Katie goes to Madagascar

Your Wish is My Command

2010-04-07T01:52:00.000-04:00

Written on 25 March 2010

That’s how I feel about living next to my site’s EPP (primary school) – like I’m living next to my own personal genie. All I have to do is rub the lamp, say what I want and it magically appears.

The education system in Madagascar is very different from the American system in a lot of ways. One major difference is that the teacher is always right. Students never question the teacher and have to do exactly what the teacher says. If a teacher says to erase the board, the students erase the board. If the teacher says to go get chalk, the students go and get chalk. If the teacher says to go get firewood, the students go get firewood. There’s never any questioning of the teacher. No “why” or “what for.” There’s no parents demanding explanations for what goes on at school. The teacher makes a request and the students do it – even if it’s completely irrelevant to their studies. As a result, teachers (at least at my EPP) end up asking kids to do a lot of household chores for them.

I happen to live right next to the EPP in Morarano and my closest neighbor is a teacher there, so I began reaping the benefits of the free labor right away. It all started during my first month at site when my neighbor, the teacher, asked me where I got my water. I pointed over to the little pond right by our houses. He looked aghast and we had the following exchange:

“Katie, that water is so dirty! Why are you getting your water there?” he scolded
“I know it’s dirty. But that’s where everyone gets their water,” I said matter-of-factly.
“There’s cleaner water that way. You should get your water there.”
“But I don’t know the way.”
“I’ll have the students fetch it for you! Is tomorrow ok?”
“I guess so. But is that ok? Is it far away? Is there time? Do I have to pay them?”
“It’s not a problem! They always get my water from there. That’s the advantage of being a teacher!” [N.B. I have taught these kids formally exactly one time since my arrival]

And that’s how it all started. The American in me was pretty uncomfortable taking advantage of elementary-aged kids. It felt like using child labor. I guess I shouldn’t have been. That’s the way they do things here. A lot of people around here seem to have kids just so they can have someone around to help out with all the work. So now whenever I’m getting low on water, I go over to one of the teachers and ask them to send a few kids over. Every once in awhile one of the teachers will stop by my house and make a comment about my yard looking overgrown. The next thing I know there’s an army of kids in school uniforms at my house weeding my yard. There seems to be no limit to what you can ask the students to do. I’m starting a gardening project at the school and told the teachers that the first thing we needed was a fence around the area to keep out the animals. For some reason I expected them to have a couple of men from the village spend a day building the fence. Of course that’s not what happened. The students have been showing up every day at school for the last few weeks carrying bundles of sticks twice their height and building the fence during their recreation time. Then the other day, I asked my neighbor, the teacher, if there was any lemongrass nearby because I wanted to plant some in my yard. I told him specifically that I only needed a little and could go get it myself if someone showed me where it was. He completely ignored that suggestion and started asking every student that left his classroom to bring lemongrass to school for me. So the next morning about 20 students trickled into my yard toting massive bundles of lemongrass. I ended up with way more than I needed but it provided a perfect opportunity for me to teach them and my neighbors about the benefits of planting lemongrass near your house.

Toilet Troubles

2010-03-05T08:38:00.001-05:00

I’ll start off by saying that I really like my house here. My community built me a really nice ravinala house. It’s spacious, the thatched roof and cement floor keep things relatively cool and there’s a big yard with a huge tree providing shade. They did a really good job on the house. I can’t say the same for my latrine, however. It’s not that I have anything against outdoor bathrooms. I actually learned to really like them the last time I was here. There’s no real routine maintenance needed and in a country where the indoor plumbing that does exist is usually malfunctioning, I’ve found that going to the bathroom in a hole can actually be preferable to using a toilet.

I have been having issues with my kabone since I got here. I don’t know what my community was thinking when they built it to be perfectly honest. For some reason, they decided to build my bathroom – something that I would have to use multiple times a day – in the one spot that floods every single time it rains. The east coast has a pretty considerable rainy season, so it has been flooded most of the time since I arrived. It’s not like they didn’t have other options. My kabone is about 50 meters from my house, you can’t even see it from here, I had to hunt for it when I first moved in. There are plenty of other spaces much closer to my house that I have never once seen flooded. So why, Morarano? Why did you build my kabone in a place that is flooded for half the year?

I’m guessing this lapse in judgment is due to the fact that there are no other kabones in Morarano. The people here just go to the bathroom in the woods. They seem to be terrified that if they build a kabone anywhere near any place that people frequent, that the smell will take over that place and make their lives miserable. Consequently, my bathroom is in a place that no one ever goes – the flood zone.

When I got installed, my Peace Corps installer told them it was too far away and they had to do something about the pathway that was under a foot of water. Naturally, the President of the Fokontany (Morarano is a fokontany, or small village, of nearby Foulpointe) immediately responded that they would fill in the pathway so I at least wouldn’t have to wade through knee deep water every time I had to pee. I’m pretty sure he had no intention of ever doing this, however, since every time I asked him when he was going to fix it, he would show me this incredibly long meandering route I could take to my kabone that wasn’t flooded. Naturally, being so close to the flooded area this alternate path, while not under water, usually has several inches of mud the entire way.

After about a month and a half here, a different Peace Corps employee came to visit. He took one look at my kabone and demanded that they just build me a new one and offered to have Peace Corps pay for it. I was relieved because building a new kabone seemed like a simple enough task – all they really had to do was dig a new hole and move the building from the old one to the new one, and with Peace Corps paying, the community would have no excuse to not do it. It seemed simple, but unfortunately, the idea of a cement floor got thrown in there somehow. I don’t know if this idea came from Peace Corps or from the community trying to show their dedication to building an excellent kabone, but for whatever reason, my President of the Fokontany became convinced that he had to have cement for the new kabone. So, the next thing I know, I’m housing two big bags of cement courtesy of Peace Corps.

Sure enough, the day after the cement arrived the President stopped by and admitted that no one in Morarano actually knew how to build a kabone with cement. I didn’t know how to build one either so we went on the hunt for a technician. I knew that there were people in Peace Corps who knew how to do it, but of course, I couldn’t get a hold of them. By the time I did, my President had already gotten this insanely complicated kabone plan requiring tubes leading to holes and who knows what else. I immediately got him on the phone with Peace Corps so they could explain to him what to do. Then I got on the phone and had them explain to me what to do. For the next week or two I went over the plan with the President every time I saw him:
“Here’s how you make the cement floor. Then build the same thing you built before but replace the wood floor with a cement one. Put the building with the cement floor directly over the hole. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand well.”
We even went over exactly where I wanted them to build the new kabone (for some reason, after being so afraid to put a kabone near any houses, they wanted to build the new one adjacent to my kitchen window):
“Please, do not build the kabone right next to my kitchen. I want you to build it in the front right corner of my yard. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand well.”
It got to the point where I reminded him of exactly what to do so many times that I was starting to feel like I was being patronizing. But I at least felt fairly certain that he knew what to do.
I was wrong. I returned home from a Peace Corps workshop a few days ago to find a giant hole right outside my kitchen window and the foundation for the kabone building already started – located, not above the hole as I had specifically stated over and over for weeks, but behind it. I frantically went over all the conversations we’d had in my head:
“What went wrong? Did I mix up the words for over and under? I do that sometimes. Maybe that was the problem. But even if I had, wouldn’t he have caught me? After all, it doesn’t make any sense to say you want the building underneath the hole. And why didn’t they build it in front of my house? I had even cleared the space where I wanted it! Looks like I’m stuck with the crazy tube contraption for a kabone. Maybe it will work and it won’t smell up my kitchen…”
I was still pondering all of this when I headed out to go to the bathroom. When I got to the site of my old kabone I stopped short. The kabone was gone. All that was left was the floor and the hole. Of course! They had taken apart the building of my old kabone and moved it to where the new one would be. And they had done all this before they were ready to build the new building. Well before, as a matter of fact, as they had not even started on the cement part of things, which I hear takes at least a week to dry.
This discovery was one of many times where I desperately wished I could peek inside the head of a Malagasy and see what kind of logic they were using when they made this decision. Maybe they reached the cement step, realized they still didn’t know how to do it so while they waited for me to get back, they went ahead and did what they knew how to do – take apart the old building. Whatever they were thinking, they certainly were not thinking of the fact that they were leaving me with a bathroom without walls and that my kabone sits it plain view of the village elementary school. For now, I have the choice of using my old wall-less kabone and letting all the students stare at my bare ass while I go to the bathroom, or I can switch to using my chamber pot full time. So far I’ve been going with the chamber pot option, but I really hate cleaning that thing out so if they don’t finish soon I might end up returning to swimming my old kabone and letting the entire school gape at me while I go to the bathroom.

Rough Travels

2010-01-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

Written on 16 January 2010

I had my first you-chose-to-come-back-to-this-you-idiot moment the other day. I had been waiting for it – wondering when it would happen and what it would be that would trigger memories of all the things that had caused me frustration with Madagascar and with Peace Corps before.

It finally happened during my trip back to site after finishing my portion of the training in Mantasoa. Things started off well. I got a ride in a Peace Corps car early in the morning from Tana to Moramanga. Then my taxi-brousse from Moramanga to Tamatave filled up relatively quickly and we were able to leave way earlier than I had expected. I think I only had to wait for about an hour. Even the brousse ride started off well. We hardly had to stop at all and were making great time. I was actually counting myself pretty lucky, especially since when I left Moramanga, Chris’s car was still waiting for 18 people and it was looking like he’d be waiting around in Moramanga for a good part of the day.

Then the trouble started. I knew something was amiss when I started seeing endless lines of camions along the side of the road and I started to worry about what had caused all the truck drivers to call it quits so early in the day. Then we got to the first traffic jam and I discovered the reason. Land slides. Parts of RN2 were completely covered in mountains of mud. I can only assume that this was a result of the cyclone that had apparently caused torrential downpours on the east coast for days on end. I must say, as an environment volunteer, it’s pretty frustrating getting held up by something like land slides and knowing that if the people would listen to all the various environment workers running around Madagascar and stop burning/chopping down the forest problems like this would be a lot less likely to occur.

The first couple weren’t so bad. The people in the surrounding villages had managed to get them cleared and cars were making it through. Traffic was just backed up because only one side of the road was cleared. But as we continued the traffic jams got worse and worse. The lines of traffic were so long that the drivers were just turning off their cars and sitting and waiting for hours on end. I felt really bad for the men who were clearing the road. Every time we got to another land slide it looked like every male in the village had showed up with their shovels and antsy be (the Malagasy version of the machete) and were working like mad to shovel the mud off the road and push the cars through one by one. The damage was incredible. Rivers and ponds had swelled well beyond their banks; houses were flooded and barely standing; trees had fallen everywhere; the mounds of mud at times reached heights that were well above the heights of the taxi-brousses. Despite all the surrounding damage, the people seemed most concerned about getting the road cleared, which I appreciated but it made me wonder why no one seemed to be concerned about the pitiful state of some of the flooded houses.

Every land slide we came to took longer and longer to get through. The driver kept stopping the car and we would sit for so long that I kept thinking we were giving up for the night and that we would just sleep in the brousse and try again in the morning. I was wrong each time. After sitting for a couple of hours the cars would all suddenly turn back on, everyone would wake up in excitement that we were going to move again and we would advance for about a dozen or so meters. Naturally, my phone died in the middle of this trip so while everyone else was calling family and friends to check in I just sat huddled in my seat thinking of the people I would have been able to call to pass the time and trying to fight off the onset of claustrophobia (thankfully I had my iPod fully charged – I think that was the only thing keeping me sane). My phone dying presented another problem as well. Apparently our Safety and Security Officer had been trying to get in touch with me to warn me about the road being cut and find out if I was ok. Of course, there was absolutely no way for him to get in touch with me and the next morning I received all of the missed calls and text messages from him and other friends trying to find out if I was still alive. At one point we saw a couple bulldozers come through (that’s right I said bulldozers, in Madagascar). At that point I assume the road was cleared but it still took another 4½ hours to make it to Tamatave because everything was so backed up. I am now able to fully appreciate just how many cars use RN2 every day. It was pretty shocking to see such long lines of traffic in a country where you can usually travel from one place to another and only see a handful of other cars.

All in all, the trip from Moramanga to Tamatave – a trip that normally takes around 4 or 5 hours – took us over 16 hours, 12 of which were spent trying to get the 30k strip of land slides. That was probably the worst taxi brousse ride I have ever experienced in Madagascar. But when I came back to Madagascar I knew something like this was bound to happen and I’m feeling pretty good now that I’ve survived my first incredibly frustrating event. I’ll feel even better if I ever make it back to site. Today is Saturday and I left Tana early Wednesday morning. I’m supposed to get back today but I don’t want to jinx it since I was supposed to make it back yesterday but the taxi brousse to my site never showed up. This trip has been plagued numerous problems aside from land slides. Peace Corps is going to have a hard time getting me to come back to Tana again during the rainy season, which is going to be a problem for them since there are several things scheduled in the next few months that they need volunteers for. At this point, I think I’ll only agree to make the trip again if they send a helicopter to pick me up and take me back home.

Welcome Niger Trainees! (Oh yeah, and Happy Holidays too)

2010-01-15T07:03:00.003-05:00

My much needed one week holiday vacation to take a mental break from site (and Peace Corps in general) turned into three weeks dedicated almost entirely to training the new training class that just transferred from Niger. So much for the mental break! I still got to take my Christmas trip to Ambato with some other volunteers but my plans to spend New Year’s on relaxing on the beach in Foulpointe quickly got thrown out the window when Peace Corps called me two days before Christmas to say, “We hope we caught you before you left site (they didn’t). We would like you to come in to train for two weeks after Christmas. You don’t have to commit to the full two weeks (actually, you kind of do) but we really think the trainees need the support of volunteers because they still have not met any PCVs in Madagascar. Oh, and we’d like you here on the 27th.” Well, I couldn’t very well say no to providing support to a bunch of trainees who had just lived through consolidation and evacuation from Niger and were now being forced to start back at square one with a new country, a new language and new jobs. So I ran back to site, grabbed a few warm clothes for the cold Lake Mantasoa weather at the Peace Corps Training Center and said goodbye to my chance to relax.

I knew when I signed up to reinstate that a large part of my responsibilities would be to help get the program started again, i.e. training. And I had been excited about the opportunity to help restart and reform Peace Corps Madagascar. So the fact that I had to train this new group didn’t bother me – in fact, I was excited to meet them. The timing, however, was pretty unfortunate as was the chaotic, last minute nature of the request. This was made especially frustrating since I had spoken to Peace Corps several times about when and if they needed me to train and had gone ahead and planned my vacation since I had been unable to get any information aside from being told I would be needed some time in January and definitely not for more than a week. This is Peace Corps though, and organization and communication have never been among Peace Corps strengths.

I am excited for this new group of volunteers. Overall, they seem like a really good group. They’ve handled the evacuation and transition to Madagascar surprisingly well. I’ve lived through Peace Corps training and evacuation if I had to go through both at the same time I don’t think I’d be in nearly as good of shape as this group.

The question of whether taking this training class from Niger was a good move for PC Madagascar is still up for debate. On the one hand, having an extra training class, especially one with volunteers in each of the four sectors, will do wonders for getting PC Madagascar back up to where it was to before evacuation. Also, keeping the training class together in the transfer is great for their group. This way, they get to go through this incredibly trying time together and have each other as a support network as opposed to getting farmed off to different countries and having to go through transferring/training alone. On the other hand, Peace Corps barely seemed ready for our tiny group of reinstatees when we arrived in country and I’m afraid that taking on such a large training class so suddenly is going to start a vicious cycle of disorganization. Instead of being able to take time to develop really good sites for the next training class and provide good support for the volunteers that are already in country, they were scrambling to get enough sites ready in time for the group from Niger and now they will have to scramble again to get sites for the training class due to arrive in March. Finding appropriate sites and matching appropriate volunteers with those sites has always been a difficult issue and probably always will be. However, I had hoped that by starting off with a small number of volunteers they would have the time to devote to site development that they didn’t when there were 120+ volunteers in country and that maybe by starting off on the right foot that some of the issues with finding sites would be eased. At the same time, starting off small would not have guaranteed that there would have been any more organization once the program got back up to full capacity so in the end, it may not make a difference and more places in Madagascar will have a Peace Corps Volunteer, which is a good thing.

Either way, after having met and worked with the group from Niger, I am positive that they will all be great volunteers once they make it to site and I’m excited to see the kind of work they all end up doing.

And finally: Happy Holidays Everyone! Here's to hoping 2010 is a little less rocky for Madagascar...

Readjusting to life as a PCV

2009-12-19T02:35:00.000-05:00

One of the things that really made me think twice about rejoining the ranks of Peace Corps Madagascar was the memory of the culture shock I had dealt with when I first arrived at site last time. My first few weeks, months even, in Andina were really tough to get through and the thought of going through that again was really not appealing. Having lived through it once and being familiar with Madagascar, I assumed it would be an easier process this time. First, I already know how my body deals with that kind of stress so I would be able to identify culture shock for what it is rather than constantly pondering over whether or not I’m manic depressive. Plus, I wouldn’t be quite as clueless when it comes to Malagasy culture and things like shopping at the market so I wouldn’t have to constantly think about every little daily activity – previously a source of great distress, mental and physical exhaustion as well as questioning of my mental capabilities both by myself and my neighbors. On the other hand, I knew going into reinstatement that my new site would be very different from my old one and we were going to arrive at site right as the holiday season began. So while I convinced myself I could survive the inevitable adjustment period, I was also bracing myself for a painful first few weeks.

I’ve been at site for three weeks now and I must say, the adjustment process is going much smoother the second time around. First of all, I seem to have skipped over the culture shock induced state of constant hunger I suffered through last time. That’s been a relief given the lack of food options in Morarano and insanely high price of food in Foulpointe. Plus, there’s nothing more embarrassing than always feeling like you’re starving when you live in a place where most people really don’t have enough food to eat.

The language barrier is also miniscule compared to last time. I still have issues, obviously. They speak a different dialect here and I forgot a lot of Malagasy while I was back in the states. But it’s coming back to me quickly and even though the dialect often makes it difficult for me to understand what people are saying, everyone here is usually able to understand my random mix of official Malagasy and Betsileo. I think this has a lot to do with the process being easier this time for two reasons. First, I’m able to express my wants and needs. When I got to Andina I was constantly stammering through broken sentences about wanting to do something like buy an egg, all the while gesticulating wildly in the hopes of supplementing my incomprehensible gibberish (picture me hopping around imitating a chicken laying an egg), and being met with blank stares or long lectures on the correct pronunciation of “egg” (neighbor: “ah TOO dee” me: “ah TOO dee” neighbor: “no no no, ah TOOOOOOO dee”). Needless to say, I either did not get answers to my questions or would be unable to understand the answers to my questions and ended up egg-less and sad. This time I have had much more success. I can actually ask a question and then have a full on conversation about the response. In keeping with the egg example, I asked about eggs and my neighbor told people don’t sell them here. I explained that I really like eggs and that they are a good and cheap source of protein and she went off and tracked down some eggs to sell me – success! The second reason my improved language is making life easier is closely related to the first: as seen in the egg example, the people in Andina thought I was a huge moron. And while I don’t blame them for thinking this (after all, I thought I was a moron half the time too), the belief that I was a moron really stuck and it took me months to redeem myself. So far in Morarano, however, the people appear to consider me a fairly capable adult – or at least as capable as a vazaha can be.

I also think that having more to do here in Morarano is helping a lot. I feel like I’m spending a lot more time doing things that can be defined as work as opposed to sitting around all day. I do still do an awful lot of sitting around so it’s possible that I’m just more used to doing nothing. But I’m at least telling myself I’m doing something productive and this is enormously helpful.

Over all I’m kind of amazed at how quickly I’ve settled into a routine remarkably similar to my routine from Andina. I still listen to the news and Border Crossings every night on the Voice of America. I make a lot of the same meals. I’m becoming friends with a lot of the teachers. Every Sunday, I avoid the church crowd and do my laundry. I go to bed and wake up at about the same time. The kids here are even stealing from my fence just like the kids did in Andina – it’s good to know at least one thing is the same on both the plateau and the coast.

Tonga Soa! We have been waiting for you for a long time!

2009-12-14T07:10:00.003-05:00

Written on 01 December 2009

I finally made it to my site this past Saturday so my second attempt at Peace Corps service has officially begun. This came after three days traveling up and down the east coast making courtesy visits to virtually every authority figure in the area. Now anyone who is anyone knows that there are two volunteers in the Tamatave region and how to contact us and Peace Corps if there’s ever a problem. Personally, I think this was a little overkill. If the last crisis is any indication of Peace Corp’s handling of security issues I expect to be receiving hourly text messages directly from the Peace Corps office so there’s really no need to involve every gendarme in the surrounding area – they will probably have bigger problems to deal with.

Regardless, I eventually made it through all the meetings and reached my site. Morarano is beautiful and everything about it is completely different from my old site. First of all, there are trees! I’m actually surrounded by them – a huge change from Andina, where every square inch of land was being cultivated. And 4k away from my house is Analalava Forest, a small but largely endemic patch of forest that the community (in partnership with NGOs) is working to conserve. I’m not a biologist so I don’t really know what all makes this forest special but my neighbor has pointed out a couple of the trees that are unique to here and she seemed to take a pride in the fact that they only grow here so that was cool to see.

Another big difference is resources. As in, there are none. I didn’t buy any candles in Foulpointe because I assumed that if nothing else, a local epicerie would have them. They are pretty essential, after all, when living without electricity. I was wrong. And I was getting a little worried about having to cook in the dark when someone who had heard about my issue dropped a candle off at my house. There also are no vegetables and no beans, although I’m told there’s an epicerie that sells them from time to time. My water source was described by Leif as “that swamp” and it’s where people fetch water, bath and wash clothes and dishes so you can imagine how clean the water is. Litchis and charcoal are the only sources of income and thankfully there’s a lot of moringa and fruit around because it looks like the only thing people actually plant is rice. I hate to say it, but after being told by a couple of people around town that the soil is good but nobody plants anything, I started to think there might be something to this laziness stigma attached to the people on the coast. Andina, on the other hand was producing anything you could think of and whatever you couldn’t find at the epiceries would certainly be available on the major market days.

My arrival was also drastically different this time around. When I got to Andina before there weren’t really that many people around and we had to go track down someone official to let them know I had arrived and get the keys to my house. A group of people helped me move in but they seemed to only be in it for the day’s salary I would have to pay them and it took forever to clean up the house and make it livable.

This time, the car was surrounded almost as soon as it stopped and everyone pitched in to bring my stuff down the hill to my house. The house had been built specifically for a volunteer so it was new and clean and a couple of women immediately grabbed my hand and showed me everything: both rooms, the yard, the path to my kabone and even the windows to show how well they locked. When they noticed I didn’t have any furniture someone showed up with a table and a little later someone dropped off a chair (I found out later these are on loan from the director of the elementary school. He told me I can feel free to keep them until I get my own, which is good since I’m still trying to find someone to order furniture from). Once I got settled they killed a chicken and we had lunch with the President of the Fokontany. That was followed by an official ceremony with lots of speeches and of course, plently of Bonbon Anglais – the beverage of choice for any special occasion in Madagascar. The whole time, people kept coming over to greet me and the one thing that everyone said was “We’ve been waiting for you for a long time!”

Overall, it was quite the welcoming party. Now, to be fair to Andina, the people who were mostly involved with requesting a volunteer lived pretty far from my house, so maybe if they had been around when I arrived there I would have been greeted with more enthusiasm. But still, it was nice to feel like people were excited for my arrival. Nice, and a little overwhelming. Morarano was supposed to get a volunteer from the group that should have arrived last February. So they have indeed been waiting for a long time. And now that I’m finally here everyone keeps coming up to me to ask when I’ll start my work – when I’ll start teaching about SRI, or how to plant vegetables, or work at the tree nursery or teach at the school. It’s been a little crazy. Not to mention the fact that I’m still just trying to figure out how to get from my house to my kabone without having to walk through the enormous flooded area that is supposed to be a path. Fortunately, we’re in the middle of litchi season so the majority of the town is too preoccupied trying to get all the litchis off to Tamatave to be serious about wanting to start working with me. Unfortunately, my neighbor told me litchi season is over on Monday, and she expects me to start working then.

I hear you're going back to Madagascar. And I hear you're excited about this.

2009-11-13T01:20:00.011-05:00

That's how I was greeted one morning last weekend when I stumbled, still half asleep, into my friend's living room. As I pondered how best to respond and wiped the sleep out of my eyes,the girl's serious look of concern for my mental health came into focus. That's when I realized it was high time that I explained myself before one of the following two rumors started circulating amongst my friends and family: (1) Peace Corps bound and gagged Katie and forced her to return to Madagascar or, (2) Katie's masochism has officially gotten out of control and the intervention is scheduled for...

So here I am attempting to shed light onto my decision to return to Madagascar. Let me start off by saying that I understand why many of you may be confused. After all, over the last few months my feelings towards Peace Corps and development have vacillated between the following extremes: (1) I hate Peace Corps; (2) I love Peace Corps; (3) politicians suck and are making development impossible, so why bother with anything remotely related to Peace Corps? (4) I loved the PCV work... but there are crazy people running Peace Corps so I should probably get out while I still can; (5) really?? did that just happen? Clearly, it's been quite the rollercoaster. Either that or I've become schizophrenic. But I had no trouble getting my medical clearance so I'm assuming that means I don't have to worry about the possibility of being clinically insane.

Anyway, on to my perfectly logical reasons for returning. First, it has really been bothering me that I was unable to finish service. Particularly because I felt like I had dealt with a lot to get to where I was and ended up having to leave just as I was making headway at my site. So reason number one has to do with my search for closure. My second reason is that I thought it was important for people to return to Peace Corps Madagascar and help reopen the program. Despite the numerous stumbling blocks, I still for some reason believe that there's a lot of potential for development work over there and the people in Madagascar need assistance now more than ever. Yet another draw for me was the opportunity to try again in Madagascar with a clean slate. I had been having a great deal of trouble at my old site due to a variety of different site specific issues and I knew Peace Corps wasn't reopening sites anywhere near my old one. Therefore, it was really tempting to get the chance to start over, learn from my previous mistakes and see if I could have a little more success the second time around.

So there you have it, my top three reasons for agreeing to go back to Madagascar with Peace Corps. Hopefully it's all making a little more sense now. Our group actually flies out tomorrow so I'll be back in Madagascar this coming Monday. And I should make it out to my new site sometime in the next couple of weeks meaning that I'll find out soon if my motivations for returning were naive or rational. In the mean time, just know that yes, I am going back to Madagascar and yes, I am excited about it.

Goodbye Madagascar

2009-03-26T04:45:00.000-04:00

I'm sure most of you have heard by now that Peace Corps evacuated from Madagascar. I've been waiting to post on this since I was pretty emotional and not really looking forward to answering all the questions on what I'm doing next. It's been a little over two weeks now since I first got the news and I still don't know what I'm doing with my life besides putting off making real decisions for as long as possible.

The week leading up to our evacuation was pretty bizarre. It started off with me leaving Andina and heading to Tana for a week long training preparing for the incoming environment volunteers. The day I left things started heating up in my banking town. In fact, I think I just missed getting trapped in Ambositra due to road blocks put up by the strikers to keep out the military (this may sound a lot more dramatic than it actually was, I'm pretty sure the road blocks were just dumpsters). Our training continued as planned for a few days but the whole time we kept hearing reports about strikes happening all over the country. Ambositra eventually became violent and was temporarily made a red zone for volunteers, which was crazy to hear since it's such a tiny town, and a town I would have had to go through to travel anywhere outside my site due to the lack of roads in Madagascar.

Just after I finished putting together all my lesson plans and materials for training we got word that trainees wouldn't be coming after all. The military had taken sides in the conflict and was refusing to control strikes and looting so I'm sure Peace Corps made the right decision but I feel for all those incoming trainees...apparently they'd made it all the way to Philly for staging before being told they wouldn't be going to Madagascar after all.

A couple days of moping around Mantasoa later, we were told that we would be evacuating - via text message read aloud in the middle of dinner. A rather unceremonious way to find out you're goin to be ending your Peace Corps service if you ask me, but what can you do? I was on the next flight out to Johannesburg with two other volunteers and everyone else trickled in in the following days. Ironically, Johannesburg is a red zone for Peace Corps volunteers, meaning that we were evacuated from a country where most of us were able to live in complete safety at site to a city where we weren't allowed to leave the hotel because it was so dangerous. I have my doubts as to how dangerous Johannesburg really is but I didn't want to push my luck.

After a week long Close of Service conference where I first waited to hear my options (being the first one there meant I had to spend several days biting my nails while I waited for everyone else to show up to hear the talk on our options). Then I spent hours debating my options: direct transfer to another country? re-enroll in a few months? hold out for Madagascar and re-instate when the program re-opens? get a job? It was an incredibly stressful and emotional week and I am so glad it's over.

I finally ended up deciding to travel in Africa for awhile with friends and then go home and debate my future further when I'm feeling slightly less emotional. By the way, Becca, it looks like I'm going to make it to your graduation after all so I'll see you soon! I spent a few days on a safari in Kruger Park for one last hurrah with a few people before we went our separate ways. The animal sightings were amazing and we saw four of the Big Five. Right now I'm in Cape Town where we're taking in the sites and planning the rest of our trip. Yesterday I went wine tasting - it was so nice to drink wine that didn't taste like vinegar! This is an awesome city and I'm amazed at how much it feels like I'm back in the states already. Good news there is that I can get some of my weird readjustment to life in a developed area out now while I'm with other PCVs so maybe I'll be kind of normal by the time I go home.

I still have moments where I think about the last couple of months and can't believe what's happened. The worst part is that I wasn't able to say goodbye to anyone at my site since it's so difficult to get calls through to Andina. They thought I was just going to be gone for a week and now I've been forced to abandon them when they need help the most. Madagascar was so calm and peaceful and it was my home for a year...it seems crazy that it's now in so much turmoil. Hopefully things will get better soon because the people there will really struggle the longer this goes on. In the mean time, I'll keep you updated on my travels and if anyone has any ideas for what to do once I get back I'd greatly appreciate the input.

The Waiting Game

2009-03-04T22:31:00.000-05:00

I had intended my next post to be all about carting a live turkey all the way to Chase’s site in Anosibe An’Ala for Thanksgiving and my trip to Tulear and Ifaty for Christmas and New Year’s. I also had every intention of being out of site for most of February with various trainings in Mahajanga, Tana and Mantasoa. Those were my plans. However, my experience thus far as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar has been that even the best laid plans have a tendency to go up in smoke. Something always goes wrong. Either people forget to show up, there’s a death and people can’t show up, one of the key materials somehow doesn’t make it, the person you’re meeting goes out of town, it rains (you would not believe the number of people who say they will only meet me if it doesn’t rain. It’s the rainy season!)…there’s an endless list of things that can and will fall through. Predictably, my current plans have followed suit. The culprit this time: political unrest…an unexpected and slightly more serious twist on the normal events that throw a hitch in the plans of a Peace Corps volunteer. Needless to say, the tale of my latest beach vacation seems a little trivial when every major city in Madagascar has had riots and looting. Additionally, all travel plans have been canceled due to the initiation of our emergency action plan (so I guess I’ll have to wait to go see that 700 year old baobob in Mahajanga some other time, preferably when the capital isn’t still smoldering).

