Walkin on Sunshine

Over the past couple months I have been involved in some really fun projects that I wanted to share. After starting to doubt that it was even possible to actually accomplish anything in Peace Corps, I suddenly am busy with a lot of work that I really believe in, which is a pretty awesome feeling. It also makes me suddenly highly aware of the time limitations in place.

Cinnamon Peanutbutter

Cacao Workers tasting the chocolate

Chocolate Making

This is one of my favorite projects that I’ve done so far. Around Ambanja is where almost all the cacao grows in Madagascar and most small villages farm it. There are several NGOs working to organize small farmers into co-ops and help coordinate their transactions with collectors. Madecasse, the gourmet chocolate company founded by two former Madagascar PCVs (and which produces the most delicious chocolate ever) works with several co-ops in the Ambanja area with the help of my friend and fellow PCV, Jonathan. Once the beans are collected, however, they are sent to Tana for processing and then made into chocolate outside the country (the final product isn’t even sold in Madagascar). After doing several health trainings with the different groups of farmers, we realized we should try to make chocolate with their beans. It turns out that though the farmers grew and harvested the cacao, they had no idea what its relationship was to chocolate. We started doing trainings to teach the farmers and cacao workers how to make chocolate, experimenting with different additives, and they loved both the final product and knowing how to make it. Since then, I have been going back to visit the groups regularly to do health trainings followed by chocolate making (or sometimes just to make chocolate!).  So far we have experimented with coffee, coconut, peanuts, cinnamon, sakay, citron, pepper, ginger, and oranges, and the results have been delicious! (Dear Madecasse: I haven’t seen a chocolate bar of yours with ginger in it yet and, having tried the combination this morning, recommend it for a new flavor!)

Chocolate Making:

1.     Harvest the beans from the fruit, dry the beans

2.     Roast the beans and peel the skin

3.     Grind the beans until the oils come out

4.     Add sugar to taste and pound until mixed

5.     Add whatever flavor you want or eat plain!

Suggested Usage: Sprinkled on top of bananas and/or oatmeal in the morning

Teaching in Nosy Be

Condom demonstration

HIV Week

Back in February, I spent a week at the lycee (high school) on Nosy Be where my friend Ja’Nel teaches English. We saw six classes of anywhere from 60-90 high-school students each for three-hours at a time. I taught about HIV/AIDs, safe sex, and STIs, while Ja’Nel gave the corresponding English vocabulary in between section breaks. I was worried going in that the students would be unmanageable, but as soon as I started talking about sex in Malagasy, I had their attention for the rest of class. I also quickly caught on to the magic classroom management technique of picking out the rowdiest boy, the one who was clearly already showing off for his friends in front of the white-girl teacher, as a volunteer for our first activity. The boy would usually be one of the ones to act disinterested and smirk but to make sure he got up before all the spots were already taken; to swagger up to the front of the room nodding to his friends and brushing just a little too close to me to get to his place in line. First I assigned six of the volunteers to be gendarmes. Then I asked for one special volunteer. He would always step forward. Izy omby, (“He’s the cow”), was all it took for the class to burst out laughing and for the air to visibly escape from his deflating ego. Smooth sailing from there. The week was exhausting, but the students seemed to learn a lot, asked intelligent questions, and were even fun to joke around with in class.

The snigger that I hear without fail every time I talk about needing to use condoms is ALWAYS Tsy matsiro. (“It’s not delicious”). Though I didn’t get a chance to read through it, I saw an article recently about Bill Gates starting to talk about needing to recognize the real reason most people don’t use condoms: because they significantly diminish sexual pleasure. Especially in developing countries where the condoms that are sold have been sitting for months in a hot, dusty, wooden shack, are not lubricated and can end up being painful, and often break anyways. Would you use them? Maybe if the Malagasy teenagers had access to a CVS with strawberry-flavored, glow-in-the-dark, heat-inducing, exotic-oil-lubricated condoms I would feel like less of an idiot when the only response to tsy matsiro is “Well maybe, but sex with a condom is more delicious than an STD would be.” Or “true, but there are lots of other things you can do to increase pleasure too!” Anyway, the article caught my eye because it addresses a major issue in teaching about adolescent reproductive health here.

