JayneNews from Madagascar

Velondriake Post Number Two

2011-07-23T09:01:00.005+03:00

Coco Beach
Blue Ventures is based at the Coco Beach Hotel in Andavadoaka, a scattered arrangement of huts on a point jutting out into the ocean on the south-west end of the town. The volunteer huts are on the top of a dune overlooking Half Moon Beach, which is sheltered from the incredible winds that shake the staff huts and the restaurant on the other side of the hotel compound. When we come together for meals on the restaurant porch the volunteers all look like they live on a tropical island and the staff are all in jeans and fleeces and hats. I’m sharing a hut with Sabrina (a dive volunteer from Manhattan), Vicki (an independent researcher (of OCTOPUS!) from London), and Jess (on a medical student elective from a school in England).

The volunteer huts

The view from our hut

The village of Andavadoaka

My Project
I spent my first week in Andava reading a bunch of materials about WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), lots of stuff about PHE programs, and ‘Tales of Shit’ which is about CLTS (community-led total sanitation), an approach to stopping open defecation that involves “triggering” the community to be totally grossed out by their own shit being everywhere (a key point is using the local equivalent of the word ‘shit’ to avoid euphemisms/sugar-coating anything, etc) and realizing that it must be getting into their food and water. I will not be doing anything like that while I’m here, but it was an interesting read – or at least as interesting as 200 pages of development-speak can be. On Monday the directrice of the school was finally back in town so I got to meet with her about working with the school and Wednesday I led my first lesson about WASH. It went really well and the kids were totally interactive which was quite a relief since my biggest fear was that they would be too shy to talk or just give me vacant stares because they don’t understand my Gasy at all.

My "office"

The view from that window

A poster I made about diarrhoea

The "Aja Filako" - a bottle baby to demonstrate how diarrhoea causes dehydration

Other cool stuff
Last Friday I went by motorized pirogue with Issy, Vicki, Vicki’s Malagasy assistant Dany, and one of the CBD supervisors Balbine to Tampolove, a smaller town south of Andavadoaka. We helped out with the Depo-Provera clinic that BV runs in Tampolove every two weeks, and then Issy and I stayed on for the weekend to help Vicki with her octopus surveys. Friday night was a full moon and low tide was at 10:30 pm so we went out with some BV aquaculture people to count and weigh sea cucumbers. We walked way out into the middle of the bay where there are about 10 sea cucumber pens, each belonging to a different household from Tampolove. The pens are completely submerged during high tide but at low tide you can see the fences sticking up out of the water, which was about up to my knees while we were walking around. Again, pictures are really the best way to describe the experience, but the sea cucumbers were all between 200 and 400 grams and, well, they’re kind of gross. They’re bumpy and hard when you pick them up and then suddenly they squirt a stream of … sea water?... out of their butt and go limp in your hand. So we waded around in the pens for a couple hours shining our headlamps on the sea floor and collecting all the sea cucumbers we could find into a basin that we floated along next to us. The Gasy women from Tampolove that came with us all carried big bright lanterns that made an eerie whooshing noise and looked really picturesque scattered across the dark bay. It was a totally surreal experience: standing out in the middle of the sea at midnight, under a full moon, in Madagascar, weighing sea cucumbers.

The sea cucumber pens at low tide during the day, and the watchtower to prevent sea cucumber theft.

The sea cucumber pens at low tide

A sea cucumber!

Walking out to the pens at night.

Bleh, little sea cucumbers...

Angelo and Gaetan weighing the sea cucumbers

On the sailing pirogue to Lamboara

The clinic in Tampolove

On Saturday morning we waited around for low tide and then went out into the bay again, this time to do transects with Vicki. We waded out too early at first and the force of the tide going out was so strong that we had to go back to the beach and eat roasted peanuts for another half an hour before it was low enough and steady enough to do our transects without being dragged out to sea. Vicki’s research involves laying out a 30 meter tape measure on the sea floor and then writing down what material is on the ground at 20 cm intervals. My job was to write down the codes she called out: “SA (sand)... SA … RB (rubble) … SA… RB… TA (turf algae)…URC (urchin)…SA…etc.” While we were doing that two Gasy women were walking on either side of the transect with fishing spears, looking for octopus dens. I saw them spear one small fish and a squid, but no octopus. (We did, coincidentally, have octopus for lunch that day though).

On Sunday we sailed across the bay to Lamboara and did more transects, a kilometre out into the ocean (we had to be in the octopus reserves) where the ground was all really sharp uneven coral with loads of sea urchins that was exhausting and painful to walk over, even wearing thick dive booties. When we finished up and went back to town the wind was coming from the north so we couldn’t sail back to Andava and had to spend the night in Lamboara, sleeping three to a bed in the president’s house. The next morning we got up at six to sail to the mainland (Lamboara is an island) where a zebu cart (ox-cart) was waiting to take us on a bumpy but beautiful two-hour ride back to Andava, through spiny forest and only a handful of meters from the ocean for much of it.

Waiting for the tide to be low enough to do transects.

Vicky with a ... sea creature of some sort.

A Few More Random Things
• Matt asked me to take over the volunteers’ Malagasy lessons for this expedition so now I am officially a Malagasy teacher. I taught my first lesson on Tuesday and I have another one this afternoon. It seems a bit silly to have a vazaha teach Gasy when we’re surrounded by native speakers, but I guess sometimes it’s easier at first to learn from someone who speaks English too and had to learn the language recently. Or maybe they just don’t want to pay a Malagasy teacher. Anyway, it’s exhausting but fun.
• On Monday I went swimming at Half Moon Beach at low tide and stuck my hand on a sea urchin. I barely grazed it but it hurt like crazy – my whole hand was throbbing – and left about 6 blackish-purple dots on my hand that Issy and I couldn’t figure out whether they were just puncture marks or if there was spine in them. I soaked my hand in non-scalding hot water for half an hour until it turned all pruny and then Issy was going to try to pick out a couple so she shot some local anaesthetic into my finger near one of them which really hurt (Issy afterwards: “normally I would have used a smaller needle but we didn’t have one”) and then we decided that actually they were all really tiny and would probably dissolve or come out on their own. The upshot of all of this is that while I was soaking my hand I read a BV guide about marine stings/envenomation and now I actually remember which things you’re supposed to wash with fresh water versus salt water or vinegar for – unlike when we got a long powerpoint presentation on them in Wilderness Medicine. They have some actually relevance now because I hear the other volunteers talking about fire coral and lion fish when they get back from dives.
• On Tuesday I saw a whale!

Velondriake Post Number One NOW WITH PICTURES

2011-07-23T08:53:00.004+03:00

Hi All. Turns out I do have some internet access of sorts. I am in temporary possession of the “staff dongle,” which allows for a very slow connection via a Telma sim card – all newly possible just this past year when they built a Telma cell phone tower in Andavadoaka. No pictures or anything fancy but I’ll add some in when I get back to Providence because you have got to see this place.
First off, Tana and Tamatave.
Not much to say about Tana; it’s still crowded, cold, and unexciting.
We went to Tamatave for 3 days (though 2 were in mostly spent in the taxi brousse) at the end of my week in Tana which was wonderful. I played Scrabble in Malagasy and French with Mika’s family. It was warm and sunny. I ate ananambo and lychee chinois (those are the spiky ones that look really cool but just taste like grapes). Everything was green green green and tropical even though it’s winter. Everyone speaks the dialect I understand best. I love Tamatave.

On the June 25th I met up with the newly arrived group of Blue Ventures volunteers to take a 4 day overland tour to Toliara. We drove down to Fianar the first day, which is a beautiful drive through hills and forest and terraced rice paddies, and sentimental for me because it’s the first leg of the trip from Tana to my old Peace Corps site. The 26th is Malagasy Independence Day and the official entertainment in Fianar for the occasion was … Mika & Davis. Unfortunately we left the morning of the 26th to continue south so I missed the concert.

The 26th was momentous because we were finally heading into a part of Madagascar that I hadn’t seen before, and everything was new from there on out. We stopped at a ring-tailed lemur park and hiked around over giant boulders with incredible views of the cliffs and a valley of rice paddies. After lunch we drove on to Isalo National Park, re which I think I’ll just wait to describe till I can put in some pictures. Big rocks. Lemurs. Natural swimming pools. Cliffs. Desert; spiny and otherwise.

We spent all of the 27th in Isalo and drove the rest of the way to Toliara on the 28th, where we stayed in a hotel that had a swimming pool and wireless internet! Holy smokes. (Not that I had a computer with me, but still…)The rest of the volunteers took a camion to Andavadoaka on the 30th, but I stayed in Toliara with Matt (a former environment PCV who runs the Population, Health, Environment (PHE) program for Blue Ventures in Andavadoaka) to go to some meetings with various NGOs and the regional health authority, and to wait for the arrival of Issy, a doctor from England who is going to work with the PHE program for six months. Toliara’s a pretty cool town and it has a gelato shop, but I was definitely ready to get to Andava after a few days there. I didn’t have much to do and I wanted to get started on my project. Also, I moved into a cheaper hotel, so no more swimming pool.

The volunteers' camion

After almost a full week in Toliara we drove up to Andava in the BV truck (which only takes 8 hours compared to 12 to 18 in a camion (depending on how often it breaks down)), stopping in 5 villages along the way to meet with the village presidents to recruit new Community-Based Distributors (of contraceptives) who all came to Andava last week to get CBD training with a PSI (Population Services International) trainer. All of the villages were right on the beach and to get to some of them we just drove the truck right up over the dunes. I sliced a big gash into my ankle by catching it on a sharp vine walking/sliding down a sand dune. Then I kicked a stick into my big toe and bled all over the place walking back up the same dune. All of the volunteers here in Andava have band-aids and duct tape all over their feet from various foot lacerations. This is a dangerous town for toes.

Visiting a village

Meeting with a village president

As promised...

2010-07-02T22:44:00.004+03:00

Antsika Jiaby

2010-05-08T11:23:00.007+03:00

Saturday was the first Madagascar Tous Ensemble concert in Tana, so I got to watch 12 of Madagascar's finest musicians try to squeeze their 3 song sets into the daylight hours. Unfortunately this was not possible, because despite being May 1st (which is maybe the biggest concert day of the year because it marks the start of the DRY season) it poured rain for maybe 2 hours right in the middle of the concert, and we all had to take shelter under this one tiny tent in the "backstage" area while a mob of spectators hovered angrily around the gate being slightly menaced by two police officers but really being more menacing themselves, which was terribly inconvenient for poor Mika who really had to pee but was scared to pass through the mob, even though Mika & Davis had already finished their set so technically the crowd should have not have had any beef with them. But try explaining that to an angry mob. After the rain finally stopped it was still ages before they could start the concert again because all the equipment was wet and all the artists had stories of being minorly shocked/totally electrocuted by wet microphones etc., but all the spectators were demanding that the music start or they get their money back (prix d'entrée: 1000 ariary, or about 50 cents) so finally one of the artists procured a pair of gloves and agreed to go on with the show. By this time it was already late afternoon so the remaining artists did just two songs a piece, but then it was night and the organizers hadn't ordered lights (because how could TWELVE bands possibly not finish by 5pm??) so the last two groups played one song a piece, illuminated by the light of the remaining spectators' cell phones. Good times. And I got to speak English all day because my friend from Peace Corps was in town.Tomino (Hazolahy) and his awesome homemade giant wooden guitar. Video coming soon when I learn how to compress video files so they'll load from the internet cafe.

Chillin' with Bagzana.

Ok next article of business is spiders. There are some really big spiders in Madagascar and I have developed a serious fear of them since arriving two years ago. In Mahatsara Sud they would sometimes appear on my walls or worse on my chair and one time I smashed one behind a poster and I almost threw up, but I think the fear really started when I scared one off my chair and it jumped to the ground and made a THUD. As in the noise of an object that has significant mass. Here in Itaosy the spiders make huge webs between the trees which I frequently almost walk into when I'm hanging up my laundry to dry. Here are some pictures. I'll leave you to freak out.

