World Malaria Day!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks on my side of the world! A lot of things happened, including (but not limited to) the completion of my first secondary project, feeling stressed for the first time since I can remember, walking around more of my commune than ever before, and lots of fun hanging out in between.

World Malaria Day: The Good!

For those of you who did not know, Happy World Malaria Day (on April 25)! I wrote in my last blog about the plans I had to commemorate the event and I am proud to say that I successfully-ish completed everything I set out to do. It was a lot of work, but such a rewarding investment of my time and effort. I broke down my activities into three parts:

1.     Wall of Fame

a.      The week before World Malaria Day, I spent walking around with my camera, a full liter of water, and my malaria teaching aid pictures. I walked to every little village hamlet within 5 kilometers of the village I live in and talked to around 100 different people and families. In each small community, I showed the sketch of the mural we planned to paint and explained it to my little audience, highlighting why they should use a net, and also who should use a net. Then I inquired as to whom all already used bed nets within the little village. I would say generally about half the families in all the small villages I visited actually used a bed net to sleep under. I did hit the jackpot though in this little village community called Maromoky that literally means “lots of mosquitoes”…every family there uses a bed net! I took pictures of all the people and families with their nets and then invited them to Malaria Day on the 25^th where they would be able to pick up their photos. This was really effective in recognizing the people and families who used nets and making them an example to other families who don’t use nets. Photographs are very highly valued and so the fact that I was taking their pictures and then giving the photo back was a great source of pride for people. Canvassing the entire commune of Mahatalaky kind of felt a bit like campaigning for myself and my work, but it was a really great way to get out there talking to people about malaria.

2.     Dream Banners

a.     In Madagascar, Malaria is the number on cause of death in children under the age of 5. In fact, 1 in every 14 kids here die of malaria each year. This statistic in unacceptable. To get kids thinking about their futures, Peace Corps Africa came up with the idea of dream banners. Basically, all the kids who attended my malaria day activities were given paper and crayons and asked to illustrate their answer to the question “When I grow up I will…” This was my favorite activity of all the things we did on World Malaria Day. Creativity and individuality are not things that are valued here in terms of the education system. Little kids don’t color in their free time, and generally don’t even know how to hold a pen until they go to school when they’re 6 years old. In their first year of school, they study how to draw and then get tested and scored on their drawing abilities. So this whole exercise in creativity was something that all the kids had actually never done before. Asking them to wrap their little minds around the abstract idea of the future was really challenging, but I am so happy with the way things worked out. They drew big houses and farm fields and flowers and happy families and cows. They wrote their names in huge letters and asked if they were allowed to keep their masterpieces. When I asked some of them to explain what they drew, their responses were simple: This is my house that I’ll live in, this is my family being happy, this is the flower that will grow where I live. I was really proud of the fact that all my kids were able to grasp what I was asking them to do in imagining their futures. It also made me so happy just to provide the opportunity for them to have this small creative outlet. Watching this small army of kids walk home clutching their small drawings created with the one color crayon I handed out per kid made me feel more validated than all the other activities I did on World Malaria Day.

3.     Malaria Skit

a.     Thanks to my great friends at ONG Azafady, I was able to enlist the volunteers in their Pioneer program to help with the various activities of World Malaria Day. One of the biggest challenges with malaria education is that a lot of families use nets, but only the parents or grandparents sleep under them. The kids who are most susceptible sleep on the floor or somewhere else. The other challenge is the fact that parents often wait a long time before bringing their sick child into the hospital for treatment. The volunteers and I acted in a skit that addressed these two main obstacles with malaria work in Madagascar. It centered on a Peace Corps volunteer (me!) going around a village doing malaria counseling and education. The volunteer (me!!) comes across a family who uses a net, but where only the parents actually sleep under it. Their baby gets sick with malaria and the parents try herbal remedies and visit a witch doctor before I finally tell them they need to visit the hospital for treatment. The whole skit was well acted and very clear and all the kids loved it! The volunteers did a great visualization of malaria transmission from mosquitoes and how a net works to protect you, which I loved, and all the kids really understood. It was a lot of fun.

World Malaria Day: The Good But Difficult!