In two weeks I am scheduled two do a smaller version of the same curriculum at the lycee here in Ambanja and I’m excited to do it again!

Pool, early morning in Ankarongana

Bednet hanging training

World Malaria Month

I just posted about these in more detail, but I’m still in the midst of this and it’s going well. We had a small set-back last week when the World Malaria Day Festival was stormed out but we are rescheduling this weekend and it will definitely happen within the next two weeks. The last event was on Tuesday and, if you had to picture the “romanticized-typical Peace Corps experience,” this might be it. Gerard, a community health worker from the fokontany of Ankarongana, wanted me to come out to his village and do a malaria training with the people there. I recently met a new friend, Vivian, who works for Tsiharofy, a French-financed NGO. His current project is really cool… they’re offering basic “health insurance” to families, who can buy a 5-person family membership for 10,000 Ar ($5.00) a year. For these families, the Tsiharofy will cover 75-85% of all medical costs including births, operations, consultations, medications, etc. Families will receive a card with photos with the five approved family members and all government hospitals, pharmacies, and doctors must accept the card. Who knows how it will end up working out, but people are already excited about signing up in Djangoa. Anyway, so I invited Vivian to come give his presentation in Ankarongana when I went out with Gerard to do the malaria training. Ankarongana is only about 11k from Djangoa, but the road is terrible and has many steep ascends and descents, so biking is impossible. To beat the heat, we decided to get an early start. At 4:45 am, I was shaken awake by Gerard knocking at my door. Oops. I offered him some VIA Starbucks coffee while I scarfed down some oatmeal, threw clothes on, and got the training materials together. The most time-consuming part was actually explaining to an incredulous Gerard that this powder from the tiny packet was actually coffee and you could pour it in water like tea to make the coffee come out, and that no, I wasn’t insane for putting honey in my coffee. The hike out to Ankarongana took about two hours straight up and down pretty difficult terrain, and we saw four people and two herds of cows the whole way out. We arrived in Ankarongana at about 7:30 am and were greeted by Gerard’s mother, Gerardine, who offered us coffee (yes, this is the morning from the story as below. While she made the coffee, Gerard took me into the woods to see the waterfall. Though it was too slippery to climb to the top, the bottom opened up into a crystal-clear pool in a clearing in the woods… the perfect swimming hole. After coffee and then the pooping parade incident described in the last post, Vivian arrived on his moto and we headed up to the primary school to begin the presentation. Almost 100 people ended up coming to the presentation. My new bribing technique of trading candy for people answering questions worked like a charm and the crowd was engaged and interested in what I had to say. We did a small skit demonstrating malaria transmission, talked about prevention and treatment, and I showed everyone how to hang their nets using the “circle” method, a much more practical hanging method for small ravinala huts. Afterwards, Gerard’s wife served us a delicious lunch of rice and chicken, and we spent the rest of morning signing people up for Tsiharofy’s program before the long walk home. Gerard took me aside before leaving and gave the most gracious thank you for going out there, and we agreed to do another training before I leave, as well as looking into building some kabones for the village.

Fixing the pump with Nicholas

Gerard's "bureau" in Ankarongana

Community Health Workers

Working with the Community Health Workers for the Malaria project was so productive that I am excited to continue working with them throughout the summer and helping them set up some more lasting structures. Some of them are already very motivated: Gerard (mentioned above) had his president fokontany build him a small “office” in the village, where he makes sure to keep the basic supplies like deworming pills, ACT (for malaria), paracetimol (fever-reliever), and rapid diagnostics tests for malaria. We are meeting almost every Friday in Djangoa to discuss programming, and have plans to do trainings in all the different fokontanies. We’ve also done small projects around Djangoa like fixing the water spigot at the hospital (still missing a part but finally works for the first time since I moved). The first time I used it my immediate thought was “Oh wow, I love running water” before I realized, it wasn’t really running water. On the other hand, fetching water does make your arms pretty strong.

