Happy New Years! It’s hard to believe it’s already 2012 but on
the other hand time feels like it has been suspended and warped until 2013 so I
feel like it already has been 2012 for a long time. January here brings every
day rainstorms, the destruction of the road out to my site, intense humidity,
the end of mangos but the beginning of lychees, and the six month mark of being
in Madagascar! This holiday season was a whirlwind of travel and activity and
after being out of site for a month now, I am excited to be going home.
November Recap
November started out with a trip to paradise. Three times a
year, all the volunteers in each region take a weekend to get together and meet
to discuss concerns, exchange stories of best practices at site, and provide
feedback to Peace Corps. Luckily my region is close to some of the most
beautiful tourist destinations in the world, so naturally we chose to hold our
VAC meeting on Nosy Be, an island about 30 minutes by boat from the port. We
spent the weekend drinking coconut rum on white sand beaches, meeting tourists
from Italy, South Africa, and France, enjoying the nightlife, and even managing
to spend the day snorkeling, diving, and exploring smaller islands on a giant
catamaran courtesy of some cute South African boys.
After returning home with a sunburn (a predicament providing
much entertainment to the people in my village) I spent most of November
working on my Community Diagnostic Survey. I conducted formal interviews with
the mayor, the doctor, and the proviseur of the lycee, informal interviews with
my neighbors and friends, and had a group of women that live next to me help me
make a seasonal calendar mapping food security, water availability, work
levels, crop rotation, and finances in my village throughout the year. I also
had different people from the community rank the top three issues they thought
should be priorities. In my next post I will try to put up some of the results
of my study. I’ve also decided to stop giving talks at my CSB and instead to
focus my time on other projects. Giving talks every day about the importance of
keeping up with vaccinations and pre-natal care to the women who were showing
up for vaccinations and pre-natal consultation appointments felt redundant and
a waste of my time. Fortunately, diving into my CDS report really helped me integrate
further into community and gave me the ability to set small goals every day
more significant than just finishing a book, properly cooking my beans, or
leaving my house. I have mentioned before that my village is a gold mining
site, but I also learned during my research the extent to which this economy
affects the lives of everyone there…
Health: The top three diseases we see at the clinic are
malaria, STDs, and a parasite that people contract from standing in the water
while searching for gold.
Nutrition: For the most part, there is enough food for
people to get by. However, malnutrition is beginning to be a problem because
people (often men) simply choose to forgo meals and instead keep searching for
gold.
Education: In most of Madagascar, school attendance is a
huge problem and a large percentage of children have already dropped out by
Lycee (high school). However, where I live, we have a disproportionate number
of children not even attending primary school… because their parents keep them
home to help search for gold.
Income generation: Though the ground could be fertile, there
is very minimal farming or animal husbandry in my village because everyone
wants to mine gold. The exclusive use of the land there for mining is not only
causing deforestation but also means the price of food is expensive because it
must be brought in on cows and carts for the weekly market from a town 30 km
away instead. Also, unlike many other towns, the women’s group is not active in
my village because not many people are interested in focusing on other
income-generating projects besides gold.
Social: No matter where I go in Madagascar, when I say I am
from Betsiaka, I have the following conversation. Verbatim every time…
“Betsiaka! Fa misy vola mena!” (“Betsiaka! There is gold!”)
“Ia, misy maro.” (Yes, there is a lot.)
“Efa nahazo ma anao?” (“Have you already found some?”)
“Ehee, zaho tsy mitady. Fa olo jiaby mitady isan’andra.” (“No,
I don’t search. But everyone else does every day!”)
“A manaraka anao mitondra vola amin’zaho!” (“Next time,
bring me back some gold!”)
“Donko.” (“Maybe.”)
I have probably had this conversation about 75 times now.
Having this information makes me really want to collaborate with both an Environment
and Small Enterprise Development volunteer to help the people at my site
develop other options for income generation and food security, both necessary
perquisites for being able to work on health other health issues.
My favorite part about November though was making new
friends in my village. I love the little kids that come to play at my house and
dance in the sand or ask to fetch water or do my dishes (yes please!). I love
my neighbors who let me come lay on their lamaka (mat) under the mango tree
while they crush rocks (in search for gold) and ask me to paint their nails. I
love my mpanasa lamba (laundry woman) who introduced herself by coming up to me
and telling me while I was washing my laundry one day and told me I was “tsy
mahay” (not good), grabbing my laundry bucket, and finishing the rest of my
clothes, laughing when I was shocked that my whites actually turned white
again! I love the teenage girls who live next to me who, last time I got back
to site from a banking town in a rainstorm, ran out with an umbrella as soon as
the car dropped me off and helped me carry all my bags inside. I love the other
community health workers who always come to chat and show me around the
village, talking about projects we can do together. Seriously – I am so lucky
there are people who are motivated to help me here. I love the mpivaratra
(seller) ladies who always welcome me into their shack for a drink from their
cooler and ask me to braid their hair like an American. I love my brochette
lady whose family always asks me into chat while they are cooking and are
responsible for teaching this Jewish girl how to properly cook and eat crab! I
love my new counterpart, Nicholas, a health worker and second adjoint to the
mayor, who is so motivated to work with me and supportive of me in the village
and whose family is so welcoming. I especially love my family here. My mom has
given me numbers of her family members all over the north and I have already
gotten to have lunch with them in several different cities, making it feel like
I have family wherever I go. My sister is the first one to help me find
contacts and organize people for a meeting as soon as I mention I need to talk
to someone, and introduces me to visiting family members as “our new sister.”
My youngest niece starts laughing and runs to jump on me when she sees me
approaching the house, and the other one wants to spend every hour she’s not in
school playing hand clap games I taught her from my childhood camp. My brother
not only is extremely protective over me, making me feel completely safe, but
is extremely patient when I try to explain myself in Malagasy and is one of the
few people I have met who uses critical thinking skills to help communicate
with me (like by using circumlocution and charades-like explanations). He also
often turns on his generator at night so he and I can watch soccer!
The newest addition to our family is a cousin, Sambany, who
is visiting from the Northeastern coast of Madagascar. He is 19 and has become
my best friend in Betsiaka. I am already sad he is only staying until March. He
reminds me of my sister, Faniry, from training, in that he will spend hours
during the day just pointing to things and making me repeat them to teach me
Sakalava (my dialect). He also is one of the only people I have met so far who
has enough confidence in my language abilities to use sarcasm and humor all day
long, something which I LOVE. He has also provided me with my favorite memory
at site so far…
Towards the end of November I was hanging out at my family’s
house peeling mangos before dinner. Sambany is always singing and I noticed him
singing a lot of bass lines to himself that day. We sat outside preparing the
lasary (delicious mango salad) together and I asked him about his music. He
told me had a couple of friends who he sang with sometimes, sort of like a
band. I told him I loved to sing too and sang a lot in the states. When I asked
him what kind of music he liked to sing he said… “cappella.” EXCUSE ME? At
first I thought I was misunderstanding a Malagasy word but after he explained
further, I realized he was actually talking about a cappella! They have a
cappella here! He told me he wanted to hear my a cappella so the next night I
brought over my speakers and iPod. For the next two hours we sat outside under
the stars eating more mangos and singing along to my Mosaic Whispers albums. He
picked up instantly on every bass line. The coolest thing? It didn’t matter
that he doesn’t speak a word of English because a cappella is in… jibberish? A cappella-ish?
An international language.
I left a couple of days later for Thanksgiving in Ambanja,
where we planned to to kill a turkey, but decided last minute to spend the day
at the beach and then go out to dinner at the nice hotel where I ordered freshly
caught calamari and the first edible wine since I’ve had in-country. Yay for
South African wine. Being away from home is always hard during the holidays,
but being able to be with close friends here who could also appreciate the
oddity of eating seafood in 95 degree weather under a straw roof. And of course
we went around and said thanks, which included many mentions of the amazing
support system we have up here in each other.
After Thanksgiving I went back to site for only a week and
then immediately headed up to Diego to catch a flight down to Tana for two
weeks of continued Peace Corps training. I showed up at the airport an hour
before my flight left. Upon arriving, I looked around for where to check in
until someone saw me looking confused and pointed me towards the ticket
counter. I went up to the counter (no line), handed them my backpack and
ticket, and waited for them to ask for my ID or check my ticket. Didn’t happen.
