You Know You’re (Still) A PCV in Madagascar When…

Even after two years, the neighbor kid still sometimes runs screaming at the sight of you.

You classify all your storage containers as either rat-proof or not rat-proof.

A Malagasy person’s evaluation of your Malagasy language ability can range from fluent, completely incompetent, and back to fluent again, all in the same conversation.

When someone gives you a time for something, there is one thing you are certain of: it will not happen at that time. Maybe two hours early, maybe four hours late, maybe never. This includes flights.

Depending on the time of year, it takes 35-110 hours to get to the capital from your site. Google Maps says it takes 13 hours.

Would-be suitors scream offers at your back, but turn and run if you walk towards them.

Telling a Gasy man “I’m married” is not considered an acceptable excuse for not getting involved with him. Telling him “You’re ugly and you have no teeth” is accepted.

You no longer have any standards for entertainment.

80 degrees is a cold snap. (SAVA!)

Riding in a taxi brousse with a functioning speedometer is so noteworthy that you text another volunteer about it.

You can sharpen a machete with a rock and use it for anything.

You listened to the BBC list Golden Globe winners and didn’t recognize a single movie.

After two years, you’re surprised you still have some functioning electronics.

People only want to know the time when you’re wearing a watch.

Lost in Translation

Random Dude: Bonjour, Madame—ou bien mademoiselle?

Me: Tsy francaise zah fa americaine. (I’m not French, I’m American.)

Random Dude: Ah! Vous etes americaine, c’est tres bien…

Me: Efa niteny zah, tsy francaise, tsy azoko teny francais. Mahay teny Gasy zah. (I just said, I’m not French, I don’t speak French. I speak Malagasy.) [This isn’t true, my French is decent, but who respects the French here…]

Random Dude: Fa manino? (Why?)

Me: Voluntaire Peace Corps zah ndreky miasa ambanivolo zeny mila mianatra teny Gasy satria tsisy olo maro mahay teny anglisy. (I’m a Peace Corps volunteer and I work in the coutryside, so I need to know Malagasy because not many people know English.)

Random Dude: [It’s all Malagasy from here on…] Ah, Peace Corps, so you are American!

Me: Yes.

Random Dude: Me, I do not speak American, it is too hard, I learn English.

Me: Americans speak English, too.

Random Dude: So you are English from Britain!

Me: No, but we speak the same language.

Random Dude: But if you speak English you must be from England.

Me: The English colonized America so that is why we speak English too.

Random Dude: They colonized you, so you ARE British.

Me: The French colonized Madagascar. Are you French?

Random Dude: No, no no, I am Malagasy.

Me: It is the same with America. We are no longer British but we still speak the same language.

Random Dude: You know what is good about the Malagasy people? We all speak the same language. Not like all you foreigners. You British, French, Americans, Italians, Australians, you can’t understand anything the other is saying.

Me: It’s very nice that you all speak the same language. But many people do speak the same language, like the British and Americans and Australians, but we speak with different accents so it sounds different. Like dialects of Malagasy. It’s like the Tsimihety dialect and the Antaimoro dialect.

Random Dude: Oh, I don’t understand Antaimoro people. They talk weird. But you are American, yes, so you are from Brazil.

Me: No, I’m from the United States.

Random Dude: But Brazil is in America.

Me: Brazil is in South America. The United States is in North America, near Canada.

Random Dude: Canada! They speak French there. Also in Montreal. Is Montreal also near Canada?

Me: Montreal is a city in Canada.

Random Dude: No, it’s a country.

Me: It’s a city like Tana is a city. I’ve visited, it’s very beautiful.

Random Dude: I have an uncle whose wife’s cousin is studying there. She says it is always cold.

Me: Much much colder than Madagascar, yes.

Random Dude: Do you not have sun in America?

Taxi Brousse

The pics from here on out (including the last post) are from other volunteers because my

camera is dead dead dead. But this is the inside of a taxi brousse as it's filling up, complete with fabulous and goofy PCVs in the foreground!

Pictures--Milking Cows and Gathering Mangoes

Food Again

I was about to make rice and beans the other days when I realized that I was out of beans. This sparked off some decidedly grumpy rummaging through my shelves for what food I did have, and some moody contemplation about how easy it is to keep a variety of food in the United States with fridges and stores that regularly sell food—as opposed to the small family owned stores here that sell dry goods, supplemented by whatever happens to be sold on the road that day. And the thing is, I have no reason to complain—I had (outside of rice and live animals) considerably more food on hand than any of my neighbors and could have made a number of meals out of it.

There’s always a huge contrast between ‘need’ and ‘want’, particularly when you’re living around people who show up how little you really need. Malagasy food culture in my rural area is almost entirely subsistence agriculture—people work with their rice from seed to field to cooking pot, and supplement vast quantities of rice with smaller side dishes of whatever is nearby and in season—boiled leaves, fruit, egg, or milk for example, but rarely more than one side dish at a meal. It certainly would gain points from any local foods movement adherents (though not environmentalists, as rice fields are cleared from forest areas and frequently sprayed with strong pesticides, when the farmer can afford it).

Anyway, I made a list of all the food that I had in my house of few days ago, out of curiosity:

Food bought locally:

1 cup raw peanuts

Salt, sugar

1 egg

2 bananas

2 cups rice

Tomato paste

1 onion

Bleach

Food bought in the city:

Peanut butter

Oil

Honey

¼ kilo flour, full of weevils

Cocoa powder

Ketchup

1 bag couscous

Powdered milk

1 head garlic

½ bag raisins, full of weevils

From U.S. care packages or other volunteers:

Pineapple jam (homemade by another volunteer)

Tea

Parmesean cheese

Spices

Emergen-C, Crystal Light

2 granola bars

The weevilly stuff will be consumed after sifting and yes, bleach is a food—I filter and bleach all the water I drink. It tastes like pool water, hence the Crystal Light.

From an American perspective, this is probably the amount of food you’d bring on a weekend camping trip. From a rural Malagasy perspective, it’s a boggling variety of snack food (not enough rice to make a real meal, of course). So the question I always ask myself is—do I feel grateful for the food I have, or wish for food I don’t? I predictably try to do the former and frequently end up doing the latter—I’m grateful that I have clean pool water to drink but man! Sometimes I wish it were orange juice.

And by the way—I made banana pancakes that night, topped with honey. No complaints there.

Holidays

The number of unpleasant drunks and earsplitting “discos” in my town spikes during holiday parties, so for Christmas and New Year’s I opted to briefly flee town for safety in numbers with other volunteers. Christmas was quiet and pleasant—Secret Santa, Love Actually, and a nice Christmas seafood dinner at a hotel. Pretty American, minus the heat (It was NINETY at EIGHT in the morning the other day, and that’s not unusual).

New Year’s, though, ended up being a mixture of Gasy and American, and a lot of fun as well. One of the volunteers in my region just left this week for home, and some of us spent New Year’s at her site with her wonderful (and wonderfully protective) host family to say (a very temporary) goodbye.

Malagasies generally stay up until midnight the night of the first, not the thirty-first, but they were willing to humor us and do both. It’s a chore to stay up late when there’s no electricity, but happily the matriarch of the family brought over a pick-me-up drink—equal parts coffee and condensed milk. We were placidly playing Hearts and having our hair braided when, shortly before midnight, we realized we had to do SOMETHING to mark the New Year. We explained the tradition of the midnight ball drop our very confused hosts, who humored us by finding a slightly deflated soccer ball. (One volunteer suggested dropping a chicken off the roof and was vetoed, though I regret to say not entirely on humanitarian grounds—we thought the roof would cave in.)

So at midnight we stood in the yard in total darkness, counted down from ten, and threw the soccer ball up in the air. One of the volunteers, who had previously served in Namibia, was goaded into ululating for us, which briefly made the Malagasies think there was a witch in the vicinity. Then, confusing our hosts further after this odd ritual, we went to bed. Like I said, it’s hard to stay awake when there’s no electricity.

The next day, we got up early to see the village patriarch shoot off his gun. I’m not sure how this tradition got started, but he shot off some blanks to announce the New Year. Then, after some rice cake and more condensed milk coffee, we went to milk cows. I think the cow owner may have just been allowing us to come along for entertainment purposes, but he was very nice about it. These are not, naturally, American dairy cows—these are hardscrabble grass fed Gasy cows with very large horns. To milk them, the farmer went to their night pen the evening before we milked to close the calves off in a separate area. In the morning, he let the calves into the main cow pen one at a time. Once the calf found its mother, he looped a rope around the mom’s hind legs, pulled the calf off from feeding, and milked into a gourd that had a hole cut into it. Once this was full, he poured it into a bucket on the other side of the fence. We all tried our hand at milking, with some minor success.

Then it was time to cook, and everyone in the extended family brought dishes to a big makeshift tent where the elders made speeches to the parting volunteer.

The day after New Year’s, we went out to the family forest before we left—a lightly cultivated area with mango trees, cassava, sugarcane, pineapple, and coconuts, which we took turns finding and eating. The kids went hunting for cicadas (also to eat, though after cooking) and chased people around with the bugs. All in all, a nice New Year’s with good people.

Six Wells

So as you can see by my last post, the wells are done! As I mentioned, two NGOs (ARES and MBG) matched funds for the original set of three wells, and we were able to build six wells total—two in each town, giving them near-full coverage. I unfortunately wasn’t able to see much of the building process itself (I was gone part of the time, and forbidden in any case to go out to the sites unaccompanied because of a rise in robberies along the trail). But last weekend I arranged for a volunteer guide/bodyguard through the mayor’s office and went to each of the wells to take pictures, check that the wells were being used appropriately, and make sure there were no disputes.

Living in an area where half the population has no shoes and new flipflops are considered luxurious, I didn’t think twice about wearing flipflops on the 14 kilometer hike to the farthest town. But I was still bummed when one of them broke one kilometer in and I had to walk the rest of the way barefoot. Walking on the muddy trail was fine (even fun) but walking on the gravel they use in the towns got a little painful and my feet were smarting for days afterward.

All six wells were nicely finished (complete with USA PEACE CORPS on each—not my idea but kind of cool), and all six had a reasonably high water levels (something of a miracle given the crazy drought we’ve been having this year). The towns had appointed guardians for each well to lock it at night and make sure people were using them correctly, and this ended up being an issue with one of the wells—the main guardian was keeping the well locked most of the time to “keep it clean”. This is sometimes an issue here—most of the (very few) public latrines are kept permanently locked shut, but people are still very proud of what nice structures they are. With the well, I confirmed with several neighbors that the well should be open and free to everyone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and asked the community counsel to bring up the dispute in the next meeting—it’s better if they resolve the issue themselves. I told them I’d have someone check that it was open in a week or two.

Two of the wells are located at schools. And I was quite the spectacle when I was checking on those. The kids surrounded me and played their little game of urging each other closer and closer to The White Foreigner while I’m trying to have a conversation with an (oblivious) adult. Then I get to play my favorite game of Lunge at the Children and Momentarily Scare the Bejeezus out of Them, which quickly becomes their new favorite game but hey, at least it makes me Entertaining White Person rather than Weird White Person. I wear many hats, as you can tell.

Anyway, after some budget paperwork is finished I’ll be turning my full attention to the library, which is already up and running but still needs advertising and a librarian training, to be held next week.

Wells-Done! Will Write Soon.

In Defense of Peace Corps

PCV Katie just added a great post about her views on Peace Corps effectiveness. Take a look!

"Here in Madagascar, the second a word of Malagasy comes out of my mouth, people know that I am American and a surprising number know that I am Peace Corps. It is this demonstration of effort and nod to longevity, this crossing of the divide, that sets us apart. Peace Corps volunteers are a presence in a country: not tourists, not disconnected development workers, but something altogether different."

"For those who criticize the world-changing effectiveness or impact of Peace Corps, this may be the crux of the issue, an incompatibility of expectations and reality. Peace Corps is exceptionally good at what it does; I just don’t think that most Americans know what it is we do."

Zah Mbo Gaga

Once again, I don't know where they find these beaches, but this is a really popular song right now--"Zah Mbo Gaga", which means "I'm still surprised":