The mural J and I painted on my house in Djangoa

Other

Besides work, things have been great. I went out to Anjiabory, a small site east of Ambanja, for Easter with Jonathan (who used to live there). The village is absolutely beautiful, tucked in the foot of big green hills covered in rice paddies and forest, and on the bank of a fresh-water river. We spent the weekend hiking around searching for fruit, celebrating with his old friends and family, and spent Easter Day picnicking at the river and swimming, as is Anjiabory tradition. I have three weeks left here until I leave for France to take the GMAT and meet my family and Luca, so I’m studying and working until then. My Ambanja family is throwing me a birthday party this weekend and we are celebrating in Djangoa on Monday with the doctor and his family. When I get back from France, I spend a week in the capital for my Close of Service (COS) conference back in Mantasoa, and then have about 8 weeks left in the north before coming home! The candidate list for the upcoming elections is being announced today, and supposedly the current president, Rajoelana, who promised not to run, is a candidate along with Lalao, the wife of currently-exiled ex-president, Ravalamanana, who also promised not to run. And so we shall see…

Amanaraka koa ("Until Next Time")

Show Me Success and I’ll Show You 1000 Failures

With only four months left in my Peace Corps service, I’m starting to think a lot about what going home will feel like and of course trying to begin to understand the effect Peace Corps has had on my life. People often ask how I have changed in Peace Corps and what I have learned. I’m not sure. I mean, how can you live and work for over two years in an environment like this without coming back changed? I know what people want to hear. “I have so much more patience.” “I really appreciate what I have back home.” “I want to devote my life to helping others now.”

I think the real answer is much less exciting than people might hope. I think it’s really about making a lot of relatively small adjustments in your way of interacting with your environment. It’s really about learning to put into practice basic skills that, though we might have always known, we have never had to apply in truly challenging situations - work and otherwise. And actually, I think a cool part about this experience of living and working with very little support in a developing country is that I probably won’t really understand exactly how I’ve changed or what I’ve learned for a long time. Or at least I will continue struggling to apply “Peace Corps lessons” for the rest of my life. For now though, here’s a couple of things I think I have learned so far in no particular order…

Morengy Fighting in Betsiaka

1   1. To pick my battles

I thought I had this concept down when I babysat as a teenager. Everyone knows when it comes to kids you have to choose whether getting them to put on an certain outfit is worth the resulting hour-long meltdown when you know you will repeat the same routine getting them to go to bed before the parents come home. Then I got to college. I thought I mastered this skill again when directing different student groups on campus, especially as Music Director of Mosaic Whispers. Truly, getting 15 highly caffeinated, over-worked college students to give you undivided attention while rehearsing the same page of the same song for three hours in a small music room at midnight on a Wednesday provides an opportunity to pick your battles. #heartmosaicwhispers. I finally think I’m beginning to understand what picking your battles really means. Learning to let go of things that are out of your control here is maybe the most important step in becoming tamana (“at-home”) as a volunteer. If from the minute you wake up you are frustrated by the drunk people at 7 am, the charcoal stove heating too slowly, the meeting being four hours late, the absence of fresh food in the village, the constant, constant, CONSTANT harassment by men (and by men, I mean almost all males from the age of about 10 and up), the slow pace of life, the lack of phone service, water, and electricity… it’s exhausting. So I pick my battles.

My current battle is against the chickens who have recently learned if they fly up into my kitchen window, they have great access to the yummy bananas, limes, and soap (yes, soap) that are on the table. I have spent the last month or so with a white-noise-type tapping in the back of my head only to race into the kitchen realizing all my food has been pecked and I no longer have soap to wash dishes. It’s an all-out war. I learned to remember to close the one window only in time for the chickens to learn they can fly up to the other window and jump on in. My play. Okay, so I guess I’m actually still working on this skill…

lunch

2   2. The identities I thought defined me actually don’t

For an example I think a lot of people I know can relate to… I came here as a “foodie.” I knew the best recipes, healthiest foods, and tastiest restaurants, and turned up my nose at fast food and pre-packaged products. The problem was, I thought being a “foodie” was really part of who I was and not just something that interested me. So I was defensive about this identity. If an activity was based around food, I always hosted/cooked. I have to be involved when planning a menu, choosing a dinner location. Cooking had to be done the “right” way. Roadtrips were a headache trying to find “good” food on the highway in the middle of Oklahoma or Arkansas (and boy the things I would do for a McFlurry right now…)

