Communicating in a Foreign Language

I want to preface this post by saying that I don’t mean to make fun of the Malagasy and their ability to speak English. In fact, I have a lot of respect for them as they seem a lot more enthusiastic about learning new languages and communicating with foreigners than Americans are.

As you know, I don’t have cell phone service at my site. I don’t mean I have to walk a few kilometers or climb to the top of a hill and hold my phone to the sky. I mean no service. This results in some interesting communication systems and unannounced visitors/visits to others. Recently the Peace Corps had to contact me through a local organization that has an office in the city where there is cell service. I think the note, while being entertaining, helps explain what it’s like trying to communicate in a foreign language. I think this is probably what I sound like in Malagasy too…

My friend who delivered it was appalled at the spelling of my name.

What exactly is it that I do over here?

Well I’ve given y’all some idea of my day-to-day life but not a lot on the work side of things. Frankly the line is blurry (cultural exchange is a big part of my job) and living in a new culture presents a lot of barriers to jumping right into “work.” But I’m going to try to explain a little bit about what’s been going onon the technical side of things now that I can speak some Malagasy and have made a few friends in the village.

Fuel-Saving Cookstoves

I’ve been building some fuel-saving cookstoves. I mentioned this before, but here’s a little more detail. With the women here, who are enthused about the idea of not having to collect lots of firewood, I have built over 10 stoves now. The materials are ash, red earth (clay), and rice hulls. We sift them, measure and mix, then add water until it is just the right consistency. We make bricks and then form the actual stove. So far I’ve built a version where the pot sits right on top of the stove and another that has a pot-stand inside and goes up around the pot to create more insulation. I also just finished a version that should work with charcoal, but it’s still drying so the jury is out on how well it works. The stoves dry for 2 weeks after construction which I think is sometimes the most difficult part (“The waaaiting is the hardest part.”) I think it’s been pretty successful for the most part, the women tell me that it saves wood and I imagine it is a big improvement over open fires. There have been some problems with stoves that break because they are fragile and the women are used to being able to move their stoves around.

English Club

I’m not going to lie, I’m actually not the biggest fan of English club. It was mostly started to quell the tides of people asking me when I would teach them English since the response that I’m not an English teacher clearly wasn’t working. But I go to the school every Saturday afternoon for English club which so far has ranged from 2 people to around 20. We are learning very basic things and it’s getting easier and easier with each week. I am learning some better techniques and the students are starting to participate more which is a big step since it seems that Malagasy education involves about 0% interaction.

Community Meeting

I finally gained the language skills and confidence to where I felt like I could handle the community and found the president of the village to schedule a meeting. I was expecting all kinds of unexpected weirdness, as nothing seems to go in the way I plan or imagine it. Surprisingly enough the meeting went smoothly. I explained again what Peace Corps is and what my “job” is and that I have another year and a half left to help out. Then we did a needs assessment where I asked the needs of the community and they ranked the biggest problems. According to the villagers, the top problems in Ambohimanarina are:

1. Low Prices. The cash crops, especially vanilla, are sold in the definition of a buyer’s market. There are tons of middlemen and the farmers don’t see a lot of the profits.

2. Not enough food.

3. No public hospital/lack of medicine.

4. Difficult preparation of students/school children. I’m not 100% sure what this one means, but I think they are getting at the fact that the parents struggle to maintain their farms and also cook for and generally tend to their children.

5. Not enough preparation for Malagasy farmers.

6. *Still searching for the translation of this one*

7. No work for young adults.

So it looks like I’ll be focused on finding some possible solutions/remedies to these problems in the rest of my service.

List of problems in Malagasy

Hillside Farming Demonstration

This is officially the first major environment project I’ve undertaken. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm the villagers are showing for learning. I am trying to create an agroforestry plot that incorpates canals to stop/direct the flow of water and sediment and nitrogen fixing trees to prevent erosion while enriching the soil. The big idea is to try to eliminate the need to find a new plot of land every year and practice slash and burn agriculture. It’s nerve-wracking because everyone hears that I am teaching a new rice farming technique, and they are excited about the rice. I’m still trying to gauge how interested they are when they find out it involves a lot of groundwork the first year (digging canals and such) and planting trees.

Farm helpers

The internet cafe has once again defeated me and I can't figure out how to open word and my prepared blog post. So, here are some photos to hold you over until I once again figure out the computer (or switch computers next time). Also, French keyboards still suck.

I am unexpectedly in town again because I ran out of gas to power my stove halfway through cooking lunch yesterday. Researching agroforestry and hillside (rice) farming as much as I can before heading home. Really I'd like to crawl in a bed and sleep, 4:30AM trips to the city are rough.

Vanilla flowers (I helped pollinate them)

Litchi season!!! yum! My friends I went picking with. The one on the right and the second from the left both claim me as their kid... lots of moms.

He's eating a litchi. I also want him to become a TV celeb. He loves to come to my house to get his photo taken and then look at it. As in, every day. Also he talks and talks and talks to me which is pretty unusual with the kids. Think 20 questions, only more like 20 million questions.

Agroforestry group! Starting a demonstration plot in my village. Finally some environment work! Thought I was going to fall off the hill all morning, it might of helped if I hadn't got up at 5 to run 7 km.

Digging a canal

Until next time, love and miss you!

My world is full of bananas and tomatoes.

There are four major food groups in my village right now.

