Mbalatsara from Madagascar! I have now been in country for almost a month and a half and am adjusting to the living on the opposite side of the world. Literally -- I think if you draw a line from Seattle going straight through the globe you end up in the ocean with the closest island being Madagascar. This is the first time I have had internet access since I’ve been here so I have a lot of updating to do!
For those who just want the bare essentials: I’m alive, I’m safe, I haven’t been sick yet, I still do not have a pet lemur, and I’m so happy to be here. (Oh, and the dumbbell debate turned out to be moot, as I didn’t have enough space to pack them. I have been using water bottles.) Details included below…
The Journey Here
On July 11th I took a train from New York where I had been visiting friends for the week to Philadelphia to meet my stage, which consists of 27 people from around the states, including 14 Health Volunteers and 13 Education Volunteers. I spent the morning walking around the historic district and searching for coffee with a couple of new friends until our rooms were ready for check-in. At noon, we met back in a conference room downstairs to begin staging, which consisted of seven hours of paperwork, ice-breakers, logistic sessions, and many reminders of the mission and goals of the Peace Corps in order to quadruple-check if we were still serious about accepting our invitations. After the official business was over, it was time for the event we had been talking about all day (and let’s be honest, thinking about for much longer): “The Last Supper.” Because our bus was set to leave at two am the next morning the plan was to shower, go to dinner, and stay out at the bars instead of going to bed and having to wake up early.
Armed with a generous amount of Peace Corps cash (thanks, U.S. government!) we headed out to dinner. The vote was overwhelmingly for hamburgers, which would not have been my first choice, but after ending up with a delicious lamb-burger and a beer, I was completely satisfied. The night unfolded as you might imagine it would if you were to picture 27 people in their mid-twenties headed out for their last meal and drinks in the states for two and a half years… a lot of fun.
When 2:00 finally rolled around we all met in the lobby thoroughly exhausted and ready to leave. As they were not sending any Peace Corps staff with us, I looked around before boarding the bus thinking momentarily that they must be crazy to put us on a bus in Philadelphia with nothing but a flight ticket receipt and expect all of us show up two days later in Africa, but being too tired to think about it further, I laughed to myself and fell asleep for the two hour bus ride back to New York. And the waiting began. Turns out JFK doesn’t even open until 5:00 am, so when we arrived at 4:15 (for our 11:55 flight), we sat on the curb for 45 minutes until we could move inside, where we found out we weren’t allowed to check-in until 8:00 and coffee shops didn’t open until 6:00. I’m sure someone in our stage has a picture they will post in the near future of how we spent the next three hours – approximately 2,000 pounds of baggage with their 27 owners sleeping on top of them sprawled across the JFK lobby. When the stores finally opened, we took shifts running to grab fruit and coffee and watching the bags until around 10:00 when someone figured out that all of the baggage scales at the empty, adjacent ticket counter were operating. If you have ever tried to pack for two years in one 50 pound and one 30 pound bag, you will know it can, in some cases, cause stress. Cut to everyone unpacking and repacking their bags, dragging them over to the scales, trying to remember how to convert kg to lbs, experiencing the first [lack of] technology shock when no one could use the calculator on their iPhone because most people weren’t taking their phones, and many bribes sounding something like “If you take these two pounds from me I will buy you your first roll of toilet paper”.” Eventually almost everyone managed to reach a satisfactory baggage weight, and we dragged our stuff over (again in shifts) to check-in. Getting through security was relatively easy and we made it to our gate with another two hours to spare. This time was spent passing around the two remaining cell phones and listening to everyone make their final goodbye calls. At 11:15 there was a collective realization that there would only be plane food for the next 24 hours, so we made our way over to the closest (and only) food vendor in the terminal: Panda Express. Panda Express actually doesn’t open until 11:30, so we sat and watched them cook the first couple of dishes, waiting for the cashier to show up for work. The American National Junior Rugby team, also on our flight to Johannnesburg, got wind of our plans for Chinese, so we attracted quite the crowd around the very confused Panda Express chef. He finished cooking the first three dishes just in time for us to board, and thankfully he let us order them before he finished cooking the rest of the menu. I walked away confused at whether I was really hungry for Chinese food at brunch time and how I felt that my last meal in the U.S. was really airport Hunan Beef and noodles. It still tasted pretty good.
There isn’t much to write about the next day and a half because, thankfully, I slept almost the entire way there. We touched down in Johannesburg and had to run through the airport to make our connecting flight to Madagascar. On July 13th at around 2:00 pm, we landed in Antananarivo with all 27 of us in tow.
