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?