A day in my life

I’m awake and I have to pee; hoping it is still early enough no one else will be up and I can just pee in my yard and go back to sleep. No such luck. At 5:18, I am definitely too late for that. Breakfast, an egg with onions and rice, is done by 6:20. I go out to ask John when he wants to have the ‘bal’ (dance) that Mitsinjo will sponsor. He thinks it won’t be this December, as every Saturday is already taken, but the first or second Saturday of January. Ok, no problem. I’ll call Bob and tell him the plan.

Nothing in particular to do today, so go down to talk to the three sisters, and to ask Josy when she wants to plant SRI. Her rice is almost cooked, so I know I have to be fast or they will have to feed me. She gives me a plate of cassava anyhow. She’ll plant in January. Ok, great. Thanks for the cassava, and bye! I take one so they don’t think I’m rude. I talk to the other sisters and their families/workers about where they will be for Christmas and New Years. Most of us will be in Andasibe, so we agree to dance together.

A disclaimer of sorts

Whenever I sit down to write something about where I live, or talk to someone on the phone, I feel like I need to add in this disclaimer:

I only live in one village, in one commune, in one region of Madagascar.

This means that what I see and learn is specific to this area. But I don’t like to preface every statement with “in my tiny village of 30 people this is what most people do but it is not necessarily representative of all of Madagascar.” It’s much easier to just say: “people do x, y or z.” So let this be a reminder that I don’t know much about most of the country, just my tiny area.

Are they all liars?

I was talking with some other volunteers about the tendency, as some people see it, for the Malagasy people to lie. And it’s true, when you are talking to people, very often they will lie. But only in a certain sense. As is the case in some other cultures, I think it’s ruder here to give an unpleasing answer or to say you don’t know than it is to just make something up: aka to lie.

To avoid rambling, here are a few snippets of the last few weeks:

-          I was scammed out of $0.05 by a small child. It involved a rotten egg and some pretty high-quality lying.

Satroka Peace Corps

*Satroka = hat

“Elsie, is the volunteer down the road really old?”

“Umm…. Not really. He’s my age. Why?”

“Well, then it wasn’t him I saw, so why didn’t you tell me there were Peace Corps people coming to Andasibe?”

“Peace Corps was in Andasibe? That’s strange, they didn’t call me and usually they would if they were in my area. I don’t know who it was.”

“Well, it was definitely Peace Corps, because they had on Peace Corps hats.”

“They all had on Peace Corps hats? I have no idea who that would have been; they don’t usually all wear Peace Corps hats.”

“The man had white hair.”

“Maybe the Country Director? Where did you see them?”

“It was an old man and three young people. They were coming out of the (really expensive) hotel and all had Peace Corps hats on.”

“Really? I’m surprised Peace Corps would stay there; it’s above their budget for sure. Maybe it was a former volunteer and his family visiting the park.”

“I don’t know who it was, but they were on bikes and had on Peace Corps hats just like yours.”

“On bikes? Ohhhhhh. Wait. Do you mean my hard Peace Corps hat or a soft one?”

“A hard one. Just like yours.”

“I think you saw tourists on bikes wearing helmets. It’s a very common custom for vazaha, not just Peace Corps.”

What's your town like?

As you can see from my mailing address, I live near Andasibe, a town of about 6,000. It’s surrounded by rainforest (with a buffer of eucalyptus, planted by the French a long time ago). The forest is a part of the Zahamena-Alanamazaotra forest corridor, the last stretch of remaining rainforest running north to south on the east side of the island. The tourist business is big here, so wandering around town I still get the “vazaha, give me candy!” calls from little kids. It is a very accessible town from Tana, due to the paved roads that come all the way here (and then stop at the entrance to town), and also because of the relatively short distance. There are lemurs galore in the forest, which is the reason most people come to visit. And they really are pretty awesome. There is one species (the largest lemur) the Indri-indri that has an incredible communication call. Their call is the longest-traveling audible land animal call (aka elephants and whales definitely have them beat, but if you add in the qualifiers, then it’s impressive), which can travel about 3km.

But what do you DO?

The dreaded, but understandable, question. The problem is that I’m still asking it too; what do I do? I have some ideas of what I hope to do for ‘work’ and I will share those later, but first a little bit about what I actually have spent time doing:

-          First, there is a fence. It is quite fun to work on, but I still look forward to the day when I’m not working on the fence but on the garden inside the fence. At first, through a series of miscommunications, my neighbor and I thought we had to build a fence around my house as per Peace Corps policy. So there was a community meeting and workdays set up. No one really came, which turned out for the best because after clarifying with PC, it is now a fence around a future garden rather than a wall around my house shutting me off from neighbors; had people actually showed up when they were supposed to, I would be sitting inside my own fortress right now. Close call.

How is a fence an activity in and of itself?

