Saturday, August 4

·        5:00 – Wake up early to run but forget that winter = dark until 6:00 am.

·        5:15 – Shower, sweep house, fill water filter (coming back to Betsiaka with no water in the filter is always a huge disappointment), and cook. Breakfast today is my last two eggs scrambled with the leftover eggplant sauté. Eat and drink coffee.

·        6:00 – Put gas tank and backpack out on porch.

·        6:15 – Riche arrives, loads my stuff into the car, and I leave on my bike.

·        8:00 – Meet Riche at the parkage in Ambilobe and leave my bike with him while I go sell back my empty gas tank.

·        8:45 – Return for my bike and backpack and head to the station to catch a brousse for Ambanja. Find a brousse pretty quickly. One of my Panera (brousse “assistant” who helps find people to ride, takes care of baggage, and drives the brousse around the city to pick people up before leaving) tells me not to go with this driver because he is mora mora (very slow). I go anyway and immediately regret not listening to him.

·        1:00 – Finally arrive in Ambanja after seething through an extra two hours of deafening Gasy radio and swerving around potholes.

·        1:15 – Meet Jason and Katie at Gringotts (our name for our favorite neighborhood gargotte – actually every frequently visited bar or restaurant has its own special name), where we order a beer and eat grilled calamari.

Ambanja Crew at the Good Life

·        2:30 – Go back to Josh’s house and watch an episode of Homeland, a (new?) show Katie wants to introduce me to. I am instantly hooked. I also am able to check my email and find out I have been matched with a elementary-school classroom in Michigan for a WorldWise Correspondence program, meaning I will basically be “pen pals” with this classroom for the remainder of my service and I can’t wait to get started.

·        4:00 – Walk over to Bat Bar (again, not it’s real name but a nod to the fact that it serves fried bat… I should do a whole post about the world of Ambanja bars and restaurants). Bat Bar is one of our favorite hangouts because of a small upstairs porch with only one table. We are the only ones who ever use it and we often hang out there all afternoon reading, playing our own music, and working.

·        5:00 – Walk over to the Sambirano bridge, which is an excellent place to watch the sunset over the river at Bridge Bar (name self-explanatory).

·        6:00 – Eat a dinner of beans, crab sauce, and rice at the Southern Parkage.

·        7:00 – Meet the Italians at Good Life (named for a previous volunteer’s slight mistranslation of the real name, Bellevie).

·        10:30 – Katie and I walk home with the Italians to go to sleep. On the way home, I see the constellation the Southern Cross for the first time and am excited to finally see the subject of one of my favorite songs. 

Friday, August 3

·        6:30 – Wake up and immediately have a craving for oatmeal (maple and brown sugar, thank you very much).

·        7:00 – Shower, sweep, cook oatmeal and coffee, and head out to porch for my morning lounge/work/read session.

·        8:15 – Eat and read.

·        9:15 – Tackle the laundry from yesterday’s maggot extermination. Today’s load even includes my Bananagrams case, which the maggots also decided to destroy. Bastards.

·        10:30 – Decide it’s finally time to get dressed in real clothes (as opposed to a lamba, a traditional wrap for women in beautiful patterns, similar to but less complicated than a sari, that most village women all day every day). Going through my suitcase, I see a pair of shorts I bought last month that are too big and decide to sort through the rest of my clothes for things I don’t want or need anymore and give them to Belia.

·        11:00 – Bike to family’s house and present a very excited Belia with a bag of new clothes - she loves shopping and fashion. My brother comes in and decides to turn on the generator because he wants to watch… THE OLYMPICS! Having totally forgotten these were going on, this is a great surprise, and we spend the afternoon watching track and field events. So fun. Go USA. Remember it’s Luca’s birthday today and Belia gives me a t-shirt and money to buy a beer for him when I go to Ambanja this weekend. We eat a late lunch of coconut chicken. Before I leave, my mom, very uncharacteristically, approaches me shyly, and says she has been thinking for the past couple of weeks about what she wants from the US (I wanted my parents to bring her a small gift but was unsure what she would want) and she has decided. She wants a watch just like mine. My watch, by the way, is a $9.00 target purchase that she loves because it can get wet, i.e., she wouldn’t have to take it off to do laundry, her main daily chore.