Several current volunteers (PCV’s) and the Country Director (CD) met us at the airport where we got through security fairly quickly and boarded two large white vans to head to the Peace Corps Training Center (PCTC). I sat next to the driver, who gave me my a Malagasy language lesson over the four hour drive to the Center. My first words were “trondro tsara” (good fish). It was dark when we arrived at the PCTC and we were all starving and exhausted. The Language and Cross Culture Facilitators (LCF’s) fed us dinner (rice, fish, and beans), sang us a welcome song, and sent us to bed.
The next two days we spent learning basic “survival” language, sitting through orientation sessions, and generally acclimating to our new environment. That Saturday afternoon we packed into 4x4’s and drove the short (but terrible) “road” to Lohomby to meet our home stay families. As we pulled up to a fork, all of the families were waiting in a crowd to welcome us. We grabbed our stuff and awkwardly walked out essentially only knowing how to say “My name is ________,” “Nice to meet you,” and “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Homestay
Lohomby is very small village outside the commune of Mantasoa in the highlands of Madagascar. It is currently winter here (June, July, and August) so though it is starting to warm up, the weather has been cold. The temperature probably isn’t that low (maybe 40’s-50’s) but with no heating, few warm clothes, and most of the day spent outside, it feels much colder. The landscape is hilly, green, and filled with rice paddies and other small agricultural plots. The houses are a mix between local materials (wood slat or clay walls with a thatched roof) and bigger, concrete structures, which is what I lived in. My house was actually fairly big compared to many of the others, with two floors, an eating room with a dining table, a tiny food-prep room, a closet for the chickens, and three bedrooms. There is no running water or electricity there and no inside bathroom. Outside the house there is a little thatched structure with a brick wall in the middle creating two separate dirt spaces, one for the kabone (squat toilet) and one for the ladosy (“shower” space). Most families cook on wood fires indoors but I was lucky to have a small cook space outside so I wasn’t constantly inhaling smoke (this is one of the main causes of the pervasive and, for infants, deadly Upper Respiratory Infections that I will be addressing). We also ate our meals at the table, though most of the volunteers stayed with families that ate more traditionally on large floor mats called “lambanana.” Because my mom is a farmer, we had plenty of chickens running around the house and all of our leftovers were boiled and given to the two pigs tied outside the door. Our house was clustered on a hill with two other houses that were also hosting PCT’s, so Eric and Mariana and I were very close neighbors.
My family consisted of a 61-year-old woman named Ramanana, my “neny” (mom), and her 15-year-old niece named Faniry, my “rahavavy” (sister). Never having hosted a PCT before, they were anxious to take care of me well and nervous to make mistakes, but I could not have asked for a better host family. Most of the first two days were spent with my mom addressing me in rapid Malagasy, me looking nervous and nodding, my sister trying to repeat it slowly, and me still not understanding. I knew things were going to be okay when after dinner on the first night, I was washing dishes with Faniry and, after finishing the plates and spoons, I lifted the big silver bowl out of the sink and dumped the water. Evidently, the big silver bowl was the “sink,” and all the dirty dish water rushed through the huge hole under the bowl and flooded the kitchen floor. We hadn’t even learned the word “sorry” yet. Faniry and Ramanana gasped but then burst out in laughter. Ice broken.
Over the next four weeks I learned, with much help from my sister, a lot about daily life in Madagascar. A typical day looked something like this (numbers denote an explanation below):
5:00 am - Rooster crows, I wake up.
5:15 am - Get out of bed, brush teeth, empty po, and fetch water (1,2)
5:30 am - Go running (3)
6:15 am - Get dressed, help cook breakfast, shower (4)
6:45 am - Breakfast (5)
7:00 am - Wash dishes (6)
7:20 am - Read, study, journal, etc.
8:00 - 12:00 - Language class (7)
12:30 pm - Lunch
12:30 pm - Wash dishes
2:00 - 5:00 - Technical or Cross-cultural Session (8)
5:30 - Help cook dinner
6:30 - Dinner
6:45 - Wash dishes
7:00 - Read, study, journal, etc.
7:30 – Sleep
(1) In most rural areas of Madagascar, people have a very real fear of witches. These witches come out as soon as the sun sets and therefore no one is allowed out of the house after dark. This poses a problem if you have to use the kabone any time starting after dinner until you wake up in the morning. The solution is the “po,” a bucket kept next to the bed used for brushing teeth and going to the bathroom during the night.
(2) I fetched my water from a well outside my house. To use it for cooking or bathing, we treated it with sur’eau (essentially bleach). To use it for drinking, I filtered it through a personal water filter provided by the Peace Corps, and then used sur’eau. Again, I was lucky to have a well closeby. Many volunteers stayed with families who fetched their water from wells very far away or had to walk to the nearest stream.
(3) While running in the morning, I didn’t encounter very many problems, as most people were still inside. However, the couple of times I decided to run after class/before dinner or during the weekends, I ended up creating a big spectacle. In India, the neighbors would set up their chairs on their porches and sip tea while they watched me run. Here, not only did the men stare and catcall (also true in India), but the children run behind me as I pass their houses, collecting more children as we go until I have a gaggle of 10-15 children running behind me, shouting and laughing for almost the whole run. About halfway through, I discovered a new running route that went down a forest (logging?) trail instead of through the village in order to avoid this problem.
(4) Bucket baths are something I am still getting used to. At home, I viewed showering as an inconvenient necessity unless after a particularly bitter winter practice, in which case the point was temperature control. Without running water, the process becomes even more inconvenient, and in Madagascar I’m not playing Ultimate or running in snow. After three days of being at homestay, Faniry took me by the arm, grabbed a bucket of water and literally dragged me to the ladosy. As if talking to a child, she said “Mandro i Eric, mandro i Mariana, MANDRO i ELLEN!” She made sure I started to undress before she propped a stick against the door to hold it closed and left me alone to bathe. Anyway, the protocol is fairly self-explanatory. Draw enough water from the well or stream to fill a bucket, use a tsinga (small plastic pitcher) to pour enough water over your head to get wet, lather up with shampoo, soap, etc., pour the rest of the water to rinse, and get rid of any excess suds with the towel. (I learned from trial and error that there is not enough water in the bucket to apply and rinse soap/shampoo/conditioner separately so it’s best to do it all at once). My mom was actually nice enough to boil water for me in the morning so that I could mix it in with the well water and have a hot “shower,” which made it much more pleasant on the chilly mornings.
(5) Food! Rice is the staple food in the Malagasy diet. All meals consist of a heaping plate of rice (or two) with a couple spoonfulls of “loaka” (side dish). The side dish could be anything from cubes of beef, to potatoes, carrots, greens, or beans. The most difficult meals were the dinners where the candle was not bright enough to illuminate exactly what was in the loaka, and I found myself very hesitant to bite into the few piece of “meat” on my plate, which often ended up being chunks of fat without any actual meat or parts of the animal I never thought I would eat. The most interesting meals were the ones my family so nicely tried to make in imitation of “American” meals, following a couple of recipes the Peace Corps provided them. The cooking execution was actually okay, but the combination of foods got lost in translation. Two standouts were plain pasta with a ton of salt and an omelet on top, and plain pasta as the side dish for our rice. One of my favorite things to eat ended up being “totovoanjo” (peanut butter), which we made ourselves (a very labor intensive process starting with roasting the peanuts, removing the shells, sifting them, grinding them in a huge mortal and pestle, and finishing by adding salt and mixing to taste). Another treat – a fruit called pibasy that grows in trees all over Lohomby. It’s looks like a cross between an apricot and a grape and is the perfect mix between tart and sweet. We pick them every time we are walking around and I probably eat around 50 each day.
(6) Of all the chores I did at homestay including chopping wood, fetching water, sweeping the house, feeding chickens and pigs, and preparing meals, washing dishes became “mine” and after every meal, Faniry and I would stand in the kitchen together talking and washing dishes. These were actually some of my favorite times, as it was a chance to chat with my first Malagasy friend. Faniry was eager to help me learn and would often quiz me about what she had heard us learning that morning, correcting my sentence structure and providing me with new vocab. Early on, this game consisted mostly of her pointing at objects or miming and asking “what’s this?” but as my Malagasy improved, we got to have full conversations about her friends, her life, and my life back home. A couple of days in, I accidentally left the soap in the bowl when I tossed out the dirty water after washing dishes. In the morning, Faniry was grinning while she watched me search for the soap until I asked her where it was and she started laughing and said, “the dog ate the soap.” When I realized what I had done I cracked up, and when my neighbors asked me what was new later in the day, I told them what had happened. Apparently what was funnier than the dog eating the soap was that a) I thought it was so funny, b) that I, the vazaha (foreigner), could describe what happened in Malagasy, and c) that I had been stupid enough to throw the soap out with the water. From then on, many villagers’ favorite thing to say to me was “the dog ate the soap” and then start laughing. This faux-pas, along with news that I didn’t like to drink sugar in my coffee* (the subject around many family’s dinner tables during week one), and my daily runs, provided the basis for my reputation.
