Stormy Weather (Keeps Rainin’ all the Time)

I love rain. I think Seattle, Washington, the city in which I grew up, is the best place on earth. I had a tremendous amount of fun during a particularly wet monsoon season in southern India. I bought my first pair of rain boots in college to be able to play outside during the torrential downpours sent by the completely unpredictable Missouri Weather Gods. This past rainy season, however, has reminded me of the key ingredient for the privilege of enjoying rain: infrastructure. Compared to here, the rain is more constant in Seattle, more extreme and relentless in India, and heavier in St. Louis. But the daily afternoon showers here completely destroy the roads, accentuate disease, cut off food supplies, and immobilize communities. 

I have tried to leave my site three times since the beginning of January. The distance from my village to the nearest town is 30 km along “national highway 7” aka, “one-of-the-worst-dirt-roads-in-the-country-that-has-the-privilege-of-providing-the-only-connection-between-the-east-and-west-coasts-in-the-northern-half-of-Madagascar.” Because traveling along this road in the rainy season has pretty much defined my last three months, I have decided that the best way to illustrate this time is to describe these three attempted escapes from site.

#1: The Brousse from Hell

About a month after returning back to site in January I received happy news: Peace Corps had finally sent our bikes and mine was waiting for me in Ambanja! I made plans to leave on a Saturday to go into town to use the bank, the post office, and pick up my bike. On Thursday, I walked over to the village driver’s house where he said he would pick me up from my house at 6:00 am Saturday. On Saturday morning I got up at 4:00 to kickbox for 45 minutes in my house (I went through a big P90X obsession), showered, ate breakfast, swept, and sat on porch to wait. 6:30, no car… 7:30, no car… 8:00 my doctor walks over, asks why I’m waiting, and laughs when I say I’m waiting for Jeanriche: “There’s no way he’s driving to town today! Look at the road!” I waited another hour before squelching barefoot through the mud to Jeanriche’s house (I had long since learned both through observation and experience that shoes are useless during the rainy season – R.I.P. Havana and Vineyard Vines flip flops). Jeanriche was sitting on his porch drinking beers. “Jeanriche, I thought you were going to pick me up to go to Ambilobe today?” He laughed too and told me he might be going next week if the road cleared. I turned to see Clavel, my brother, walking by and when I explained the situation to him, he suggested I go wait at their house for a camion to come from Sambava. (This “national highway” where I live connects Ambilobe in the west to Sambava in the east. These regions are otherwise totally isolated from one another, though only 150 km apart, and huge trucks often come through carrying people and supplies). Camions are huge and—the floor of the bus is about the height of my chest – and slow. Being used to Jeanriche’s tiny run-down car or the normal 12-person-capacity-30-person-reality taxi, I thought a camion sounded fine. I walked back to their house with Clavel and proceeded to sit and wait for the next one to come. Eight rainy hours later, a camion, now completely brown with mud, rolled up for its gendarmes inspection in front of the house. Cue the vazaha calls. Seeing me sitting on the porch watching, a guy in a too-tight striped t-shirt and studded jeans jumped off the bus and started making lewd gestures at me along with “Ohhh vazaha! Oh Cherie! Oh Cherie-naka! Tu es très belle! Avia! Tu es maries?” Great. I kissed my family goodbye, walked up to the bus and sat down next to someone else. Determined to keep playing the game, he continued yelling at me in French to sit next to him. I told him no. “Pour-quoi?” In Malagasy, I told him no I was not married but engaged, I was not a vazaha but a white Malagasy, I was not his “cherie,” and I didn’t want to sit next to him because he was rude, all of which won lots of laughter from the 50 people behind us and a round of applause from the man sitting next to me. The bus pulled out at 4:00 pm. During the dry season, it takes me about 45 minutes to go in a car from my site to Ambilobe. I decided to give the bus two hours to make the 30-kilometer trip. An hour-and-a-half later we were still at sign-post 25. Hitting a particularly flooded spot, the wheels started spinning as we sank lower and lower into the ground.

Mr, Stripes pipes up again.

“Okay, I am sorry. I will buy you dinner. I was rude but I didn’t know you were coming on this bus.”
“No, that’s okay I can buy my own dinner. You shouldn’t be rude even if you thought you wouldn’t see me again.”

“Okay, I will buy you dinner. Also I live in Tana. I will send you vegetables from the highlands every week. Give me your number so I can have them delivered.”

“No, that’s okay, I don’t need more vegetables. And I only use my phone for work.”

~longer discussion about how I won’t give him my number~

“Okay, okay fine. I know where you live so I’ll just have the vegetables dropped off at the hospital.”