·        3:30 – Bike home and pack my bag for tomorrow. I am going into Ambanja for a couple of days for the fete de veloma (goodbye party) for Josh, Jason, and Katie, three volunteers that arrived exactly one year before me in the Health/Education Stage 2010. I am really sad to see them go.

·        4:30 – Go for a 30-minute run, come home, and do some yoga and stretching for 15 minutes.

·        5:15 – Shower, sweep, and look in my food bag to see what’s left for dinner. I have an eggplant, two tomatoes, and two potatoes, so vegetable sauté it is. Don’t feel very hungry when dinner is done, so I cover the food and decide to go to PSI.

·        6:00 – Walk to the EPP for the second PSI night. Tonight is about clean drinking water (basically using Sur’Eau) and Malaria, and the presentations are much better than last night as there is much more audience participation. At the end of the evening they publicly thank me for inviting them to Betsiaka. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of the event because my camera was stolen about a week ago. 

·        8:15 – Walk home, eat some eggplant and an orange, and wash my feet.

·        8:30 – Get in bed and finish book before falling asleep. 

Thursday, August 2

·        6:15 – Wake Up

·        6:30 – Go for a 30 minute run. The road is very crowded today because it’s market day! Everyone is biking or hauling on cow-carts vegetables, fruit, clothes, and various wares to sell in the village. See Riche, my town driver, on the road and ask him if he can come pick up my gas tank on Saturday morning. Most volunteers cook on little gas stoves and, depending on how often and what food you cook, the tanks need to be replaced every 5-10 months.  I can’t carry the tank back in to Ambilobe to be exchanged on my bike so I hoped Riche could drive it in for me and meet me there. Come home and do 30 minutes of strength exercises in my kitchen.

·        7:45 – Sweep, do a well-run for water, shower, hang running clothes out, get dressed. Attempt to refill my water filter but notice is it extremely dirty and spent 20 minutes cleaning the filter with an old toothbrush.

·        8:45 – Make breakfast of eggs and coffee and eat on porch.

·        9:00 – Journal, do some crosswords, read, go over itinerary with my parents so I can make reservations in Ambanja this weekend for hotels.

·        10:30 – Walk to market. Look for Belia, my sister, to help her sell some bed linens she has bought from Tana but a friend tells me a Gendarmes lehibe (important person) has come in to visit so she has stayed at home to host; My host brother is the chief of the Gendarmes in Betsiaka. Walk home to get bike and head out for family’s house. Stop by Nicholas and Suzanne’s to ask if I can come for dinner instead of lunch and we chat for a while.

·        11:45 – Bike to family’s house. The Lehibe has left but lots of people are gathered around talking about the strikes. I am happy to be able to participate in the conversation and they ask me how strikes work in the States.

·        2:30 – Bike home and determined to tackle the maggot problem. Take out all the books and materials on my bookshelf and spend the next hour and a half dumping out thousands of maggots all over the porch and picking out pages and books that are salvageable/still readable. End up throwing away most of the books, as they have been completely eaten through. Cut out some plastic strips from my table cover and line the inside of the little shelves to (hopefully?) prevent further problems. This is maybe one of the grossest tasks I have done in Madagascar.

·        4:00 – PSI arrives! PSI is an organization that works in most regions throughout Mada on various health issues such as family planning, HIV/AIDS, malaria, potable water, diarrhea, and mother and child health. They have a really cool program where they will bring a portable “cinemobile” to small villages and spend two nights doing presentations to the community on any number of health subjects using pop culture, videos, and music (basically the draw of technology) to get people interested. I had asked them to come back in January but they said they had to wait until the road was better… 8 months later they have arrived! We chat for a while, they give me advice on my termite problem (Just spray your [small wood and dried leaf house] in gasoline! Thanks, but no thanks.), and we make a plan for the evening. They leave to drive around Betsiaka blasting music from their car and announcing the program over a loudspeaker.