I am still really into food – cooking it, thinking about it, talking about it, googling it, eating it, reading about it – I am half Johnson after all. But I no longer feel defensive about it. I think people get defensive about identities like “foodie” or “university student” because by defending and providing those terms, they are defending and proving who they are and what they believe as people. The traveler has to let people know the places they have been and their expertise on traveling when the subject comes up. The philosopher has to weigh in on every debate and prove they are the authority because they have studied the subject even though they won’t necessarily say so explicitly.

If you asked me to describe myself in America, I would have used terms like “athlete,” “musician,” “foodie,” “outdoorsy,” “educated,” etc. So what happens when you come to a place where it’s impossible to exercise and you’ve gained 20 pounds? You don’t know the local music and have no space to sing privately? You struggle cooking the most basic Malagasy dishes and certainly look very uncoordinated trying to light a charcoal stove? You went to college but can communicate to locals essentially only as a child could even though you’re supposed to be doing all this development work? Definitely one of the things I have learned here is to let go of my attachment to identities like that and make space for other ones that are just as important and just as much a part of who I am. It is scary to be put in a situation where the things that you thought defined who were are no longer true. But how can a girl call herself a foodie when the thrice-daily fare is rice and beans and the appearance of a cucumber in the village is exciting news? Could I really be a foodie when the one time I tried to branch out in Betsiaka and cook the fady (taboo) garbanzo beans I almost burned down my house, as was made clear by the billowing smoke and gathering crowd outside when I returned from the market. Anyway, this is example is kind of extreme and drawn-out. But I have learned that identities are 100% contextual and when I made the first realization that I couldn’t call myself a foodie anymore, I didn’t care. It didn’t make me feel less good or be less interested in food, I just didn’t feel like defending its culture was in some way defending myself. (In the spirit of full disclosure, dating an Italian probably called into question my own “foodie” identity in a major way as well… I just can’t compete! And don’t want to.)

“Identity isn’t ultimately a bond of unifying sameness. It’s a bid to control which forms of difference people perceive.” –Thich Nhat Hanh

All eyes on you

3    3. How Britney was feeling during the umbrella incident

Cherie! Mon amour!  Tres sexy! Oh vazaha! Oh madam! Tu est s’epouser? Vous-allez ou? Vous-allez taxi? Pousse? Bonjour, vazaha! Salut vazaha! VAZAHA! VAZAHA!!! Etes-vouz mariee? Buon giorno bella! I love you! Oooh la la! SOARAVO SOARAVO! Helene! Anao-tiako! Je t’aime! Amore! Izy vady-ko vazaha! (“This is my white wife”)

Going with the crowd on Easter 

4   4. To follow

“In a world full of leadership conferences and being told you’re special, I count myself fortunate to have been taught a thing or two about following. Like leading, it’s a skill, and unlike leading, it’s one that you’ll actually get to use on a daily basis… It turns out that most positions in life, even really big ones, aren’t really so much about leadership. Being successful and certainly being happy comes from honing your skills in working with other people.” –Ann Patchett

The Peace Corps recruits Leaders. Self-starters. Trailblazers. These are good qualities. They are certainly vital to Peace Corps service. Getting a community excited about a non-sexy project like sleeping under bed nets; not pooping in the forest; mobilizing enough people; gathering enough momentum to start a project, much less finish that project, require true leadership, go-get ‘em attitude, and persistence. But following, we’ll say followship, has been just as important for my work as a volunteer. We’ve all written on some cover-letter or resume about our great “teamwork” and ability to “work with a diverse range of people.” (I usually do). I think though that most people are just mediocre team players. (I certainly was). “OK” team players share the work-load, understand group dynamics well, often are even good leaders, and are pretty easy to get along with. There are certainly bad team players. We all think we’re good because we’re not them (doesn’t do his/her work or takes over the whole project, isn’t fun to be around, etc.). But great team-players have great followship, which is a true skill. This person’s ego truly is not a factor in group dynamics because he or she understands his or her success depends on the team success. Success and productivity are completely interlinked with teamwork and group happiness and this person knows how to balance the scale. I vaguely started to understand this during the last year of college but I certainly never was a person who excelled at making this happen consistently.

