In Which I Ramble

After getting some questions in an email I received from a friend, I realized that there are a lot of specifics about life and work here that I haven’t mentioned or have just alluded to. So here you go, some not-so-juicy details of life and the education system here in Madland:

The town I live in has about 1000 people (half of them children) and is about an hour north of Sambava, a city of 30,000. The city of Sambava (the largest in the region, the Malagasy equivalent of a state) has good internet, several banks, and a post office, but only a few decent restaurants and no peanut butter or oatmeal (I stock up when I go to the capital—these things are important). I’m fortunate to be on a good road—Malagasy roads are notoriously awful. In good dry weather it takes three 24-hr days to get to the capital from where I live, which is probably the same as the distance from Seattle to Portland in the U.S.. Happily, unlike most Malagasies, I have the option of flying.

My town is stretched out along the main road—go too far off the road and you’ll fall into a poorly irrigated rice paddy. Hills and small mountains in the distance. There are lots of fruit trees—papaya, mango, banana, avocado, litchee (Looks like something Dr. Seuss would draw, tastes like a grape), makoba (kinda like a mushy apple), pisa (gross—like an orange pinecone that tastes like laundry detergent), and ampaly be (jackfruit—a giant reptilian husk that contains nodules of sticky fruit that smell like Jolly Ranchers). After a summer (winter here) of nothing but tomatoes and bananas, the start of ‘fruit season’ has really opened up my food options—mango salsa with homemade tortilla chips, mashed papayas and sugar in crepes, makoba on my oatmeal. Yum. Still no vegetables, though—they don’t grow naturally, so people would have to cultivate them, and most people don’t see the point of working for their food like that when they can get their fruit for free, just by going out into the forest and picking it.

The town I live in, Anjangoveratra, lies in a commune (American equivalent—county) of the same name. There’s no electricity or running water anywhere in my commune, though several businesses have generators that they can fire up. I get my water from a well about 100 meters away and generally embarrass myself with how long it takes my bucket to fill up. Poor well etiquette, to make someone else wait for that. It hasn’t been too bad living without electricity, as long as I can charge up about once a week when I go into the city. No running water is more of a pain, though, especially with doing laundry by hand. I’m not a fan. There are 25 towns and a 7200ha reserve in the commune, and I am the only PC volunteer and one of the few ‘outside’ presences here, so you can imagine the number of potential projects I hear about!

A good portion of my job is serving as project ‘editor’—people will come to me out of the blue and ask for project funding and I have to decide whether to pursue it or (more usually) listen politely and gently decline. New project ideas are presented to me multiple times per week—the head of the vanilla cooperative wants a solar-powered rice mill. The physics teacher wants a hydroelectric dam. The mayor wants a Red Cross station. People make requests for tractors, hurricane shelters, cows, money to expand their pineapple operations, electricity through any means possible, better cell phone reception, a camera, a library, wells here here and here, signs for the well encouraging people to bleach their water, irrigation canals, an agricultural research center, dams for the rice fields, cash, a road, three new Catholic churches, a boat, another school building, more teachers, another English Club, soccer balls and sports team uniforms…well you get the idea! So I listen as patiently as I can to the ideas, then make suggestions of how to follow up. If it’s an unlikely project (Red Cross Center) I’ll suggest they ask anNGO (the Red Cross), with the knowledge that they probably won’t. If it’s an OK suggestion (expanding pineapple operations at a farm), I’ll try to lob the ball back in their court (get back to me with a list of what you would need and about how much it would cost—that guy never did get back to me, unfortunately).

A lot of the suggestions I get are centered around teaching English. Despite my frequent protestations to the contrary, a lot of people still think I’m here to teach English, because really, why else would an American be living with them out in the middle of nowhere? People here are obsessed with learning English. Almost every day people ask me to give them private lessons and I have to decline. I have the English Club at the school, help one of the English teachers with lesson planning, and have offered to start up a separate English Club for professionals, but beyond that, there’s just too much need for me to help on an individual basis. I woke up Sunday morning and opened my window to three girls waiting for me to get up so they could demand an English lesson, and I felt terrible about it but had to send them away and tell them to come to the English Club on Wednesdays—6.30 on a Sunday morning is an especially inappropriate time for unscheduled English lessons, I think…

The obsession with English puzzles me. Madagascar was a French colony and the few tourists who show up in the nearby cities generally speak French. Virtually no one in Madagascar speaks English, including the English teachers. But EVERYONE wants to learn English. Random teens will approach me on the street to practice greetings. (More annoying than it sounds—“Introduce yourself. Where you go? You have husband?”) People will happily announce that they speak English on the strength of a half dozen memorized phrases (“Ah em verra will, tanks, an’ you? What news? No news.”) I was really puzzled at first why more of the English teachers in the area didn’t seem interested in talking with me—I work closely with one English teacher but most schools assign a teacher to English whether they know the language or not and they rarely approach me. I eventually realized that they were embarrassed by their (lack of) English ability—many can barely put a sentence together.