1. 1. Rice. Duh.

2. 2. Bananas. Fried bananas. Breaded fried bananas. Banana porridge. Banana bread. Plain old bananas. Mini bananas. I haven’t bought bananas in weeks yet I think I have had bananas at least once every day for quite some time.

3. 3. Tomatoes. There are kids that come to my door selling tomatoes pretty much every day. Sometimes the same kids come twice a day. If they don’t, another kid probably comes by. I have tomato plants growing as weeds in my backyard.

4. 4. Everything else.

No really, I’m not an English teacher.

My Life Lately, in Pictures

I’m feeling uninspired for a blog post lately, but I have been using my camera some more. Here are a few pictures of what I’ve been up to recently…

This is what relief looks like. I recently decided to bike 40 km to Andapa. Well actually it was more like bike/walk since the second half of the “ride” was essentially a never-ending uphill climb. This is the view I had when I turned a corner, could finally see Andapa, and had a quick 3 km downhill finish. (I rode a taxi-brousse home.)

Still building those cookstoves… (Note her white hat that she put on just for the photo op.)

One of my favorite local hangouts. This is the local “soza” stand (“soza” is soy tea, aka very sweet, hot, homemade soy milk) and the only place to find bread in Ambohimanarina. Also the site of my very first cookstove.

These fish cost me 50 cents. And the women came to my house, sold them to me at my doorstep, and proceeded to clean them for me without me even asking.

I just had to go to 2 funerals in 3 days. Too much sitting for my fidgety self. This is just the “ro” (the side dish with the rice) cooking for one of the funerals. I think these might be the largest pots in the world.

Funeral lunch. That thatched roof in the background is my house. This is also not even everyone that ate.

Market day. This is actually towards the end of the market when there’s not a whole lot of people around buying stuff. But it was a particularly good market day.

This is what terror looks like, because white skin is terrifying. At least to this kid. I never appreciated how truly nice diversity is until it was gone from my life.

Came home from a walk to find my neighbor weighing this group of adorable and quite loud kindergarteners in the empty house behind mine.

*Side note: Just chased down the freakiest spider I have ever seen. Usually I’m not disturbed by spiders but this one was a huge mama carrying its babies around with it. Taken care of.

Alright, I’m going to cut it off there since I think this will probably take a while to load. Love and miss you all,

Leslie

A change of scenery

The last couple weeks has been sort of a whirlwind for me here. I went to Antananarivo (Tana), the capital, for my In Service Training (IST). Then I took a vacation. I'll try to give you all the cliff notes version here...

IST:

All of us PCVs who arrived together back in March came back for a re-training. We got to reconnect, share ideas and talk about our sites, learn more in-depth technical topics, and brush up on our Malagasy language skills a little bit. It was really nice to see everyone again and to get new outlooks on possible projects. Also, we headed back to the training center in Mantasoa and were pampered by them cooking us some delicious food and doing our laundry!

Vacation:

A group of us headed up to Mahajunga after IST. Mahajunga is a beach town on the northwest coast of Madagascar. The highlights:

• Pleasant taxi-broussing. We rented our own brousse on the way up, so it was all Americans with plenty of room. One of the most comfortable rides I have taken on public transport in Madagascar.
• Sunsets! The trip was full of awesome sunsets. The first one was on our drive to Mahajunga.

The beach. Swam in the Mozambique Channel and enjoyed a much more touristy beach than the one we have up in Sambava. We drank out of coconuts, ate fresh mangoes, coconut cookies, and brochettes (meat kabobs) on the beach.
• Cirque Rouge. Really awesome rock formations near Mahajunga where we were able to watch yet another beautiful sunset.

• Ankarafantsika National Park. Visited this park and our friend Mike's site on the way back to Tana. Got to see some more of Madagascar's unique wildlife. This park is dry deciduous forest, which felt very different from the rainforest I am used to seeing! It reminded me in a lot of ways of Florida scrub. We saw a sportive lemur and the Coquerel's sifaka. Also, lots and lots of birds! I need to look them all up in my wildlife book but one of them was the paradise flycatcher.

Coquerel's sifaka

Sportive lemur (peeking out from the tree trunk)

That's the update, hope all is well with you. I'm headed back to my site soon to hopefully get cracking on some new projects. I'll keep in you in the loop. Peace, love, and lots of rice! (Also see flickr for more photos!)

If you build it, they will come.

So something really cool that's going on in my village right now is that they are building a new school building. There have been tons of town meetings lately to discuss it. This means that a lot of nights theres a couple of kids walking around the village around 5 PM, blowing a whistle and shouting in Malagasy that everyone should come down to the school yard for a meeting. I haven't been to all the meetings, but the basic gist is that we have a lot of quatrieme students in my village (I think this is CEG, the middle school equivalent). The man in charge of schools has said there is a teacher out there and if we build a school then we will have a new teacher for it. So what this means is that the community is coming together to build a school.

It's been really impressive watching how the school construction happens. People donated the construction materials and one morning a bunch of men kept passing my house with various building materials--planks of wood, raffia (the leaves they use for roofing) and bamboo. The men went up to start construction, and the women came up with donated rice and cooked lunch. It was awesome to see everyone pitching in. Here's some photos:

Men building the school (it's up by the soccer field.)

The cooking crew

More building photos.

Giant pot!