In closing, a picture I took just this morning of my knuckles, bloody from ... washing too many clothes by hand yesterday. I wasn't actually bleeding into my laundry -- my knuckles were just kindof sore yesterday and then this morning all these little blood blisters appeared. Four months back in the US and I'm delicate as a new-born. What would my village think?

Back to the Present

2010-04-12T11:26:00.013+03:00

Greetings once again from Madagascar. I've been back in Tana for about a month and a half now, halfway through my three month tourist visa. I'm living with Mika again, but we're out in the boonies of Itaosy now. Mika moved in with his brother's family a couple months ago because they were absolutely for sure going to tear down his building within days, but apparently the guy who was causing all the problems with the house died or something, and the building is still going about its business, bothering no one. We slept there after a show Saturday night actually, because it was too late to get a taxi back to Itaosy. Anyway, our new house is in fact a villa, and we have a toilet with a toilet seat, and a real shower (still no hot water) and a SINK with a faucet and a mirror, so I'm totally content. And the windows have glass so the house can actually be sealed against the elements when winter comes. Soon.

Things were pretty quiet for the first month I was here. Mika and I went on a bunch of really early morning hikes, because you only have to go a short way from our house to be in the middle of rice paddies and farmland here, and there are some great views because it's really hilly. Then we would go to town to run errands, or walk out to the main road to buy fruit or home-made yogurt or use the internet. Mika was working pretty intensely on finishing their next album so I got some books from the Peace Corps house and spent a lot of time sitting in the garden (enclosed, grassy, peace and quiet in Tana, wow!) reading and clandestinely eating way too much of the candy that I brought from the US to give to people.

The view of Tana ville from one of our hikes.

IMika on a country path

About two weeks ago we finally got out of Tana and went to Tamatave and Foul Pointe for a week. Going to the east coast of Madagascar makes you think that everyone who lives in Tana is a total sucker. It is so green and lush, and there's mountains and the ocean and fresh fish and tropical fruits and clean air and it's just amazing. It would have been a total recharge for me if I hadn't gotten super carsick on the way there and thrown up in the brousse to Tamatave (which is super hilly and windy and I hadn't been in a taxibrousse for 4 months so ok) AND in the 4x4 going to Foul Pointe (which is a completely straight road parallel to the coast so there's no explaining it) and then felt dizzy for the whole time we were there. But I got to eat my favorite foods: ravitoto with coconut and ananambo (moringa). Unfortunately lychee season was already over when I got to Mada. There were still lychee chinois, which are way more interesting to look at but unfortunately they just taste like grapes.

Mika multitasking

Me with our voan-dalana: oranges and lychees from Brikaville

The day after we got back from Tamatave Mika played a cabaret at this super ritzy vazaha bar near the Peace Corps house and I summoned all of my mental faculties in order to speak French to our friend Steve's girlfriend during the whole concert, ending up highly concerned about how I'm going to communicate with anyone when I'm in France in June and my French comes out Malagasy. Steve made a killing that night doing fake tattoos on people with glue and glitter. He did mine free as an advertisement, because my insanely pale skin really made it stand out so all the vazaha kids and vazaha girlfriends were asking about it.
We spent the night at the house in Antanimena and left the next morning for a concert in Antsirabe, 4 hours south of Tana. Below see the banderole with hand-painted pictures of Mika and Davis.

The concert organizer's kids, styling with a juice-mustache.

Ninah and Davis

The concert ended at about 2 in the morning when the power went out, and didn't come back for about 45 minutes, during which time everybody left because despite being a really big hotel it didn't have a generator or even candles so we all just had to move around in the dark until the power finally came back on. We got to sleep from 3am to 5am, when we had to get back in the van to drive 24 hours straight to Nosy Be.

I did a lot of sleeping on the way there, because I hadn't gotten any real sleep in two nights, and also because our driver was trying to break the sound barrier and the road was of the curvy and mountainous persuasion (but Mom, it was Loulou's own personal van and there were seatbelts!). But, as usual in Madagascar, it was devastatingly gorgeous terrain so I spent a lot of time with my head out the window like a golden retriever, feeling like I might have the best life ever.
We got to Ankify at 5am and caught the slow ferry to Nosy Be because we were with Loulou's car.

Mika: "Jayne, you're missing the sunrise over the mangrove swamps..."

Got to Chez Loulou (Andilana Beach Nosy Be) around 8, ocean swimming, unable to sleep because the Salegy music had already started at full blast, rice and fish, sunbathing, giant puppets, Mika & Davis, (already 2 hours in the internet cafe, no time for complete sentences anymore), pictures:

Ninah had to catch a flight back to Germany the next night, so after a few hours of sleep that night we got up at 6 to take the boat back to the mainland and then another bajillion hours of taxibrousse back to Tana. I don't think I've ever gone 5 nights without sleep before. My eyes stopped working in sync; it was totally bizarre. I was like those toads whose eyes can go in whatever direction, independent of each other.

Finally I leave you with this picture, of me with one of the avocados that grows in Mika's brother's family's garden. I already knew that Malagasy avocados get huge, but all the ones I'd tried before were super watery. Well, this one was just like a California avocado. But the size of my head.

Veloma, amin'ny manaraka indray.

Evacuation

2010-02-15T17:21:00.008+03:00

Returning to Mahatsara Sud was odd. It was a million times better than being in consolidation, but the degree of uncertainty hadn't changed any. The possibility of an evacuation still loomed over everything, making me wonder if I would have time to carry out any of the projects I was working on. I didn't have access to much news in Mahatsara Sud, but the daily text messages from Peace Corps continued to provide vague updates.

"FEB 20, 13H TANA: ministries retaken by last night. no report injuries. more "sit-ins" announced for today. situation remains dynamic but surprisingly calm. pco"

"FEB 21 20H15. TGV ACCEPTED TO SUSPEND RALLIES IN TANA, FALSE REPORTS AND PROVOCATION. TGV-PREZ'S 2ND DIALOGUE PLANNED ON MONDAY."

Then this one, doing little to dispel the notion that Peace Corps is just a bunch of hippies:
"FEB 23 19H. All calm. Still negotiating. No rallies announced. Send positive thoughts! pco"

In between biting my nails and receiving these suspenseful updates everything was exactly the same in Mahatsara Sud. (Just kidding about the nail-biting; that's a good way to get intestinal worms.) I noticed the following interesting tropical climatic equation: end of hot season + incoming rainy season = steam. Very exotic. We do not get that in Virginia.

Despite or because of the worry that we could be pulled out of Madagascar any day, my last month at site was probably my best. Here's one perfect day that I wrote about in my journal:

Woke up. Charlin (kid who lives next door) brought me warm sweet breadfruit (I'd never had it cooked like this. It was like a yam. I don't know if they added sugar.). Pounded the peanuts that I roasted yesterday. Went to visit Emma. Made plans for our girls' group. Helped her make ravitoto (pounded cassava leaves) and chatted. Back to house. Made coffee. (Coffee beans grown, roasted, and pounded in Mahatsara Sud). Walked to Ambodimanga to leave letter for Merinina about baby-weighing next week. Back to house. Made lunch (rice and vegetables). Made friendship bracelet for Charlin. (That's right, a friendship bracelet. I banded all my little friends before I left. They probably use them to identify each other at their secret meetings, where they discuss their theories about why I disappeared without a word on March 12th. Alien abduction? Cold-hearted abandonment? The French?) Went swimming in the river with Charlin and Lebina. Took a nap. Went to Emma's to pound tsako-tsako (dried corn). Listened to Border Crossings (English-language music on the Voice of America. Awful awful banter provided by Larry London. shudder.) Dinner. Bed.

(Everything between parentheses was an editorial comment, not actually from my journal). I'm noticing two things about this day. First, the work:play ratio. Perhaps it was a weekend. Second, three of the day's activities involved pounding things. Perhaps this was such a great day because I got to spend a good portion of it beating things with a stick. It occurs to me that everyone might have had a less stressful time during consolidation if we'd been allowed to make our own peanut butter. It would have been extra creamy.

At the end of February the text messages got worrisome again.

Feb 27 "Good news -Tana normal today. No rally. Tulear calm but PC closing as banking town until further notice. Bad news - Fianar not calm. Clash there, one dead, many injured. As precaution, PCVL relocating to Sahambavy north of Fianar. PC sending PC vehicle there Saturday. Big rally Sat in Tana. Standfast. Cross fingers."

Feb 28 "Clashes in Fianar. DO NOT GO THERE. Now calm but still highly volatile...Hang tight! Standfast. Repeat...Don't travel to Fianar."

Feb 28 "Andry TGV held large rally in Tana today. Peaceful. Called for non-stop strikes starting Monday until Mada has new government. Maintain standfast."

Feb 29 "Tana- Confrontation between police and rally today...tear gas fired to disperse crowd. Calmer now. Tulear blew up last night. 3 shops looted. Police regained control via shots/teargas. Please observe standfast...Thanks."

The country-wide strike didn't really seem to materialize, but small clashes continued as the gendarmes tried to block areas of Tana to stop the rallies. Rumors were going around Mananjary that road blocks had been set up around Ambositra, a town on the road from Fianar to Tana, and everyone was talking about taxi-brousses getting held up and robbed. On March 4th apparently the president declared "no more rallies." In my experience (of reading newspapers) this is not usually a good move. On the 8th things got dicier:

Mar 8 "Tana calm today but forces of law and order's role in conflict now uncertain. Standfast"

As I mentioned, during consolidation they told us that the fact that the military and police were still doing their jobs was a critical condition for us to be able to go back to site.

Mar 9 "Tana - 600 military on strike. Limited police protection. Looting south Tana. Ivandry ok. Trainees not arriving. Peace Corps reviewing EAP. Please do same. STANDFAST. Be prepared."

The next day I heard a rumor that we were being reconsolidated, which fortunately was not confirmed when I called my boss with an overly optimistic question about a project I was planning for the next month. I also held the first (and, sigh, only) meeting of my girls' club. I was super nervous because I knew they would all be really shy this first time and it would be hard to have a group conversation, but they were great, and Emma (a teacher at the elementary school and my best friend at site) was a champ and took everything I said and made it clear and understandable. I was hoping that we would plan the sessions together and then she and the girls could keep it going after I left, but since we only met once all together I'm pretty sure it just stopped after I left. This is the thing that I feel most guilty about having to abandon. We played some name/clapping games and then talked about why might we need a girls' group in Mahatsara Sud/what should we do. We ended by going outside and playing Duck Duck Goose ('Gana Gana Gisa'), which was a riot. Everyone was cracking up and by the end we had quite an audience, which probably had something to do with the girls making me the goose about every other go. I challenge any of you to not look ridiculous being chased in a circle by little girls. There may have been some squealing/arm-flailing.

Girls like EmmedineAnd Nadia.

The 10th brought this long message:

Mar 10 "Voluntary Departure for US Mission families authorized. PCV authorized to take interrupted service as well. No PC staff leaving. TANA: Pro-TGV and Pro-TIM supporters clash. Police break it up. TGV seeks asylum with UN and French. President on radio says made mistakes wants to reconcile. Contact PC on Wed if not taken PC survey via telephone yet."

I listened to the president's apology speech on the radio with Emma and another teacher's family. Their reaction was "too little, too late." The survey mentioned was about our feelings about how consolidation was handled. Um, fine I guess. Under the circumstances. Then:

Mar 11, 19:01 "Decision made to suspend PC Madagascar. Very sad. Process of leaving will be lengthy. Prepare tonight for consolidation and onward as flights are confirmed. STAY IN SITE. For now we must be able to find you."

Mar 11, 19:50 "Advice - DO NOT TELL FOLKS YOU ARE EVACUATING. Tell them you are going to a conference. Let closest friends know that you may not be able to come back. Bring valuables 20 kilo limit. Make lists of PC and personal property. Bring it with you."

I was finishing my dinner when I got that first message. I spent a few hours staring into space and trying to think about packing all my stuff. The next morning I brought some stuff over to give to Emma. I didn't say that I was going to a conference, but it was too hard to say I was never coming back. I think I said that I had to leave now, but if the political situation got better maybe I could come back. I said goodbye to a couple people, but Ihanta was in Mananjary, and Charlin and Lebina were in school and their parents and Josie were working in the rice paddies. So in the end I left without much in the way of explanation or goodbyes. I stuffed a bunch of random clothes into my purple backpack and crammed some other stuff in my trunk to be sent to me later. I tried to make a list of people I wanted to get things from my house, but that was pretty impossible. Too many little things (e.g. orange bucket to Maman'i Charlin, big rice pot to Josie, etc) and too many people. I hiked into Mananjary and went to see Ihanta to say goodbye. I think I had convinced myself that there was still a chance it would all blow over and we'd be sent back to site, until I called the PC office and heard that some people would already be heading to Johannesburg that night. I spent the night at my vazaha friends' house (both regularly employed individuals with no intention of leaving) and caught the 4am taxi brousse to Fianar.

Last shot of Mananjary

View from the taxi brousse driving to Fianar.

Back again. Welcome to the Fianar Meva.

Chez Ninie

Getting ready to leave Fianar.The Fianar Group

Our caravan of PC vans.

Inside the van.

All us Fianar region PCVs slept at the Peace Corps house, then drove in a caravan to Mantasoa the next day. We had to drive through a couple checkpoints, but it was all uneventful until we were about an hour out of Tana, when Nirina got a call that there might be a tank heading toward the president's palace, which we had to pass. People kept calling Nirina from the PC office because Andry TGV had announced that the president had resigned, after which the president announced that that was not the case, so then Andry said that he had 4 hours to get out or TGV was coming for him. When we got to the road that leads to the palace the president's supporters had set up big roadblocks and we had to drive slowly through all these people carrying wooden clubs, milling around and waiting to repel TGV I guess. They waved us through at each barrier, but it was a little tense, with people peering through the windows at us (two vanloads of vazaha). Towards the far edge of the gathering were a lot of well-dressed people standing around and leaning against a long line of expensive parked cars. They were also carrying clubs. The president had a lot of wealthy supporters.

Our group slept at Mantasoa that night, then went to Tana the next morning to fill out paperwork and get our passports and valuables from the PC safe. I saw Mika for an hour or so, and said I had no idea what I was going to do or whether I would be able to come back. The next day I was on a plane to Johannesburg.

In front of the Tana Meva. Getting ready to go to the airport.Me and Eliko in a PC 4x4 waiting to go to the airport. Smile, what are you going to do with your life?

Back to site

2009-11-26T17:48:00.014+03:00

I opened this "new blog," stared at the page for a long time, went down to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, took my coffee back up to the computer, and now I've finished my coffee and stillnothing. I think the problem is nothing really funny happened between the end of Mantasoa consolidation and being evacuated.

I've already talked about Mantasoa. I think my Fianar group was there for 9 or 10 days. Looking at my 2 journal entries from the time, the day before we left Fianar for Mantasoa I wrote "Everyone is convinced we're being evacuated. [expletive]." Then apparently three days after we got there everyone was convinced we would be going back to site the next week. The day after we got there Eliko texted me that PC was sending a car to bring the three Morondava people to Mantasoa -- did I need any provisions? The next morning she said she was all ready to go, and would bring me some warm clothes (at that point I was sporting a clever fusion style I call "everything-I-brought-with-me." Before I left Mahatsara Sud I texted Gabe asking if it was cold in Fianar. He texted me back something akin to "Are you kidding me?" - as in, "The country is falling apart and you need fashion advice? You have the emotional depth of a brussels sprout." Thus leaving me layering tank tops and a rainshell for warmth.) The day after, however, they decided not to consolidate the Morondava people in Mantasoa, and Eliko heard if things stayed peaceful we could go back to site shortly.

Violence in Toliara put a damper on that bit of optimism for a day or two, but since it turned out to be an attempted raid on a grain warehouse that the military repelled, it was interpreted as "opportunistic" and not political violence. The fact that the "forces of law and order" still "did their job," was evidence that the country was still functioning. So we were supposed to start deconsolidating in a couple days, except for people in the south-east or the Toliara region, who would have to wait for a site assessment before they could go back, because of the riots there earlier. I was originally put in this group and I had to go to a special meeting, but then I guess they reasonably decided that Mananjary was totally calm and you don't have to pass through any hotspots to get there, because my name showed up on the list of people getting a ride back to site as far as Fianar.

Still, everything depended on events staying peaceful over the following days.
Feb 14, 19:50 "tana remained orderly. 2 sets of gatherings pro govt large no violence. this good news. tgv has said he will take over ministries or he will perhaps not. fingers and toes crossed."
Feb 15, 19:31 "all quiet. hoping for the same tomorrow."

Finally, on the 16th:
"FEB 16TH. DEAR PCVs. DECONSOLIDATION STARTS TOMORROW. PCV WARDEN PLEASE TOUCH BASE WITH PC DUTY. THANKS."

We had a big end-of-consolidation party that night, which I threw myself into whole-heartedly despite having gotten a text from Mika around dinner time that said he was hearing lots of gunfire in Tana. I perfected my dancing-with-scarf move (think "the robot," not rhythm gymnastics) and had a long conversation with someone about Salt Lake City. Then at 10:46 pm we got this text message from our security officer:
"FEB 16. HI AGAIN. PLEASE DO NOT DEPART TO SITE. WAIT PENDING CONFIRMATION FROM PC. TANA ACTIVE TONIGHT."
My impression is that most people decided they were in no state to process that information and continued with the party.

An hour or so after I went to bed my alarm went off marking the time when we should have been leaving, had we not gotten that very vague text the night before. I heroically dragged myself to the vans, was informed that we would be leaving three hours later, and went back to bed. We finally did make it out of Mantasoa, though the entire way back to Fianar any time anyone's phone rang we were sure it would be Peace Corps telling us to turn around. Apparently "Tana active" turned out to just be rumors and the only thing that actually happened was some people robbed a gas station. That didn't seem to add up with Mika hearing gunshots, but we were going back to site so I wasn't about to argue. I got to have lunch with Mika in Tana before we left, which was nice since during consolidation I wasn't sure whether I would ever get to see him again, and then we left, in one PC van, one PC 4x4 and one rented taxi brousse (suddenly we had all the people whose sites were south of Tana with us). The taxi brousse broke down a few hours out of Tana, so we all crammed into the PC van and spent the night in Antsirabe, which was quiet as the grave when we arrived at 9pm. Apparently a curfew had been imposed during the crisis.

The next day we headed off to Fianar. Things went smoothly for the first four or five hours, and I was half-asleep as we drove into Fianar ville. I woke up when the 4x4 stopped suddenly, and I saw the van stopped in front of us. I was about to ask what was going on when I heard chanting, and saw, about a block away and marching towards us blocking the whole street, a parade of protesters waving banners and shouting. Nirina (PC Fianar regional rep and our driver) pulled an epic U-turn and we sped away in the direction we came from. The four of us in the car just looked at each other and laughed. It was too ridiculous. We finally get deconsolidated, finally get back to Fianar, and we drive right into a mob. "Retreat! Retreat!" We drove around to the other side of the city on really bad roads and made it to the Meva. Chez Nini's, our favorite hotely across the street from the meva (featuring "the vegetarian" special for PCVs) was still serving, even though there were lots of people standing in the street trying to figure out what was going on, so we all went over there for lunch. Just as we finished ordering, we started hearing gunshots. After about 10 of them Nirina and Xavier (Director of the Education program) had been on the phone with Peace Corps in Tana and we were directed to take refuge in the Meva. Fortunately the staff of Chez Nini's was willing to make our food "to go," which just meant we return all the plates and silverware later. The shots continued; we counted about 41 keeping a chalk tally on the pavement.

Picture taken from J. Selb without permission.

That night PC called and said the shooting was gendarmes firing in the air to dispel looters, and the marchers were "just students," whatever that means. They also said we could still go back to site the next day. I got a ride as far as Irondro with Xavier and Nirina who were going further south to do site assessments, then took a taxi brousse the remaining two hours to Mananjary. I bought some anana (greens) to strap to the side of my backpack (no room for other food), then hiked the two hours back to lovely lovely Mahatsara Sud, which was right where I left it.

Next up: and it's a bittersweet symphony this life...

Episode 2: Consolidated to...blah still consolidated

2009-11-08T18:49:00.002+03:00

To set the mood for this episode I am recalling a period when I was about 9 or 10 years old and my dad was reading me Les Miserables. It had been night after night of nothing but Jean Valjean's inner anguish and ethical reckoning and I was bored. Finally, I think I exclaimed to my dad something along the lines of, "Gee whiz, Dad, can't we just skip the mental turmoil?!"

I'm not trying to draw any parallels between J.V.'s troubles and us volunteers', but mental turmoil was definitely the name of the game for a few weeks there. Basically it was way more PCVs than either Mantasoa or the Fianar Meva are meant to accomodate, crammed together for an indeterminate amount of time, waiting for circumstances completely out of our control to either sort themselves out and send us back to site, or continue to worsen and force us back to the US, without a chance to finish up any of our projects, say goodbye to the people we'd been living and working with, or even retrieve our stuff. Add to that the Mahatsara Sud-esque isolation of Mantasoa and the lack of information other than one daily briefing from a Peace Corps staff member and you have a group of kids who are stressed, but so out of the loop that the natural thing to do just seems to be enjoying Mantasoa. Unless maybe you were in the group that had already been there for two weeks. I can't speak for them. Personally, I was sad and worried about Madagascar and Mika and my village, and desperately not wanting to leave, but I didn't know what I could do about it. I ruled out going to Tana and giving the president and the ex-mayor a piece of my mind (logistical complications) and ended up playing ping-pong.

The other issue was that people's feelings about the situation and our options ran the entire spectrum from "let's just evacuate now" (because they're sure the country's going to fall apart/tired of Madagascar/can't stand one more day in Camp Mantasoa limbo-land) to "surely I could just wait out a civil war at site?" (my position). For the most part a peaceful coexistence prevailed, but I certainly perceived a lot of (mostly) unspoken tension.

Now let's backtrack to where the last episode left off: I've just arrived at the Fianar Meva. This was consolidation lite; we were advised not to go wandering around the Magro or the places where people were holding rallies, but we didn't have to stay inside the Meva and we could go to the internet cafe, the post office, the market, restaurants etc. There were 10 of us from the Fianar region staying in the house and I'd say the atmosphere was cramped and merry, with equal parts exasperation and doom. It started off with us all comparing notes and opinions on the situation thus far, and basically agreeing that we should be back at our sites after a few days. But a few days went by and the crisis seemed to be getting worse. We were getting our news from occasional calls and text messages from PC, CNN.com, and a Gasy site in French called sobika.com. Much was vague and unconfirmed. The mayor had declared himself in charge of everything. The military and the gendarmes might have switched to his side. A giant hurricane might be headed for the east coast. Until February 3rd things seemed to be getting a little better, and we got texts from PC saying that the country was calm and they were "cautiously optimistic," but we should plan on being in consolidation for at least a few more days. On the 4th, however, the bad news started again:

"TANA - very tense. president fired TGV [nickname of the mayor and also name of his party] last night. TGV refuses to accept. rumours abound. STAY in place...more to follow. PCO"

The next day Tana was surprisingly calm, but we heard a minister's plane had been burned in Farafangana (south-east coast) and that night Manakara (the next city south of Mananjary on the east coast) went crazy. ("TANA CALM, but manakara erupted last night. PCVs en route to fianar now. clearly situation still fluid. stay tuned. pco") There were four PCVs consolidated at a hotel there, and they all arrived in Fianar the next day, understandably shaken-up. Their hotel had been right in the middle of the area where people starting fighting and there had been gunshots and Molotov cocktails and noise and confusion all around. They were barricaded into their hotel room, though at some point I think the army arrived to protect the hotel.

Here I think I'll mention that at the start of consolidation PC gave everyone the option, during the following month, to leave PC Madagascar. Normally if you want to leave before your 27 months are up you have to E.T. (early termination). During this period we were given the option of I.O.S. (interruption of service), which I guess is like an honorable discharge and you get the same benefits as if you had COS'ed (close of service, the normal 27 month finish). I know that many people considered this option, and several took it.

February 7 was a strange, sad, and scary day. There was a big protest scheduled and everyone was waiting to see what would happen. PC texted us in the morning that they were all on standby and that there was a crowd gathering in downtown Tana. The strange thing for us in Fianar was that while we were getting updates from PC every few hours, we were also following the day's events on sobika.com, which was being updated every few minutes with brief bits of news: crowd marching towards president's office; crowd have now reached so-and-so; military firing on crowd; at least two dead so far; people are running away. Those aren't quotes. But it went something like that. I talked to Eliko that night and I think we both assumed evacuation was inevitable. She had heard that our country director was in a meeting with the ambassador and PC Washington about a potential evacuation. I called Mika, who said I should go back to Mahatsara Sud because Fianar might not be safe. I felt terrible telling him that PC might just send me back to the United States. And then? And then I don't know.

They ended up deciding to move us Fianar people to Mantasoa, with a bunch of other regional consolidation groups. We left the next day at 6am.

8 Feb, 12:04 "10AM Tana calmed overnight but future cloudier than ever. further PC consolidation ongoing. thanks for all your help!"

Arriving at Mantasoa was like a class reunion -- hugs and screaming all around -- but you could see the strain in some people. Many had already been there for a long time, and with things looking worse politically, they didn't know what to expect for the future. They were eating American food. They were doing some (very cold) canoeing. Everyone had watched The Dark Knight three or four times. Puzzles. Beer. Welcome to Mantasoa consolidation.

If there had been 80 Jean Valjeans imprisoned at a lake resort with nothing to do and a small island's worth of rum and beer, well, maybe they would have ended up doing some Speed Dating and morning Cardio-Breakfast-Boogie (available on VHS) too. Just to pass the time.

Next up: Mantasoa back to site

Episode 1: Calm to Consolidated

2009-10-29T11:56:00.000+03:00

So, as you probably gathered from the last couple posts, we were evacuated in March. I'm back in the US now, thinking about it all again. Here's what happened:

I think the last thing I wrote about the political situation in Madagascar was at the start of our consolidation period (beginning of February). To fill that in a little, as far as my own experience the crisis started on January 26th, although clearly things were brewing on the political scene long before I became aware of anything. That morning I was in Mananjary, and heard from my best friend that the mayor of Tana and his party had burned down the headquarters of Magro (the president's enormous food company), the national television station, and the national radio station. Obviously the mayor himself wasn't the one with the blowtorch, but that is what we heard. I thought it was crazy rumors, though the radio and the TV station had gone static, but I called a friend in Tana and he said he'd seen the burned buildings with his own eyes. That evening I went back to my village, and was up most of the night texting, the main form of communication between PCVs and the way that PC sends messages when they need to say the same thing to all of us. I heard that Tana was being looted, the prison was broken, and people were saying the water had been poisoned. Eliko was texting me that Peace Corps was thinking of pulling us out, and had I heard from Mika? And I was camped out in the dark inside my mosquito net, clutching my cell phone in front of my face, and considering for the first time that I might not get to finish my 2 years in Madagascar.

The next day the texts from the Peace Corps security officer started flowing in, and things started to both piece together and get more confusing, in 160 character segments. That afternoon we went into "standfast" mode, following this text:

4:34 pm "TO ALL PCVs, this is a STANDFAST EAP STAGE. FOLLOW GUIDE IN EAP BOOK. CHECK SMS FREQUENTLY. WAIT FOR FURTHER SMS. STAY CALM. :)"

What a comfort that last smiley face was; everything seemed even less real. The EAP book explains PC Madagascar's Emergency Action Procedure, and was finally located scrunched in the bottom of my bamboo bookshelf, along with some really big spiders. Standfast means pack an emergency bag, inventory your belongings, and wait to see if we consolidate. Great.

The following day, a totally normal quiet Wednesday in Mahatsara Sud, we heard that things were calmer in Tana but that there was still a lot of rioting in the provinces. This was the information gleaned from a few people who arrived from Mananjary, a couple texts from Mika, and one text from a Peace Corps friend who said that the volunteers in Tamatave had moved to the countryside because people were burning and looting in the city. But Mahatsara Sud (cricket...cricket...) was completely unchanged, so I tried to go about business as usual and not stress about the fact that things may or may not be going to hell in Tana, Tamatave, Fianar, and Mahajanga. It was wierd to think that when this whole thing blows over (as I assumed it would, I mean, it's Madagascar, people are moramora chill.) we in Mahatsara Sud wouldn't "go back" to anything, because nothing changed to begin with.

The next few days we got texts from PC that the situation was (and I think I speak for most PCV's when I say that this is a frustratingly undescriptive word and I will always think twice before using it with people who are desperately starved for information) "fluid." It's true, the situation was fluid, and I have no beef with PC for reporting it as such, but I would rather have been told a couple of specific news bits, e.g. "Big rally in Tana today;" "No agreement yet between Andry and Prez," and then said to myself "Gee, sounds like a pretty fluid situation." Remember, all I was getting in M/Sud were rumors or nothing. Anyway, PC also told us to stock food, check our phones at least two times a day (some volunteers had to scale small mountains to get reception), keep a low profile (good luck), and stay safe and calm. ":-)"

Things sounded fairly tense in Tana and the bigger cities, but it was hard to feel too nervous when Mananjary and certainly Mahatsara Sud seemed so unfazed. I was at a vazaha friend of mine's office in Mananjary, charging my phone and getting indignant over his commenting that Americans will evacuate at the drop of a hat, when I noticed that I had a missed call from Peace Corps. I called back and they told me that they were consolidating my region and I needed to go to Fianar, now if I could and tomorrow at the latest.

I hiked back to my village at warp speed (think Dan speedwalking. If you know Dan. Dan, you know who you are.) and started to pack/arrange the things that I had only half-heartedly put together after we got the "standfast" order. After going to tell a few friends that I would be leaving for a while, I realized that there was no way I was going to make it back to Mananjary before dark. So then I started packing agonizingly slowly, much more my normal packing style. I decided I needed to wake up at 3:45 am in order to get to Mananjary by 6:30-ish and catch a morning brousse to Fianar. Some of you may be familiar with this hour of "the morning" and know that it is in fact very much "the night". Hiking in the woods by yourself at night is a stupid and scary thing to do, unless you are The Tracker or maybe Batman. Anyway, I was totally freaked out. I kept chanting to myself "You know everyone in Mahatsara Sud," but then I remembered that a more accurate statement would be "Everyone in Mahatsara Sud knows you," which is somewhat less comforting. The other scary thing is that pretty much all men in the commune Mahatsara Sud (or ambanivolo Madagascar perhaps) carry big knives. I didn't see a soul during the dark part of my hike except one guy, walking a ways behind me, definitely hoisting a big knife over his shoulder. "He's just going to plant rice, he's just going to plant rice, he's just going to plant rice..." Eventually he passed me (a feat, considering I was zooming along on pure fear), said hello, and that was that. Still, I have never been so happy to see the sun rise. Sometimes an imagination is a dangerous thing to have.

On the brousse to Fianar I got an update from Eliko that 41 PCVs were already consolidated at the Peace Corps Training Center, the summer camp-ish resort on Lake Mantasoa that I think I've already discussed, about 2 hours out of Tana. So far she was supposed to stay in Morondava, and I only had to go to the Fianar Peace Corps house (a mere 6 hour brousse ride from Mananjary (20 hours to Mantasoa, for contrast)), but not all regions have a Peace Corps house so I guessed it was Tana and Tamatave region folks at Mantasoa.

About an hour away from Fianar I got this text from PC:
Jan 31, 11:12 am "PCVs, avoid joining crowd gathering. keep low profile. check if town is calm then go get all money from bank asap. come back quietly then remain inside. THANK YOU. PC"

My immediate reaction was it's over; we're evacuating. I closed my eyes, reminding myself that external displays of extreme emotion are not appropriate for inside a taxi brousse. Really I wanted to climb on top of the roof and scream "NOOOOOOOOOOO!" at the top of my lungs. Tear my hair and so on. I refrained. When I got to Fianar it turned out that PC was just worried about banks running out of cash and wanted to make sure that we had enough money to last us a couple weeks if the consolidation period dragged on. For many PCVs that would mean pretty much "all money," as the text said, but for me "all money" would mean getting a huge amount of cash out (because I barely spent any money living in M/Sud), hence my reading way too much into that text message. Much relieved exhalation of breath and forehead-brushing ensued.

So there we were, consolidated. A couple days then back to my village? A couple days then back to the US? No one knew.

Episode 2 to come shortly...

The North

2009-06-18T14:15:00.005+03:00

This is a post about the trip I just returned from, to the Donia Festival on Nosy Be and then the north of Madagascar, not about the coup d'etat and evacuation. I still really want to write about that sometime, because it's a real story, but it's a lot to cover and I can never seem to finish it in one session at the internet cafe. Today I'm just going to post a bunch of recent pictures and talk about various beach paradises. Fluff, in other words, and the serious stuff can wait for later.

I got back to Tana at 3am tuesday morning (the 16th) from two-plus weeks of being on tour in the north of Madagascar with Mika&Davis, my boyfriend Mika's band. We left May 27th in a special chartered caravan (read: taxi brousse, but one where they're not allowed to pick up any other passengers, so the 24-hour ride is a lot more pleasant), just for Mika&Davis, which contained me as an official passenger (read: all-expenses paid) even though I am not technically a member of the band, but it should be noted that the M&D entourage was the smallest of all the bands traveling to Donia, probably because it does not contain any backup dancers, makeup artists, or personal assistants. Who it did contain: Mika (accoustic guitar and vocals), Davis (vocals), Herve (bass), Danza (accoustic guitar), Tovo (lead guitar), Jimmy (batterie (that means drums in french!)), me (vazaha), and Andry, who was along to film a clippee (music video) for them.

Here's Mika waiting for everybody to be ready. We absolutely had to leave by 9am in order to catch the boat to Nosy Be the next day, so of course we left at 11.

The Donia brousse. The pole holding up one of the flags broke before we even left Tana, and the flag on the other side blew off somewhere in the middle of nowhere a few hours later.

The first flag that fell off we reattached to the back of the brousse.

Me and Mika in the first place we stopped to pee en route. I'm loyal to the east coast rainforest style, but the red clay dirt here with the clouds hanging so low was pretty stunning. I tip my hat to you, high plateau of Madagascar... just get a little warmer please because there's no hot water in our "shower" (read: high power spigot). This is the sky I'll be requesting my grandfather to photoshop into all future photos I take, by the way.

Donia is now on its 16th year; it's the biggest music festival in Madagascar "if I'm not wrong" (that's a translation of something people say a lot in Malagasy that always makes me want to say "Madagascar is a small fungus found on the underside of certain sea turtles in the south pacific, if I'm not wrong."). It takes place on Nosy Be, a small island off the northwest coast of Madagascar (but still part of the country). You get there by boat from the mainland. The Donia organizers alotted us 5000 ariary a piece to take the slow boat (2-3 hours), but I'm pretty sure that everyone in the caravan opted to pay an additional 5000 ariary out of pocket to take the speed boat, which takes half an hour.

Here's me and Mika on the boat. Us loading up the boat. The lifejacketed fellows in the boat on the left are Ambondrona, a hard-rock band that are remarkably popular here in Madagascar, despite the fact that you can't really shake your butt to their music. I was wearing a lifejacket too, a conscious choice and not something that I was required to do, as I am no longer a US Peace Corps volunteer.
So we arrived at...DONIA!!! (Say that really low, and really loud, so you can hear the exclamation points.)They put us up in a suite in what was without a doubt the nicest hotel I have ever stayed in in my life. I think it was owned by one of the french organizers.Here's the view from our balcony.The only problem was that it was really far out of Hellville, the main town on Nosy Be where the festival is, and taxis on Nosy Be are outrageously expensive, so we were kindof limited in our movements, and dependent on whether there was a Donia van to pick us up. I would not have traded with the artists who were staying in town for anything though, because after 2 months in Tana all I wanted to do was stare at the ocean.

From left, Herve, Tovo, me, and Mika, in the car from the hotel to Hellville.

Mika during soundcheck.Shooting clippee at Andilana -- Nosy Be beach paradise. I kept my distance, this being one of those times, like concerts, that remind me that I am not a member of the band. Mika, me, and Davis on the festival grounds after enjoying a lunch of potatoes and meat mush. With rice.All my pictures from the actual concert are rubbish, so let's jump to the next stop on the tour: Diego, way north and much-hyped by Peace Corps volunteers.

Ramena Beach, gorgeous indeed, but chock full of tiny little midgee/mosquitoes that seem like a minor annoyance until you wake up the next morning and you are covered in 200 bites, minimum, that itch like no mosquito bite I have ever experienced. I spend the next week scratching myself to a pulp. I will be wearing a beekeepers uniform if I ever make it back to Ramena.Herve and Danza modeling some advertising for the Mika&Davis concerts.

Mika and Danza at the soireeAfter Diego we went back to Nosy Be to stay at Chez Loulou, a really fancy resort in Andilana, for 5 days until they played a cabaret at Chez Loulou.

Chez Loulou was also a much nicer hotel than I'm accustomed to, but this time our sleeping arrangements were a bit different. It was no problem after we got a mosquito net, but there was an hour after we first went to bed the first night when I almost had a complete mental breakdown because I got 6 gnarly mosquito bites ON MY FACE, to add to the bajillion from Ramena. I had to go outside and take very slow deep breaths while Mika searched for a net.

The cabaret finished around 3am at Chez Loulou, we caught the boat back to the mainland around 9 the next morning and went straight to Ambanja where we ran around preparing for a concert that night, then to Antsohihy the next day (where you might recall I was last year for a health festival) for another concert. Then, sigh, back to Tana.

Now what?

2009-03-18T16:11:00.003+03:00

Hello. I am in South Africa. I have been requested to make the following clear before talking about anything else on my blog: I and all my friends from Peace Corps Madagascar are safe.

Please send any and all job offers and donations my way. Most of my belongings are still in my house in my village, along with my sense of direction. For now I'm just floating along, trying to finish the paperwork and medical pokings/proddings involved in leaving the Peace Corps (e.g. pap smear at the airport), and trying to come up with a plan C and D.

I had an amazing last month at site, which I'll write about some time.

I've tried to keep the Gaubatz Master Life Plan general and flexible, but this was not part of it.

by the by

2009-02-06T09:13:00.002+03:00

I'm in Fianar at least until Sunday, with nothing to do, so please send me an email. I will write you back. I check my email once a day farafahakeliny (minimum).

Word is there's a giant cyclone heading for Madagascar right now. Just what we need.
And they burned the national radio station and national television station down, which were how people used to get cyclone warnings.

The Vaovao (news)

2009-02-04T17:02:00.000+03:00

Those of you who began to pay attention to news coming out of Madagascar since I got here (or perhaps you've always been avid Madagascar-watchers) may have heard that we are in the middle of a fairly tense political situation right now. I don't really feel equiped to give a detailed update on the situation, but I will fill you in briefly on what it has meant for Peace Corps so far.

The basic conflict is between the president of Madagascar and the mayor of Antananarivo, the capitol. On monday things began to get violent and Peace Corps went into the "standfast" stage of our emergency action plan. All volunteers got word that we should stay at our sites but be aware, keep a low profile, make sure we had phone credit, check our text messages frequently, and pack an emergency bag in case we needed to leave in a hurry. Over the next few days the protests and strikes spread out of Tana to the provinces and on friday I got a call that we were consolidating, and I needed to go to Fianar, my "consolidation point." I was pretty surprised by this because I thought things were calming down, and there had been nothing going on in Mananjary and certainly nothing in my little village.

I've been in Fianar with 11 other volunteers since saturday, and right now we're just waiting to see what happens. We get daily messages and calls from Peace Corps in Tana. Evacuation is a possibility, if things get violent again, or if food and fuel prices fail to stabilize or services like banking become unreliable. A couple days ago we heard that we might be able to go back to our sites as soon as this weekend, because although protests are continuing they have all been peaceful. But yesterday the government fired the mayor of Tana and people are pretty upset about that, so things are pretty tense again, I think.

Hopefully, things will be resolved soon and I'll be able to give you the whole story of when we almost got evacuated. Sadly, even if everything was sorted out today, people have already died and much damage has been done to the country, which was already struggling before this crisis began.

Taloha

2009-01-09T14:30:00.004+03:00

(If you click on these you can see them blown up big enough to see my little cartoon pores.)

First, here's two cartoons that I drew months and months ago. Maybe like 10 months ago because the first one is from when I still had massive snack cravings and was practically eating spoonfuls of flour to keep from imploding between meals (Remember, no food available for purchase for 11km). Now I sometimes forget meals. But that was a painful adjustment period.

The second one depicts an exchange that is still part of my daily life whenever I leave my tiny village.

Next I want to talk about...

LYCHEE SEASON AT MY SITE
aka the best time and place combination anywhere/when on the planet. Perhaps you, like me before I arrived in Madagascar, have never had a lychee. You should do something about this. Like visit me next lychee season. Last lychee season I ate a lot of lychees, but I didn't really think about how we don't have them in America and they're the best fruit ever so I really need to make the most of being here. So this year I was all strategy. Example: foods other than lychees take up space in your stomach that could be filled with lychees, therefore they should be avoided during lychee season. My diet for a month was basically lychees all day and then a small portion of rice and vegetable/protein-source for dinner. You know when you're hiking in the woods and you pass a blackberry bush or something and you find bear scat that's just 100% berry, like jam...?

I also figured out the times and places where you're most likely to be invited to sit under a lychee tree and gorge yourself while fathers and children climb to very scary heights to bring them down for you. My site is covered with huge lychee trees, but it turns out they all belong to someone or another, so you can't just climb 'em yourself and pig out. Fortunately, random people bring lychees to my house several times a day during the season. These lychees don't come with the peaceful scenery and companionship that go along with an evening spent inhaling lychees under a tree, but you also don't get devoured by mosquitoes (a reason some people think lychees cause malaria).

NEXT...
One day last month I came home and opened my side door to find, hanging from the top of the door frame, inches from my face, a snake wrapped around a gecko. Swinging in fact, because I clocked it pretty hard when I opened the door. I called my friend, who called the clinic guardian, who came and killed it with a stick. Gasy people are terrified of snakes, and although I know that there are no poisonous snakes in Madagascar, I had been a little concerned since I found a long snakeskin hanging from my wall a few months ago. Also, geckos eat mosquitoes so gecko-eaters are not welcome in my home.

Teaching
I finally broke down and started teaching English to my best friend, so that she can finally pass the BAC exam. It sucks just as much as I thought it would. I hate speaking special English, and I have no patience. But my friend is fun and we've started having some really great conversations in Gasy since I'm over at her house a lot more now.

Health at my site
I went to talk to the doctor at the clinic in Mananjary about services for people from my site and he said that loads of people from my site already come to the clinic in Mananjary for birth control and vaccines and treatment. I had been thinking that people were choosing no health care at all over walking all the way to Mananjary, but they are actually making the trek, contrary to my doctor's opinion that they're all lazy. The doctor in Mananjary said I can come and help out with the education programs they do at the clinic every morning, so there's some more work for me, and I feel a lot better about the talks I give in my village now that I know that the people are not hating me for asking them to go to Mananjary.

Tomorrow I finally go back to site. I just remembered that my gas ran out the week before I left so I'll be cooking on charcoal indefinitely, since there are no longer any NGOs with cars who come to my village. But I have lots of flower and vegetable planting, cookstove building, and latrine construction to look forward to. Good times pending.

More Pictures

2009-01-05T11:14:00.007+03:00

As always when I make it to a computer to write here, I am in transit. Right now I'm in Fianar for a few days before I finally go back to site. I left about three weeks ago to go to Tana, which was supposed to be the jumping off point for a fabulous Christmas/New Year vacation, and I suppose it was, but not after much changing of plans, and about-to-go-ing, and but-then-not-going, and all sorts of only-possible-in-Tana experiences in between.

The first week was spent going back and forth between the Peace Corps house and Mika's house, and waiting for Eliko to get to Tana while exchanging 2 or 3 text messages a day with her in which we bounced back and forth between potential vacation locales, debating likelihood of rain versus likelihood of heatstroke, how many hours/days we were willing to spend in a taxibrousse, etc. During this time I was having a completely different type of Tana experience than the usual (hanging out doing big city things with Peace Corps volunteers). Instead I was doing all these "normal," hanging out with americans-type things, but with Gasy people. Gasy people with money and access to newspapers, the greater world, etc. Big city folk.
I'll insert this picture to remind you of who my friends are at site:I love my life and the people at my site, and the ambanivolo lifestyle is what I've grown totally used to. I just want to show you this picture and the next one to give you an idea of what a trip it was to be living the big city life for a couple weeks.
The above picture is Davis, Ninah, me and Mika. Things to note: juice in a box, remote control, painted cement wall, camera on table, decorative dried flower arrangement in corner, painting on wall, ashtray, I am clean and wearing a cordoroy jacket and dangly earrings. We're at Davis' house, where we went to hang out and talk. About politics and work and what we've been up to, which was different yesterday from the day before. Ninah is super awesome and took me out to the Tana countryside to bathe in a sacred waterfall while people played the accordion and drummed and sang.

So it was a super fun week in Tana, highlights (other than the sacred waterfall) being two Mika&Davis concerts, meeting my other favorite Gasy musician, playing pool, singing all of the Paul Simon album Graceland with a guy who works at Mika's studio (he knows a few words from all the songs, I have known every word in the manner that we know the pledge of allegiance since a very young age) while I waited for Mika to get home (after a transportation miscommunication), and finally, helping Mika move from his room below the studio to a couple rooms at the back of the studio so that the person who owned the land could destroy just the half of the building that he owned (something about a fight with his brother who owned the other half), but not completely destroyed, so that Mika now lives in a building that looks like this:Yes that is the sky you see at the top of the photo. His rooms are back behind what you see here, but those doors lead to the bathroom and showers that we have to use. This picture is what used to be the big reception room of the studio, and off to the right were the actual recording rooms with all the equipment. It sucks, to be sure, that the studio and his house were destroyed, but with no roof and all the windows knocked open and a few days of great weather, it was actually kindof beautiful and I took a ton of pictures. But it was a bit of a shock the first night I saw it and had to enter the studio up these stairs:It was like coming home to find your house had been bombed. We were supposed to leave Tana to go to Tamatave (another big city in Madagascar, on the east coast, Mika's hometown), but the night after Christmas we got mugged on our way to a restaurant and I lost my bag with my wallet, phone, mp3 player, identity everything, and a patch of Bruce Springsteen that I'd drawn and embroidered myself. That was a friday night so we had to wait until monday to cancel bank cards and file a report with Peace Corps. We did go to the police on saturday which was an interesting experience. When we arrived we walked past a room where a bunch of officers were sorting through tables overflowing with confiscated pirated cds, and someone called out to Mika that there were a bunch of Mika&Davis cds in the pile, so we had to stop and talk about why Gasy musicians can't make any money. Then I had to go to a shop down the street to buy three sheets of white paper so I could handwrite in triplicate my Declaration of lost or stolen stuff, which meant copying the template that was taped to the wall and then having Mika dictate to me in Malagasy Officiale what happened to us on friday night. Then some police guy typed up a report on an old typewriter and we finally got out of there after a few hours. Which I'm told is fabulously speedy and I should be very grateful.

On tuesday we left for Tamatave.

Tamatave was beautiful- very hot, but a very cool city. It's big. I hadn't realized that. I was expecting something more like Mananjary. The climate and the landscape are similar, but Tamatave is an economic capitol of Madagascar and there's loads of stuff going on there. We stayed with Mika's family and I got to see a couple of PCVs too. It was a good trip.
Here's Mika at this party we went to where he got "forced" to play an impromptu mini concert and a very drunk woman got on a microphone and started talking in English about how it was all for me. And everybody was dancing and it was a bajillion degrees and I had to dance with all these people who kept winking at Mika while they were dancing at me which was uncomfortable but I was still happy because his music is so good. Plus everyone was really surprised that I could sing along.