In the mean time, all of the volunteers were forced to spend a few weeks waiting…and waiting and waiting…for Peace Corps to make a decision on what to do with us. Do we get on the next flight out of here or do we go back to site? Or, a third option that seemed to have popped up for a while: finish out the rest of our service here at the PC training site while waiting for that elusive “tomorrow” when we’re sure to get a definitive decision. Given the circumstances, there was surprisingly little drama during the time spent in Mantasoa and most people were pretty productive. Personally though, I found being surrounded by as many as 70 people without the option of really going anywhere to be pretty stressful, not to mention the fact that we had no idea if we would be in South Africa, the United States or Madagascar in the coming weeks. The rumor mill got pretty out of control as well. I guess that’s pretty inevitable when you put that many stressed out people, all with different sources of information, together.

After a number of false starts, we did finally make our way back to site. I’ve been having a hard time getting back into the swing of things, however. I just have a hard time believing that this whole thing is going to work itself out without incident. I mean, how many political crises have ended peacefully? That’s definitely the exception to the rule. So despite going back to Andina and now returning to Tana to prepare for the new trainees’ arrival (Peace Corps did decide to bring them in a month late. Let’s hope they don’t get too freaked out by the current situation. I can’t imagine going through adjusting to life as a PCV in Madagascar with the added chaos of civil unrest going on at the same time), I still find myself waiting on edge for whatever may happen to finally tip the scale and send us packing.

Despite all of this craziness, I want to reassure all of you that I have been perfectly safe throughout the whole ordeal. In fact, it’s entirely possible that if I had remained at site this whole time without updates from Peace Corps that I never would have realized what was going on in the rest of the country. And finally, as much as I’d like to be able to give actual details about this attempted coup (or whatever they’re calling it now), I’ve long since lost the ability to decipher fact from fiction, so you should probably check out some actual news related sites. And there’s always facebook…you may laugh at that suggestion but there was supposed to be a page devoted to the crisis in Madagascar that was pretty reliable.

Well, I’m off to go prep for the new environment trainees. Hopefully all will go as planned. But in the off chance that it doesn’t, my bags are all packed and I may be seeing you back in the states sooner than expected.

sorry for the delay

2008-12-03T09:29:00.000-05:00

It’s been a long time since my last post and I’ve had some complaints about the lack of updates so I apologize for the lack of activity. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to get to an internet café where I wouldn’t physically grow old waiting to log in to gmail. I don’t seemed to be blessed with the patience required for online activities in the developing world. Anyway, here’s a rundown of what I’ve been up to in the last couple months.

Tamatave Bike Race

At the beginning of October I headed to the east coast for the annual Tamatave bike race and a week of HIV/AIDS sensitizations. It was a lot of fun. There were a bunch of other volunteers there so I got to meet some new people and catch up with friends from my stage. I also got to learn how to do things like give condom demonstrations, so that was a blast. It was a kind of weird experience at the same time though. I first got my invitation for Peace Corps around this time and I started reading a bunch of blogs of environment volunteers from the stage before me. They had all just been to Tamatave for the bike race and everyone seemed so settled into their lives in Madagascar. Finding myself at that same physical point in my service was strange since I still feel like I’m just getting started and, most of the time, still pretty clueless. Though, it was a bit of a motivator to finally get some projects going at site.

My Birthday

Shortly after my stint in Tamatave I went to Antsirabe with a couple friends for my birthday. We didn’t have any grand plans I just wanted to get out of site for the day. People in Madagascar don’t really celebrate birthdays. In fact, most people don’t seem to be to sure of their actual age here. Given that, I had a feeling that hanging around my site wouldn’t make for the most exciting birthday and there certainly wouldn’t be anyone bursting into song with a cake in tow. So Antsirabe it was. Still no song and cake but at least I was with people who think birthdays are worthy of noting. We spent the day eating cheeseburgers and checking out the vazaha grocery store. For those of you back at home, going to a grocery store may not seem like the most exciting thing to do on your birthday. In fact it’s probably one of those daily errands you would try to accomplish the day before so as to avoid the hassle on your birthday. Here, however, a trip to the grocery store is something to look forward to. We’re talking can’t sleep the night before kind of excitement. On the rare occasions when I find myself in a city that actually has a grocery store I always set aside time to visit. I could spend hours just walking up and down the aisles gazing in awe at everything. There’s so much food! You have more than one option for everything and you can buy an apple even when they aren’t in season! You can even find delicacies like ketchup and oatmeal and, my personal favorite, cereal. I always relish my breakfasts in the days following a trip to the grocery store. That trip, which probably seems the most mundane of all the things I could do on my birthday, was probably the highlight of my day. Anyway, after the excitement of the grocery store wore off we decided to splurge on dinner. We got dressed up, headed to a French restaurant, sipped cocktails and dared to order our steaks medium rare (a serious risk at non-vazaha restaurants), all for the ungodly sum of 16000 ariary a person...or about ten bucks. Like I said, it was a splurge. All in all, it was pretty good, though slightly unorthodox, birthday.

Halloween

Goal two of Peace Corps is to teach about American culture. So, as the end of October approached along with the timing for our next VAC meeting, the Fianar VACers naturally decided to throw a party to teach about the great American tradition of Halloween. It was an interesting experience to say the least. The next set of pictures I send home to be uploaded online will include documentation of the event so when you stumble across pictures of a guy dancing around in nothing but a gony sack a few months from now you’ll know why. I don’t know where Ryan got his idea from but his bag of rice costume was pretty ingenious. And Brendan’s portrayal of Dr. Bruce was uncanny. Anyway, when the pictures finally do make it onto my blog, enjoy.

The Plague

I was helping a friend harvest orge a couple weeks ago when she started to tell me about someone who had died in a town nearby. I didn't pay that much attention because people die off pretty regularly here and the reason is never all that clear. Plus I was really getting into the harvesting since I was finally starting to get the hang of weilding my knife without fearing I would chop off my hand. So I was just kind of nodding and saying "uh huh" a lot as I tried to attempt gathering more and more orge at a time but my friend kept repeating the story over and over again and asking if I understood what she was telling me. After about the tenth repition I finally decided I should probably actually pay attention to what she was telling me and it dawned on me that the disease she was describing sounded an awful lot like the plague. I really hoped I'd misunderstood as so often happens and asked her to describe the symptoms one last time. She sighed and said "you know, you get a fever and then you get sores on your neck, armpits and groin and then you die after one day." No misunderstanding there. Definitely the plague. Someone 30k from my house had just died from the bubonic plague. The same one that decimated the European population in the 14th century. I guess that's how far behind the times we are here in Madagascar...still fearing the black death 700 years after the rest of the world has filed it away in the history books. I mind immediately shot to the rats that parade through my house every night and the flea bites that have become a permanent fixture on my legs. Did I seriously have to add the bubonic plague to the list of ailments to avoid during my time here? Apparently I do. Just when I thought my life couldn't get any more bizarre. I've since called up the PC doctors to find out if I should be concerned about this illness that I had since thought had been wiped out. Apparently I don't need to worry unless someone dies in my town but they sent me the meds just in case. And they told me to keep my house free of fleas and rats. Yeah right, I gave up on finding a solution to those pests months ago.

That's all for now. I'm currently on my way to a week of environmental education along with a belated Thanksgiving celebration. I stupidly volunteered to provide the turkey. Traveling with a live turkey is turning out to be quite the ordeal...

Efa Zatra (already used to it)

2008-09-06T11:18:00.000-04:00

It is truly amazing to see what you can get used to. I’ve been at site for four months now and in the country for seven and now that culture shock has officially worn off (culture shock hit me like a ton of bricks in the form extreme hunger all the time. I literally ate my way through my first six months here and never once felt full. I seriously started to worry about the possibility of a tapeworm. Countless jokes have circulated through my training stage about my incessant eating and nobody believes that I actually used to have a smaller than average appetite) I’ve begun to notice numerous things that I now view as normal but would seem absurd to your average American.

For instance, I have absolutely no problem with the hour plus long wait for a taxi brousse to finally get moving. In fact, I generally find taxi brousse rides on the whole to be fairly relaxing. I pop a Dramamine, tune into my iPod, cozy up next to whoever or whatever’s crammed in next to me and sleep through the majority of the ride. On the rare occasions when I actually have space to breath I actually feel like something’s amiss. Life without electricity and running water is also surprisingly easy to get accustomed to. Those are probably two of the things that I miss the least from home and yet they seem to be the two things that people are most shocked that I live without. I don’t really have that many things that require electricity. When I do need to, for instance, charge my cell phone I just listen for the generator to be turned on to watch videos and run over and have them charge my phone at the same time. As for the water issue, I have a water fetcher come once a week to fill a huge bin with water and the bucket shower, now that it’s getting hot outside, is actually pretty refreshing. I now go through withdrawal if I go too long without rice. And by too long I mean like a day, maybe two, max. My ability to wait for hours or days on end for something has also improved drastically. I, like most Americans, used to get really aggravated if I had to wait for something for more than a few minutes without an explanation. Now, however, I have absolutely no problem sitting on a rock hard bench and waiting for a couple of hours for a meeting to get started. And I’m still waiting for someone to come fix the leak in my roof which I pointed out when I moved in but it seems strangely natural that no one has gotten around to it yet. As long as I keep reminding the mayor about it someone will fix it at some point and until then my weekly trip to the mayor’s office to complain about the leak gives me something to do. I may feel differently about this when the rainy season starts, however.

