year until I get to go home to America, see my friends and family, and drink New York City tap water. But on the other hand, I also start to get anxious about having enough time to do everything before I leave. Will one year be enough to make enough progress on my work project so that I can feel content about leaving next April? Will I have time to start an English club and work on a library for my town? And outside of work projects, will I be able to see all the things I want to see in Madagascar, and have all the experiences I want to before I go? As much as I have seen and have done already, there are so many more places that I want to visit and areas in my region that I want to explore. Time is ticking away just as quickly as ever, even on days when I don’t want it to.

And not only is time ticking away for me, the Peace Corps clock is now running out for my friends who came to Madagascar in March 2011, one year before me. When I arrived last year I always envisioned this stage of volunteers having one year left—until I realized last fall that no, if I had less than two years left, then they had less than a year left as well. This group of volunteers is one that I feel a very close kinship with, because for me, their friendship, guidance, and assistance shaped my experiences in my first year more than anything or anyone else. A great many of them were volunteer trainers for my stage, and so I got to know them very early on. And since being in the Sud Est, the six of them in my region have shaped some of my favorite memories of my service: bike-exploring and discovering the beach in my region with Matt, relaxed Manakara weekends cooking and watching movies with Emily, long afternoon talks with Maria at her house, night-swimming in Mananjary with Bryan, being entertained on long taxi-brousse rides by Al, and bridge adventures (he’ll know what this means) with Paul. And so to think of them leaving the Sud Est, as they are all doing today, is almost unfathomable to me. What is Farafangana without Maria? Or Manombo without Paul? I can’t picture going to work in the Coldis office in Manakara without stopping by Matt’s house in the compound to say hello, just as I also can’t believe that I won’t get to go to Gourmandise for breakfast with Emily the next time I am in Manakara. At my last lunch with Maria I unsuccessfully fought back tears when I told her how much I would miss biking down the main road in Fara towards her house, and the happy feeling I’d get when I’d see her door open and know that my friend was at home. And what I realized last week is that as Peace Corps volunteers, we strongly associate the places we know and love in this country with our friends who live there—and then when they leave, as we all will do at some point, it’s almost like the heart has been ripped out of the town.

On Thursday I paid one last visit to Paul in Manombo (about 45km north of Vangaindrano) to celebrate his two years of service and participate in the going-away fety that his town was throwing for him. When I coasted down the hill into town on my bike and saw him, as I often do, standing on the road checking for cell phone service, I realized that it would be the last time that I’d see my friend’s Scandanavian-esque blond head on the side of the road. I’d never be able to wave at him from a taxi-brousse window again, or share a brousse home from Farafangana. But as sad as that was to think about, it was wonderfully bittersweet to be part of Manombo’s celebration for him and honor the work he has done here. I can only hope to be fêted as Paul was when I leave next year, and seeing what it’s like to say goodbye to your town as a volunteer made me realize for the first time what a difficult time I’ll have when I leave next year.

During my visit, Paul jokingly said to me that we should continue to call Manombo ‘Paul’s site’ even though he will be replaced by a new volunteer in May. We laughed about it, but on my ride home I realized that there’s no way that I will be able to disassociate that town from him, nor can I do so for any of my friends who are leaving. So I say this to all of my volunteer friends who are finishing their service and heading home this month : you may be leaving Madagascar’s soil, but to both your Peace Corps and Malagasy friends, you will always be a part of this place. And next year, when it’s my turn to head home, my wish is that I’ll be thought of the same way.

Then and now

It’s amazing to think about how much my life has changed since I arrived in Madagascar. When I do a mental comparison of what my life was like a year ago versus today, it can be almost comical to compare the difference. I saw another volunteer post a similar entry on her blog, so I thought it would be fun to replicate it myself.

THEN:
Ah, the convenience of a washing machine. Just press a button and wait for it to be done.

NOW:
I hand-wash everything (including sheets) in plastic basins. It takes me about 2-3 hours, and I do this once a week. I also sometimes pay a woman to help when I have too many dirty clothes to deal with.

THEN:
Pre-work Starbucks visits.

∫NOW:
My local coffee and mofo stand, with endrini' Arnaud, its proprietor. 10 cents for a small cup of coffee.

THEN:

Barre workout classes at the Physique 57 studios all over NYC.

NOW:
Physique 57 DVDs in my house, using sand-filled water bottles as weights.

THEN:
Commuting to work on the NYC subway.

NOW:
Commuting to work on my trusty bike, via rutted, muddy roads.

THEN:
Monthly air-travel.

NOW:
Monthly taxi-brousse travel.

THEN:
iPhone.

NOW:

Crappy circa 2007 phone.

THEN:
Drinks at cocktail bars (especially my favorite, scotch on the rocks.)

NOW:
Cheap rum that has been steeped with vanilla beans (known here as rhum arrangée) to make it taste better.

THEN:
Running water in my kitchen and bathroom, with NYC tap water-- the world's best!

NOW:
Water from a hand-pump about 50 meters away from my house. I fetch about 3 buckets' worth per day. My "running water" setup is a jerry can that I've fitted with a tap so that I have a good place for handwashing.

Shake it!

Some funny videos of my neighborhood kids dancing.

The song of the indri

Here are two videos I recorded in Andasibe, a national park about 3 hours east of Tana, in October 2012. They both show the indri, a special type of lemur that is unique for its "singing", and which is only found in the Andasibe area. It uses this singing to locate its family/group members, and also to mark off its territory. This was one of the coolest things I have experienced so far in Madagascar. My fellow volunteer James lives right on the edge of this forest and hears the indris from his house every morning-- lucky guy. When my brother Tim came for a visit last fall, we spent a day in Andasibe and then a day exploring James's forest, Maromizaha. The first video shows them jumping from tree to tree, and the second one records their ethereal singing.

An Open Letter to DreamWorks

Author’s note: I know that the majority of my blog posts to date have been long-winded bouts of often overly-sentimental naval gazing, but with this post I hope to do something a little different. Along with posting this letter on my blog, I am sending it via email to as many DreamWorks contacts as I can find. If you are as angered as I am by the information I’ve presented below, I urge you to sign the petition here:

To Whom It May Concern:

First of all, let me congratulate you on the success of the most recent Madagascar movie “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted”, which, according to your most recent earnings report, has earned over $720 million at the worldwide box office. I have yet to see the newest film, but I look forward to watching it when I return to America in 2014, after my Peace Corps service is over.

It should come as no surprise to you that when I first announced to my friends and family that I would be serving my Peace Corps assignment in Madagascar, most people’s reactions had something to do with the Madagascar movies. And truth be told, when I announced my assignment on Facebook, I did so with the visual aid of a film still from the first “Madagascar” movie. Because of its massive success, your film series is responsible for many Americans’ entire perception and knowledge of the country of Madagascar.

However, once you get past that initial name recognition, most people will admit that they don’t know much about the actual country. I didn’t either, when I first got my invitation to serve here. But here is what I have learned: while Madagascar is indeed a wild and wonderful biodiversity hotspot, full of unique and colorful creatures like the lemurs and fosas shown in your films, it is also one of the most heartbreakingly, devastatingly impoverished countries in the world. According to the Malagasy government, more than 75% of people here live on less than $1 a day, an increase of 68% since the crippling political crisis of 2009, which ground local industries to a halt and caused many international donors to pull their aid funding. This is a country in which its people fight a daily battle just to survive and feed their families.

The needs here are so great yet so simple: access to clean water and reliable electricity, improved bridges and roads so that all routes are passable even during the rainy season, rehabilitation of schools so students have a proper learning environment, money to pay the teachers so that they don’t go on strike and disrupt the children’s learning, and in fact, money for children to pay the very meager school fees that they can continue to learn. These are all things that we as privileged Americans take for granted, but are veritable luxuries here in Madagascar.

And getting beyond basic human needs, there is an immense need for wildlife protection and natural resources conservation. This is a country that has already lost over 80% of its original growth forest to increasingly desperate farmers who clearcut land in order to plant food, only to exhaust the soil's nutrients within three years, forcing them to move on and clearcut even more land. Disappearing forests means the disappearance of animals that live there—lemurs, chameleons, frogs, birds, spiders, and all sorts of creatures that are found nowhere else in the world. They are dying because their forest is dying. Once they are gone from Madagascar, they will be gone from the entire world.