There's more to say. But it will have to wait till tomorrow because I have to go pick up some pictures before the photo place closes. I hope you all had wonderful holidays.

Elections and cheese

2008-11-20T19:17:00.005+03:00

The past two weeks I've been in Alarobia, a small-ish village about an hour out of Tana (the capitol), training the new health PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees). The village my group trained in was similar to my site -- houses and rice fields, no pesky distractions like electricity or running water -- while Alarobia is almost metropolitan in comparison. As trainers, Eliko and I were just fine with the luxuries. We got our own cubicle (guny sack 3/4-walls) on the top floor of the training center, two beds crammed in with a desk and a computer (!!! MUSIC !!!). We had all our meals cooked by the Peace Corps chef, a fabulous man named Gaby who makes killer mashed potatoes, and we ate dining hall-style with the language teachers and other Peace Corps staff. We also got to watch movies and ... TWO HOURS of BBC news on TVMadagascar every morning. We led sessions about malaria, safe motherhood, family planning and Peace Corps life, but whenever the trainees had language class (2-4 hours a day) Eliko and I were on our own. In other words, free to head to the cheese factory with some box-wine in a Nalgene (keepin classy, as always). The presence of three or four cheese factories in the Alarobia area was especially funny to us, since cheese cravings/favorite dishes involving cheese/various torments we would be willing to endure for cheese were frequent topics of conversation when we were in training. This new group doesn't know how good they've got it.

Heading to the cheese factory

The new trainees seem like a good bunch. I got to talk to most of them a fair bit, though the conversation relationship is a little weird right now because the most automatic topic is just questions about real life as a PCV in Madagascar, and although I love talking about my site, it makes for a rather one-sided conversation and you have to be really careful not to get too long-winded. Or full of yourself, since we're the experienced ones now. It's an ego-trip.

Another highlight of training was that I got to be at the ambassador's mansion watching CNN on a giant flat-screen TV as the election results came in, instead of huddled alone around my short-wave radio in my village. I found out Obama won at the same time as you did. It was incredible.
About 20 Peace Corps volunteers were in town, and we pretty much took over the back living room at the ambassador's, so we could yell and squeal and not offend any ex-pat Republicans (also out of respect for the ambassador and the various Malagasy dignitaries present, since as usual we looked like bums (even your nice clothes take on a sortof hobo charm after a year of washing them on a rock in a dirty river) To our credit, we did leave the box wine at home). We screamed. We cried. We experienced a long-awaited taste of (could it be...) American Pride. It was really hard to watch all the crowds going crazy in America and not be there, but it's also been cool to witness the amazement and joy of the rest of the world. Especially from a country where many people don't even believe me when I tell them there are black people in America.

The results were all in by about 7AM Madagascar time, and after Obama's speech a Peace Corps van picked up Eliko and me and a bunch of other PCVs who were giving presentations to the trainees (on zero sleep for most of them) and we headed back to Alarobia. I felt like we were a victorious sports team coming home after a world championship -- we were received with cheers and handshakes from all our Malagasy associates. And now I get to go back to my site tomorrow and explain my joy to all the people in my village that have been asking me about the election for the past many months. Good times ahead.

Ravoravo

2008-11-17T13:33:00.004+03:00

I have been having a lot of fun recently. All of it is documented on Eliko's camera, so I could show you, but on saturday (her last day before heading back to site) we chose awesome concert over going to the internet cafe to copy her pictures so...hopefully when I see Eliko again around Krismasy I'll be able to pass those along. But you're thinking: awesome concert, tell me more!

OK! I will. It was some big Radio France International spectacle (that's splec-TAC-luh, it's french): Jerry Marcoss, Lola, Mika & Davis, Baba, and Tambour Gasy. Jerry Marcoss puts on a good show but his songs run nonstop on the radio and in clubs and I'm pretty tired of them. Lola is fluff super-produced pop. Mika & Davis, Baba, Tambour Gasy, and this guy/group? Mikea (sp?) who won a recording contract from RFI, on the other hand, were all amazing so the concert was a blast. But now you're thinking: Jayne, I heard that the concert sold out ages ago. Right you are! Good thing we met Mika from Mika & Davis (my favorite band in Madagascar) at the discotheque last weekend and then hung out the next day. I sent him a very passive text ("gee I heard that your concert is sold out. Is that true?") and he called and said that he had tickets for us, just call him when we got there. So come show-time Eliko and I are led behind the arena where several artistes are sitting inside a very smoky beat-up Camry-type car, presumably pretending to be angsty American high school students. We milled awkwardly around being the vazahas who speak Malagasy until Lola rolls up in a brand-new black SUV. I shook his hand, not to impress you guys but because the kids in my village are going to freak out when they hear. Then Mika very kindly escorted us inside and we got to watch the whole show from the very plush symphony-hall-type seats with a bunch of oldish French people with their fingers in their ears, which normally would not be my scene because I like to dance, but the floor at this type of concert is like pickpocket/groping-central so we were pretty happy where we were. When the concert was over we slipped out so we wouldn't have to mingle backstage with the other vazaha who got free tickets from the bands/receive reality check that we're not fabulously beautiful and fascinating, we're just from America, France, etc. Mika did take me to the zoo yesterday however, so I feel a little bit special.

Now I'm off to buy toothpaste imported from America (poison-free!). Next entry: election day at the ambassador's, and training the new PCVs in a town with a cheese factory.

PICTURES!

2008-09-27T15:25:00.018+03:00

I don't have much in the way of stories this month, so I'm going to try to upload some pictures from the Fitampoha trip, with commentary. None of these were taken by me since most of mine came out blurry and I can't fix any settings on my camera because the screen is broken. The plus side of this is that I'm in many of these pictures.

Ok, above we have our intrepid travellers drying the underwear that we just washed in the river as the Gasy guides look on in astonishment from the riverside where they are preparing luxury cuisine for their higher-paying clients. All of us had arrived in Antsirabe with a bunch of dirty laundry. In my case it was because the rain hadn't stopped in my village in weeks.Nothing like standing in a waterfall with your glasses on. This was a 2-minute hike from the river. We stopped for lunch and a bathe (and the aforementioned clothes-drying).

Here's 2 views from the river. The scenery changed dramatically over the 3 days. In some places we were floating through a canyon of solid rock walls, and sometimes it was dry rolling hills like this.Here's me on the river taxi/trench-warfare-simulatron before they let the rest of Madagascar squeeze onto it.Sunrise over the baobabs.

Squeezed into a truck taxi for 6 hours from Morondava to Tsy Mafana.

The above 3 are us doing condom demos at night during Fitampoha. The guy in the jean ensemble is a Malgasy AIDS educator we were working with who was loving the spectacle of him doing condom demos surrounded by a tent of vazaha girls. His demos got more and more ridiculous as the night went on. It was literally like he was getting drunker and drunker off all the attention. I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that I have a tan. Ok, in the last one it looks like a sunburn, but I swear it was a tan.

Cooking the morning rice porridge in front of our hut.

Here's me attempting to comb my hair for the first time in years in order to get it done up in dokodoko balls (complete with brightly colored weave) -- it's fady (taboo) to enter the area of the beach where the ancestors' bones are unless you have them (for women).

I think this picture speaks for itself, although it reminds of something that would be in Shrek. Can you read the banner? "A.P.M. : Association des Princesses de Madagascar"

I think I mentioned that we made costumes out of our expired condoms. Here's us as the condom crusaders, preparing to launch a sensitization attack on the last night of Fitampoha.

Storming the beach with our wooden penises.

Discussing...

Always on the job. Natalie does a condom demo for the gendarmes that came over to hit on us while we were having a beer later that night.

The last day of Fitampoha. The Sakalava Menabe royal family carries their ancestors' bones to the river to wash them.

Crammed again into the back of a truck on the way back to Morondava. All mummied up for 6 hours of sand and spinal bruising.

You can see Maggie and me and Natalie taking the picture in the reflection in Kate's sunglasses. Also take note of the dust, please.

Fitampoha

2008-08-26T11:50:00.005+03:00

Heading back to site today after 2 weeks of travel, half vacation, half business. I met up with 2 Peace Corps friends in Antsirabe, where, in an astonishing feat of bargaining, we negotiated for a guided 3.5 day canoeing trip down the Tsiribina River from Miandrivazo to Tsy Mafana. By carefully explaining (in Gasy) to our potential guide and a peanut gallery of onlookers/unsolicited advice-givers that despite appearances, we are not wealthy European tourists but penniless volunteers from the ambanivolo, we managed to get what can be a 200 euro trip for about an 1/8 of that. We provide all our own laoka (side dishes), pots, pans, eating utensils, and do all our cooking, cleaning, tent set-up, etc, the guides bring the rice and the fish. The next day we show up at the taxi brousse station and the brousse cooperative has bumped the fare up 3000 ariary per person due to rising fuel prices. We threw a small fit because we thought they were just raising the price for us vazaha PLUS we had made a reservation at the lower price the day before, but when we found out that everyone was paying the higher price we gave in. Only to discover that the best seats in the brousse (first row behind the driver, lots of legroom) which I had specifically reserved for us, were being occupied by a pair of old-ish French vazaha wearing Home Depot-style back braces. We began fit #2. It probably would have been as short and sweet as the first, except that one of my friends happens to be a master of getting really angry in Malagasy. (As she puts it: "As soon as I start speaking English again, I'm cool.") So soon we're in the middle of a crowd of everyone at the stationment, all mesmerized by Haddy's fiery wrath. The problem is, she's giving them her most ferocious material -- I'm in awe and can only muster the occasional "Yeah!...uh huh...seats...mine!" -- but all the Gasy people are noticing and saying in response is "ooo tena mahay BE izy!!" (wow, she's really good at Malagasy!), without absorbing anything she's actually saying (probably a good thing for their sense of self-worth, but not good for me getting the seat that I want). So after being complete and total brats and not managing to offend or affect anyone in spite of ourselves, we accept our lot and climb into our new, inferior seats. The especially frustrating part is that through it all, the French couple is playing dumb as if they don't understand what the problem is. Fair enough, the whole argument was in Gasy, but it was clear enough what we were yelling and gesturing about. They probably just climbed into the front seats and assumed no one would try to move 2 vazaha with back braces. Which now that I think about it might have been just props for this very seat-commandeering business! People with serious back problems do not ride taxi brousses. People who ride taxi brousses become people with serious back problems.

Anyway, the ride to Miandrivazo was about as uneventful as a brousse ride with 3 vazaha who speak the Gasy can be, except for me leaving my Nalgene and a really nice carabiner at a roadside restaurant and the denial/anger/grief/acceptance that followed. (No sympathy from my travel companions, who have already been in country a year longer than me and have lost many personal nalgenes themselves). In Miandrivazo we asked where we could pitch our tent and our guide took us to his front yard, which would have been nice except we realized we didn't have a place to lock our stuff and it was right next to a pen full of pigs practicing for the nasal congestion olympics. So we said hmm maybe a hotel tonight, but the cheapest hotel was full so our guide said why don't you stay at the nice tourist hotel and I'll pay for half of it. "Excuse me?"
"You stay at the "(Fancy french hotel name)" and I'll cover half of it."
"We don't understand."
"You pay half, I'll pay half."
"...why would you do that...?"
We tried to figure out where the catch was where we accidently agree to bring all his children back to America with us but his offer seemed genuine. I guess these guides do make a ton of money. Probably more than Peace Corps volunteers.

The next morning after paying courtesy visits with our guide to the gendarmerie and the police (both wanted to know my parents' first names and what country they live in... serious background information) we hit the water. 3 guides/paddlers, me, Haddy, Maggie, and...our fourth passenger: a highly stressed-out 37 year old chain-smoking lesbian substitute teacher from France. She had paid the full tourist price, and I don't think she had expected to be traveling with the three of us who, in the words of our guide, "tsy tia mandoa vola" (don't like to spend money). So every time we stopped for lunch or dinner, the 3 of us would jump out of the boats and rush to gather firewood and three big rocks to set our pot on, chop vegetables, and wash dishes, while she sat on the sand and waited for the guides to prepare her meal. It was a little awkward. By day 2 however, she had remembered most of the English she had learned at lycee, so we got her full story. You can read it when she publishes her autobiography, but she won't be doing that until she quits smoking.

So basking in the sun floating down the river and camping were all fabulous. Unfortunately, the last stretch of the river is too close to the ocean to go by canoe so we had to switch to a river taxi. This was bad news, contrary to the name of the boat, which meant "good news" in malagasy. Lies, all lies! First off, the boat sounded like heavy artillery fire, and smelled like smoke and gasoline. Our french companions stuck her fingers in her ears and repeated "zees eez not good, zees eez not good" over and over, then retrieved her cigarettes with shaky hands. I expressed some concern over the combination of fire and gasoline to my friend Maggie, but she wisely asked me if I wanted to be the one to tell the woman she shouldn't smoke. I decided to take my chances with sudden boat explosion rather than try to cut off an addict in the middle of a high stress situation -- death by gasoline bomb is probably faster and less taxing on one's nerves. Plus I had a new worry when we stopped to cram about a hundred more people and chickens into the boat, plus a small school's worth of furniture on top. We were sitting very low in the water, and patching up holes with soap, and I was sure the roof was going to collapse. I was very tense for about 20 minutes and then I relaxed, removed all body parts from within pecking reach of the velociraptor-size chickens squeezed between the suitcases I was sitting on, and spaced out. Six hours later we made it to Tsy Mafana, where we crammed into the back of a pickup with a bunch of other french people and their 2 malagasy guides, who were drinking gasy liquor from the bottle and very happy to join us in a singalong of all the Gasy songs we knew, and to examine our reasons for not having Gasy boyfriends. They dropped us off at the Avenue de Baobabs, where we got permission to pitch our tent in front of some people's hut and then fell asleep.

The next morning we got up to watch the sunrise over the baobabs, which, along with lemurs, are one of the least over-rated things I have ever seen. Baobabs are incredible, guys. Someone has got to come visit me. We made it to Morondava, where we watched Maggie's sister win the Bronze medal in the 10k at the Olympics. I will not even try to describe how exciting this was.

Finally, the reason for the whole trip: the Fitampoha festival. Fitampoha is a fertility festival for the Sakalava Menabe people. This means a lot of sex, so we descended on Belo sur Tsiribina with...a whole bunch of expired condoms. Oops. Fortunately other NGOs checked theirs before carrying them all the way to Belo so we did have good ones to hand out. We made costumes out of the bad ones. Basically, in the mornings we wandered around and ate tons and tons of fried food and hung out in our grass hut on the beach, and in the afternoons and evenings we talked to people about getting tested for HIV at the festival and did sensitizations about STDs and condom use. We also talked a lot about clean water and hygiene, since everyone had to poop in this one spot in the woods (probably the grossest pooping situation I have ever encountered) and people were washing their butts in the same river they all fetch water from. Surprise surprise, about 3 days into the festival people start showing up at our hut looking for diarrhea medicine. My faith in Sur-Eau (our water chlorine treatment) was dramatically strengthened, as our water was a pretty gross color even after filtering, but none of us got sick, even though we were almost certainly ingesting (sterilized) human excrement.

So much fun was had by all. Now I'm going back to site to see if everything I tried to set up before I left has fallen apart.

Love to you all.

This is hecka long. Do you have enough time? Sorry.

2008-07-16T14:45:00.010+03:00

Visual Aids
The first thing I want to talk about this month is the most awesome poster in my health education visual aids arsenal.
This poster is about family planning and it brings the house down. When I first saw it I thought it was a bit...extreme. "Aiza no tianao?" means "Which do you like?", Zaza maro misesy (lots of babies in a row) or fiterahana voarindra (well-planned births). The poster basically asks what do you prefer, everything in your life going wrong, or everything in your life going right. Great, I think we all know the answer to that one. But this poster gets people talking and thinking and all worked up in a way that I can never do in a kabary. All I do is open it up in a group of people and the ensuing heated discussion does all my work for me. I'll insert a question or comment here and there and discuss the logistics of contraception in Madagascar, but the pros and cons of big versus little families, the advantages of family planning for all members of the community and the country as a whole, different family planning methods, all get covered as people digest this poster. They take every detail completely seriously (I have had to explain on multiple occasions that it's a drawing and I don't know what the people's names are) and they think it's hilarious. First they count the children ("1, 2, 3,...SEVEN! and Eight is in her belly!"). Then they crack up because the woman is pregnant and she's still "mibaby"-ing (carrying on her back) her last child. Then they discuss her hair, the kids' clothes, how her husband is mean and angry, how fat the other family is, how they all have sandals, and on and on. It's incredible. I got another copy of the poster to put up at the clinic (that's what this picture is from) and I always see people leaving the road to come look at it. People who have already seen it love to explain it to first-time viewers too. They point out all the details they noticed the last time they looked at it. It's amazing.

Baby-weighing

I know what you’re thinking.: Baby-weighing sounds like a half step up from politician-baby-kissing – a photo-op, not reflecting any serious concern for the squirming baby’s actual wellbeing. And indeed, pictures of grinning volunteers placing babies on scales feature prominently in all Peace Corps recruitment literature and advertising. But as I recently explained to a surprised PCV in the education sector, we do! Actually weigh babies! Even when not accompanied by members of the press.

Once a month I head out with either of the two baby-weighers (I really think that might be their full-time job) from the Mananjary NGO I work with, to meet up with a local mpanentana (health educator) and a scale in villages all over the commune. In the past few months I’ve been adding venues to my tour, as I figure out which of the villages the NGO works in I can get to by 9 am on foot or bicycle. (I’m really trying to figure out how to get to all of them soon however, because the NGO’s USAID contract is up in September, and then it’ll just be me and the mpanentana from the village).

The reason that I want to write about baby-weighing this month is that I just started working with the other baby-weigher and it was a totally different experience. Despite all attempts at creativity, baby-weighing is essentially a nag-fest. The mothers that show up with their kids each month (already the diligent ones just for coming) have heard the information about healthy food and balanced diets before. The challenge is to come up with ideas (before the talk and in conversation with the mothers) of realistic changes they can make in their kids’ diets, and present them in a way that’s engaging, non-critical, and readily recalled when they go back to the kitchen. Humor is good, but the material is a bit dry – anyone know any good cassava jokes? One of the baby-weighers is often in a hurry, and after one of us does a short talk, feedback on each child’s growth is limited to a comment – “Your kid did/didn’t grow” – and sometimes a “why?” when the kid lost weight (the answer is always that s/he had malaria or diarrhea). As a PCV my job should be to talk with some of the mothers individually while we’re working, particularly with the mothers of kids who didn’t gain weight that month, but I totally suck at this. My Malagasy is finally good enough that I can understand most of what the women say to me instead of just blurting health slogans at them, but I always feel like I’m approaching them with demerits or something when I try to talk to them right after they’ve been told in front of everyone that their baby lost weight. The advantage and disadvantage of being a vazaha is that everyone turns to look at me if I start talking, so it’s like I’m calling them out in front of their friends. It’s hard to be encouraging in that context. So I was pleasantly surprised to weigh babies with the other guy from the NGO, who has a completely different style. The first time I weighed babies with Richard it took all day to weigh kids in 2 sites. We had to eat lunch twice (and turn down a third) and drink coffee in 3 different places because we did so many courtesy visits to village elders, etc. The main difference was that instead of weighing kids outside, we did it inside this tiny hut, so we pretty much had to take it one family at a time. Richard told each mother how much weight their kid had gained and usually had a conversation with her if her child had not grown. I was able to go back and forth between talking to moms inside with Richard, and sitting outside with the other mothers, talking about healthy food in general but not about any one child specifically. It was time-consuming, but a lot of fun and made me feel more like a health worker, and less like a census taker, hoarding the data for myself and my NGO to analyze later, without real people cluttering up the numbers.

Dance Parties

My days tend to alternate between days of massive exercise where I’m hiking up and down cliffs all day, and days where I don’t leave my house. To keep my muscles from atrophying as a result of the latter, I’ve started having dance parties on these lazy evenings. Lacking both speakers and electricity, these are by necessity headphones dance parties. Here is the problem: the “dancing” that I do involves a lot of wild arm-flailing because I’m going for maximum calorie utilization, THUS I am constantly yanking the headphones out of my ears. There is very little that provokes me to instant, way-out-of-proportion-to-the-stimulus anger (think Incredible Hulk) like the feeling of earbuds being unexpectedly yanked out of my ears. My eye is twitching just thinking about it. So in case anyone else has this problem, and also to give you a really goofy mental image of me, I’m going to share the headphone-management system I’ve devised to protect myself and the breakable objects in my house. It’s complicated, so suggestions for any improvements would be very welcome.

1) First put the earbuds in your ears so the cord is behind your head. Now start the music. Louder…

2) Twist the cord around your ponytail 3 or 4 times. Don’t forget to leave enough slack so the headphones don’t get yanked out when you twist your head (shudder…).

3) Tuck the mp3 player under your hairband (Walkman/Discman/Giant-old-iPOD users are going to have to invent another headphone-management plan).

4) Next, put on a beanie over your whole head/hair/music player/ears.

5) Finally, put your headlamp on over the hat so that it secures everything in place. You can turn the headlamp on to really put the “party” in “lone dance party,” but your neighbors might come over to investigate if there’s both strange clomping and a light show coming from your house. Remember, only you can hear the music.

Mazotoa! (Enjoy)

The Gospel

I went to a gospel music concert by a group from the Mananjary Evangelical Church. It was nuts. I could have been in Alabama. Robes and everything. And they were good. The two main guys should have recording contracts. They both wore angled fedoras with their robes and one of them didn’t take his sunglasses off the whole show. All four hours of it. Apparently “Which songs should we sing?” was not the question that got asked at rehearsals, but rather “What order should we sing every song we’ve ever learned?” I made the same observation after leaving a four-hour Christmas Eve service at midnight, but I assumed that that church was just caught in the totalitarian grip of an egomaniacal choir director. It was really a shame for this gospel show however, because they were amazing, but by the end of the show the only people left in the once-packed town hall were (I think) friends and relatives of the performers. This included me both because they were too good to walk out on and also because the sunglasses guy was one of the animateurs for my friend’s agriculture NGO. I was having a great time imagining him singing Malagasy gospel songs about intensified rice production.

My Cat

…died. He ate rat poison (or a poisoned rat) from the mayor’s office on Friday the thirteenth. It took him 3 days to die. The first day he puked 5 times all over my house. The second day he crawled under my house and was completely unreachable. When I finally coaxed him close enough to me to pick him up and move him into the house he just laid on the ground not moving for another day. I was spoonfeeding him oral rehydration solution. It was awful. I’ve never had a pet die before and I’d only had Pichou for about a month. I felt so horrible because I had adopted him from my friend who was moving back to France and then I had to tell her that he died.

I wanted to write about Malagasy Independence Day, visiting my friend’s family in her village 60 km away, coffee, whale food, and knocking over my pô (bucket that I pee in at night and when it’s raining and when I don’t feel like walking to the kabone) at night while having a dizzy spell, but this is getting way too long and I don’t want you to stop reading. Or get tired of me. Til next time, veloma.

What's news?

2008-06-07T10:59:00.004+03:00

...(Standard greeting from Malagasy english students.)

Fianar turned out to be out of gas as well. My tank ran out about 3 days after I got back to site, so I've been cooking on charbon (charcoal) for the past few weeks. It sucks. It takes ages to get the charbon going, even longer for it to be hot enough to cook on, even longer to cook your food, and you can only cook one thing at a time. On the other hand, it's kind of cool to cook outside, time is really not something I have any shortage of, and it's been really cold lately so it's nice to huddle around my fatam-pera (metal charbon holder/stove thing). I will be very happy though if I can refill my tank today. I've had this minor hacking cough that won't go away, ever since I switched to charbon.

