Winter

Look on the map – Madagascar is in the Tropics. It is a tropical island. We have coconuts, malaria, people taking naps in the middle of the day to escape the heat, strange fruits year-round.

But that is all in another part of the island. I am fortunate enough to live in the temperate, highly-forested, cloud-capital that is Andasibe. It’s wonderful, except for the cold.

Every night, I heat up water to put in my two bottles. These go in my bed under my comforter, down sleeping bag, and thick blanket to warm it up while I change into my wool socks, long sleeves, giant fleece, and wool hat.

My friends who were visiting from home were not particularly affected by the cold; I think they are just too accustomed to snow storms to appreciate how cold morning mist from a rainforest really is. Faced with sleeping three-to-a-bed, they all wanted to sleep on the edge of the bed; I asked if I could please sleep between them so I didn’t freeze in the night.

Of all the side-effects of winter, one I did not expect is an increase in suggestions for husbands/boyfriends. Everyone knows how cold it is at night, and my neighbors for the most part sleep one family per bed. They know that sleeping alone is seriously cold. So they are kind enough to list off all my potential bed warmers. My village is colder than Andasibe (and my house is very windy at times), so when I’m in Andasibe and people ask about my village, they invariably want to know how I can make it out there all alone. Some are even kind enough to offer their own body heat to me; so nice of them.

It’s probably good, however, that I sleep alone in my house because it turns out that cold bucket baths are a casualty of winter.  I try to schedule my weeks so that I am home for an acceptable length of time before coming back to Andasibe with its wind-proof houses and warm showers.

When I left Seattle in February to go to Madagascar, there were things I expected to miss. But of all the things I thought about, the warm weather of a Washington summer wasn’t one of them.