1.     Malaria Mural

a.     This was so hard! I completely and totally underestimated the amount of work, time and skill that needs to go into successfully completing a wall sized mural. These things coupled with my lack of art skills made the whole thing way more stressful than it needed to be. It was really challenging for me to find myself in a situation where I needed to be kind of laidback and calm about things. I really wanted the mural to be perfect and a masterpiece on par with the Sistine Chapel, but obviously that was impossible. By the third day of work on the mural though, I reminded myself that I wanted this whole thing to be a community project, not just “Monica’s project.” So, yes, that meant imperfections and crooked lines and cartoon-looking people, but I am proud to report that the community of Mahatalaky loves and adores their kind of strange looking malaria mural! Furthermore, it is effective and clear as a malaria teaching tool, which at the end of the day, is all the mural really needs to be. But I will say that I do not intend to paint anything for at least another year!

And so completes the first part of my first big project! I consider it a huge success because I spent basically two weeks talking about malaria with everyone I came into contact with and it was also just a lot of fun. Right after World Malaria Day was the long-awaited grand opening of the secondary school built by Azafady in Mahatalaky. The whole community celebrated together which was wonderful and so amazing to be a part of. There was an all-night party Thursday to commemorate the school opening, and I had a great moment where I just looked around at my community gathered together dancing and having fun, and thought to myself how happy I am. :)


[Sidenote: I tried to upload some photos with the post and it just failed miserably, everything froze right before my uploads finished and I'm so sad. So anyone who hasn't seen the photos I already posted to Facebook can follow this link here to this album! http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150766217943232.436937.518898231&type=3&l=f3e5f83eda]

Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday: My Next Big Thing

I am proud to finally reveal My Big Peace Corps Project [working title]! In addition to my work at the health center in Mahatalaky, I’m starting work on my secondary project at the end of April. So without further ado…

Phase I/Health Curriculum/CEG Mahatalaky/April – May

        April 25 – World Malaria Day Project 
Phase II/Anti-SIDA Club/CEG Mahatalaky/June – July

Phase III/Peer Health Educator Leadership Training/Fort Dauphin/September

I’ll be teaching a Health Curriculum at the middle school in Mahatalaky, starting in a couple weeks. There’s about 250 students ages 11-18 that study there. The month long curriculum will cover general health with a focus on HIV/AIDS, STI’s, and good sexual practices. There’s no traditional cringe-inducing ‘birds and bees’ talk that kids have with their parents here. Sex is not talked about at all. I hope that my curriculum will provide the students with some very basic knowledge so that they can make better decisions for themselves, and provide motivated students with leadership opportunities.

The kickoff event to my curriculum and this 6-month project is World Malaria Day, April 25. Over 90% of all deaths from malaria occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Madagascar, malaria is the number one cause of death in children under the age of 5. In fact, 1 in every 14 kids here die of malaria each year. I’ve blogged about malaria before and how shocking it is to see a child so sick from an illness that is so preventable (Malaria in Madagascar), but this month I’m joining with Peace Corps Africa to support the President’s Malaria Initiative goal of “halving the burden of malaria in 70 percent of the at-risk populations on the [African] continent (i.e., approximately 450 million residents)” by 2013. More than any other illness I’ve seen in my community here, malaria is the most preventable and the most ignored. So on April 25 in partnership with the CEG Mahatalaky, and my new Peer Health and Leadership Program, I’m organizing a community-wide event to raise awareness and promote education. We’ll be painting a mural illustrating proper net usage and creating a “Wall of Fame” to recognize the community individuals and families who practice malaria preventative measures. I’m so super excited about this project, and I can’t wait to update you all on how it goes, complete with pictures and illustrations! For now, I’ve posted the sketches of the mural’s we’ll be painting in Mahatalaky.

This is an illustration of a pregnant woman taking her malaria prevention medicine. Only 23% of pregnant women in Madagascar are receiving the necessary 2 doses of the medicine. 

This illustrates a couple things: proper net usage, and caring for a malaria-affected child.  Last year in Madagascar, 56% of children with a fever did not seek any treatment. 

After the Health curriculum ends around June, I’m starting the new Anti-SIDA Club! Until the end of the school year, the club will mostly just focus on Youth Development, i.e. hanging out, playing soccer, and talking. Hopefully we’ll have time to do a couple community activities, maybe around World Environment Day or something. I figure maybe around 30 kids will be interested enough in Health to join the Anti-SIDA club. From those 30 kids who stick around, I’m going to pick 10, the best of the best, to be trained as Peer Health Educators.