“Fine. I like vegetables.”

“Good. Now we will be friends. You are my best friend. Am I your best friend?”

“No.”

“Why not? You don’t have Malagasy friends? You are my best friend!”

“I have lots of Malagasy friends. But I already have a best friend.”

“Okay. That is fine. You will be my best friend I don’t have to be yours. Best friends. [now in English…] YOU MY BEST FRIEND!!”

More laughter from the back. All of sudden shouts start coming too… “Best friend!!! Best friend!!! Best friend!!! If I say now how long this exercise kept the crowd entertained I will ruin the rest of the story of my escape to Ambilobe. The entire rest of the ride was regularly interrupted with “BEST FRIEND!! Tee hee hee.” Eventually this got old and they switched to using whatever other English words they knew interspersed with “friend.” Every five minutes someone shouted at me “BEST FRIEND!” “BEST CARROT!” “BEST VAZAHA!” “BEST GIRL!” “BEST EAT!” Apparently its level of hilarity never ceased.

So after this initial conversation I looked out the window only to realize we had been in the exact same spot spinning our wheels for about 30 minutes. The bus driver finally had everyone get out. While a few men got shovels and started digging, the rest of us bought rice from a woman whose house we were stuck outside of. (I also got a fish, as Stripes insisted on finding me something special).

20 more minutes, getting dark, no progress. Out comes the rope.

After another hour the bus driver announces we are officially stuck for the night and will try again in the morning. I considered getting my bags and walking back to my house but a 3-mile trudge by myself through mud, in the dark, during heavy rains, and with my laptop in my bag sounded even less appealing than spending the night on the bus next to Stripes. Over the next 14 hours of not quite sleeping in the sweaty, crowded, smelly bus, the worst part was actually the fact that the bus was tilted at so steep an angle that I couldn’t sit or lay down without slowly sliding down the seat, ending up in the aisle at approximate 8 minute intervals. Fortunately the rain let up during the night and by around 10 the next morning we were able to pull the bus out of the mud and get on our way.

Unfortunately about 10 kilometers down the road we repeated this get stuck/spin the wheels/evacuate the bus/play tug-of-war exercise, though we were lucky enough to only be stuck for an hour.

Finally through the worst of the mud, the bus broke down 2 kilometers from Ambilobe. We got off and walked in, arriving around 2:00 pm. After a quick lunch we took off down the cement road south where, 26 hours from the time of departure, I arrived in Ambanja, greeted by hugs and a cold beer.

Vowing never to take a bus or car during the rainy season again, my return to site took place on my bike. This trip included dismounting every 200 meters or so to walk through the thick mud. Upon reaching a spot that was too deep to walk through, and unable to lift my bike (weighed down by heavy baggage), I was lucky enough to be found by a group of young guys who, after getting a good laugh in, picked up my bike and carried it up into the hills while I waded through.

P.S. I have yet to receive my weekly shipment of vegetables from Stripes in Tana.

#2 The Crocodiles

So actually the second attempt was only that – an attempt. I was preparing to head out on my bike when the doctor arrived back from Ambilobe on his moto. He headed straight for my house with his camera to show me pictures from his trip back. Turns out the road was completely flooded. The pictures he showed me were of he and his moto being ferried across a long section by an old man who built a canoe several years ago for just this purpose every year. This impromptu slideshow was delivered complete with tales of crocodile sightings and warnings. Now, my experience thus far with Malagasy people is that they tend to point out that now that it’s rainy season, there are crocodiles in every single body of water. This includes small puddles. It usually turns out that these crocodiles have always been seen “by a friend.” However, after several recent conversations with friends who have actually seen the crocodiles and who have actually seen them attack people, I took him at his word and decided to skip the canoe and the crocodiles.