Then there’s the things that I haven’t gotten used to… I will never, for example, get used to being told how fat I’m getting. Telling someone she’s gained weight in Madagascar is equivalent to telling someone they’ve lost weight in the US. It is a huge compliment, mostly because if you are fat then that shows you’re able to get enough food to eat. While I am fully aware of this cultural difference, I am also an American female, and when someone tells me how huge I’m getting I can’t help wincing a little, no matter how excited they are about it. I will also never get used to having people talk about me like I’m not there. It is like a flashback to middle school and sitting at the lunch table worrying if anyone noticed that you just spilled mustard on your shirt. Only here they did notice, and not only will they tell you about it but they will also tell everyone else who happens to pass by and it will continue to be a daily topic of conversation for at least the next month. Note to any incoming PC Madagascar Volunteers: don’t do anything that you don’t want to have to discuss with everyone at your site for the rest of your service. This issue of having every aspect of your life discussed openly ties in with the issue of being stared at nonstop. It is so hard to function when there are at least ten people around scrutinizing every move you make. I realize that I’m a foreigner and I look different from everyone else, but honestly, the way that I dial a cell phone is no different from the way that everyone else in Andina dials a cell phone. Yet I still find myself having to gently nudge people’s noses away from my phone so that I can see the screen as I’m dialing. Also on this note people here do not like my freckles and they don’t hesitate to tell me about it. They think I have some sort of disease. I frequently will have some drunk man come up behind me, grab my arm and exclaim “What’s wrong with you?!” while pointing at my freckles in disgust. I’ll reply that there’s nothing wrong and that that’s just my skin. They never believe me though. The drunk will just look at me doubtfully surely thinking, “Whatever crazy white girl. Thank God I don’t have whatever that is.” I can’t say that I necessarily blame them though. They’ve probably never seen freckles before and still haven’t figured out the word for skin so I’m having a tough time explaining what they are. One final thing that I will never get used to is having people who don’t even know my name ask to get their picture taken with me. What is it that makes people want so desperately to get their picture taken with someone they don’t even know? Once a woman upon seeing my bike (Peace Corps graciously gave us all these fancy new bikes that are way nicer than anything that I would own in the States so you can only imagine how they compare to gasy bikes) immediately insisted that she get her picture taken with me and my bike.

All in all, I have gotten much more comfortable with my life on the red island. And it always excites me when I discover one more aspect of my new gasy lifestyle which I've gotten accustomed to. There are definitely things that will never seem normal to me. But, I suppose that's to be expected when moving to an obscure island nation halfway around the world.

Phew! Made it.

2008-08-15T00:16:00.000-04:00

I’ve officially made it to our In Service Training, which means that I’ve survived my first three months at site. And let me tell you, it has been a long three months. Supposedly they are infamous as being the worst months during Peace Corps service and I think it’s safe to assume that it can only go up from here. I think the high point was probably when I came home to chicken innards strewn all over my porch. Not sure who decided to throw them at my house but I’m really hoping it was the kids since if it was adults I would be really freaked out. The incident also left me feeling rather confused since chicken organs are prized meat in Madagascar. Here are some highlights from my time at site so far:

Mr. Sketchy

I was traveling with a fellow PCV, Melanie, when we encountered what I can only describe as the creepiest man I have ever seen in my life. As we made our taxi-brousse reservations this guy started hovering around us. I wish I had a picture of this guy because he looked like such a mess that I could barely hold in my laughter. He reeked of alcohol, was dressed in rags and could not get out a single word to us but insisted on standing practically on top of us. We quickly resorted to waiting for our departure somewhere else hoping he would have wandered off by the time we had to board our brousse. Unfortunately, he ended up following us right on to the brousse which we found a little shocking since he did not look like there was any way he could afford the fare. Of course, he sat right next to Melanie, squishing her in to me even though there was plenty of room in the brousse. He still couldn’t manage to actually say anything since he was so drunk but just stared nonstop at the two of us adoringly. As he pressed up closer and closer to Melanie we finally had to hop over the seat to sit behind him and the guy who was behind us graciously moved in to sit next to the drunkard. This, however, did not stop our friend. He merely turned around and leaned over the back of the seat to continue his staring, now directly in our faces. I was starting to get afraid that he would puke into our laps if the road got too windy when he turned back around. But the awkwardness did not end there. He left his arm draped over the back of the seat and started groping the air trying to grab one of our legs. I was seconds away from losing it when the brousse stopped to get gas and the driver forced him to get out. Apparently he couldn’t afford the fare and had just come along for the ride across town from the station to the gas station.

On guard

So, I have a guard for my house. I have no idea why I have a guard as my site seems perfectly safe and I don’t know anyone else in Peace Corps who has their own personal guard. I’m assuming that the Peace Corps freaked my site out so much about security that they decided to have the guard for the middle school guard my house as well just to ensure that I don’t have any security issues that could lead to my having to move to a new site. Anyway, my guard has officially proved to be completely and utterly without worth.

My first clue was when I discovered that someone had used my kabone (outhouse). I’ll spare you the gory details as to how I could tell that someone used my kabone and just say that it wasn’t a pretty sight to come home to. After that incident I decided to take the matter of fixing my fence into my own hands since it clearly wasn’t keeping people out and all of my requests to have it fixed were ignored. As I was outside fixing my fence my guard came up to me and told me he thought it was really good that I was fixing it since people could get through it. He actually gave a physical demonstration of how people could climb over, under and through the pickets. He then told me that I really needed to start keeping my kabone locked since he had seen people use it. When I asked him what he had done about it he looked at me like I completely crazy and said nothing. Hmmm…

As if that wasn’t enough proof of his lack of guarding abilities I have since noticed that the bamboo sticks I’d used to beef up my fencing were slowly disappearing day by day. One day, as I was walking by my guard’s house I saw a few of them strewn in their yard. I was pretty sure they were mine because of the way I had cut them. Later, when I walked back through one of my guard’s kids had one in his hands and I asked him if it was from my fence. He said that it was and then handed it backed to me as I started picking up all the missing pieces of my fence. I don’t have high hopes of my guard keeping anyone from doing stuff to my house given that he can’t even keep his own kids from stealing from me.

Are you cold?

A couple weeks ago I attended my first gasy wedding. My friend Nicole was super excited I was going with her and gave me all sorts of advice about the event in the week leading up to it. Most of the advice was pretty helpful: gifts, different parts of the ceremony, when it would begin and end etc. However, one thing that she really stressed was that I wear really warm clothes because it would be freezing that day. It is winter here so it does get pretty cold during the day in my region so I decided to listen to her and I wore a thick sweater and scarf along with my skirt. As I walked over to Nicole’s house to meet her before the wedding I felt pretty good about what I had on, it was a little chilly outside but not too bad with the sweater. Apparently, though, I was not wearing nearly enough warm clothes. Everyone I met asked me if I was cold. I kept insisting that I was fine and pointing out that they were all wearing dresses too. This did not stop them. Every five seconds throughout the ceremony someone sitting near me would ask if I was cold. I replied every time that I was not. Then, what must have been minutes before the ceremony ended, Nicole turned to me and said she was taking me home so I could change clothes before the party because I was so cold. I told her that wasn’t necessary, that the ceremony was ending soon and that I wasn’t cold. Her response was to repeat that she was taking me home to change my clothes because I was so cold. Hmm. This back and forth continued for several minutes until I finally caved and told her that yes, I was really cold so let’s leave so I can change.

She walked me home and dropped me off. I changed into pants as she had suggested and then put on all my warm outer clothes in the hopes that that would keep people from commenting on my attire with regards to the weather. I took my time because I had assumed that Nicole was cold as well and used me as an excuse to be able to change into warmer clothes herself. That was not the case. I walked out and she met me wearing the exact same thing and kind of smirking at what I was wearing. As we waited for the taxi brousse to take us to the party every single person who passed me started laughing because I had changed my clothes. From then on the comments on my dress shifted from asking if I was cold to asking if I was still cold with just as much repetition. To top it off, I was sweating because I was wearing so many layers. Imagine my frustration.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time at my site. It does not matter what I say, think or want to do. My personal plans do not matter. If someone decides that I must be feeling a certain way or that I need to go do a certain thing then that is what I have to feel or do. I can resist all day long but the people here never give in. So I always end up caving out of frustration and agreeing to whatever it is that I’m supposed to be thinking or doing at the time. I can not possibly explain how aggravating this is. Maybe some day my town will let me have my own thoughts but lately my hopes that that day will ever come have been diminishing rapidly.

That’s all for now so, enjoy. I’m off for a much deserved beach vacation and am hoping to return to site with a fresh set of eyes and a restored tolerance for all of the every day annoyances.

Some Questions About My Life at Site

2008-07-05T03:54:00.000-04:00

Recently I received a letter from one of my aunts with a list of questions about my life at site. They seemed like questions that would be of general of interest to all of you so I’ve decided to post my answers.

1. Have you made the trip in from your site to your banking town yet? How long does it take? How do you get there? And what can you do while you’re there?

The banking town is literally just the town where your bank is located. PCVs are allotted three days every month to go to their banking town and take out money. Why three days you may ask? Because for many volunteers it takes that long just to get there and back again. My banking town is Ambositra. I am very lucky in that my site is only 17k from my banking town, the road is fairly good and there are taxi-brousses going back and forth between the two towns every day and several times a day. It’s about a 30-45 minute drive to Ambositra. The length of time for the trip is determined by whether the driver has enough gas or is trying to save gas by periodically turning the car off and coasting as much as possible. Many people walk or bike the trip, which I’ve recently considered doing in order to come and go as I please rather than wait for the brousse to fill up and leave (our taxi-brousses are old station wagons which they cram at least 13-14 people into).

What do I do while I’m there? Well, other than go to the bank, I usually bring a few things to charge. I always eat at least one thing that I can’t get at site (ice cream, baked goods, French fries, something with cheese etc). Most of the time I end up doing some shopping for food or household items that I can’t find at site (butter, ketchup, olive oil, toilet paper, kitchen stuff…there’s even supposedly a place where you can buy real cheese but I have yet to see this legendary place actually open). Also, I always take advantage of the nice bathrooms at my hotel and take a hot shower. This is one of the things I look forward to most when planning to go to Ambositra. I am very unlucky in that Ambositra does not have internet access so checking my email or updating my blog is not something I can do when I go to my banking town.

2. Are you going crazy yet?

No. At least I don’t think so. Although it would be hard for me to tell since the people at my site would think anything I did was completely nuts. Some of you may be laughing but this is actually a reasonable question. Going crazy is apparently a legitimate problem for PCVs. People get MedEvac-ed for going crazy more frequently than I’m comfortable with. So frequently in fact, that we have a special name for it – WackEvac-ed. Also, I recently found out that PCVs are granted three free psych visits upon returning to the US. So I’ll keep you all updated on my level of sanity.

3. What is you “hut” like?

My “hut” is two rooms of a three room house. It’s a one-story cement house (when I say cement I mean cement everything, walls, floors, everything but the wood doors. It’s winter now so most days it feels like I’m living in a cement refrigerator) with a tin roof. I have a porch with a fenced in front and back yard. It’s a way bigger house than I ever imagined I’d be living in during my service and I really like it aside from the large rodent population living in my ceiling and the window in my kitchen which is large and low enough for the kids to perch themselves on it and stare at me nonstop.