The gem of the entire project is my Peer Health Educator Leadership Training. I even gave it an acronym, PHELT, which I’m totally trying to make happen! For example, all the emails I send to my boss about it I label “PHELT Project Proposal” or “PHELT Budget.” He didn’t really get it at first, but I still hope it catches on! With the help of the NGOs Azafady (www.madagascar.co.uk) and PSI (www.psi.org), the training will take place during school’s summer vacation, most likely in September, and will focus on developing the leadership and communication skills of the 10 selected students. The goal is for the trained peer educators to teach a health curriculum at the CEG again in September, just like I’m doing now in April. In this way, I hope to achieve project sustainability. At the very least, I hope that even just one student will learn some skills to help motivate them to work and educate themselves beyond the scope of the rural village they live in.

I am ridiculously excited about this project. I hope that it becomes the cornerstone of my Peace Corps experience, and I really feel like with this goal I really have a chance to make a difference in some lives here. If you are interested in anything I’ve written about in this blog or have any questions about my project or malaria, please feel free to comment or email!

I’ve told you my plan, now how will you Stomp Out Malaria in 2012?
           http://stompoutmalaria.org

How Peace Corps Made Me an Animal Hater and Three Other Ways I’ve Changed Since I Got Here

[I’ve been here eight months, so it seemed a fitting time for a list-style post.]

1.     Animal Hater

           While I won’t pretend that I was ever a passionate PETA supporter and I’ve never called a bearded dragon my child (Grace..), I’ve always liked animals. Really, who doesn’t? I’ve had fish and cats as pets since I was a kid, and Addie the dog is probably the most valued and beloved member of the Skelton family. But since moving to Madagascar, any love I ever felt for animals in the past has been extinguished. I hate all animals. Chickens, roosters, ducks, goats, dogs, cats, cows, mice, rats: you name it, I hate it. And before you condemn me as a heartless rhymes with witch, please refer back to some of my former posts (read: Monica Eludes an Escaped Cow)! I think part of it is the fact that I live in a village where the main industry is agriculture, so barnyard animals are always roaming around. Sometimes to amuse myself, I just throw rocks at the chickens and see how long it takes me before I hit one. Lucky for the chickens, I have pretty poor aim. And WHY would a rooster crow not only at 4 am when the sun is rising, but also at 3 pm in the afternoon when I’m trying to do something?? Because roosters are stupid. Many of you may not know this, but a goat is one of the most irritating animals on the planet, because it’s bleating sounds extremely human. It’s unsettling. Google “goat that sounds like a man” and you’ll see what I mean. Imagine living with that. I don’t want this post to become a rant on animals, so I’ll end it with this: I recently got a mouse as a roommate. EXCELLENT!

2.     Nature Lover

     Ok, I have always liked nature, probably more than the average person. But, after 8 months living in the most beautiful place in the world, it still takes my breath away. The green of the rain forest, the enormity of the mountains, the blue of the ocean.. I could write poems about it, if only I knew how to write poetry. Take today for example. I’m here in Fort Dauphin to work the cultural center but also primarily to finally finish writing my health curriculum and project proposal for the Peer Health Ambassador program I’m trying to start. I was lamenting to a Malagasy friend of mine about how I had no good place to stay, and she kindly offered me a bed at her house. She told me the neighborhood it was in so I knew it would be nice, but she never told me it would be inspiring! She lives in a roomy bungalow right on the seaside cliffs of the Indian Ocean. Literally, the windows to the room I’m staying in open right out to the ocean. It’s amazing. Nothing compares to the beauty of the completely un-developed ocean side property that is all of Fort Dauphin. I love it.

Photo credit to my friend Amy Stephens, an Azafady volunteer who worked in Mahatalaky. 

3.     Happy Waiter

       I believe I’ve written before about the notion of “Malagasy time.” Someone says be there at 9am, they really just mean sometime in the morning. Someone says a restaurant is open for lunch, they really mean it’s closed from 12-3pm. A bush taxi driver says the broken down car will be fixed in a little, he really means after at least 4 hours. This has all become the realities of my life here in Madagascar. At first, it would drive me crazyyy. Like bang-your-head-against-the-wall-scream-your-head-off crazy. And then I just got used to it. In fact, I can now say that I depend on waiting anytime I ever go anywhere! I always bring a book, and since I’m currently in the middle of the epic that is the Game of Thrones series, I actually look forward to these time lapses because I have an excuse to read! Yay!