So I left my village for a few weeks--training and vacation. But I am told that once the school is there, they will request the teacher. By the time I get back school should be in session. This could mean a lot more kid visitors because the main path up the hill to the school passes my house. I'll keep you updated.

Article about Marojejy

If you're interested...

Article about lemurs and Marojejy (near my site!)

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/film-underlines-plight-of-the-lemur/

Gross insect or fun toy? You decide.

Check out the kid on the right, priceless.

Children!

I have a lot of little kid friends. Friends in that most days I find them amusing, I am on a very similar level at speaking Malagasy as them (though I finally feel like I am getting slightly better than a five year old!!), and on their end I am fascinating. They love to come over and look at my picture books (thank god I acquired them during PST) or to look at my photo album or to talk to me or stare at me or occasionally play frisbee. I'm not going to lie it can be annoying, but here are some of the more priceless interactions...

Everything is a toy. Seriously. Candy wrappers, bottles, papaya peels. The best was the other day when the little girl whose photo I posted earlier (and who has really taken a liking to me lately) came over with a roach. Luckily after living in a pretty well infested apartment in SC and in the south in general for about 6 years I am okay with roaches. Don't love them or anything but I can handle them. Well this roach was her toy for the day. I got a really funny photo that I'll post later.

Sometimes being watched is just too much, so I'll go to get water at the pump and hope the kids lose interest. It's pretty much never successful but I still try. Yesterday I got water with about 5 kids running alongside. They arrived at my door and stood there in the way. When I walked around them I of course spilled. "Hey, Leslie, your house is wet." Thanks, kid. I didn't notice that water sloshing out because you were in the way.

We also have "salama" wars. Salama is the general greeting in the dialect of Malagasy spoken at my site. I have one kid that really likes to come up, pause for a moment, then yell "salama!" at me. They find it really fun when I respond and each kid has to try. But sometimes one kid just keeps repeating it, so it's basically us going back and forth: "Salama!" "Salama!" "Salama!" "Salama!" "Salama!" until I get tired of it.

It's been pretty darn rainy and therefore muddy. I was walking behind a little boy. In his little kid way he wasn't really looking, stepped in a puddle and slipped, almost falling down. He made a surprised noise (wah-lah!) and looked down at the puddle like it snuck up on him.

Accident Prone Annie

I thought I was a fairly well-coordinated person. I've played lots of different sports involving hand-eye coordination and I even took several years of ballet. Then I came to Madagascar.

In my defense, I feel like my clumsiness here is probably magnified by the abundance of dirt roads which quickly turn to slick mud when it rains and very narrow walking paths that often abut places you probably shouldn't be walking, like in a rice field. Also being stared at 24/7 adds to it. But, in addition to losing my coordination I have also lost a lot of self-conciousness and my sense of shame so I am going to invite you to be entertained by my foolishness and let this be my verbal blooper reel. Here are some of the more ridiculous embarrassments I have suffered so far:

First day of homestay, we go to do laundry. In the middle of some rice fields. I slip and fall in carrying my full bucket of laundry home. Welcome to Madagascar, Leslie.

Riding my bike home, it's a rainy day. It seems like an okay idea to bike on the muddy road (why, Leslie?) Go over the wooden-plank "bridge" but have to turn right immediately afterwards. I slow-motion topple, with my bike, into the muddy ditch that the bridge spans. Covered in mud and all I can do is laugh as I pick myself up and go home to clean up.

Market day in Maroambihy, went with my counterpart to introduce myself and learn about the community (it is a village about 5 km from mine, still in my commune-think county) Another rainy day. The market route has turned to mud, but I am sick of sitting and waiting for the market to end so we can ride home with the market ladies from Ambohimanarina. I decide to go check out the market and buy some food. I end up having to take off my sandals because they just get stuck and make it harder to walk in the soft mud and come back with some incredibly muddy feet. And all the food was at the market entrance on the paved road.

Went to help transplant rice, about a 45 minute walk on little paths around the flooded rice fields. Rainy day (a bit of a theme here, I think I might be in trouble when it's actually the rainy season.) On the walk home they have someone hold my hand for all the difficult stretches because I slip and slide in my shoes a lot more than they do in bare feet!

So I'll be over here doing balancing exercises until next time.

Love from Mada, Leslie.

How it feels to be a PCV, personified.

I generally don’t download photos because it is slow and internet is kind of expensive, but today I am making an exception. I recently snapped this photo of a little girl who comes by and hangs out at my house. She stares at me with a look that is somehow both incredibly intense but also expressionless. I can’t figure out if she is trying really hard to memorize my face or something. Anyhow, I feel like the way she looks at me really describes what it feels like to be a PCV for me every day in my village.

Adventures in Taxi-broussing

Riding in taxi-brousses continues to be quite the experience. I think I already described taxi-broussing, but here’s a refresher: a taxi-brousse is the public transport here, usually a mini-bus or van. They pack them as full as possible. They are generally set up in rows where there is a double seat on each side of a middle aisle. In the U.S. you would probably put 4 people in each row and leave the middle clear, even though there is a small fold-out seat there. Here you definitely have 5 people across each row, but it’s not uncommon to pack in 6 or have a few children on laps here and there. The passenger’s seat up front can hold two to three people too, and then as the brousse continues to pick people up along the way there are often people standing on the back bumper, hanging on outside of the vehicle as well. According to my guidebook, taxi-brousses in my region of Madagascar are some of the most packed, and I don’t doubt it. My village is on the road between Andapa and Sambava, so I have to flag down passing brousses when I want to leave. If I don’t get up at the crack of dawn to catch one of the first vehicles passing my site then they are all overstuffed with people hanging out the back and it can take a couple hours before I find a spot. (I will snap a few photos some time before I leave this country because you really need to see a full taxi-brousse to believe it.)

My most recent brousse ride back to site was quite the event. I was sitting up front at first, but we stopped to pick up a woman who insisted that she had reserved the front seat. The other man up front refused to move. I was ready to get going and when I turned around the back of the brousse actually wasn’t overstuffed (this should have been a red flag) so I agreed to move to the back. We proceeded to pick up more people so that an extra person was standing in what little space was left in each row! There was a woman standing next to me holding a small baby, but of course when I tried holding him he just cried in terror at the sight of my terrifying white face. The brousse was so stuffed that the driver let people off, went through the police barricades where they check the brousse’s papers and make sure they are not overly cramped/carrying illegal items, then waited for the people to catch up. Twice. And they still had to bribe the police.

Another exciting aspect of taxi-broussing on some routes is that there are certain stops where vendors run up and swarm the brousse selling snacks. I just got back from a trip to Antalaha with my friend, another volunteer Mallory. The route to Antalaha has one stop with especially aggressive vendors selling hard-boiled eggs, green coconuts, green papaya salad, coconut cookies, samosas, and hand-made baskets. The vendors attack the car like hungry piranhas and shove dishes of food towards the windows. This time Mallory decided she would get a green coconut. In case you have never had one, next time you get a chance you should buy one because the coconut water inside is delicious! But, you should be sure to have them open it for you. (Someone gave me a green coconut last week and I literally spent half the morning in my house wrestling it open. The natives have super sharp machetes that get the job done in minutes.) Well, Mallory bought her coconut and drank all the delicious juice. Then she wanted to get at the equally delicious fleshy insides. Unfortunately the drinking hole in the coconut was not quite big enough to get into, nor did we have a spoon handy. But like any resourceful PCV, Mallory widened the coconut hole and searched her belongings for a makeshift tool. After a couple hilarious failed attempts which entertained not only us but all the other passengers, she settled on the cap of a water bottle. Delicious success!

A brief overview of my life lately...

One of my guilty pleasures at site is listening to Voice of America on my shortwave radio. Recently I have found the tables turned, I am worrying about all of you over there in the U.S.! I got back from my previous trip to Sambava and heard about an earthquake(!) on the east coast, and now Hurricane Irene is headed straight for NC! The radio hasn’t been specific about where it will make landfall (I am pre-writing this blog post so I don’t know yet) which is frustrating for someone who hails from coastal NC. On to the updates from me, I feel like it’s been a little while. I can never seem to remember what I have told you all…

Well, I have passed the 3 month mark at my site. By the time I post this I will have been in Madagascar for 6 months! My focus is supposed to start shifting towards environmental work instead of the community integration I’ve been working on during my first weeks at site. Honestly, this change is not really a noticeable one. I am still scrabbling to find things to occupy my time. We have training again at the end of September with a focus more on technical work, so that should be really helpful to get things going.

Rice season is starting, and people are still sorting their cooked/dried vanilla. I really love it when my neighbors lay out their vanilla to dry because it smells amazing! I have been working with many of the women here building fuel-efficient cookstoves. We mix up a sort of mud from red clay, rice hulls, and ash, then form it into a stove that is supposed to retain heat. It’s not the most exciting work but it is nice to do a little bit to slow deforestation. After being asked about a million and one times when I would start teaching English I decided to start an English club on Saturday afternoons. I realized just how unqualified I am and how difficult teaching English is, but I will learn along with the students and they are very eager to learn even what little I can teach them.

In daily life I would estimate that being the only white person living in about a 40 km radius makes me twice as weird, 5 times as popular, 10 times as attractive, and 20 times as interesting as ever before. Also, there are 2 things that can always increase: the amount of food in my stomach (especially if rice is involved) and the ridiculousness of the situation in which I currently find myself. I don’t think I could make up some of the crazy things that happen to me on a daily basis.

I used to pride myself on being good with names, but I have a ridiculously hard time remembering Malagasy names. It’s difficult to ask a person their name repeatedly when I see them every day, know where they live, and they all know my name already. A lot of people go by “Mama of…” or “Papa of…” so I probably know more people by association with their children than by their first name.Sometimes I have to rely on descriptions such as “the woman who lives by the Catholic church and sews,” which is effective but makes me feel even worse about not retaining names.

I am now regularly rising around 5 AM to go running with my Malagasy friend, Mama nyEry. She runs one of the shops in town and every other day she comes to my house to get me for a jog. It’s really nice to have someone to keep me on track and to keep me company, but getting up that early is always a little bit rough, regardless of how early I go to bed. There have been a couple mornings where she has been my alarm clock (Mama nyEry happens to be one of the few Malagasy people who is actually on time or early; though she says 5:30 this can mean any time from 5:15 on). On many mornings I go from laying in my bed to running in as little as 15 or 20 minutes.

I visit the market in town every Wednesday, do a lot of reading, and try to get out for at least a short walk every day. I really hate doing laundry and I am getting pretty sick of eating “ananasmafana” which seem to be the only vegetable that is reliably available here (and also convenient because people come to my door selling it). I head into Sambava every few weeks as a break from village life and to communicate with the outside world (if you ever want to talk, shoot me an email and we can work out a time). Trips to Sambava mean eating myself sick as it’s difficult to resist the pastries, ice cream, pizza, and other exciting foods that my stomach is no longer used to eating.

Well, that about covers it. I hope you are all surviving the weirdness that Mother Nature seems to be delivering over there in America. Thinking of you from Madagascar!

Classroom correspondence

Hey all,

I wanted to write a quick post about doing a classroom correspondence. I already have a class that I do a monthly correspondence through with Peace Corps. The local private school has expressed interest in setting up a correspondence between the Malagasy students and American students. The class I am currently writing to is a high school class, but the school here has students starting from around kindergarten age up through about 16 years old. I was wondering if there was anyone out there who knew of any other interested group of kids (can be a school group, church group, or otherwise)? I think this would be especially cool for younger kids. Honestly, I still need to talk with the school director and teachers to figure out how the correspondence would work because while the students here do learn some English they are definitely not fluent. I also don’t know if the school already has funding to send the letters or if I would need to find that as well. Please let me know if you are aware of any interested groups of children, but keep in mind that they will probably be responsible for postage for their letters sent from the states (an airmail stamp from the U.S. is 98 cents and I think covers something like 10 ounces). The school year here will start back around October. Feel free to email me (natureles@gmail.com) if you are interested or have questions. Thanks!

Two years...

First of all, thanks to all of you who have been following my blog and keeping in touch! I have heard a lot of positive feedback and I am glad you are enjoying reading.

For today’s post I am taking a slightly different direction. I was reading through my letters from the U.S. today and it got me to thinking about just how different daily life is for my friends and family in America and for me. I hear you have the iPad 2. To me that is just some mystical device that is rumored to exist but having settled into electricity-, cell phone-, and general modern gadget-free world it sounds like a farce. I have also been listening to Voice of America and hearing them repeat the same “new” Lady Gaga song for a few weeks now. I can’t help but wonder what new singer is out there that I have yet to hear about. It got me to thinking, what the heck is going to happen to me when I go back to the U.S.???

First I tried to think what it was like 2 years ago. Let’s see… I had just graduated from UNC and was living in South Carolina. Big national/world news was the financial crisis and the job crisis (especially being a young person in the job market). Personal news was getting a Verizon cell phone, following Carolina basketball (which was kind of confusing as to me this means UNC but in South Carolina not so much), working and for the first time not having to go back to school in the fall.

Then I tried to imagine what it will be like for me in the U.S. in two years. I will still be a Carolina basketball fan but I will no longer know how to turn on a TV or find the correct station. This might involve giving your TV/computer/cellphone/all-in-one-super-advanced-electronic-thingy some sort of voice command. Grandmas will be more tech-savvy than me (though this might have already been the case…) I might just try flagging down cars on the highway to send notes to my friends, because this is the best way I know how to transmit news. I will probably be starting or looking for a new job. My English will be rusty but on the bright side I will have the much sought-after skill of speaking Malagasy to add to my resume. I will be overwhelmed by the incredible selection at the supermarket, but miss the interactions of asking how much everything costs, bargaining, and being stared at by small children. I might actually be sitting in my house waiting for a small child to pass by selling vegetables out of a basket on her head and just never find food. If I need to go to the doctor, I will have friends who in the time I have been gone have become doctors. The roads will be filled with all kinds of amazing new vehicles that run on sustainable fuels and I won’t know what to do with all the room I have in which to stretch my arms and legs while inside said vehicles. I might still be on Malagasy time and therefore always be late to engagements, but wake up super early in the morning and go to bed shortly past dark. I will either have to eat rice every day or never want to eat rice again. I will use a variety of sounds in place of words to express emotion and often speak in a sing-song manner with exaggerated vowel sounds.

Really, that’s all just exaggeration and speculation but it’s really interesting to think about. What do you think America will be like around May 2013?

I still have times where it’s hard for me to believe that I am sitting in my house which is in Madagascar. Or I am out for a walk and find myself at the top of a hill looking down at a beautiful tropical landscape and a quaint little village. It’s strange that as I am waking up in the morning, my family in America is going to sleep. They are driving to and from work or school every day. They go home to watch TV or get on the internet or read a book under their electric lights. I am walking around my village and talking in Malagasy and sweeping my house and front yard and fetching water from the pump down the road.

These differences are also something that I have a hard time wrapping my head around when I think about development. In the U.S. it’s pretty much a given that your house has electricity and clean, running water. Somebody comes by once a week with a truck to collect your garbage and you probably don’t even really know where the garbage ends up. You can go to the supermarket and buy an apple every day of the year, regardless of season. The whole scale of an American life is so much larger than that of a Malagasy. In my village your trash goes into your trash pit that is somewhere near your home (at least you should have one) or is very often recycled into a game for children. The most common electronic device is a battery-powered radio, and even this is a luxury. If you are having pork for dinner they probably killed the pig down the road early this morning. It’s interesting because there are a lot of Americans out there looking to be more “green” or more sustainable—definitely not a worry here. But then the Malagasy have their own problems, like polluted water sources or spending hours each week travelling to far away patches of forest to collect firewood for cooking. It definitely raises the question of where is that balance between having enough infrastructure and development to support the people and having so much development that you are degrading the world around you?

Maronjejy!

