Efa Zatra (already used to it)

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.