·        5:00 – Walk to Suzanne’s to help prepare for dinner but everything is already ready from lunch. Nicholas has exciting news and we sit and meet about our water projects. We met a technician in Ambilobe a few months ago who has built some pumps in the city and Nicholas asked him if he would be willing to come to Betsiaka and help us build. Nicholas says he sounded enthusiastic and was willing to give us a great price, which means I can start applying for funding for the pumps! I am planning to go through an organization called Water Charity, an international NGO that provides funding for Peace Corps water projects.

·        6:00 – Suzanne, Rozia, and I walk over to the EPP where PSI is holding their event. They present on HIV/AIDS and family planning to a big crowd. The presentation is a little disappointing. I’ve seen them be very interactive and engaging in the past and I felt like they showed too many lengthy movies, but at least there was a public conversation. I know a lot of people in Betsiaka who still believe in one of three myths about AIDS: 1) It doesn’t exist. 2) It’s only an “African” disease, i.e., not in Madagascar. 3) It’s created by white foreigners to scare and control people in developing countries.

·        8:00 – Walk back to Nicholas’ house and we eat a late dinner.

·        9:00 Suzanne and Nicholas walk me home and, exhausted, I go straight to bed.

Wednesday, August 1

·        6:30 – Wake up and think about going running for an hour but don’t feel great.

·        7:30 – Finally get out of bed, sweep, take a shower.

·        8:00 – Make breakfast: 2 egg omelet with tomato and coffee. Eat and dishes.

·        8:45 – Set up on porch and drink coffee while I write in journal and do crosswords.

·        10:00 – Walk over to clinic and see Nicholas chatting with doctor. He still hasn’t found Chef Japs.

·        10:30 – Bike to family’s house. Help my mom dye her hair black, play ball with the kids, and hang out. Bebe asks if there are any mosquito nets at the clinic and unfortunately we have been out for a long time but PSI (Population Services International) is coming to Betsiaka tomorrow for health presentations and they usually bring some to sell.

My mom in Betsiaka with faux-bands 

·        1:00 – Eat lunch with family. We have one of my favorite Malagasy meals – Felomahogo, crushed cassava leaves, often with meat or fish and, in the north, with coconut.

·        2:30 – Bike home, sweep, nap, and start new book – “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson McCullers.

·        4:30 – Plan lesson for today’s English club. Decide to do “the family” and have everyone make a family tree.

·        5:00 – Walk to EPP to teach. Wait 20 minutes but no one shows up today. It has been a few weeks since we have been able to have the club so I assume people thought it wasn’t happening.

·        5:20 – Walk home and sit at doctor’s house to chat with his family.

·        5:30 – Suzanne, Nicholas’ wife, and their daughter Rosia, arrive at my house. They are my two most enthusiastic English students and apparently had lost track of time but still wanted to study today. We decide to do the lesson at my house with just the three of us and we set up on my porch. They have fun learning about the family but creating a family tree seemed to be slightly too ambitious of an activity since we spent too much time just learning what a family tree was and how it worked. I also tell Suzanne about looking for Chef Japs and she says she has seen him earlier that day and that he might be in his house. She also tells me she is planning to make felomahogo tomorrow and wants to know if I want to come over for lunch! I enthusiastically accept and tell her I’ll come early to help cook.

·        6:00 – Walk Suzanne and Rosia halfway home and then head over to Chef Japs’ house. Only his daughter is home and apparently he is already in Ambilobe.

·        6:15 – Walk home, sweep, shower, and make dinner. Cucumber, tomato, and onion salad again.

·        7:00 – Wash dishes and get into bed to read. When I take a book from the shelf next to my bed, I notice that it is covered in maggots and most of the inside has been eaten. Scared to look at the rest of the books, I put it outside and put it on tomorrow’s to-do list.

·        8:30 – Sleep

·        10:00 – Wake up to phone – Luca calls to say he has bought tickets to come with my family to Ile St. Marie! 

Tuesday, July 31

·        6:15 – Wake up and do a little bit of laundry from yesterday

·        6:45 – Go for a run and meet the doctor on the road who is returning from strike meetings. Along with all of the teachers in Madgascar who have been on strike for the most of this year, the doctors are now striking as well. For many students this has meant that they will have to repeat the same class next year. For everyone, the doctor strikes have meant the already inadequate health care services are even less available. In Betsiaka, there has been a big spike in infant deaths over the past two months from Typhoid fever.

