A simple secondary project

Sometimes it feels like work moves about as slow as molasses. In some ways, this is pretty literally true, since my primary project is with rice growing techniques. There is only so much talking that can be done before you just have to get out and plant something, then wait for it to grow.

In April 2012 I accompanied the group of new trainees on their technical trip, visiting partners and learning the technical skills they will need at their sites. We saw Parc Ivoloina, which has a great environmental education facility in place and runs many programs with local children. I wondered why Mitsinjo didn’t do something similar, since Andasibe also has a forest and kids. Seems like a natural fit.

Destructive habits

I was new in my village, sitting around doing nothing. A group of people walked by all carrying their machetes. It looked interesting. They invited me to go, definitely just being polite, but I was bored so I surprised them all and tagged along. My Malagasy was still downright terrible, plus we were strung out in a line tromping through thigh high mud, so I didn’t have time to ask what we were up to.

When education doesn't work so well

There were about 250 kids enrolled in the primary school in my village of 35 people; they came from all over the area. The government pays one teacher. His monthly salary wouldn’t buy a decent meal for two at a restaurant in the US.

That is NOT what I said

I like to talk. I have been in Madagascar for over two years. My daily life and my work is conducted in Malagasy. Put two and two together, and that’s a lot of words spoken in Malagasy. 

However, speaking words doesn’t necessarily mean doing it correctly. I still make people laugh, and those that talk with me often know just where my limit is. No one here has ever heard me truly angry in Malagasy, because I don’t know how. Often things become simplified: a speech to our volunteer team for environmental education expressing my profound gratitude becomes more like “thanks, it was nice.”

Despite all of this, there is a funny thing that happens. Regional dialects in Madagascar are very significantly different from each other. I speak a mix of two, Betsimisaraka-Atsimo and Merina. Frequently, I say something to Person A in my special Gasy. Person B partially overhears our conversation, and asks for it to be repeated. Person A then repeats the meaning, but in perfect dialect one way or the other, adding how impressive it is that I speak just like them. Now person A and B both think I speak their dialect, but they have just added 10 words to my vocabulary that I’ve never said in my life.

My favorite mistake: There were some Swiss tourists, and one was a doctor. They visited a woman in my area who has been bedridden for three years with a serious back problem (something with the discs). She is the Pastor’s daughter. They left some medicine for me to pass along, just some pain killers and vitamins. I wanted to translate the directions from English to Malagasy, so I asked a friend for assistance, because immune system was not a word I knew.

Me: “This is a vitamin to help her sell herself”

Him: “What? What do you mean to help her sell herself?”

Me: “You know, when you are sick, and your body has to sell itself to get better!”

Him “Ah. Elsie, I think you mean protecting yourself, not selling yourself.”

Oops. Fivarotan-tena ≠ Fiarovan-tena

It's all in the name

Malagasy is a fairly descriptive language - snakes are long animals, and insects are small ones.  If one child dies, the next born is sometimes know as “Solo,” which means replacement, and many are named after the days on which they were born. In keeping with this pattern, town names are possibly the most descriptive of all.

There are the ones that state the obvious:

Ampasimpotsy – At the white sand

Besarety – lots of ox-carts

Ampasampito – at the seven tombs

Bekininina – lots of eucalyptus

Beravina – lots of leaves

Ranomafana – hot water (If you want to find a hotsprings in Mada, no need for a guidebook, just look at a map and go to any town named Ranomafana)

Andasibe – at the large encampment

Ambato – at the rocks

There are some that make you want to live there:

Maromahatsinjo – many things that make you look forward/many views

Mangarivotra – Fresh breeze

Maromizaha – lots of views

Sahavola – money creek

Anjiro – where there is light/electricity (ironically, in most Anjiros I have seen still rely on candles)

And some that maybe could have been less honest:

Bekalalao – lots of cockroaches

Sahatay – shit creek

Sahamaloto – dirty creek

Arivonimamo – a thousand drunk people

Manadala – makes you go crazy

Sahaparasy – flea creek

Pineapples, minnows, and litchis

In the US, many people don’t know in which month asparagus ripens, or when avocados are at their best. And I can’t blame them, since the little “Grown in Mexico” tag has very small writing. Here in Madagascar, that isn’t quite the same. In a nice juxtaposition of how it is in the US, local organic seasonal fruits and vegetables are delicious and cheap. Out of season, imported, tasteless produce is pricey. The logical choice? Save money and eat fresh food!

            Compared to Americans Malagasy are in general a very indirect people. But when it comes to appearance, they just say what they see. It is not always meant in a mean way, but that depends on the situation. One kid I know is nicknamed “Rat,” and when you see his front teeth you know why. There is a guy named “Tall Mami,” and a lady “Big Jenny.” Pretty clear as to why. In my village, I’m known as “Big Elsie,” and in the house in Andasibe, “the stomper” because they say the house shakes when I walk.

            I’ve never been small, but I’ve never been so constantly made aware of my size. And it doesn’t help that they are comparing me to themselves – generally short people, and most of them are manual laborers of a sort. If someone was really embarrassed about their body, they would not like it here. These are a few episodes from my time here:

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.

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?