Just watching… US government sponsored entertainment

I was a little stir crazy the other day, so I invited myself to transplant bananas with my neighbor. It was, to be fair, the first time I have had the occasion to plant a banana. What it was not was the first time I have ever used a shovel/dug a hole. After about 6” done, my neighbor took a break from digging to express his surprise at my ability to dig a hole. I guess he thought my offer to help was an empty one.

Potty Talk

My neighbors’ toilet habits differ greatly from mine in 3 ways:

If you think there is something crawling on you...

... then there probably is.

I was talking with another volunteer about how nice it is that here in Mcar there isn’t really much to worry about in the way of poisonous creatures. It actually makes me (slightly) less jumpy knowing that all the creepy-crawlies that pop up everywhere are mostly just harmful to their dinner. However, this does not mean that they keep to themselves. There are some bugs here that are REALLY annoying, even though “harmless.”

The World is Flat

I often eat dinner at my neighbors’ house. They are wonderful people and very nice to let me eat there frequently and are patient as I struggle to follow the flow of conversation. A few days ago the topic took a turn from a discussion about the timeline of the World Wars and the Cold War to the question/statement, “I’ve never heard of anyone who has seen the end of the world.” They were all looking at me, waiting for me to tell them exactly where the end of the world is. As I struggled to formulate my answer, they thought maybe I hadn’t understood the question. I also thought I must have misunderstood the question; we were on the same page there. But after some clarification it turns out that that was, in fact, the question.

First two weeks- a few Accomplishments

I did not burn down my house with candles/stove.
---
I left my house everyday and talked to people.
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"Mahay" is a word in Gasy that is really really useful. It means either to know, as in "do you know how to cook?" "are you mahay cooking?" or to be good at something, as in "he speaks Gasy really well" "he is really mahay Malagasy". Also kind of can mean to understand, as in "mahay Gasy culture".

This isn't all it is used for, but it's a start. So, this week I have been declared mahay at the following things:
Fetching water
Playing soccer
Dancing
Saying helllo (in the local dialect)

I have a home!

It's been just over two weeks now at my new site. I'm now near Andasibe, about 3-4 hrs east of Tana. My house is great!

It is made of wooden planks with a thatched roof. Luckily they (because Peace Corps told them to) put plastic sheeting up on the ceiling to stop leaks and keep bugs from falling on me. I am supposed to be working with a local NGO that works with community organizations to manage parts of the forest (VOIs), so the carpenter working on my house\ building my outhouse (kabone) works for them.

Apparently it wasn't quite clear what I meant...

An excerpt of a g-chat conversation with Rose:

rose: i love your blog i was laughing hysterically about your bed wetting dream
  haha
  brings back memories of plastic bags over the beds
 me: those were the days.....
8:23 AM rose: so it was tea? still not sure what you were talking about
 me: what?

Patience is a virtue

Arrival in Madagascar: training center to host families and back to training center. Looking forward to the May move-in to my home for the next two years! I've been collecting seeds from interesting plants to start my garden.
So, on May 8th we get to my site; it's beautiful. We get out to look at the house, to see if it's up to PC standards, and there seem to be a few details lacking. No fence. No shower. No bathroom. No one to ask about it. Hmmmm.

New Address (and a little bit about my new site)

Observe the new address to the right -->
We are officially Peace Corps Volunteers now, no longer trainees. We had our swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday (I gave a speech in Malagasy!), and now we are scattering to the winds! I am in Tana right now, but we head out for our "installation" process as soon as I finish this and pack up. It will be one other girl, Jennifer, and I with Ursula, one of the LCFs (languag trainers). They send one of the LCFs because you have to do a bunch of courtesy visits to local authorities, so they send someone who can actually speak the language to facilitate.

Hi everyone!

I'm currently in Fianarantsoa, south of Tana, on our Tech Trip. We're gone from the PC training center (PCTC) for a week, traveling around and learning the technical aspects of rice farming etc. The road we have been on is generally good (the national north-south highway), but there have been many a carsick traineee. This is due not exclusively to the curvy roads, but also due to the fact that the PC drivers are possibly the most aggressive in the country, and are also provided with some of the only cars that still operate on all cylinders and can have their brake pads replaced frequently.

Some of my favorites (so far)

Malagasy saying:

"Olombelo tsy akoho." Literally meaning "People are not chickens." It is used to stop a taxi-brousse when you have to go to the bathroom, the idea being that chickens a) do not pee, but people do, and b) unlike chickens, people don't do their business in the same place they sit.

I'm leaving, on a jet plane

Two days until I head for Philly to stay with Anandi. Then I'll meet up with my staging group (the other Peace Corps volunteers I'll be going with, 48 in total) on the 27th, icebreakers and vaccinations (woohoo) the 28th, then fly to Johannesburg and on to Madagascar! 

FAQs and Communication Information

Q: What will you be doing? 

A: I don't know. My assignment is in Agroforestry, but they wait to assign us a specific project until we are in country. 

Madagascar

Some general information: