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?