#3 The Bike

The third trip out from site was by bike and I planned to bike from Betsiaka all the way to Ambanja. About half an hour into my painfully slow ride, all of the bumping around caused my luggage rack to snap, leaving my bags in the mud. As I was about to turn around and walk back to site, a man came riding up on his own bike and stopped to help. He was also headed to Ambilobe, so he picked my bags up, strapped them onto his own (empty) rack, and proceeded to carry my luggage all the way to Ambilobe. Though it still took several hours, following him definitely sped up the journey as he turned out to be much better than me at finding the appropriate path through the mud. We chatted on the way there about his family, who lives in Ambilobe, and his wife, who was sick at the time, and he invited me back to his house for a visit. Once we reached Ambilobe, he took me straight to his friend’s shop where I got my rack welded back together and my tires pumped. Why, I don’t know, but I had decided to set out that morning with only a half a bottle of water, no food, and the equivalent of $1.25 in cash (to be fair, the whole point of leaving was it was time to visit the bank). I asked the welder how much it would be and he gave me a price slightly higher than what I had. I told him how much cash I had and he laughed and accepted my money. We went to visit my new friend’s family just outside the city and chatted for a while until I decided it was really time to set out. My friend biked with me a couple of kilometers to show me a shortcut to the main road and before turning around he told me I could not keep biking to Ambanja (another 100 kilometers) without any money and handed me 5,000 Ariary (about $2.50). Even though I refused repeatedly, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so we decided if he was ever in Betsiaka again, he would come find my house and share a meal. After about an hour and a half more of biking I was exhausted, extremely thirsty, and it was starting to get dark. With about 65 more kilometers to go, I debated finding somewhere to buy water or trying to get onto a brousse and hoping I would have enough money to pay the fare. Brousse it was. I got off my bike and waited by the side of the road for about 30 minutes until an older woman walked by and asked why I was waiting. I told her I needed to get on a brousse going to Ambanja and, with raised eyebrows, she said she hoped one would come. She invited me to come back to her house a little ways up the road to wait, assuring me repeatedly to not worry – if the brousse didn’t come I could sleep in her hut! I was not thrilled about the idea of sleeping in a stranger’s tiny hut on the side of the road with no floors and no mosquito net, and though they would have fed me, they did not have nearly enough rice for themselves, much less to offer to a stranger. I crossed my fingers that a brousse would come by and pick me up. 45 minutes later the first brousse came… full. Second brousse, full. The fourth brousse that came by about an hour and a half later finally stopped and picked me and my bike up and headed to Ambanja – for a fee of 5,000 Ariary. Friend from the road, if you ever read this… THANK YOU!

So actually this last one was pretty much all my fault because of poor planning. But if the road hadn’t destroyed my rack… okay, still my fault. Now, in the beginning of May, the road is finally starting to clear enough for biking to be more feasible and 4x4 cars are beginning to run, only hitting a few big problem spots. Nonetheless, after a Peace Corps staff member saw the condition of the road in March, I am pretty sure they won’t be placing another volunteer at my site to replace me. I still love rain and most of what it brings but am newly thankful for paved streets in the states.

In Other News

Upon returning back to my village from our winter vacation trip, my counterpart (Nicholas) and I got straight to work applying the things we had learned from the December Project Design and Management training. The first step was a community-wide meeting to complete a series of exercises that served as an extension to the Community Diagnostic Survey I had been conducting during the fall. We invited everybody in the village to come and I was happy with the twenty or so people who ended up turning out. I felt much more confident conducting the meeting with Nicholas there to reiterate things I was having trouble explaining and help me facilitate smaller groups during the exercises. In the priority ranking matrices, both the men and the women came up with a list of almost identical priorities for Betsiaka:

1.     The need for another doctor, another school building, and for children to go to school

2.     The need for a better road

3.     The need for more teachers

4.     The need for a public kabone (bathroom)

5.     The need for clean water

6.     The need for electricity in the clinic

The top priority problems are tough. I’ve been thinking for a long time about how to encourage children to stay in school/parents to keep their kids in school when there really isn’t much incentive to get a degree. Most children don’t go to school because they are helping to search for gold. Even if they manage to get to high school, passing the final exam is extremely difficult and passing only means a better job or going to a university for a very small percentage of those students. If you will probably end up mining gold in Betsiaka whether you go to school or not, why go to school? It’s definitely something I will keep thinking about and working on. I’m considering starting a couple of extra-curricular clubs and student organizations to make school more “fun” and also setting up a peer-mentor health program but I think the two main factors are hard to address – a huge number of early pregnancies, causing girls to drop out, and helping families search for gold. Eventually I would like to build a women’s center in Betsiaka with services for girls and women including free contraception, family planning counseling, information about healthy relationships, and other general resources designed to empower women. Other than that, I’m not sure where to start. Girls trip to the college in Diego? More family planning work? Feel free to post with thoughts.