*The Malagasy people drink coffee with their sugar instead of the other way around.
(7) Every morning one of the Language and Cross Cultural Facilitators (LCF’s) would come over for four hours of language instruction along with Mariana and Eric. Being able to learn Malagasy was one of the things I was most anxious about before coming and it has ended up being so much fun. Immersion is absolutely the best way to learn a language. In some ways, Malagasy is an easy language to learn because it doesn’t use gender for any names, doesn’t conjugate verbs according to subjects, and doesn’t differentiate between plural and singular. On the other hand, the words are all very long, using various repetitions of only a couple sounds, making everything sound very similar and causing each word to be about 4 syllables too long. Nonetheless, I have made good progress and I am loving being able to speak Malagasy. The only setback so far was after passing our first LPI a level above where we are supposed to be right now, I switched to learning a dialect called Sakalava, which is basically like starting back at the beginning except few people around me actually speak Sakalava so it’s harder to practice.
(8) After lunch we would walk about 2k to the local EPP (primary school), which was empty because it is now vacation. These sessions would alternate between cross-cultural training where we would talk about Malagasy customs and living in small communities in Madagascar, and technical training where we would go over the different health issues we are supposed to be addressing here and how they are currently being dealt with. Once a week we would also be picked up in the morning and driven to the training center where we spent all day in Safety and Security and Personal Health sessions. Though we were always happy to be at the center, the topics of these trainings ranged from all the ways you can in a taxi brousse, to the different locks you must buy for your house in order to avoid being robbed, to the myriad parasites and worms we will get, to prophylaxis techniques for diseases that don’t even exist in the states anymore… at least we were able to charge our ipods at the same time.
The weekends provided us with some free time. Saturday afternoons were usually dedicated to laundry and studying. Laundry provided me with one of the first of many déjà vu moments since coming to Madagascar when I asked my sister to teach me the best way to do laundry in a bucket. It wasn’t until I poured the soap in and started to knead that the smell of the detergent and the gritty feeling on my skin reminded me that in fact I did know how to do bucket laundry as I had done it all year in India. On Sunday mornings everyone attended church after breakfast. The three-hour services were hard to understand and by hour two, the benches built for much shorter people started digging into our knees and backs. The biggest surprise came during the last thirty minutes when the deacon brought out a basket of food and kicked off what is apparently a weekly auction for fruit and vegetables – highest bidder wins. After church, we walked home and cooked lunch, and then the health volunteers would meet in front of my house to walk about 3-4k into the commune of Mantaosa where the education volunteers were staying. The village children would come along and meet the kids from Mantasoa at the field in front of the Lycee where we alternated teaching them American games and learning their Malagasy games. Soccer was a favorite.
After four weeks at homestay, I was both sad to leave my family and also ready to go back to the training center. Both my mom and my sister cried that morning and my sister gave me her favorite necklace and bracelet. I had taken a picture of me with Faniry and Ramanana a couple of weeks earlier and given it to Richard, the Peace Corps driver, to take to Tana and develop for me. I put the photo in a frame I made from firewood and gave it to them as a going away gift. The one thing I was happy to leave behind was the wildly aggressive bed bugs that have been eating me alive despite several attempts to DDT them to death and wash my sheets.
The PCTC
We arrived back at the PCTC last Thursday. If homestay is a dose of reality in Madagascar, the PCTC is Malagasy summer camp. The center is in a large gated compound on a lake (wonderful but not swimmable because of schistosomiasis). There are canoes, a sand volleyball court, a basketball court, a beautiful stone dining room, dormitories, classrooms, picnic tables, an infirmary, flush toilets, and electricity. Meals are served three times a day, morning snack is provided, and they set up a bar every evening. Once a week they even wash our sheets and towels for us! After language and technical trainings each day, we play volleyball, watch movies, set up speakers and dance, or play games (I have been teaching everyone my favorite WP and HVC games including mafia, salad bowl, and “wah,”). So that we maintain our language proficiency, we are not allowed to speak English between the hours of 7:00 am – 7:30 pm. We are actually handed out red cards and fined if we are heard speaking anything but Malagasy.