4. How do you furnish your house?

My actual furniture (bed, chairs, table, shelves etc) was ordered and made at site. Everything else was purchased in my banking town on my way to being installed, including my mattress, gas stove, pots and pans and other kitchen supplies and LOTS of plastic buckets of various shapes and sizes. People here are obsessed with plastic. The other day one of my neighbors was over while I was cooking and I was using a metal mixing bowl. She told me I shouldn’t use it and shouldn’t have bought it and that I should go out and buy a plastic one.

5. How do you get food to eat?

As far as sites go for environment volunteers, mine is surprisingly well stocked. We have a market three days a week where I can buy just about any fruit or vegetable, beans, rice and other various items. The main street of my town is lined with about a dozen epiceries. These stores are the Malagasy equivalent to convenience stores and sell everything from flour to needles and thread to candlesticks. I can’t figure out how they all stay in business because they all sell exactly the same things at exactly the same prices.

I also have the option of buying live chickens, ducks, turkeys and rabbits to kill and eat. I haven’t gone down that road yet and I’m not sure I ever will. Meat here is a bit of an issue for me. I haven’t been able to bring myself to buy it. The stuff that isn’t still alive has been hanging outside for who knows how long. I’ve actually seen people using fly swatters but swatting directly at the meat. Last week I was given a serving of meat which I tasted, choked down and was then too terrified to ask exactly what part of the cow it was. My friend Nicole served me cow tongue in honor of Madagascar’s Independence Day. At first I thought it was kind of cool to be this close to my food source. Now I’m over it. I can’t wait to go back to the US and be able to buy meat and not immediately be able to tell exactly what animal it is. Nicole’s family was floored when I told them we buy all our meat already dead. Meat dishes here are almost always served up with uncomfortable reminders that they were once living things. There’s usually at least one organ along with the dish. Birds usually still have some of their quills. Mammals often still have some fur. And fish are served whole with the eyes staring up at you from the plate.

6. What’s the deal with your indoor shower?

Indoor “showers” in rural Madagascar are really just tiny rooms about the size of a walk-in closet with a hole in one corner for water to drain out. That’s it. I still heat up water and take a bucket shower. Hence my excitement at the opportunity for real showers in my banking town.

7. Do you ever see any of the other PCVs?

Because my site is relatively accessible, I get to see other PCVs fairly often. I usually run into at least one when I go to my banking town. Last month I was able to go to Fianar with a bunch of other PCVs for a big meeting and then tag along with my APCD for a bunch of visits to other sites. Two weeks ago the environment volunteer that lives closest to me showed up at my door to take me to see her site and visit some other PCVs on the way. And now I’m back in Fianar celebrating the Fourth of July and a fellow volunteer’s birthday (and of course doing “business” too since that was how I got permission to make this trip in the first place).

8. Have you made any friends with the locals?

Since I replaced a volunteer all her friends automatically made themselves my friends too. At first I thought this was kind of weird seeing as we’re not the same person. But I quickly got over that and was just happy to have people around who know how to speak Malagasy to someone who just started learning the language. They’ve been incredibly helpful too. Aside from taking it upon themselves to teach me the language (they get a lot of humor out of this), they also show me around town, take me to meet people, help me find stuff I need, act as my interpreter and help me deal with issues like, say, for example when a drunk guy follows me home and politely asks if it would be alright if he slept with me. Honestly I don’t know what I’d do without them.

9. How do you spend your days?

Right now my days are pretty uneventful. I usually wake up at around t6:30 and lay in bed mentally preparing myself for my day until at least 7. The earlier I get up and open my windows the earlier I have to deal with people staring at me through them. My house is on the path that leads to the only middle school in my commune so if I get up before school starts I have to deal with every single middle school aged child in Andina walking by my house. This entails lots of staring and laughing – a few are brave enough to say hello. Students here go home for lunch so they walk by my house four times a day so if I can eliminate the morning walk by not waking up I’m down to three waves of the staring. All in all there’s really very little incentive to get out of bed. Then I get up, eat breakfast and listen to the news on either BBC or VOA (I don’t know what I’d do without my short wave radio – I listen to it all the time). After that I do the dishes and clean my house. I’m pretty anal about cleaning my house because I don’t want the family of rats living in my ceiling to discover my kitchen and fleas are a huge problem here on the plateau.

At around 10 I usually leave my house and choose between one of a few daily activities. I can help someone with their farming. From time to time there’s a meeting I have to attend. Sometimes I walk around our “downtown” and talk to different people. If it’s a market day I’ll go to market but this has to be done early in the morning or the men are all so drunk that it’s more of a hassle than it’s worth. Sometimes I make the 5k trek to my counterpart’s house. This is always nice because it takes up pretty much the whole day. If I’m feeling adventurous I’ll go for a walk to places I haven’t visited yet. About one a week I’ll pay a visit to the mayor’s office and remind them that they still haven’t fixed my fence or the leak in my ceiling. Lots of times I just go to my friend Nicole’s house and spend time with her family. They like to teach me about Malagasy culture and how to cook different Malagasy dishes and ask me all sorts of questions about the US. They also take me to meet different people in Andina and teach me how to farm different things.

If I’m at someone’s house when it gets to be lunch time I’ll eat lunch with them. At first I felt guilty about this because I have plenty of money to buy my own food while the people here a pretty poor – we’re talking paying for stuff with rice poor. But I’ve since realized that when people are cooking they’ll pretty much feed anyone who is nearby so I guess it’s just part of the culture. Plus the people here are such good farmers that they have way more food than they could ever eat on their own so I don’t think feeding me is really all that much of a strain. Anyway, if I go home for lunch then it’s pretty much a repeat of my morning routine and I leave my house again, choosing a different activity for the afternoon. Everyone bars themselves inside their homes when it starts getting dark so I go home, eat dinner, read a book and go to bed. I have an exciting life here in Madagascar.

That’s it for the questions. Feel free to send me more. I’m happy to answer them. The third goal of Peace Corps is after all to teach Americans about your country of service.

Creepiest Cultural Exchange Ever

2008-07-05T03:50:00.000-04:00

A week or two ago I attended my first Malagasy wake. Well, not exactly my first. My first was during training but it was with all the other trainees and there were so many of us that we just cycled in and out and I was probably only in the house for a total of about 5 minutes. So that experience hardly counts.

Anyway, the husband of a woman I’d farmed with a couple of times had died. My friend, Nicole, told me the news the day it happened and said that in two days we would go together to visit the family. I was relieved to hear that because I still wasn’t 4exactly sure what was culturally appropriate for the Betsileo people when it came to deaths.

At around seven the next morning, one of the daughters of the family showed up at my window and calmly told me that her dad had died the day before and asked if I would come with her to her house. Now, 7am is pretty early for me. I usually don’t even get out of bed before 7 because the earlier I get out of bed the earlier I have to figure out what to do with myself for the day. But for some reason I was up that morning but I still hadn’t eaten or gotten dressed so I really couldn’t just follow her out the door right then and there. So, not knowing how to explain I’d already made plans to visit the next day and fearing it would be offensive to refuse the invitation, I told her I would come later. “What time?” she asked me. I replied that I didn’t know but would come later in the morning. “But at what time?” she asked again. I was pretty taken aback by her insistence on me giving her a time since Malagasy people have zero concept of time and I’m usually the one asking for times of activities and then assuming that the planned event will happen somewhere within three hours of whatever time I’m given. So I again told her I wasn’t sure but I would come over as soon as I finished my morning chores. I guess she found this answer acceptable because she said ok and left.

Fortunately, I decided to get dressed right after she left because 15 minutes later she was back at my window with a bundle of flowers so huge she could barely see over them. “Ok, let’s go!” she said. “But I already told you I was coming later” I replied, slightly confused. “I know, so let’s go!” Seeing there was no way I was getting out of this one, I locked up my house and followed her wondering the whole time what I would have to do once I got there and whether or not I should appear sad since she certainly didn’t and I had never met the guy – I didn’t even know his name. On the way over, she asked me if I was afraid of dead people. I told her I wasn’t and she said that was good. This made me a little nervous.

When we got to the house, there were more people than usual but everyone seemed to be going about their daily routine. The daughter immediately left me upon entering to go clean up the house. The mother happily greeted me and led me into the next room where I found myself faced with her dead husband lying on a bed covered by a white sheet and another white veil. She led me up to the bed and lifted the veil so I could get a closer look at him, thankfully. His face was wrapped up in some kind of white gauze almost like a mummy.

After she felt I’d had a good enough look, she led me to a seat that was directly in front of the bed. She then proceeded to ignore my existence and go about the room straightening things up and talking to other people. I had never met anyone else in the room before and couldn’t understand much of what they were saying so I couldn’t participate in any of their conversations and everyone seemed to be perfectly content ignoring me. My chair was one of the woven little “stools” that are about six inches high which are so popular here so I was pretty uncomfortable and literally had nothing else in my view except this dead body.

After 10 or 15 minutes of sitting in silence not knowing what to do with myself and desperately wishing there was some sort of picture on the wall behind the bed to look at, the mother came up to me again and matter-of-factly told me that he had woken up at four in the morning, thrown up a few times and then at seven in the morning had died. I could have done without the details. She then left the room, I can only assume to do work around the house like everyone else. So, there I sat, with no one to talk to and nothing to do except continue staring at the body of a man who I knew nothing about except that he had woken up, puked and died the day before.

About an hour later when I was thoroughly creeped out to the point that I really couldn’t take it anymore, I started to think I would have to just get up and leave. Other people had been cycling in and out of the house all morning so it seemed that I should be able to as well. Plus it had become clear that I wasn’t actually expected to do anything and I was afraid that if I didn’t get up to leave, they would have me sit there all day. So, gathering up my courage, I got up, walked out of the room, found the daughter and told her I was very sorry but that I had already made plans to see my counterpart that morning and I had to go (a complete lie). She said that was alright and walked me home. That was it. No one was sad or upset. No one seemed to really be doing anything other than their normal routine or sitting in the room and chatting about everyday things. And to this day I still have no idea why they wanted me there so badly when no one seemed to take any notice of me once I was seated.

