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.