Though the PCTC is a bubble of luxury, I often remind myself to enjoy it while I can as there are only four weeks left until swearing in, after which I will be driven to the far north and dropped off in my hut in a small village without amenities or friends. In preparation for this, I organized a “technology swap” last Sunday where we all brought our computers and kindles out and spent the morning swapping movies, tv shows, music, and books. I now have all the books I should ever have read (or read better) on my kindle and am ready to dive [back] into the classics.
Madagascar
Mantasoa is in the highlands of Madagascar outside of Antananarivo, which provides a very different atmosphere than the coastal regions. Since this is the only place I have been so far, I can only speak about what it’s like on the plateau and relay what I have learned in cross-cultural sessions. First off, the Malagasy people are extremely friendly, though somewhat conservative in the highlands and very shy. Everyone says hi to everyone in the village whether they know you or not. There is also a “yes” culture here where it’s sometimes hard to get a straight answer because no one wants to answer “not” to a question even if, in reality, the answer is no. Though not in terms of technology and infrastructure, Madagascar feels fairly western in some aspects of culture like dress and attitude. Both men and women wear western clothing (there is a traditional women’s dress for certain ceremonies), Christianity is by far the predominant religion, and the attitude toward marriage and sexuality seems to be fairly liberal (although homosexuality is illegal here). In this regard, living in Madagascar has been a big change from my experience in India where Hinduism was predominant, all women and most men wore traditional dress, and there were many taboo subjects. 85% of the population here is rural/agricultural (a huge number), which actually means that though there are very clearly defined gender roles, sexism doesn’t seem to be quite so violent or pronounced as it can often become – with more “development” often comes more developed systems of oppression.
Economically and politically, Madagascar is struggling. The Forbes report published right before we arrived that Madagascar’s economy now ranked #1 for worst economy in the world. As the biggest rice consumers per capita, Madagascar produces a lot of rice, but is now having to import rice internationally just to feed its own population. USAID provides much of the funding for NGO projects but I think that all direct U.S. funding has been cut off because we do not officially recognize the government, which has been “transitional” since 2009. They have been promising to hold elections ever since installation, but have yet to make progress in that direction. People I have talked to here tell me that most likely the serving president will be elected because no one will vote, so politically the country won’t change much except for being recognized internationally and re-granted funds. Clearly Madagascar is poor, but the poverty here feels different than poverty in India or the U.S. and I think it’s because it’s not seen in such juxtaposition with incredible wealth. Here, everyone is poor, almost everyone lives in a rural area, and even in the cities, the apparent wealth is not as ostentatious. The problems that this type of poverty creates also adds to the feeling that the poverty here is understated, ubiquitous, and inescapable as opposed to more aggressive, obvious poverty that only affects parts of the population. For example, qualitative malnutrition is a major cause of deaths in children under 5 years old, meaning that they are eating enough food, just not the right kinds (they are eating coffee and rice).
In some ways, the geography feels very similar to parts of rural Southeast Asia. The local materials and structures in Lohomby and Mantasoa could easily be in a Vietnamese or Cambodian village. One of the biggest differences I have noticed is how sparsely populated it feels. The country is overwhelmingly green with rolling hills in a way that reminds me of Kerala, India. Because it’s not so densely populated, even though people still dispose of all their trash by dumping it outside on the ground, it’s much cleaner even in the cities. For the same reason, combined with the fact that there are fewer manufacturing plants, the air also feels cleaner. The most confusing sight here is the flora – Madagascar has the oddest collection of plants. There are palm, bamboo, eucalyptus, and mango trees next to many things I don’t recognize next to…pine trees. Yes, that smell of pine trees mixed with dry heat that instantly puts me in my grandparent’s backyard, at a soccer tournament in Eastern Washington, or hiking in the Cascades by my cabin is all over my village. I still don’t quite know how pineapples and pine can share root space, but it throws me off on a daily basis.
There you have my five weeks of Madagascar. We have four weeks of training left and then I will move to my permanent site, which is a commune in the North called Betsiaka, between Ambilobe and Diego. I am so excited about my placement. The North is hot, has a rainy season, is near the remaining rain forest in Madagascar, has tons of tropical fruit, and is near Nosy Be, a beautiful vacation destination. Jason, my friend from home, is also very close by so we will be able to see each other at least once a month when we bank. I miss you all very much and would love to hear from you. I will be able to read emails and facebook about once a month, letters are always appreciated, and if you call my phone number on your skype account, it’s really cheap (and I would love to chat on the phone if I have service). I’ve also updated the “package requests” list on the sidebar if you are thinking of sending a package J. Love to everyone.
