Article about lemurs and Marojejy (near my site!)
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
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.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
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.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
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!
Sunday, September 4, 2011
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!
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!
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