Peace Corps requires followship. Letting yourself accept help from Malagasy people while you are still trying to figure out basic survival skills (and then for the rest of your service when you’re still trying to figure that out…) accomplishes so much more than just your basic survival. It directly addresses the second and third Peace Corps goal of sharing Malagasy and American cultures, integrates you into the community, and helps you figure out the right balance of integrating and also maintaining your self-identity. Along with this absolutely goes the importance of speaking to someone in their own language. Being able to successfully do development work requires an intimate understanding of how all parts of Malagasy society works and gaining that understanding absolutely requires following. One of the most effective leaders I know, Marin Tollefson, is also one of the best followers I have ever met and her magic comes from understanding followship is essential to leadership.

National Highway

5   5. You really didn’t build that

I was out of the country for the whole Obama “You didn’t build that” situation, but I do know that whatever in particular he was referring to (roads, bridges, businesses) doesn’t matter because he’s right. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. If you are healthy or educated or rich (or all three), you definitely didn’t build that. Not all of it. Obviously credit’s due all over the place and certainly to the hard work of “fill-in-the-blank” owners. But after observing almost all good efforts on the parts of NGOs, volunteers, and community leaders failing because of lack of infrastructure, it is clear that those roads and bridges are essential to success of any kind. In fact, quality and widespread roads and bridges are the most important building block of development. (Yeah, it sounds oversimplified. But I’m just going to go ahead and make the bold statement while I’m 25 and in the Peace Corps). Roads lead to more frequent communication, then reliable transportation, easier access to health services, individual mobilization, urban concentrations, incentives for education, and on and on. All these concerns are highly related obviously and development isn’t some linear projector…but educational, health, and environmental concerns seem to me areas that can only be fully addressed with the existence of basic quality infrastructure. I see that every day when I teach people to take a malaria test if they have a fever but the clinic is out of malaria tests and the mud road leading to the nearest hospital is 30 kilometers and you depend on farming rice every day to make a living… We still gotta build it!

Andilana Beach, Nosy Be

6   6. This too shall pass…

They say Peace Corps is a roller coaster. They even give us a chart divided into the different 3-4 month emotional segments during Peace Corps throughout the whole service. (Apparently right now I’m supposed to be realizing the own limitations of my time left, acknowledging unmet goals, and making plans for the states… check?). The chart is actually pretty accurate in creepy you-don’t-know me sort of way. I even got to certain points where I just had to look to the chart to tell me what I should be feeling. Anyway, it’s a definite roller coaster. The days are absolutely endless and the weeks fly by. Months become the new weeks. (Basically it’s almost 4^th of July here). You hit your highest highs and lowest lows. You are paralyzed with loneliness and then almost manic with discovery and joy. You witness profound beauty and truly wretched ugliness. Your priorities shift, your relationships change and sometimes end, and your fundamental values tested. The only consistent thing is that the next stage always comes. But what they always tell you before leaving you at site for that first night remains true: “if you can do tonight, you can do any night.”

Accidentally cutting the thing clean off

7   7. Failure is not only an option, but a requirement

If I had a split personality it would absolutely be my (admittedly much more dominant) stubborn, a-type, driven, and did I say stubborn? half and my hippy, good-time peace love and everyone wins… (okay everyone wins isn’t even usually part of my hippie self). So I have always listened to people who talk about the importance of failing over and over again to eventually succeed and have agreed. Genuinely agreed. But the dominant “failure is not an option” side dictated most of how I approached my own life and work. That’s not necessarily bad. I think that attitude is responsible for many things of which I am proud. But after FAILING and then failing, failing, and failing some more in many different instances here before finding success, I do think failing is absolutely crucial in allowing you keep refocusing your strategy to achieve a goal and adjusting the goal itself. I “failed” to finish the well project in Betsiaka. There’s still a clean-water shortage there. But they now have identified getting clean water as a community priority and have a leader and tentative action plan in place. They also have tools to identify other community priorities for the future projects. I have a much clearer understanding of how to approach getting a project started and finished in a small-village setting and do health work here in Madagascar.

