Who Hit You? And other ways of dealing with children

            What inspired me to write this is one particularly funny parenting technique I see every day. And let me qualify this: I essentially live with two giant extended families, so I can’t say if this is a Malagasy thing or a family thing. Anyhow. If a kid is crying, no matter the reason, they ask “Who hit you?” The wailing child then points out the offender, and that person is pretend-hit by the parent. Problem solved, crying stops. 

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.

Picture Nightmares

Every few months we have a report we have to fill out for Peace Corps. One of the sections is called “lessons learned.” During training, they printed out and gave to us some of the lessons that previous volunteers reported learning. The other day I was particularly angry and wondering why no one had thought to tell us to avoid this problem. To deal with my frustration, I decided to hide in my house and go through old papers. I came across a sheet from the first few weeks here, and sure enough there was the advice I thought I had not been given, in all caps: NEVER PRINT PICTURES FOR ANYONE.

Transient lives

Before I left the US I remember telling people that I was excited to live in one house for two years. This would mean all my stuff in one place, not moving all the time, and two full growing seasons (or more, depending on the climate) in my own garden. They laughed that I was joining the Peace Corps and thought it would settle me down. But I was pretty convinced it would be a change from the always shifting life I had in the US, from family to family, friend to friend, not really settled. And I think that for many volunteers, it actually is a fairly settled life for two years. 

The last 6 months

It is not just laziness that this blog has been inactive – I have actually been busy (by my standards). Quite a change from the first months here. To summarize the happenings of the last few months:

Rice is life. Life is rice.

            Rice. It’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast. Everyday.

            If you don’t have enough money, you might not eat rice 3 times a day, and that is not good. It varies from region to region, with some eating other root crops more often, but rice is the Malagasy “white food,” and in my area people like to eat it for all meals. It is not an easy concept to convey that Americans eat a different food for every meal, and there is no single base for all meals, or no “white food”. Sometimes they will alternate with corn or boiled cassava root for lunch; it depends on the kind of work they are doing.