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?