·        7:20 – Do 10 minutes of yoga

·        7:30 – Sweep house, take trash to neighbor’s burn pile

·        7:45 – Shower, rinse out running clothes

·        8:00 – Make coffee and eat bananas and peanut butter for breakfast. Eat and wash dishes.

·        8:30 – Read, write two letters to stage mates.

·        10:00 – Walk to the office again to meet Nicholas. He says he was unable to find Chef Japs, EPP director, last night but will try to find him again today. He is also back and forth from Betsiaka at strike meetings in Ambilobe. I also ask him if he knows someone who can help me build a chicken coop – I’m planning on raising them when I get back from vacation in September – and he says he will ask around. The problem with living in strictly a gold mining town is the lack of people skilled in other trades.

·        10:30 – Walk to market to visit with friends. Buy meat again. Find phone credit at the big epicerie which they were saving until the rest of the credit in Betsiaka was gone so they could sell for almost double the price. Walk home.

·        11:15 – Start cooking the same lunch as Sunday but add two potatoes instead of cooking rice.

·        11:40 – Read until lunch is ready.

·        12:15 – Eat lunch and then sweep house

·        12:30 – Read on porch for the afternoon.

·        4:15 – Finish book; Highly recommend it! Make chamomile tea and write in journal. Walk over to doctor’s house and visit with him and his wife and daughter, who are visiting from Diego, where she is studying at the Lycee.

·        5:00 – Head over to clinic with doctor to talk to some patients who have arrived outside. Two new cases of malaria.

·        5:45 – Go home, eat leftovers on porch, and wash dishes. Sweep, take a shower, finish tea, and start a new book in bed – “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit” – Jeannete Williams.

·        8:45 – Finish book and try to sleep despite termites.

Monday, July 30

·        7:30 – Wake up (late) and sweep. Make oatmeal and coffee for breakfast (thank you to my Grandpa Frank for both!) Eat and clean dishes.

·        8:30 – Clean dishes, set up on porch. Make to-do list for the week, write in journal, and do a couple of crossword puzzles.

·        10:00 – Walk to commune office to find the adjoint mayor. Both my counterpart and the adjoint mayor are there and I ask them about using two outside walls of the EPP (primary school) to paint a big malaria mural and a World Map, a common Peace Corps project. They love the idea and Nicholas says he will find the director of the EPP later in the day to double check about using the space. Also catch up with Nicholas about our well project. We have found a technician in Ambilobe who is willing to build the wells for a great price and Nicholas says he will talk to him further when he goes into town this weekend.

·        11:00 – Walk home and get my bike to ride over to my family’s house on the other side of the village. Spend an hour grating coconut for hair oil and gossiping with my mom, help finish the day’s cooking, and eat lunch. There’s so much kabaka (the side dish served along with the obligatory rice) today: fried fish, leftover crab sauce from yesterday, and beans. My sister, Belia, and our zoky (older sister), Bebe, who is visiting are in Ambilobe for the day so I play ball with my two nieces, Jenny and Noela, and my nephew Pauly in front of the house with the new rubber ball Bebe and Paoly brought as a present from Diego.

·        2:30 – Bike home. Stop at market for phone credit and they tell me there won’t be any until Thursday, market day. Buy cucumbers, onions, potatoes, and soap.

·        3:15 – Heat up leftover coffee from this morning and set up on porch to start a new book – “Restless” by William Boyd. The Peace Corps doctors call me to say I have to go up to Diego within the next two weeks to get a flu shot they are flying up today to the meva. This is a big hassle but apparently required.

·        4:00 – My kids stop by and I give them magazines to look at on the porch. They love flipping through the pictures and choosing their “families” from the pictures. All of the white women are either my mom or me and all of the darker skinned models are in their families.

·        4:45 – Go for a 30 minute run and do 30 minutes of strength exercises in my house before it gets dark.

·        5:45 – Bathe.

·        6:00 – Make dinner by candlelight. Tonight is cucumber, tomato, onion salad with vinegar, salt, and pepper.

·        6:45 – Get in bed and read.

·        8:15 – Prepared for the termite symphony tonight, I put in earplugs (thank you Jill Beckerman!) and go to sleep. 

