Locale setting problem

[Sridhar Srinivasan <sridhars@nc.rr.com>]

hi,

my system (unstable) currently has the following locales set up for
it:

degoba:/etc# locale -a
C
POSIX

i want to add some other locales like en_US to it so that i can see
some of the special characters that are in emails on this list. i've
tried 

dpkg-reconfigure locales

to try to generate the new locales and it seems to work. i get
messages about generating the new locales. my problem is that these
new locales do not appear when i try locale -a.

i have also tried localeconf, but that seems to be fine-grained
control over the LC* variables.

can anyone tell me what i'm doing wrong?

TIA,
sridhar