Nothing to do but wait

8   8. Patience

The cliché one. But what is the other option when one-hour brousse ride turns into a 26-hour marathon and you have no choice but to wait? Or when buying every different type of fruit or vegetable in the market is a whole new bargaining ordeal. When the boat was supposed to leave… yesterday. When a meeting has been scheduled and then rescheduled every three days for a month. When asking for directions to anything elicits solely the answers of “ao, ary, eto, or any” (all of which have almost interchangeable definitions of “there”) and a vague shrug of the lips in a general direction even after pressing for specifics. Maybe it’s just learning to give up control when you have one. Anyway, I think my blood pressure stays a little lower during patience-testing situations. I know I’m not just better at hiding impatience because my face still unfortunately displays unconscious and automatic displeasure at unpleasant tastes, smells, and sounds (lookin at you, woman singing next to me in the brousse).

Aqualand

9   9. To live with uncertainty

The corny one. I really don’t like uncertainty. I like to know exactly what my next move is and what to do to get there. I think most people probably do. But here I’ve learned to live with it and even sometimes enjoy it. I guess it actually started before even coming to Madagascar when I accepted the invitation to “serve as a community health volunteer in Madagascar…” and that’s pretty much it. Then being dropped off in a small village and told to “to community health development” for the next two years came with another big dose of uncertainty. But especially for the first year, looking at the calendar with absolutely nothing written in for 12 straight months was a lesson in living with uncertainty. During low points, having no direction was a little heartbreaking. But after living here for two years and having a little more certainty about the next couple months of my life, I now feel like I have spent all this time biking up a really long hill, sometimes feeling great and sometimes really wanting to quit, but never really being able to see where I was, and now I am at the top of this really awesome view of everything around me, both forward and back. There have been several times in my life I have felt so certain of what I thought and of the future, only to look back completely shocked how certain I had been. I definitely prefer being able to have a plan, but I think I’ve learned to be comfortable with a little more uncertainty knowing that eventually I’ll get to the top of the hill.

Homemade apple/cranberry brochettes confuse the grill ladies but taste delicious

1   10. The Willingness to look stupid

A co-worker and I arrived at a training last weekend and after sitting down and drinking coffee with his mother I had to poop. I asked them if they had a kabone at the house. (No.) Nearby? (No). In the village? (No.) So you go in the forest? (Yes). Where? (far, dirty). Uhh… After confirming that I truly did need to poop, my co-worker decided to take me in search of a “clean” spot in the woods. His house being at the other end of the village, he led me through the line of houses with people cooking on porches and drinking coffee (or liquor, more likely), looking up with the usual staring, pointing, and commenting. In Malagasy culture it is fomba (tradition) to greet everyone you see on the road, except in larger towns. If you are particularly friendly with this person, you ask hoaizanao? (where are you going?) My co-worker decided the correct response to this question was to explain the entire situation. “Where are you taking your vazaha?” Everyone wanted to know. “I’m taking her to the woods to poop because we don’t have any kabones!” “Hahahahaha! The vazaha is going to poop!”

It should have been one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. But an hour later, almost 100 people showed up to my malaria training and we had one of the most successful programs so far.

A willingness to look stupid here is key. Everyone already thinks I’m very weird for reasons ranging from the fact that I don’t cook rice in my house every day to the fact that I exercise to the fact that I use sunscreen and eat peanut butter. But with all eyes on you all the time, every truly embarrassing thing you do is a public event. And it turns out, the willingness to do embarrassing things like essentially parade through a village with a loudspeaker announcing your impending bowel movements or stand in front of a room of 85 teenagers doing condom demonstrations is a pretty good tool for getting people interested in what you’re doing.

Happy May!