Random Tale from Week One

2008-07-05T03:16:00.000-04:00

Apparently the first week at site is notorious for being extremely difficult to get through. When I ran into a fellow PCV who was getting ready to COS, the first thing she asked me was how my first week went. After admitting that it had been pretty rough she told me not to worry, that she had spent her first week holed up in her house crying. So, to demonstrate the emotional roller coaster that was my first week, here is a description of a particularly interesting day:

On the morning of my fifth day in Andina, I made my way to a meeting for the rice planting organization. I had absolutely no desire to go to this meeting because I still sucked at Malagasy so I wouldn’t understand anything and I was really worried they’d make me give a speech, which, given my difficulties with the language, would have been more than a little embarrassing. But I agreed to go because one of the members of the organization had come to my house insisting that I attend. He actually made quiet the spectacle in asking me. He showed up at my house speaking in rapid-fire Malagasy about this meeting. Of course I didn’t understand him so I told him I’d only studied the language for ten weeks so he needed to speak slowly. He then repeated everything, but this time in rapid-fire French – naturally. So I again requested that he speak slower. This went on with him switching between the two languages until I finally managed to piece together what he wanted but I still didn’t know where the meeting was. When I asked, he sighed, sounding exasperated and said, “You don’t know Malagasy and you don’t know French!” By this time a huge crowd had gathered and he went through his whole spiel again but this time he wrote everything down, checking after each individual word to make sure I understood, but in English (don’t ask me why he waited so long to go the English route given that he knew I was American). However, he still neglected to tell me where the meeting would be held. Tired of dealing with this guy, I told him I understood and would be there; all the while hoping I’d be able to find out where the meeting was from someone else.

Anyway, at 8 in the morning I headed to the meeting, prepared speech in hand and dreading having to face this guy again. No one was around and the room was locked. I waited around for 30-45 minutes until someone finally told me the meeting was actually at 10. Perfect. So I headed home grumbling the whole way about how that guy had treated me like such a moron yet couldn’t even tell me the right time for his precious meeting. Regardless, I returned at 10 and the meeting finally got underway at around 11. It lasted for a couple of extremely long hours. The whole time the presenter kept stopping to ask if I understood what he was saying. Each time I said I understood a little but really the only thing I got out of the whole thing was that he was trying to convince the people to plant some sort of plant in their rice fields. Also, periodically throughout the meeting, my favorite member would sneak up behind me to check and see if I was taking notes and understanding. I finally started writing random things down in English to get him to leave me alone. Needless to say, I came out of the meeting with a huge migraine from trying to understand the language for so long and irritated that I’d been forced to go at all.

All I wanted to do when I got home was and lunch and take a nap to recuperate. But, as always happened when I got home, as soon as I opened my windows kids swarmed in from all corners of my village and started screaming my name. Thus, napping was officially out of the question.

Desperate for some peace and quiet in order to maintain my sanity I decided to go for a walk. I somehow managed to forge a path through all the kids and made my way along a footpath that looked mildly secluded. After walking for awhile I was finally starting to feel normal again when I stumbled upon a huge house with a group of kids outside who looked absolutely terrified of me. Now, I should explain that someone at some point in the history of Madagascar started a nasty little rumor that white people eat babies. From what I understand, this rumor is still in circulation. So, when I see kids cowering in fear at the sight of me I try to talk to them to prove that I’m not actually going to cook them up for dinner. With that in mind, I started trying to chat with these kids. Before I knew it, heads were peaking out of every window of the house and a man with a lame leg hobbled out the door to find out who I was and invite me in. This was the last thing I wanted to do and my first thought was to turn and run to avoid suffering through an inevitable long and difficult “conversation” with this guy but that didn’t seem like the best reaction if I ever wanted to integrate myself into this society. So I reluctantly followed him in and sat down with him and his mother (who was so tiny and shriveled that I seriously think she may be the oldest woman in Madagascar). To my surprise, we ended up having a relatively good conversation. This guy, Edouard, had known and worked with the volunteer I replaced and was excited to be able to work with me.

On my way out we walked past a huge room packed with people screaming and yelling at each other. I asked what all the noise was about and, as luck would have it, I had stumbled upon this family on the one day that they were hosting the monthly town meeting. Of course, they all insisted that I go in and give a speech. I couldn’t believe it. Just as I thought my day was turning around I was being forced into a room so full of Gasy people I could barely find a place to stand and I was going to have to address them all. Awesome.

The whole room fell silent and they all looked at me expectantly. I took a deep breath and, hoping I could get through everything in one piece, dove into a brief speech. It actually ended up being a hilarious experience. As I stumbled through my self-introduction and explanation of Peace Corps, the whole room would periodically erupt into chaos for some unknown reason. Then Edouard would stand up and get everyone to be quiet and I would begin again only for another outburst 30 seconds later. The whole time everyone kept telling me how great I was at Malagasy and how they loved Peace Corps and couldn’t wait to work with me. I agreed to meet with Edouard again the following week and walked home feeling like I was on cloud nine.

Off to Site!!

2008-04-30T01:17:00.000-04:00

Training has finally drawn to a close. Now that it’s over I’m actually kind of sad. I mean it was really intense and got to be pretty frustrating at times but I’m really going to miss everyone. I’ve spent the last ten weeks constantly surrounded by this group of amazing trainees, trainers and host families and it is going to be really weird to go from all of that to being completely alone. Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely looking forward to having control over my life again and have been for awhile. Having zero say in what you eat, when you sleep, what you do and where you go is one of the most aggravating situations to find yourself in. However, once I get to site I’ll be immediately confronted with the fact that I still can’t really communicate in Malagasy and still don’t really know all that much about the environment. I think I could end up sitting in my house twiddling my thumbs a lot in these next three months wondering what I’m doing here and how I’m ever going to teach lifelong farmers how to farm. I’m lugging a copy of War and Peace along with me to site to help pass the time because if there is ever going to be a period in my life when I’ll have time to sit and read one of the most absurdly long classics in existence I’m pretty sure this will be it.

It also recently occurred to me that moving to site will be major life change number two in less than three months. I’m going to have to meet all new people, learn my way around an entirely new village and adjust to a new daily routine all over again. Except this time there won’t be any Americans around for me to vent to…or speak English to at all for that matter. That is a lot of life change in a little bit of time. I just hope I can handle it because I see a lot of potential for going crazy here.

Our swearing in ceremony yesterday went really well. We had it at the zoo in Antananarivo and lemurs were screaming in the background the entire time, which I personally found hilarious. Right afterwards we got to have lunch at the ambassador's house so we all felt really important and slightly out of place given that he lives in an enormous mansion. It was definitely nice to get to relax and eat good food all together before all the chaos of moving to site began (not to mention all the goodbyes).

All in all though, I am really excited about getting to site and getting started with my actual work. Between the year-long application process, the waiting period between receiving my invitation for PC Madagascar and departing, and the ten weeks of training, my Peace Corps service has really been built up and I’m tired of sitting around waiting and preparing. I just want to get this thing started and feel like I’m actually doing something for a change.

Field Trip to the Rainforest

2008-04-30T01:16:00.000-04:00

After almost two months in Madagascar, I have finally seen some of the crazy biodiversity this country is so famous for. It was just in time too because I was beginning to think I would have to change the subtitle of my blog since I had yet to spot a single lemur.

We went on a field trip to Andasibe, a village in the forest corridor a couple hours east of the capital. For the first time I really felt like I was in Madagascar. We got to romp through the rainforest all weekend so there were lots of lemur and chameleon sighting. There also were lots of mosquitoes but I thought it was a fair trade. I even got to plant a tree during a mini reforestation lesson. It was pretty cool to get to leave a permanent mark like that…that is of course if I didn’t kill the tree in the transplanting process. And given my lack of expertise with all things plant related I guess it’s highly likely that my tree is dead already. But it’s the thought that counts, right?

One interesting note I’d like to include about traveling in Madagascar, however, is the lodging situation. We were fortunate enough to stay in a hotel advertised as providing the “cultural experience” which is really a way to glorify staying at the cheapest hotel in the area. So “cultural experience” translated to rooms with light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, electricity that was on sometimes, communal bathrooms that sometimes worked, communal cold water showers (why do they insist on teasing us with the hot water knob when there is no hot water?) and large piles of rubble all around the outside. I do think that the hotel may have been under construction which could account for the rubble and lack of mosquito nets on some beds. Now for me the fact that this hotel had running water and electricity at all made it pretty luxurious. However, I couldn’t help but think about American and European tourists who get off the plane and walk into a hotel that looks like it could fall over at any moment and may or may not be surrounded by a junk yard. I mean, what must these people think? And how absurd is it that the state of this hotel didn’t even phase me until I thought about it from the perspective of someone who would be staying there for their exotic, tropical vacation? I guess this is all part of the cultural exchange that Peace Corps aims for.

FYI

2008-03-28T14:19:00.001-04:00

I just wanted to warn you all that the blog posts are going to be pretty sporadic. I just found out that not only does my site lack internet access (obviously because the village doesn't even have electricity) but apparently there's no internet in my banking town either. This means that in order to get to a place where I can actually update my blog I'll have to travel to a town that's like two to three times farther away from my site than my banking town. Therefore, don't freak out if you don't notice any new posts for a couple months at a time. Because I'm going to be even less connected to the outside world than I originally thought, snail mail is going to be even more important to keep in touch. So send me mail! Seriously, you have no idea how exciting it is to get a letter when you're this isolated.

Rules of the Road...or Lack Thereof

2008-03-28T13:37:00.000-04:00

So I thought it was really bizarre that every blog I read leading up to my time of departure mentioned the Malagasy roads. Now I know why. The roads here are absolutely horrendous. I don’t think there is a single rule for drivers to follow. Actually, I take that back. There appear to be two guidelines: (1) get there as fast as you can and (2) don’t die. Let me tell you, I am shocked every time I step foot into a vehicle that my driver is able to successfully accomplish guideline #2. My life has flashed before my eyes so many times it doesn’t even surprise me anymore. I just assume upon entering a car now that I’m going to cheat death at least twelve times – no matter how short the trip.

The issues with car trips here are twofold. First, people drive like complete maniacs. They honestly do not think twice about passing other cars at any time. The road could be really narrow, they could be going around a sharp bend, there could be oncoming traffic or all three at once. Nobody seems to be concerned about collisions at all. Passing isn’t the only absurdity. When sitting in a traffic jam (which happens constantly in Tana) it is perfectly natural to just pull into the lane which would have oncoming traffic if you were moving and try to forge your own path. It doesn’t seem to occur to people that this actually makes the situation worse because you’re adding more lines of cars trying to cross the same intersection. Traffic lights and signs are also nonexistent. I heard that at one point they actually did set up some traffic lights in Tana. However, nobody had any idea what they meant so they would just drive right through red lights. Apparently nobody thought about actually having to teach the population that red means stop and green means go. Needless to say, the traffic lights didn’t last too long.

The second issue is that the roads themselves are really bad. When they are paved they never have lines, are incredibly windy and because they’re reasonably flat, people feel justified in driving even more recklessly. So you end up passing a huge truck carting petrol around a bend at 100 mph. When they aren’t paved then they’re gravel, dirt, or inevitably mud. That’s when the fun really begins because there is absolutely zero chance the road will be even remotely flat. Giant craters and mounds are characteristic of these lovely country roads and getting stuck at least once is almost a guarantee. There are times when I’m not even sure what we turn onto is an actual road. One of my fellow PCTs compared driving over these roads to being on tumble dry low (I think that was Austin?) and I can’t think of a more perfect way to describe it.

All in all, if anyone happens to stumble upon this post who is preparing to serve for Peace Corps in Madagascar, do yourself a favor and bring along some motion sickness meds. Even if you’ve never been carsick before. I never ever experienced motion sickness before coming here and now I dread car rides.

Playing with Knives

2008-03-28T13:34:00.000-04:00

After a couple of weeks here, I’m beginning to feel somewhat settled. I feel a little less out of place all the time and have mastered most of my daily activities (I’m probably never going to get used to the outdoor bucket shower on cold rainy days but there are worse things to have to deal with I suppose). I’m even managing to string together a few simple sentences at the dinner table, so I don’t seem completely mute and deaf to my host family anymore. I’m hoping that as I start conversing more I’ll be able to convince my host mom that I am somewhat intelligent and that she’ll trust me to do some things – like fetch water – on my own. As of right now, I am not allowed to leave the yard without my little brothers as escorts. I appreciate the concern but I think my brothers are sick of having to tag along for all of my daily chores. Overall though, the adjustment process seems to be coming along.

One thing that I have been struggling to adjust to, however, is the tendency to allow kids to play with knives here. Apparently, nobody here is considered too young to wield a knife because I’ve seen kids as young as two waving knives around without nearby adults so much as batting an eyelash. Meanwhile, I’m standing by having heart attacks ready to catch flying limbs at any moment. Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if I start finding gray hairs. I noticed this for the first time when my host mom brought a huge knife along to cut back the path on our way to get water. Her hands were full on the way back so she just handed the knife over to my five-year-old brother. Without hesitation. We’re talking a knife that’s probably longer than his arm. My brother then proceeded to try to chop branches off of every tree and bush that we passed on the way back home. This didn’t go over too well with my mom so I thought she was yelling at him to stop or he’d chop his arm off. But when we finally got back I took the knife to be placed safely out of reach. I thought I was doing her a favor but when my brother started crying she gave it right back to him to play with at the house. So I guess she was just yelling at him to hurry up.

I was faced with this again the other night while helping cook dinner. My little brother and his two-year-old cousin were running around fighting when my brother reached for the sharp knife I’d been using and started waving it around in front of his face. His cousin, not to be outdone, then reached for the antsy-be (big knife) and started waving it around. I thought for sure my host mom would intervene this time given the fact that the two were dangerously close to one another, but she just sat there calmly and continued cooking. Given what had happened the first time I’d tried to intervene, I just moved myself out of striking range and prepared myself for the worst. In my mom’s defense, nothing happened either time. And I haven’t seen any Malagasy children with missing fingers. So I guess these kids really do know how to handle a knife.

Even the Chickens Stare at Me

2008-03-28T13:20:00.000-04:00

I went into this whole deal anticipating that there was nothing I could really do to prepare myself for those initial days in country…and I was more right than I ever could’ve imagined. There is absolutely nothing I could’ve done to prepare myself for the extreme absurdity that made up my first days in Madagascar. It’s really been an incredibly surreal first week started off by the most awkward night of my life.

As soon as we landed, the group was herded to the medical office for our initial round of vaccinations, a whirlwind explanation on how to take a bucket bath and use a po (it’s fady, or taboo, to go outside at night here, which in a country largely without indoor plumbing necessitates the use of the lovely po, or pee pot). They then taught us a few key Malagasy phrases (“hi, my name is…” “I’m full” “I’m tired” “Where’s the bathroom?” etc) and crammed us into vans to go meet our families. While in transit to our village I should mention that I endured my first bit of “unwanted attention.” I don’t know why this surprised me, I always seem to attract the creepos immediately upon entering a new country. This time it was in the form of a guy wearing the creepiest mask I have ever seen coming up to the van and staring at me intently - to the point where the nose of his mask actually dragged along the entire window as we crawled along the road at a snails pace. Awesome. Way to get my stay here started off right. Anyway, this meeting of the families was a hilariously awkward endeavor. The mass of trainees all huddled together facing an even bigger mass of host families. One by one we went up to a PC worker to tell our name and they called it out repeatedly until the matching family emerged from the group to claim their trainee. I think I now know what it must feel like to be auctioned off…

After being united with my family, my host mom immediately latched on to my arm and half led half dragged me down the path to the house. It was pitch black at this point and after I stepped in about my eighth pile of what I can only hope was mud I began to seriously question Peace Corps’ insistence on us arriving in business casual attire. Those shoes will never be the same again. Not to mention the fact that we arrived at night in a place without electricity…I don’t think my host family had any idea what I was wearing.

We managed to make it to the house without incident. Notice I said house. For those of you who automatically equate housing in Africa with mud huts (and there’s a lot of you, I’m sure, so you don’t have to feel too embarrassed), I live in a lovely house with two floors and a thatched roof. Ironically enough, my room here, in a village of subsistence farmers, is about ten times bigger than the room I had in Geneva, a city of wealthy bankers. Anyway, we sat down to dinner and as the guest of honor, I was forced to sit in the only actual chair, which is about six inches higher than the benches my host family sits on. Now, the people who live on the plateau here are really pretty short. We’re talking at 5’4” I tower over almost everyone I meet. So as I sat down to dinner I was literally looming over the rest of the table, certainly adding to my already freakish appearance.

My family attempted to talk to me throughout the meal, but it was in vain given that the only thing I’d managed to memorize in Malagasy was “hi, my name is…” This, by the way, was a complete waste of brain power given that my family obviously already knew my name. I have never felt as worthless as I did that night with my host mom trying so desperately to have a conversation with me. The charade continued as I was ushered into my room immediately after dinner. At this point I was completely lost because I had been under the impression that at some point we would actually get our bags and that PC would give us a schedule for the orientation that was set to begin the following morning somewhere at some time. It was becoming abundantly clear that neither of those things were going to happen so I was beginning to wonder when and if I would see my bags I had spent so much time packing. Not to mention how I would attend training without knowing when and where to meet everyone. I’m pretty sure my host mom was trying to explain all this to me but she was talking to me as if I was a native in the language, apparently having forgotten how unsuccessful her previous attempts at talking to me had been. The only thing she managed to get across was how to light my candle and blow it out before I went to bed. Of all the messages for her to focus on getting across, that was probably the most useless. Although after appearing to have the mental capacity of a 5-year-old I suppose I can understand her concern with my ability to use a candle. After that riveting exchange my host mom shooed everyone out of my room and having no bag and thus zero entertainment, I went to bed.

My next few days grew steadily (though painfully slowly) less awkward. I began to figure out rudimentary sentences and could respond somewhat to my host mom’s attempts at conversation. I even began to figure out the “bathroom” and bucket showers and developed a bit of a morning routine. By about my fourth morning, I was feeling less like a fish out of water when my confidence was immediately shot down. As I went out to the kabone (bathroom) to clean out my po, one of my host family’s chickens cam over and watched me. I went about my business and then walked over to the shower to brush my teeth. The chicken followed me and proceeded to stare me down the entire time I brushed my teeth. By the time I was done I looked over at the chicken and met it’s gaze for awhile and all I could think was “holy crap, I am so out of place in this country that even the chickens here are staring at me.”

Let's go on an adventure...

2008-02-19T23:15:00.000-05:00

"Let's go on an adventure" happens to be one of the most common strings of words in my vocabulary. Usually, my adventures of choice end up being something to the extent of driving to Crozet for pizza or maybe meandering around a new part of New York City. Lame really as adventures go. So the fact that I'm about to hop a plane to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar probably seems a bit shocking to most of you. I must say I've definitely been second guessing my decision as my date of departure has drawn nearer. However, in an attempt to answer the inevitable question of 'Why Peace Corps?' I will say that this is something I've wanted to do for a very long time. Volunteering in general is something that has always been very important to me. When you couple that with my major in foreign affairs and my interests in international human rights and development the whole idea of Peace Corps begins to sound a little less out there (at least I think so). I also seem to have a tough time really settling in to one place for very long so the thought of being able to pick up and move to a completely new and different part of the world is incredibly enticing. I love the idea of being able to learn about a new culture and experience a way of life so different from that of Americans. And when you think about it, this whole thing is a pretty good deal. I mean you get to live and work in a place you most likely never would ever go to otherwise and it's essentially free of charge. So leaving friends and family for two years of a hopefully long life starts to sound a little less daunting when compared to all the things everyone involved can get out of the experience.

That's not to say the decision has been an easy one. Leaving friends and family for two years is pretty daunting, especially when you're moving to a place where it is all but impossible to stay in touch. And then there's the inevitable doubts that arise when pondering moving to a place where you don't know the language, don't know any people, and aren't told exactly what your job is going to be until you get there. Needless to say, the last couple of months of my life have been quite the roller coaster going from excitement at the thought of finally having the chance to live in a rainforest to utter terror at the thought of all the things that could go wrong and all the people I could let down. After being told repeatedly that as a volunteer, I am the Peace Corps, I have officially had the weight of responsibility that I have been dodging so well lately placed firmly down on my soldiers.

For better or worse, tomorrow I will be getting on a plane heading for Madagascar. And I must say that at this point, after all the anxiety, packing and repacking, goodbyes and the last two days of staging I am really just excited to get there and finally witness for myself what this island is like. Then maybe I'll be able to develop some more concrete thoughts about all this. Not to mention that after over a year of being in the application process, it will nice to finally step foot on the country and meet my new friends and neighbors.

They say that getting placed in Madagascar is like winning the Peace Corps lottery. And from what I've heard about the program there and the country in general I do feel pretty lucky. So, Madagascar, I hope you live up to all the hype.