So I finally got to visit the national park near my site, Maronjejy. It was awesome! The trip got off to an interesting start. As I have said before, there is no cell phone service at my site. A volunteer who lives nearby told me that she would be coming to visit the park for a day so I was expecting her to arrive at my site in the morning. She hadn’t arrived by mid-morning so I decided to go over to my neighbor for a lesson in cooking Malagasy food (this resulted in a delicious lunch which I will have to inform you about in another post some other time). What I didn’t account for was the fact that nothing here ever occurs as you expect it to. I was cleaning up lunch when I heard American English at my doorway—not something that really happens at my site. My friends had arrived and informed me that we were going to spend the night in Maronjejy. I packed in about 10 minutes and we set out for the park.

We went up to stay at the second camp because the first one was full. It was quite the climb! Looking at the distances on paper it didn’t seem like it would be too bad—about 4.6 km to the first camp and another 2 km to the second. But that doesn’t include the 5 km from the road to the park entrance or the fact that we climbed up to 775 m above sea level. It was a bit of a difficult hike with a lot of travel over mud and slippery rocks. The second day we hiked around in search of the Silky Sifaka (more on that later) and then descended almost as quickly as we had come. We also got rained on (it is the rainforest after all) which made the trip a little more tricky. I was exhausted when I got home but it was definitely a great experience overall.

Things I got to see in Maronjejy: the most exciting would have to be the Silky Sifaka. It is an all-white lemur that is one of the 3 rarest species in Madagascar. Maronjejy is one of the few places the Silky Sifaka can be found and we saw one in the morning as it was still drowsily hanging out in the trees. We also saw bamboo lemurs by the first camp. There were also lots of exciting plants, including an endemic palm that is only found at a certain elevation on the mountain, a latex tree, and rosewood. There were also frogs, snakes, a few birds, and a rat (I still need to look up what it might be).

I have heard a couple stories about where the name Maronjejy comes from, but I was told by villagers that it is from “maro jejia.” Maro means many in Malagasy, and jejia is a type of tree similar to a coconut. I look forward to learning more about the park and the surrounding areas in the months to come. Some other time I want to return and go all the way to the summit of Maronjejy.

Reading List

I thought I would share with you what I’ve been reading so far for anyone who is interested. It’s kind of a wide variety of things and lately highly influenced by what I have gotten from other volunteers.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union- Michael Chabon

One Amazing Thing

Practical Demonkeeping- Christopher Moore

Be Cool- Elmore Leonard

The Firmament of Time- Loren Eiseley

Two Ears of Corn- Roland Bunch

A Thousand Acres- Jane Smiley

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency- Alexander McCall Smith

The Good Good Pig- Sy Montgomery

The Bad Girl- Mario Vargas Llosa

Embers

Bizarre Foods Madagascar

I’m going to start off this post with the disclaimer that if you have a weak stomach (Christine) you probably shouldn’t read this whole post. I’ll tell you when to stop. Or if you are feeling brave and have already fully satisfied your hunger for the day with delicious food (which you should do on my behalf anyhow) and are not going to eat again soon, read on if you dare.

Before I came to Mada, there was an episode of the TV show Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmer on the Travel Channel where he came to Madagascar. We DVRed it (side note: I just need to say that having all your favorite TV shows at your fingertips all the time is crazy, let alone having them once a week at a given time, on time) and watched the episode. I’m pretty sure Christine said something like “if I come visit you, I am bringing all my food with me.” Well, it turns out living in Madagascar has given me my own little bizarre foods experience which I feel like I should share with all of you out there enjoying heaping portions of macaroni and cheese or pizza or hamburgers or risotto or vegetable stir fries or lasagna or ice cream or cake or whatever delicious treat you happen to indulge in. (In case you couldn’t tell I have been suffering from vivid food dreams here.) Food is also one of those topics of discussion that can get me through a long conversation in Malagasy that goes something like this:

“Do you have X in the U.S.?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have Y in the U.S.?”

“No.”

“Have you ever eaten Y?”

“No.”

Laughter. (sometimes this results in a gift of food Y and demo of how to consume it)

“Do you know how to cook Z?”

“No I don’t know how.”

“Well first you wash it, then you peel it, then… It’s good mixed with coconut or oil or meat or…”

…

It’s also very entertaining for everyone when I go to the market and point at various fruits or vegetables and ask what they are and how to cook/eat them. Another favorite topic of conversation is what the “ro” is at one’s house, meaning what is the dish you ate with your rice today? (Because obviously you are having rice at every meal, right?)

Something new at my site is the amazing selection of tropical fruits. They tend to go in and out of season very quickly; one week there will be so many of one fruit you don’t think you will ever want one again and then in 2 weeks they are impossible to find. We have lechees; I am told that the lechees in season now (they are called “lechee kakazo” and are raspberry-colored, golfball-sized with soft spikes) are not even as delicious as the real lechees which are only in season around December. Then there was “saokoana” which I would say is kind of a cross between a peach and a mango with a little apple thrown in. It’s sort of apple-sized, you peel it and eat the insides and it has a spiky peach-like pit. Very tangy and kind of a weird flavor but yummy nonetheless. There is also “corresol,” a big green fruit with what I can only describe as tiny black dimples (that is a terrible description but bear with me). The inside is soft and white with smooth black seeds. Corresol juice is incredibly delicious. Today I tried “ampalibe,” a huge yellow, scaly fruit. Inside it looks kind of like fat pieces of spaghetti and you eat the soft part around the seeds.

Pretty much everything here can and is cooked with coconut milk. (Someone else in the region is actually trying to count all the things she has eaten with coconut here.) Things you can eat with coconut milk: cassava leaves, chicken, fish, corn, plantains, any type of greens, breadfruit…

Bananas: there is an amazing selection of bananas. I think there is something like 8 types, ranging from bananas the length of the palm of your hand to almost the length of your arm. There are bananas you can eat when ripe and those that you have to cook before eating.

Ranonampango: Rice water. After they cook the rice, there are usually some burnt remains in the pot. They pour in water and boil it over the burnt rice remnants and you drink this at the end of the meal. It basically is rice tea; before coming I had one of those Nuvi brand teas that was rice-flavored and tastes kind of similar. It’s an acquired taste; I think it’s alright but other volunteers hate it. The Malagasy people at my site are always shocked when I tell them we don’t have ranonampango in the states.

Ananas: greens. There are lots of different types of greens (as in the U.S.) but it is hard to tell what they will taste like. The names are somewhat descriptive. For instance “ananas mafana” means hot greens, they are not exactly spicy but they give your mouth the tingly sensation like when your feet fall asleep. “Ananas be” means big greens, looks just like green leaf lettuce but can be more bitter. “Ananas mamy” means sweet greens, they aren’t really sweet.

Lately some of my adopted Malagasy families here have been having quite the time of introducing me to new foods. It’s really kind of funny the contrast between my reaction and theirs. Whereas they think eating something is totally normal because they have always eaten it and so does everyone else, I am confused or shocked by it and just have to say nope, I’ve never eaten that. It’s probably a good thing that I gave up my years of vegetarianism a while before I came here otherwise this would certainly be extra difficult.

*Here is the really bizarre portion, stop reading if you are easily grossed out or about to eat. Go eat a cookie or a sandwich for me instead.

The first really bizarre foods experience was cow’s feet. Not delicious and I am going to spare you the details (if you are curious, shoot me an email or letter and I’ll describe more.) I think they could tell I was a little freaked out and I said I had never eaten cow’s feet before, which led to a discussion of foods that are “fady” or taboo. I couldn’t really think of anything that’s a taboo across the board in the U.S. Some Malagasy people don’t eat pork because it’s “fady”; I guess you could say that eating parts of the animal like the feet is sort of taboo in the U.S. It’s kind of hard to think of those kind of things under pressure and besides I don’t really feel okay telling them that I won’t eat the food they are kindly sharing with me.

The next bizarre food was cow’s heart. They made it on sort of kabobs, and since I had already eaten the kabobs (“brochettes” or “moustik”) with regular cuts of meat I didn’t realize that it was heart until towards the end of the meal. I can’t say I regret not knowing. I’m pretty sure I will have eaten most parts of the cow by the time I leave Mada, as I was told it is okay to eat everything on the cow. The newest addition was cow skin. Yes, cow skin. Luckily this was delivered to my house, where though I felt obliged to at least try a bite I could discreetly give it to the dogs. This was one of those that they thought was really funny we don’t eat. It was delivered to my house by a third party who didn’t actually know what he was delivering. When I lifted the lid he just said “oh, it’s cow skin,” in a way that insinuated that this is a perfectly normal side dish.

This past week I was shown a type of bug that they eat here, though we didn’t eat it. The bug is actually slightly scary looking, it has kind of a long nose (the proboscis maybe? My apologies to those of you who are actually good at entomology) but unfortunately I already forgot the name. They assured me that it was a nice, fatty food (this is an excellent thing in the opinion of the Malagasy).

Dry fish was something focused on in the TV show and there is definitely no shortage of it at my site. I think it is one of the major sources of protein for people here. Bascially they take the fish and splay it down the middle, then dry it. Does not smell particularly good in the market.

Well that pretty much wraps it up for now though I am sure there will be more exciting food adventures to come. I hope you enjoyed reading or at least were not too freaked out!

A funny story from my village recently...

Someone was asking me about my trip to Madagascar (how long was the flight? How many planes? etc.). When I told them that I was in an airplane for something like 16 hours they asked me if we ate on the plane. Yes, I said, they give you food on the plane.

Did they have rice?

Well, no.

You would be amazed at the response to this. The people were so shocked. A meal without rice? Did it make you full? Someone even said they would bring their own plate of cooked rice with them on the plane.

Malagasy funerals

Within my first month at site I witnessed 2 funerals, including one for someone who was apparently well-known and important in the community. A Malagasy funeral is quite the event and lasts a long time. After the person dies, they clean the body and dress it in white and lay it on a bed with a white veil over it. Then, the family and community sit and wait with the body, anywhere from 1-3 days. For one funeral they waited 3 days; the first 2 days they were waiting for the body to arrive from Diego and then the family/friends to arrive from far-away villages. The people literally sit together all night and day. The family sits inside the house with the body and they build a covered structure outside for everyone else to sit under. They even string up lightbulbs and run those off a generator at night. The night before the last day of waiting, they have a sort of funeral service. People sing and pray and there are also speeches (speeches seem to be a given in all Malagasy customs). The young girls prepare coffee and serve it to the people who are waiting.