4.    My Relative Role

      Every Peace Corps volunteer, whether they admit it or not, wants to save the world. Even if it’s only in the littlest way, it’s still part of the reason you join Peace Corps. But moving to my tiny village in rural Madagascar has really changed my perspective, not only on what it means to “change the world” but the role one person can play in making a difference. I used to think my success as a volunteer would be based on the number of projects I completed or the number of wells I built here. After 8 months here, I measure my success based on how my community values and perceives me as one of its members. I am currently working on the proposal for the project I want to base my entire service around, and I am so excited about it. I really feel like this is an idea that my whole community can get behind, and an idea that I can potentially take to many more small communities around the Antanosy and Antandroy regions of southern Madagascar. I’ll keep you updated as this idea comes to fruition, hopefully I will have the proposal completed in the next week!

In other news, work at the Health Center continues and my responsibilities there continue to grow. My English Club is flourishing; I’ve really found a lot of joy in teaching kids who genuinely want to learn! My camera broke (sad!) but I’m trying to get in the habit of taking pictures on my iPod so I can keep up to date with photos. I should be able to post pictures of the cultural center in Fort Dauphin, my English Club, and the health center in Mahatalaky next time! XO

Waiting for the Hurricane

I'm currently in Fort Dauphin right now waiting out the last bits of Hurricane Giovanna that's been tormenting Madagascar since last week. I'm working on a post, but here's a visual to tide you over: 

And this is a picture of the time my bush taxi got stuck in the mud on the road back to my village. It took 4 hours to dig it out, plus the 4 hours of actually driving the trip takes when the road is washed out. Fun!

Monitalaky in 2012

Another Peace Corps volunteer told me recently that San Francisco is the exact global polar opposite of Madagascar. Meaning I am as far from home as it is possible to be without getting closer. 11262.79 miles to be exact. Here’s what’ up and what’s new on the other side of the world:

New and Improved in 2012

As some of you know, I struggled in my first three months at site to find things to do and figure out work. But with the dawn of the new year, that challenge has effectively eliminated itself! About a month and a half ago, I rode the taxi brousse with the nurse back to Mahatalaky, and we had a talk. She asked me why I didn’t work more and I asked her why she was always leaving Mahatalaky without telling me. The end result of this conversation was the two of us sitting down and making a work schedule for me. And since then, I have been so busy! I work 3-4 days at the health center, usually from 8am-12 or 1pm. The past six weeks in Mahatalaky have really opened my eyes to the reality of the health situation here. There is one nurse trying to serve and help every patient that walks through her door. On any given day, there’s at least forty pregnant women waiting for a prenatal visit, plus ten or twenty other patients who are just sick. Seventeen women have given birth in just the last six weeks alone. And it’s just the nurse and me! [A quick note on the giving-birth culture here: the birth room is just a table and a bucket. Mothers in labor come to the health center and just walk around until its time to actually have the baby. No one talks. During a contraction, the woman in labor just closes her eyes and waits it out. Even during the crowning of the baby, no more than maybe a peep escapes her lips. It’s amazing.] I do everything I can to help her. Typically, I do twenty to thirty minutes of health counseling with the waiting patients before I go in and help the nurse with her consultations. I fill out charts, weigh patients, take blood pressure, hold down a kid before a shot, and distribute vaccinations. The fact that I can actually speak Malagasy now is the most influential factor in me taking on a bigger role at the health center. I can converse with the patients and communicate medical information to the nurse without getting flustered or bungled. I love what I’m doing, and it is great to feel like I am a needed and integral part of running the health center in the village.

Project idea: Solar panels for the Health Center. Women giving birth at night do it by candlelight. We keep vaccines on ice blocks!

Malaria in Madagascar

We are currently at the height of malaria season. The rainy tropical weather is the ideal breeding place for blood-hungry plasmodium falciparum, or malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Born and raised in the western world, I had never seen malaria before, and nothing can prepare you for it. Most often seen in children and babies, malaria makes a kid too sick to even move. At least ten children every day come to the health center carried by their mothers. Glassy eyed and unresponsive, these kids have a temperature over 102 degrees F. The highest I’ve seen is 104.6 degrees F. Oftentimes, they are so late into the progression of malaria that they are comatose or convulsing. It is unsettling to see a child not even stir when their finger is pricked for a malaria test or an IV is inserted into their arm to try and revive them. I am still shocked every day to see children so sick coming in to receive care. Sometimes parents have to walk 10 km or more to bring their child to the health center, which is why a lot of times kids come in really late into the progression of the disease.

Watching malaria ravage the children of my community has been perhaps the most personally frustrating thing I’ve witnessed since coming to this country. Using a mosquito net at night is the single most effective way to prevent malaria, and it is SO EASY, but for some reason people don’t do it. USAID has sponsored numerous free bed net distributions over the years, but still people do not use them. I see bed nets used a lot to fish in the ocean and to store cassava, but never to actually sleep under. The worst is the families who have a mosquito net hanging over their beds, but don’t let them down to sleep under at night. People know they need to use the nets and understand how they protect from malaria, but there’s a disconnect somewhere along the way. I’m still trying to figure out where those disconnect lies, but that’s all part of my job as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Project idea: Malaria awareness workshop/campaign, bed net distribution for a nominal fee.

Black Nadia or How I Got Converted to Liking Malagasy Music

Some Malagasy music is really terrible. Actually, MOST Malagasy music is pretty terrible. But somehow over the course of my seven months here, I’ve been converted into a Black Nadia fan. Black Nadia is basically like the Britney Spears/Rhianna/Beyonce of Madagascar. She’s sassy, independent, and sings catchy pop songs. I don’t know where along the way it happened, but I love her. The music video for her latest song features her dancing in front of a Hummer. How can you not love that??

Apples: The Most Delicious Food on the Planet?

Madagascar has every fruit you could ever imagine…except apples. I never thought I would actually write a blog post about apples, but let me say, you’ll miss apples when they’re gone! I’m here in Tana, the capital of Madagascar, for some business, and Tana has supermarkets. And supermarkets have apples!! I ate my first apple in seven months a couple days ago, and I legitimately GOT CHILLS. Then I ate some apple slices with peanut butter and I almost cried! Have apples always been this good???

Officially, my official OFFICIAL address:

After extended trial and tribulation, I finally figured out how the post here works. I've been getting mail for months, I just never knew it! So thanks to everyone who has sent me things in the past...three months or so. Believe me, it was like a second Christmas getting all this great stuff from the US. The post office here is only open on Tuesdays and Fridays from 8:30am-10:00am because this is Madagascar and they can do whatever they want. Just something interesting I learned. Anyway, keep the good stuff coming!!!

For all future use:

Monica Skelton, Corps de la Paix
Commune Rurale Mahatalaky
Fort Dauphin 614
Madagascar

NYE, Speak-singing, and the Escaped Cow: Mahatalaky Musings Part II

New Years in Madagascar

After six months in Madagascar, I’ve gotten used to the fact that nothing is ever set in stone, and Malagasy people are often prone to exaggeration. Like, gross exaggeration. For example, “We’re leaving in a little bit” translates to “We’re leaving sometime in the next 24 hours” or “he’s my husband” can mean “he’s the guy that I’m sleeping with right now.” So when I was told the New Years holiday was ‘maresaky’ (aka happening/crazy/fun/goin on) I thought to myself “Yeah SURE, I’ll believe it when I see it.” How wrong was I! This New Years has definitely been one of the crazier ones I’ve ever celebrated. Hopefully it’s a good omen for the year of 2012.

My first clue that maybe it was actually going to be a happening party was on December 30, the day after I got back to Mahatalaky, when we all piled into the truck and drove into Fort Dauphin to purchase the ‘comisión,’ or all the food we needed that they don’t sell in the village, as well as 30 liters of gasoline for the generator. The next day, New Year’s Eve, the party started at about 6pm, at which point they started the generator and started blaring the music, and it didn’t end for another 48 hours. I got ready with my friends, did their makeup and we shared jewelry. It made me feel a little more at home, just like my New Year’s Eves with my Alpha Phi sisters. :) Except minus the Hilton hotel and a party with Steve Aoki. Anyway. We popped champagne that I brought back from France, and had ourselves a party! By some miracle I managed to keep my eyes open until midnight, at which point things really got crazy. The Dada, the mayor, and his people turned the town hall into a disco, and with the better part of my 500 person village packed into one room, it was a site to behold. Pictures to come soon. Everyone was dancing; people were passing around bottles of rum, and sharing cigarettes. It was a site to behold. I was a little scared!

