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.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
The Waiting Game
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.
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.
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