They asked where I was going (I said Tana) and they said okay and told me I
should go wait in the other room. I walked through another door to a small
seating area and looked around for the security line. None. Waited 20 minutes
for the back door to open to the tarmac, took my unchecked, unscanned backpack
and walked onto the plane. One twenty minute leg and one 45 minute leg later, I
landed in Tana. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Air Mada. Upon arrival, I
picked up my backpack and walked outside where I was immediately swarmed by
people asking if I needed a taxi. I zeroed in on one man who held a sheet in
front of me with rates from the airport into the city – 40,000 Ariary. I told
him I was going to Ivandry and I was not going to pay 40,000. As soon as he
heard me speaking Malagasy, he laughed, both amused and disappointed that I was
Peace Corps – not only could he not charge me overpriced rates just because
they were printed on a sheet, but I could understand everything he was saying
to his friends. He drove me to the meva where I dropped my stuff and turned
around to meet the rest of my stage at a nearby Mexican restaurant (oh foreign
food! Oh cheese!! )before heading to IST the next day.
IST (In-service Training) happens 3 months after living at
site. We all met back in now much warmer Mantasoa for a week of continued
technical training. There was the opportunity for language clarification in the
mornings, visits from USAID representatives, information about applying for
funding, and a presentation of everyone’s initial CDS reports to the rest of
our stage. 8 volunteers stayed on an extra week to attend a PDM (Project Design
and Management) workshop, which was extremely helpful. The best part about the
workshop was that Peace Corps paid for one counterpart from each of our
villages to attend the workshop with us. Together, we spent the week talking
with our counterparts about our communities, evaluating priorities, starting to
design a project, and learning about monitoring that project. A lot of the
information was old for the volunteers, but extremely valuable for our counterparts,
some of whom had never been to the capital before. Having Nicholas, my
counterpart, gain development and leadership skills, understand the Peace Corps
process, further understand my role in the community, and think about short and
long term goals before Betsiaka will not only be immensely valuable for me when
I am able to work with him back at site, but also helps make the work we do
there together more sustainable, as someone who has been deeply involved in the
process will still be there after two years.
To celebrate the completion of our next big milestone (IST)
17 people from my stage went up north on vacation together directly following
PDM. Crowding 30 people plus a goat and 10 chickens in a 12 person vehicle is
normal on a local brousse, meaning around 7 hours or less. This amount of
cramming often leads to people puking in bags, muscles falling asleep, bruising
from seats, intense knee pain, and claustrophobia. Unfortunately, the brousse
ride up from Tana to the north is anywhere from 17-24 hours. Fortunately, this
means it qualifies as a “national” brousse, which guarantees everyone his or
her own seat. Unfortunately, our national brousse didn’t get this memo. Enter
the brousse ride from hell. We spent the next 21 hours in a brousse with each
3-person row crammed with 5 people, made worse by the fact that the rows
weren’t bench seats but instead individual seats, meaning two people sat in the
cracks without a backrest). Our brousse also broke down a grand total of 6
times, each time causing everyone to have to get out of the car and sit by the
side of the road while someone inevitably threw up and the men all peed too
close to the car. Four of the problems were dead lights, problematic on dark
windy roads, and fixed by taking out the front seat and connecting several
wires to odd places in the car. The first problem, however was the brakes,
which fell off on our way down a hill. That was a fairly big delay and a
stressor for the rest of the ride. The last problem was an explosion from
behind the driver’s seat that caused water to shoot out from the floor of the
brousse, making everyone scream and jump out.
Trip Spark Notes:
We spent Christmas in Ambanja celebrating at the beach and
attending a huge party at Mama Peace Corps’s in honor of Josh’s family who is
visiting from the states and his girlfriend who is a PCV in Benin. Josh even
killed a goat for us to eat! (Pictures of the head in the new picasa album).
From Ambanja, we broussed up to Ankarana, the national park and rain forest
about 130 km north. Staying in bungalows, we spent two days hiking through the
park with guides, seeing incredible tsingy forests, huge bat caves, chameleons,
crazy bugs, and lemurs! Each day we came back to the staff cooking us steaming
bowls of fish stew, coconut chicken, rice, and lychees. The next stop on our
itinerary was Diego, the old French colony on the very tip of Madagascar, a hot
tourist spot for the French, especially French men looking for Malagasy women.