The second priority issue is also a big challenge for me. At first, I partially dismissed the need for a new road as impossible and in actuality a lower priority than things like clean water. However, my recent experiences traveling down that road have made me realize actually how important it is to the health and all other aspects of my community. I included the stories above about my adventures into town… luckily for me, I wasn’t sick and I had no urgent need to get where I was going. However, I have now seen four people die traveling along that road trying to get to the hospital in time. One was a woman with eclampsia who waited until she started seizing to come into the clinic. Anothers was an older man being carried the entire 30 km on a chair by five of his family members who only made it about 2/3s of the way. It is often that I venture part-way down the road with my doctor when he points out a group of people veering off into the bush. “Olo maty,” he says. (Dead person). With no way out and no way in, being sick is often a death sentence and being hungry is more of a problem – all the food being biked into the village is at least double the price and often doesn’t come at all. My Peace Corps doctor just visited my site on a routine yearly check-in and decided the only way to get me to help if I’m sick or injured is by private helicopter. Wish everyone had access to one of those. Or that we could just get the road paved… email the EU, which paved the road from the capital to the North? Unlike the rest of the country, where NGOs have a big presence and much volunteer work is happening, the North remains isolated and there is a much smaller presence of International (or local) aid organizations because of its inaccessibility.

As for the other issues listed, a new doctor has actually already been assigned to work part-time in Betsiaka, and another school building is something the mayor’s office is looking into. This good news leaves me with three clear projects to work on over the next year at my site: building a public kabone, building pumps for clean water, and getting some electricity for the clinic. Many people in the community are excited about these projects and, having identified the issues themselves, are eager to start working with me to make them happen, starting with fundraising. Yay!

The last work-related update is that I am in the process of starting a regional training for new health workers in HIV/AIDS in collaboration with Ryan, a volunteer in Diego. The proposal is for a week-long training for both volunteers and people nominated from various communities around the city – NGOs, women’s groups, schools, market groups, the MSM organization, commercial sex workers, etc. – in HIV/AIDS including epidemiology and history, prevention, treatment, awareness-raising, and project design and management. The hope is that each person or pair will go back to their individual community with the skills to start their own trainings and design projects as a peer educator, emphasizing condom use and testing. The week will culminate in a community-wide festival with artists, performances, speakers, and events to promote HIV/AIDS awareness, provide resources for people to take home, and, most importantly, provide free testing for every attendee. We will put on the training in three different cities across the Northern region of Madagascar – Diego, Nosy Be, and Sambava, working with the local governments, NGOs, and other PCVs in the region.

If you are interested in donating to any of these projects, please let me know and I can tell you how to donate either generally or for a specific cause.

Other than that, things are still going well here in Madagascar! Here’s some cool stuff that’s going on:

·      I am excited about my upcoming work projects

·      I just spent an amazing month traveling with my sister in both Madagascar and South Africa

·      While I am mourning my no empty mango trees, I am thoroughly taking advantage of avocado season – they’re huge here!

·      I just turned 24, so am naturally much older and wiser than yesterday

·      I am starting to plan a vacation to Africa and Madagascar with my parents in September

·      I am thinking about running the Tana marathon in November

·      I just completed the whole bike ride from Betsiaka to Ambanja – 130 miles on a heavy mountain bike with flip flops. (Thanks, Dad – if a ride seems too long, I just think about you)

·      The new stage just swore-in, officially becoming Peace Corps Volunteers. Three of them will be coming up north and will arrive in Ambanja tomorrow – welcome!

·      I have now been in country for 10 months and am continually surprised how fast time is passing. I can’t believe I have to start thinking about what I will do when I come back – what do I want to go to school for??

Speaking of month 10, we have a sheet up in the Meva house called “Critical Periods in the Life of a PCV” describing the different stages of service and what volunteers often feel. Here are months 7-10 (satire of course):

Issues	Behavior/Reaction	Intervention
“They’re still staring!”	“Why aren’t face veils in fashion here?”	Remind all offenders, “at least I still have teeth!”
Voluntary house arrest	Villagers put a ladder up to your house to see if you’re still alive	Explain all behavior as “fomba ameriken”
Animal rights issues	Adopt a stray, unvaccinated dog or cat	Omby (cows) can’t get rabies, and you’re less likely to be tempted to give mouth-to-mouth
Decline in personal hygiene/appearance	Fleas/scabies	Rationalize as cultural integration

Adopt a cat? Check! (He eats my rats – thanks, Max.) Decline in personal hygiene/appearance? Check! (Definitely rationalized as cultural integration). Call out people who still stare? Check!

But seriously, things are great. As always, thank you for your letters, emails, and packages! Hearing from home is a huge source of comfort and support on this crazy roller coaster that is Peace Corps.

P.S. I am so touched that everyone who has sent a package knows me so well -- almost everyone has included at least one bottle of red pepper flakes and some have included several. Unfortunately/fortunately this means I now have a lifetime supply of red pepper flakes in my tiny little kitchen. Please don’t send anymore!!! I have updated the list on the side of my page J