The way English is taught, even aside from teachers’ expertise, goes a long way in explaining the language level. Usually when I go to a new town, people ask me to stop in at the schools to introduce myself and teach the kids a few new phrases, so I’ve seen a lot of the classes in the commune. Despite the fact that a number of new schools have been built in the area (mostly by the Japanese government and the French NGO Aide et Action), there’s still not enough space in the classes or enough teachers to keep classes going. Some kids will be sent home for part of the day because there aren’t enough classrooms. Classes average 50 or 60 students, and I’ve been in two classrooms that had around 110 six-year-olds for ONE teacher. The newer building have decent desks, but in the older ones many kids just sit on the floor. There are few books—mostly, students learn by copying book excerpts from the board.

Even the teachers have trouble with the books, since their own language ability is often pretty low. The teacher I do work with frequently, who can get by pretty well in English, came over to visit me after school one day last week and asked me to help him puzzle out the rest of the lesson plans for the week, since he didn’t know what they were asking him to do. The first lesson plan, it turned out, asked him to teach the future tense through an activity with horoscopes, which he had never heard of. That was interesting to try to explain in Malagasy—with my profound apologies to people who take horoscopes seriously, my explanation went something like: “So this is like a game that foreigners play to see if ancient Greek religion can predict what is happening in their lives? And each month has a mascot…What is a Saggitarius? Uh, good question…do you know what a bow and arrow is?” After we laboriously got that lesson plan translated, he asked for help with the next lesson—also teaching the future tense, this time using the CHINESE ZODIAC. And even, better, it asked students to figure out the order of the Zodiac by decoding a logic puzzle, a concept that most teachers here have never encountered and which none have the answer key to. Happily, I like logic puzzles and was able to solve it for the teacher pretty quickly…anything else? Yeah, the next lesson plan was confusing to him as well…it was a four page mockup of a teen magazine, complete with a Dear Abby-type corner and a joke section. I have to give it to the textbook writers, they’re creative, but the material isn’t really appropriate for African classrooms, where even the teachers don’t know what is being asked of them (many of the elementary-school teachers only graduated from the Malagasy equivalent of a middle school). My favorite example from the fake teen magazine was from the joke section. Try to read this like you’re an African middle school graduate who doesn’t really speak English:

Q: How do Eskimos get dressed in the morning?

A: Very quickly.

Really? So I got to explain this one too—my apologies to the Inuit for grossly misrepresenting their culture—“Um the Eskimos are a tribe that live in the north of North America and they live in houses made of ice so it’s very cold and they have to hurry when they get dressed in the morning?”

Anyway. Enough bashing of the education system, people are doing their best with what they have. The real problem is the sheer number of kids—each family has an average of 5 or 6, and even if the parents can manage to pay for school fees on a subsistence agriculture work salary, the schools are busting at the seams with the load of TOO. MANY. CHILDREN. This is a difficult subject to approach with many people. On one hand, Gasy culture is pretty open so that there’s no problem talking with people about things like birth control (minus the presence of the Catholic Church, which in my politically incorrect opinion can go take a flying leap as far as its stance on condom use in STD/STI-ridden Africa is concerned). But Gasies love their children, and it’s not really like I can go up to families and say, “Hey look. Your kids are in rags and poorly nourished. They’re probably going to drop out of school by the American equivalent of 5^th grade. They aren’t going to have jobs when they grow up. They aren’t even going to have your barely-adequate salary because you’ll have to spilt your family rice paddy between your four sons. How about you consider getting a vasectomy?” Nope, that approach can’t work, and it’s one of the things that makes development work so incredibly frustrating. For every kid you can educate about the environment or English or the proper handwashing technique, there are another dozen who won’t get the info. Which is why development policies, again just in my humble politically incorrect opinion, should take another look at their foreign aid and stop wasting money on stupid things like building bus shelters (one of the NGOs here actually spent a lot of money on this project, despite the fact that there are no buses and even if there were, people here are perfectly capable of building their own shelters, thanks much). Instead, what if they were to reconsider what might actually be an effective approach to improving the lives of people in developing countries and by extension in our globalized world, improving our own futures in terms of environment, health, education, etc etc? What if the U.S. were to reconsider its current policy of limiting funds for family planning overseas? This has never made sense to me, since obviously if a wealthy country that has 2 children per family and a 80% or so churchgoing rate refuses to give family planning aid to poor countries with 6 children per family on the grounds of morality, there’s a ‘lil bit of hypocrisy going on.

OK! So I’m going to get off my soapbox now and go back to chipping away at the giant iceberg of sustainable development! Madly yours, Rowan.