I fell asleep on Dada’s bed at 1am with Cicia, Patricia, and Christiana (the 3-month-old!) with my guy Erika taking the floor. I woke up again at 3am and went to my own bed, with music still blaring, and hundreds of people still dancing. I woke up the next morning at 6:30am, and music was still blasting, but only a faithful 15 people remained. I went back to bed and watched Pride and Prejudice and got up at 9, keeping with my family’s tradition of spending the first day of the new year doing nothing. When I got up again, the music was STILL BLARING. I then helped prepare our New Year’s brunch! Spaghetti, pork, cucumber salad, carrot salad, rice (of course), bread, soda!!! It was quite the spread. I was stuffed afterward. But the party still wasn’t over. There was another disco that night, and the night after. The New Years holiday in Madagascar is a time for partying, dancing, drinking, visiting your family, and thanking the special people in your life for a good year. It’s like if Thanksgiving and Christmas got rolled in with New Years! I visited the great aunt’s brother’s son, and he treated me like I was his on daughter. I ate goose and drank more Coke than I’ve drunk in my previous 23 years of life. By the time the party finally ended on the 4^th of January, I was pretty happy because I was exhausted.

The Christmas Tree!

Trying to keep our eyes open til midnight...granny alert.

NYE dance party

New Year's Day brunch

Speak-singing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about learning languages and how the way that a language is spoken has just as much importance as the words and grammar that make it up. So the pronunciation, diction, the rhythm of how you say something, and the patterns of speech. I still translate from Malagasy to English in my head, I’m starting to get to the point where I can converse without doing that, but it still takes time. It always amuses me though, because the way people speak here is so different than the way English is spoken, so when I translate in my head it often sounds funny. For example, when I’m walking down the street any number of people, friends and strangers, call out to me, and the exchange goes something like this:

            Person on the street/in their house: Ahoana! Hoeza hanao? [Hey! Where are you going?]

            Me: Mitsangasangana! [I’m just hanging out!]

            Person on the street/in their house: Mandrosoa bageda! [Come in! Have some sweet potatoes!] (Or whatever they might be eating or drinking)

Me: Majotoa! [Enjoy!]

This whole exchange happens while I continue on my way, in a span of maybe 10 seconds. It always cracks me up.

People also speak very sing-songy and liltingly. For example, when someone greets me, it often comes out like “Salam-eyy Monica-eyy, ino vao vao-eyy?” [Hey Monica, what’s up?] The patterns of language are so interesting to me, and I love that I’m getting to the point with Malagasy where I can notice the intricacies of it.

Monica Eludes an Escaped Cow

There’s a scene in Pride and Prejudice (the Kiera Knightley version) where Mr. Collins calls out to his wife Charlotte to come quickly, and she replies, “Has the pig escaped again?” You laugh because it seems very mundane and ridiculous, but I can now speak from experience, and escaped livestock is no joking matter! Yesterday, a giant cow went rogue and escaped the handling of the herders and started running through town. Cows here aren’t like the Happy Cows Come from California cows.  They are big and dirty and they have horns, and everyone pretty much stays out of their way when they’re being herded around I was sitting in the shade with Patricia, Christian, and the baby, when a giant cow comes stampeding into the yard. He looked manic. Patricia ran for the house with the baby, while Christian just started yelling. I froze in place, hoping that if I didn’t move this giant cow would just run back the way it came. A couple seconds later, the herders came chasing after it and managed to at least get it out of our yard, although not under control. Once we realized we were safe from the being speared on the tip of the horn of a giant, everyone was free to laugh at me and how scared I was. Christian, the six-year-old, was literally rolling on the ground laughing and screaming “SHE WAS SO SCARED…. OF A COW!!!!!” Thanks a lot Christian! This is my life we're talking about! 

Even I eventually found amusement in the whole situation, because it was pretty hilarious to watch five grown men chase a cow around town for the better part of a half hour. Only in Mahatalaky!