Welcome to Madagascar!

Finally…I arrived in Madagascar. After my flight from Rome to Milan to Nosy Be (a paradise island in Northern Madagascar), we touched ground 16th of September at 9 o’clock a.m.

Tuli and I have been picked up by a WFP driver and his huge jeep with the UN-logo on it…yes, I have to admit that stuff like that still puts a smile on my face.
We got of at our hotel which is really nice and conveniently located, so that we can actually walk to the office.
We found a note in our rooms that Arne (a Norwegian PI consultant) will visit us.
So we spent the afternoon having lunch with him and his family. It was a pleasant gesture by Arne to spend his Sunday with us…so we were welcomed warmly.

For our first day at work we have been picked up again by a driver. Probably just to make sure that the interns don’t get lost on their first day. Arne was already there and showed us a little bit around before Volana arrived as well. She will be our direct supervisor and closest colleague. We spent most of the week with briefings from the different departments. Everybody was very keen on explaining to us what his or job is…so we got plenty if information about logistics, IT, school feeding, food for work, nutrition centres, etc.
It will take some time to get the whole picture, but this introduction was very helpful.

In our Public Information department we are mainly responsible for the external perception of WFP Madagascar. So from writing press releases to looking for suitable collaborations to enhance the visibility of WFP, we are the ones when it comes to spreading publicly the word of hunger.

The interns were directly involved in writing a briefing for our country director Krystyna, because she will meet a high US government official to discuss the relations between the States and WFP. This meeting is quite important because the USA are the biggest donor of WFP.

We received lots of input for the briefing from Stefanie who is a programme officer. Following her remarks for the first time is a challenge and even more to put that later on in a comprehensible language.

Arne recommended that we should try to write a single part ourselves, so Tuli had to compose something about the pre-positioning of food stocks and I had to write a paragraph concerning the re-introduction of sorghum to the dry South of Madagascar (I will write an extra blog entry about what WFP is really into here in Madagascar sometime in the near future).

We finalized the briefing note Friday evening after receiving extensive feedback from Stefanie…but normally we are allowed to leave the office at 2pm on Fridays…nice, huh?

Besides our work we spent most of the time looking for an apartment. We called several real estate agencies to help us out…but the offered places were either way too big (3 floors just for Tuli and me!!!), not furnished, still being renovated or just too far away from the city centre.

We put our hopes into an offer I found via the StudiVZ (German Facebook), so there might be an apartment available where already other interns lived before.

We will check it out the next days…keep the fingers crossed or squeeze the thumbs…what ever you do to wish us good luck!

As soon as we gonne settle permanently I will give you some more impression of the city itself, my office and the daily life so far.

MGG Fabi

Goodbye Germany…Hello Rome…Ciao Rome

Okay…I know it has been about one month since I last wrote something, but that doesn’t mean at all that nothing happened. Actually it has been quite the opposite.

After 6 great weeks in Lyon I got back to Germany on the 12th of August where I entered the very final phase of my preparation to go to Madagascar, which included an amazing reunion with my friends from Konstanz and 2 very special weeks in Bremen.

Last weekend it was time then to see my family and friends goodbye, so we had a nice dinner at my place before my mother took me to the Frankfurt airport early Monday morning. Finally I headed off to Rome where all the interns were about to get an intensive orientation training in the headquarter of the World Food Programme beginning on Thursday.

Arriving in Rome 3 days before the official programme started, I had enough time to see my Italian buddies Fabio & Monica. They showed me the beautiful city of Rome in 2 days and they took me to non-tourist spots which I never would have found without their local knowledge. To me Rome is like one giant museum…almost everywhere you look you will find something interesting and it became one of my favourite cities by now.



On Wednesday the other interns arrived and I would like to introduce them quickly. Sebastian & Eva are going to work for the School-Feeding-Project in Burkina Faso, Katrin & Lieke are assigned for project monitoring in the city of Mongu in Zambia, Valentin & Tabe will take care of the IT- and procurement tasks in Laos…and off course there is my Dutch mate Tuli who will join me for the internship in Madagascar.

So our training began on Thursday morning with a tight but very well organized schedule. We had all kind of seminars, varying from how to become a good story teller for WFP, a security in the field briefing to visits of the WFP Situation Room and library. To me the most valuable event was having lunch with Haladou Salha from Niger. He has been working for 4 years in Madagascar and was very keen about telling us about it. Especially him but also the other WFP staff were extremely nice and helpful towards us interns. We had sufficient time to ask as many questions as we wanted which I don’t take for granted at all, giving the fact that they have been quite busy themselves.
The training ended Friday evening with a little farewell event and the obligatory group picture and the overall “we finally want to start our internship”-mood!


We will leave in a couple of hours to our different destinations and I am glad to have been given the chance to get to know better Alex, Patricia, Christiano and especially my fellow GEPers 2007. Take care and you will here from me next time from Antananarivo/Madagascar!

MGG Fabi