The day after arriving, we chartered a small sailboat to Paradise, otherwise
known as Emerald Bay. Emerald bay is a tiny island about a 2 hour sail from the
mainland with nothing on the island but about four small shelters with picnic
tables, and a gorgeous white sand beach. The name stems from the color of the
water around the Bay. The crew caught our lunch on the boat ride over, and we
spent the entire day sitting in brilliantly green water, drinking cold beer,
napping on the beach, and enjoying our lunch of three different types of fresh
fish, a huge plate of crab, a bucket of coconut rice, carrot and mango salad,
and lychees and bananas for dessert. It definitely wasn’t a white Christmas,
but it was one to remember.
So What’s next?
Starting from day one of living in my village, people have
asked me multiple times a day if I am “efa tamana” (already at home here). They
ask for many reasons, including an understanding that my life has changed
drastically, a desire to help me if they can, and a confusion about why the
hell I would leave America to live in a small village in Africa (a question
they also ask explicitly by itself), and a pride in their community. I have
always answered yes, efa tamana, to this question because I haven’t wanted to
offend anyone and in Malagasy culture, it’s rare to speak openly about your
feelings. So even if at the beginning I had had ample vocabulary to explain
that, “no, I’m not at home yet – I’m too hot, I have diarrhea every day, I have
intense stomach pain and throw up my food three times a week, I hate walking
far to a well and carrying water on my head back to my hut, I miss my family
and my friends, I can’t communicate with home, I can’t really communicate with
you, I can’t exercise normally, you stare at everything I do, and I have no
idea what job I’m supposed to be doing here,” I think that might have been
inappropriate.
I’m going back to my site today and I could not be happier
to be going home. I miss the people in my village and the slow pace of my daily
life. I actually miss being challenged to speak only Malagasy all day, every
day. First and foremost though, I am excited to go back with renewed energy for
my work and new tools with which to start projects. Here’s some things I have
on tap:
-English Club. At first I was resistant to starting an
English Club because people came up all day every day asking me to teach them
and I was both resentful of the fact that I was there to work on health issues,
not as a teacher, and also I wanted to improve my own Malagasy skills first.
Now I see it as a great way to get further involved in the community and
contribute to the development of people’s marketable skills there. Education
and health are inextricably tied, and I plan to base my English curriculum
around health issues such as HIV, Family planning, and reproductive health.
-Community Garden and composting. There’s an environment
volunteer about two hours away from me who has agreed to come to my site and
help me build a garden. The plan is to start with one at my house and then
expand it to outside the clinic and the schools, turning it into a community
effort that youth can help out with and we can use as a small income-generating
project to support other endeavors.
-Water project: During the PDM workshop, Nicholas and I
identified water sanitation and shortage (in agreement with the opinions I
collected from my village) as a health priority in Betsiaka. We started
drafting a project that would call for the creation of a water committee to
raise money for someone to come in to build pumps and train one person per pump
(a “chef de pump”) on the care and maintenance of the pumps. This chef would be
responsible for his neighborhood pump and its use, collecting a small monthly
fee from each user to ensure financial sustainability as well. Eventually the
goal would be to have a clean water source within each small cartier, therefore
drastically eliminating diseases like giardia and other diarrheas.
-Community Health Worker Training: During my time in Diego,
I met with PSI (Population Services International), which works closely with
USAID and Gobal Fund all over Madagascar to focus on family planning and
reproductive health. They recently trained a new set of community health
workers in two cities fairly close to my village and I have plans to go meet
with them and talk about how we can set up a system for them to come work in
the small villages around these two cities and set up regular programming.
-Grassroots Soccer and teaching in schools: I plan to start
teaching a health class at the CEG level (currently there is no health class in
school) and organizing an after school soccer program that combines soccer with
HIV/AIDS education.
Thanks to everyone who called and wrote over the holidays –
it makes it so much easier to be away when I hear from people from home. More
to come later, but for now it is time to catch that dreaded brousse back to my
site! Check out my new pictures on picasa.
Much love from Madagascar.