So as I began learning more and more about the poverty, despair, and environmental disasters that exist in this breathtakingly beautiful and unique country, I started to wonder if your company had donated any of the profits from the “Madagascar” movies to the country that they are named after. I posed the question to a State Department official here, and I was shocked to hear anecdotally from him that, aside from a token gift of around $50,000 (to which entity I am not clear), DreamWorks has not used any of the franchise profits to aid the people or the environment of Madagascar. Yet this is a franchise that, according to a June 2012 press release, has raked in over $1.1 billion worldwide. That is more than 10% of one year’s GDP of the entire country of Madagascar. Certainly the argument can be made that the success of the “Madagascar” movies increased the country’s reknown and elevated tourism revenue, but that is unfortunately not the case. (Even if a child saw the films and then begged his parents to take him to Madagascar, it’s just not economically viable as a family vacation destination when airfare from the United States costs upwards of $2,000 a person.)

I am not one to enthusiastically lobby for aid; in fact, I am serving as Peace Corps Community Economic Development volunteer because I am passionate about helping people improve their livelihoods through economic activity and business development. However, when I see something as imbalanced as a movie studio making billions of dollars using the name of one of the world’s poorest countries, I feel that there is a need for rebalancing. It’s about doing what is right. If you named a film “Haiti” and then proceeded to make millions of dollars of profit from it, surely there would be a public outcry for some portion of this revenue to be shared with the country. But because Madagascar’s poverty is not quite as visible to most westerners, the public attention is not there.

I know that DreamWorks Animation is by nature a charitable company, with a namesake foundation of your own, and that your founders Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen have also personally donated much of their wealth towards charitable causes. So what I am asking of DreamWorks is this: take some of the money you allocate for charitable giving and direct it towards an organization that is doing a lot of good work here in Madagascar, such as CARE, WWF, the United Nations World Food Programme, UNICEF, or the International Red Cross, just to name a few. Or even better, how about dedicating a portion of DreamWorks’s profits that can be attributed to “Madagascar 3”? According to your most recent earnings statement, your company posted a total of $24.4 million in profit for Q32012, an increase of 24 percent profit over the previous year. That earnings statement also noted that “Madagascar 3” accounted for 25 percent of your total Q3 revenue ($47.1 million). So how about taking a very tiny part of this small portion of the film’s total revenue, and pledging it towards good works in Madagascar? A mere 1% of the Q3 revenue would be $470,000, and this comparatively small amount of money could do such a world of good here. For example, just $20 could pay one year’s high school fees for one student. $1,500 would pay to install a water pump that would literally change the lives of the people who’d use it. Even a large-scale project such as paving an important 20 kilometer stretch of road could be achieved for under $100,000—a huge amount of money to a country as poor as this, but I am sure there are Hollywood charity benefits where reserving a table commands a more princely sum than this.

I know it will be easy enough for you to dismiss this letter and its accompanying petition as a rant from a naïve Peace Corps volunteer who doesn’t understand how the business world works. But you see, I do in fact understand a little bit. Prior to my Peace Corps service, I spent over 7 years in the business world in New York, working for fantastic companies such as Food Network and EMI Music, and now I am studying to take the GMAT in order to get my MBA when I finish my service.  I read The Economist whenever I can get my hands on a copy. And what I know now about modern business is this: in order to survive, a company cannot purely exist for profit and profit alone. A company must show that it has a commitment to serving its customers but also respecting the world in which it exists. How else to explain the rise of B Corps, or the fact that the State Department’s “21^st Century Statecraft” agenda now includes a doctrine on corporate social responsibility? I hope that DreamWorks can evolve and grow as a company just as so many others are, too. And to do so, I am asking you to please give back to the country that has lent you its name. It deserves more than to just be a line item on your earnings report.

Sincerely,

Emily Silman

Peace Corps volunteer, Community Economic Development

Vangaindrano, Madagascar

March 2012- May 2014

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READERS: if you agree with me, please take a few minutes to sign my petition at Change.org: