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!