Eight Days a Week

So many people ask me what I do on a normal day and it’s difficult to answer that question. It’s also hard to answer the question “how is your work going?” My work here is so different from checking off tasks on a to-do list from 9-5. At the most basic level, I’m supposed to be helping my village build the capacity to improve their own health status and facilitating cultural exchange. Specifically, the three goals of Peace Corps are:

Goal 1: Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women

Goal 2: To help promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of the peoples served

Goal 3: To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans

Having very broad objectives like these means that sometime I can go for two weeks at a time without doing “real” work, then spend the next week chasing down one person to try to meet, and the next doing something more tangible like teaching a week-long health class in school. If you talk to me on a week where it’s harder to tell exactly what “work” I’m doing, it may seem like Peace Corps is just about sitting and reading on my porch with kids and the next maybe I would be able to tell you I received funding for a clean water project and it seems like I’m accomplishing way more than I actually am. Who knows.

My dear, beautiful friend Marin, who is a TEFL volunteer serving in Cape Verde and Mozambique, did a post a couple months ago called “A Week in the Life” that chronicled her day-to-day activities over a random week. I thought it was a great way to give a sense of what I do on a day-to-day basis in regards to both work and simply living in Betsiaka. Like Marin, I thought about choosing a week where I knew I would have more to do but since every week is pretty different, I decided just to start.

Sunday, July 29

·        6:30 – Wake up to see Jason off. He was visiting Betsiaka for the weekend with John Shen, another great friend of mine from Wash U who is also serving as a health volunteer in Madagascar. For breakfast, we finish the leftover Thai-peanut pasta we had made the night before. One of the advantages of the cooler season (which is very unfortunately ending abruptly) is that it’s possible to save food overnight as long as it’s reheated well in the morning. Jason hopped on his bike to go the 30k to Ambilobe. The road, while still in horrible condition, is now possible to navigate in a little under two hours on a bike.

·        7:30 – Fetch water from well, take a shower, and get dressed. A note about bucket showers – I have come to not only enjoy these, but prefer them to normal showers. They’re such an amazing way to cool off, use considerably less water than a real shower, and I always feel cleaner.

·        8:00 – Sweep house. This is a two or three-times-a-day chore, especially during the dusty season – basically the entire year except for rainy season – because Betsiaka is extremely windy and dry and there’s pretty much constant billows of dust blowing into the house. Set up my laundry buckets on the porch and spend the next hour listening to my iPod and cleaning my clothes.

Laundry on the porch!

·        9:15 – Hang clean clothes out on line and refill water buckets from well.

·        9:30 – Make tea from bags I brought from the states. I’ve been trying to find citronella seeds so I can make tea just from boiling the leaves, but for now Jasmine does the trick. Take the first of my deworming pills (yes, I officially played host to my first African worms), and set up on my porch with work materials. Fill out leave request form to submit to Peace Corps for vacation with my family in September, go through rain water harvesting materials Jason left for me, and read about World Map project I am thinking of doing.

·        10:45 – Walk to market, stopping to talk to friends on the way. Everyone wants to know where my two visitors are and I tell them “efa nody!” (they have already gone home). Buy tomatoes, eggplant, cabbage, eggs, rice, two carrots (an expensive treat), and meat (another luxury but is available in Betsiaka on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays). With the road more passable now, we are lucky to have many types of vegetables available lately and I’m taking full advantage! For the past couple of months the options have been pretty much limited to tomatoes and onions.

·        11:15 – Walk home and throw carrots, cabbage, and meat into a pot to slow-cook, and sahafa (clean by picking through to get rid of the rocks and husks) my new rice until lunch.

·        12:00 – Eat lunch and do crossword puzzles.

·        12:30 – Take a nap on the porch.

·        2:30 – Wake up, put away dry clothes from line, sweep house again.

·        3:00 – Start a new book: “The Secret Scripture” by Sebastian Barry.

·        5:30 – Eat leftovers from lunch, wash dishes, and chat with my parents on the phone.

·        7:00 – Get in bed and read.

·        12:00 – Finally fall asleep after finishing my book, no thanks to the cacophony of termites that are aggressively chewing down my house.