The next day the family of the deceased prepares a huge meal and everyone eats lunch together. The young women cook the rice in the biggest pots that you have ever seen. The young men prepare the side dish that goes with the rice (“ro”). Once the meal is ready, everyone eats together. Also on this day, they build the coffin. After everyone eats together, they have a small service then take the body to the tomb to finish up the ceremony.

People also bring gifts of rice and money, which is all recorded in the “boky mena” (red book). There are rules for how much each person should give and who must give and who can give if they want to. They write down everyone’s donations and I am told that they will actually consult these books when someone dies. If you didn’t give when there was a death, the people will not come and give to your family when you die. The various organizations in the community, like the women’s groups or sports clubs, also donate to the family.

Vingt-Six

Vingt-six (26 in French) is Malagasy Independence Day. It is June 26 and quite possibly the most important Malagasy holiday. I am told this and New Year are the big ones. And it’s not just a one day celebration but it generally gets extended over several days. This year vingt-six was on Sunday. The celebration in my village started around midnight-2 AM Saturday morning when I was awoken by the sounds of pigs being slaughtered and dogs barking. The big thing here is to eat pork on holidays, there have been signs out since I got to site over a month ago announcing that people will be selling “Henan-dambo matavy” (literally: fat pig meat) on June 25. Saturday morning I left to go running around 5:45AM and already a lot of people were out picking up their pork to begin cooking and celebrating.

There was also a soccer tournament which ran from about Thursday through Monday. The big finals were on vingt-six, with tons of fans, speakers blasting Malagasy music, and lots of vendors selling snacks. People here all buy new clothes to wear on vingt-six, so everyone was dressed in their best new clothes. Especially with kids, they tend to buy outfits that go together and twins wear the same thing.

On vingt-six, there is a small parade with all the students from the school and the fikambana vehivavy (women’s groups) in town. My town has 8 fikambanana vehivavy. After the parade, they raise the Malagasy flag and play the anthem, then the women’s groups each perform a “soma,” which means they sing and dance. They dug 2 holes in the ground and placed planks over them to accommodate the dancers who do a lot of stomping. It’s actually pretty ingenious, it allowed everyone to be able to hear the stomping loud and clear. One of the women’s groups adopted me and taught me their soma, dressed me up and had me perform with them front and center. I have definitely had a lesson in getting over any self-conciousness here because everyone is always watching what I do. But the soma was a lot of fun and the people in my village really enjoyed that I participated. Plus it’s my job to learn the culture. On Monday I played soccer with the women. They had a game of the women who haven’t yet had kids versus the women with kids; my team (no kids) won. We got a prize of 10,000 ariary and all went out for sodas after the game. I have definitely missed playing team sports so it was a lot of fun to play.

The other tradition that about half the people participate in is drinking “betsa”—alcohol from sugar cane. Apparently part of the reason the holiday lasts so long is that they make huge vats of betsa and drink it all. There is also music and dancing in the night and sometimes films. I can’t really elaborate much on these events as I don’t go out at night and so can’t participate.

A funny part of this holiday has been explaining that American independence day is on July 4. People are actually surprised that we don’t celebrate vingt-six and our independence day is not the same as theirs, which I have to admit I find a bit amusing each time they ask.

Hello again!

Alright, I’m taking a shot at writing this post before I get to the internet café with its crazy French keyboards. I want to thank all of you have have taken the time to send letters, packages, emails, etc. With me moving to site and changing addresses everything has gotten delayed, but I will get back to all of you! Thank so much!

Okay, I’m going to do this post as a list of fun facts about life in Madagascar.

1. You can eat anything with rice. Seriously. For instance: peanut butter, eggs, ramen noodles.

2. A lot of things are also eaten with sugar. The Malagasy love sweet foods. They also think its hilarious and weird when I tell them that we usually eat the same foods with salt, not sugar. For instance: avocado, potatoes, corn.

3. Many Malagasy people do not believe that Michael Jackson is dead. Apparently famous Malagasy people announce that they are dead when they no longer want to be stalked by paparazzi. So they think Michael Jackson did this too.

4. If you are white, you must be French. Having people try to speak French to me can be a lot more confusing than when they speak Malagasy to me.

5. All the Malagasy people in my village want to learn English. And tell me so every day.

6. The typical Malagasy person wakes up around 5 AM and goes to bed by 7 or 8 PM.

7. I am a giant here. For those of you who don’t know me, I am 5’4”, but I am usually taller than all the Malagasy people. In the U.S. I’m generally pretty average to short, but when I stand up in a room full of Malagasy people I can actually see over most heads. It’s a new and interesting experience.

8. There are lots of creative ways to communicate with people when you don’t have cell phones. Locally, you can send a small child to tell someone something or bring someone to your house (this is often how people in my village get me). You can send a note with a passing taxi-brousse. You can announce stuff over the radio.

9. We Americans waste a lot of space in our vehicles. You can probably cram about twice as many people as you would think into your car, and they do it every day here. Riding in a taxi-brousse you will not move when you go around a curve because you are packed in so close to the next person.

10. Meetings here are not usually scheduled in advance. You show up, tell people you are having a meeting (often times a kid goes around the village blowing a whistle), then wait a while until people show up.

11. Conversation typically consists of a statement of what you are currently doing, what you are going to do, or what you are coming from doing. Walking down the street with my water bucket. Neighbor: “Mangala rano.” (Getting water) Leslie “Ia, mangala rano.” (Yes, I am getting water).