A few weeks ago we had a "video" in my village. The kids were talking about it for a week beforehand, but I didn't really know what they meant, or how we were going to watch a video when we don't have electricity or TVs. But when saturday evening finally rolled around, in trekked 3 or 4 guys, who had made the hilly, 2-hour hike from Mananjary with a giant battery, a VCD player, and a tiny TV (like Americans might have in their kitchens or dormrooms) on their backs (think hobo-style, attached with string to the end of a pole, carried over the shoulder). Everybody in my village crowded into one of the classrooms at the school, and for 200 ariary for adults, 50 ariary for kids, we got to watch Gasy music videos and a soap opera until the battery died. It was maybe the most "integrated" (Peace Corps vocab) into my community I've felt so far. (1), I'm starting to love Gasy music (except for the slow ballads and religious songs) and I've been listening to the radio a bunch so I actually knew most of the songs that the videos were for. (2), I was almost as excited as the people in my village to watch something on a TV, but (3) not quite as excited as them so it was amazing to watch everyone from babies to grandparents packed into the classroom, pissing their pants with the thrill of it all. The soap opera I did not understand a word of. I think it involved love potions and unexpected pregnancies. There was definitely a woman giving birth in the woods while running away from her alcoholic husband. My best friend was sitting next to me, trying to explain what was going on, but she had a tendency to get distracted during the dialogue, and then only explain the stuff that I could see clearly with my eyes. (eg: "pss jayne, the old lady is stashing the bottle behind a bush...the man is driving away from the pregnant woman. Mazava? ('clear?')"). But crushed into a tiny school bench/desk surrounded by my whole village, I felt so comfortable and happy with where I am. It was awesome.

In other fun news, on Wednesday night I had a fancy dinner (the appetizer was frog legs! Classy!) in Ranomafana National Park with a bunch of PCVs from the region, the US ambassador, the director of PC Madagascar, and the director of USAID in Madagascar. Turns out the ambassador went to Lewis and Clark, so he knew all about Reed which was awesome. He'd never heard of Renn Fayre though...we were talking about things that bring Reedies to the Lewis and Clark campus and vice versa, I wasn't just like wow Mr. Ambassador, that's great that you know about Reed, we do throw a killer party. Anyway, the ambassador and a bunch of hot-shot americans were in town for "America Week" (I know, it sounds like something off the Colbert Report), which originally was going to involve a lot of Peace Corps organized activities (a basketball tournament, a barbeque, a poetry slam) but then it got cancelled "indefinitely" and then last minute resurrected, so the Peace Corps participation ended up being just us staffing a tent with posters about what PC does in Madagascar, at some sort of expo about American or USAID-funded organizations in the country. So I hung out next to some health posters for about 5 hours, answering questions and scaring away annoying kids trying to steal the condoms we were handing out. I spoke mostly in Gasy, but there were a ton of university students who were actually really good at English who kept passing by to practice talking with us. I haven't met any students who can really speak English in Mananjary yet so I was quite impressed.

Last night we had our regional Volunteer Advisory Committee meeting, which should have been really interesting because the new PC Mada director came to talk to us, but about 5 minutes into the meeting my stomach started hurting and then I had to go lie down while my stomach ballooned to pregnant-woman proportions and hurt really bad, and then I threw up and then I felt better. But I missed the whole meeting. It was very disappointing. Plus, my friend Lisa who is from North Carolina and I formed the "Slaw Club" that morning and made a massive batch of cole slaw and potato salad and spent the entire day making "slaw" jokes (read that with an extreme southern drawl, please. Like so much that your friends might think you are saying something about "sloths" and start talking about how they've been moving really slow that day too.), and then I couln't eat any of it. I always do this to myself in Fianar and Tana. I think because I eat so simply and so little at site - just rice and vegetables - I make myself sick when I got to the city and pig out on rich restaurant food and dairy products. Mmmm.

Now I must go stumble around in the foggy marsh of international development project funding. Apparently solar panels are expensive. Maybe if you all just sent me your little solar powered calculators...

Quick update

2008-05-10T09:58:00.002+03:00

Back in Fianar again. I wasn't planning on leaving site again so soon, but the gas in the tank for my stove ran out and for some reason there is no gas to buy in Mananjary so I had to put an empty gas tank on the roof of a taxi brousse and head to Fianar to refill. I say "an" empty gas tank instead of "my" empty gas tank because I'm lying about my tank being empty. There's actually still a little bit of gas left, but not much and there's a barbeque in Fianar for the COS-ing (close of service) volunteers in the region this weekend, so I'm planning ahead and refilling Gabe's empty extra tank today -- which is actually a genius move on my part because this way I only have to find a car to make ONE trip to my site from Mananjary, to switch out my empty tank with the one I'm filling in Fianar. Even this will probably be difficult, since there's only a vehicle going to my site about once a month, but I'm planning on reminding the NGO in Mananjary that I work with that they asked for a volunteer at my site so they need to support the one they got. Pleeeeeaaaaassssseeee...

In site-related news, the new doctor did finally arrive before I got back, so we had a good mother and child health week and my commune finally got vaccines for the first time in almost 6 months. Our new doctor seems pretty great (she's a 28-year old female which I think will be really good for my community where most of the people that come to the clinic are women), and I think/hope she will work pretty hard. Unfortunately she's about to go on vacation for a couple weeks so I won't really know for a while. In the meantime, I'm getting started on some other projects in my village so hopefully I'll be able to stay occupied while the clinic is closed again. These include: getting some public latrines constructed at the school, planting moringa trees with the women's organization (the miracle tree-- the leaves have protein, calcium, and a bajillion vitamins and minerals), improving the facilities at the clinic, some sort of anti-AIDS club, and building fuel efficient stoves with whoever I can convince to provide the materials.

That's the news for now. I'm going to go make a peanut butter and guava jam sandwich, with all ingredients homemade by the woman who works for the Fianar Peace Corps house.

stuff

2008-04-17T18:00:00.002+03:00

I have been a lot of places since I last wrote.

I left site almost a month ago and spent 2 and a half days on a taxi-brousse to get to Morondava, which is almost straight across madagascar from my site, on the west coast. Madagascar's not THAT big across but there's no straight route east to west, and there's a lot of cavernous, unpaved road between the middle of the country and Morondava. After a few relaxing days at the beach (it was Easter, no one works on easter) my friend Eliko and I spend a week walking long distances on very hot, unshaded roads to talk to random groups of people about AIDS. This is how you get an audience for a AIDS presentation in the Malagasy countryside: 1) Walk up to a person. 2) Say "Salama" ("hello") 3) Turn to a nearby person 4) Say "Salama" 5) Wait 3-4 seconds 6) Turn around and greet massive crowd now assembled behind you whispering "Mahay teny gasy ny vazaha!" (The foreigner speaks malagasy). Then you blurt out in random order all the malagasy words you know about AIDS, pull out a wooden penis (uproarious laughter) and do a condom demo, and then stare pleadingly at the crowd, half hoping that there will be questions because then maybe they care about what you just said, and half terrified that there will be questions but you won't understand them, thus exposing you as the fraud you are. (The health group before mine is making shirts that say "I'm not a doctor...I just play one in Madagascar." (I should take an extra parentheses here to explain that we don't tell people that we have any medical experience, people just tend to assume that you do. And bring their sick people to your house.)) Usually there will be someone who summarizes your presentation to the group for you in real Malagasy, which is great. And my Malagasy question-answering ability is improving. Last week I understood a woman who said she worked at a sketchy hotel and wanted to know if she could get AIDS from touching sheets with semen on them.

Anyway, when I say we did this for a week, I mean that we gave AIDS presentations in the mornings, and went to the beach and the pool and saw baobabs in the afternoons. And some of the presentations took place at the beach and on the way to the baobabs. But those people are at risk of AIDS too. Maybe more so because there's tourists and prostitutes.

Then Eliko and I broussed back to Antananarivo for our in-service-training, which was sometimes useful and sometimes not. It was definitely interesting to hear what other volunteers' sites are like. I got to talk to my director about my clinic being closed for months and not knowing what to do and I got a bunch of ideas for how to be more productive at site, which I really needed.

After training, about 15 health volunteers from my stage and the stage before mine went to Antsohihy, where a health PCV had organized a really well-planned health fair. We spent about 5 days going out and doing group presentations (3-4 PCVs) about AIDS and other health stuff, and promoting the saturday health fair and HIV testing. Then on saturday there was a big fety, and we had booths about different health topics, and a sports tournament, and a raffle for people who got tested for HIV. (There's pictures on my facebook page). 700 people got tested, which was amazing. It was all really fun, and great to hang out with other PCVs.

Tomorrow I head back to site. I'm crossing my fingers that the new doctor will be there, because Mother and Child Health Week starts on monday. Also because I might go crazy if she's still not there. I think she will be. Positive thoughts.

I miss you all! Check out my pictures! Write me a letter!

3+ months, heck yeah

2008-03-21T10:55:00.002+03:00

They say the first three months are the roughest, and though mine weren't bad at all, I'm still patting myself on the back for surviving them.

Here are the two most interesting things I've done in the past month:

We handed out medicine to everyone in the commune that prevents "ongobe," aka filariosis (sp?), or elephantitis (of the feet and ankles specifically i think - the name in malagasy means big feet). This was totally nuts because there's two types of medicine and one of them the dosage depends on age, but people were picking up medicine for everyone in their family so we had to explain how many pills each person needed to take, but loads of people aren't literate so i was drawing little pictures to show people which of their children needed to take which pills. AND lots of people don't really know their age, so we had people saying "um...22?" and I would be like "No, I'M 22... you are at least 35." Well, I wouldn't actually say that, but I was pretty skeptical of some people. Fortunately the dosage is by loose age group, so we could ask questions like "Do you think you're older or younger than 40?". One day I went with one of the Malagasy health workers to another village in the commune to give medicine to the kids at the primary school. For most of the kids there were at least 3 pills to take, and most were too young to swallow them, so they chewed them all! And there's no nice pink chewable kids version of these pills, we're talking big white chalky pills. It was really something watching all these kids with mouths full of pill dust, and only looking mildly inconvenienced by it all. I would have been gagging.

Faharoa ("second"), last week I went to an education volunteer friend's site (about 3 hours from my site) {justwant to mention that there is a dance version of alanis morissette "uninvited" with a different female vocalist playing in the internet cafe right now} to teach 5 two-hour classes about AIDS (all in Malagasy!) with my friend Haddy, a health volunteer from the stage before me (so she's been here for more than a year) . It was exhausting (monday we taught for 6 hours straight) but so great to be working hard (have i mentioned things are very slow at my site?) and so useful for me to watch Haddy inaction because she's super good at Malagasy and teaching. I finally mastered most of the AIDS vocabulary and because we did the same lesson 5 times, by the end Ifelt pretty comfortable with the material. I was SO nervous for the first class. It was also awesome to hang out with Haddy and Maribeth (the ed volunteer), whose site is in the rainforest and is gorgeous. I'll try to putsome pictures up when I'min Tana orFianar again.

Now I'm off to buy snacks for my taxi-brousse ride to Morondava, where I'm going to help my friend Eliko teach about AIDS in the ambanivolo around Morondava... and to hang out at the beach and see baobabs. If I survive the 12+ hour brousse ride. Blah.

pictures

2008-02-08T17:05:00.000+03:00

there's pictures on my facebook page. not many, but some.

Inona ny fofona tsara kokoa?

2008-02-07T11:14:00.000+03:00

Translation: What is the best smell?
A question posed to me by friend the other day. Discuss.

Major breakthrough. I have always felt that keeping a journal was a tremendous bore/chore, and until recently all my journal entries had been motivated by a nagging guilty feeling that someday I'm going to regret not having a record of my time in Madagascar. But recently I've discovered that I actually enjoy writing short little notes in my journal when wierd or funny things happen to me, and sometimes I even keep writing after that, and can therefore trick myself into writing things about my day-to-day life here as well. But never about feelings. That would be awkward, forced, and cheesy.

So today I think I will include some of these stories. But first a short summary of what I've been doing since I last wrote. The most exciting thing to happen at my site in the past month was the Kaominina Mendrika Festival on January 18. Kaominina Mendrika ("Champion Commune") is a program of a USAID-funded NGO called SanteNet. Last year my commune was chosen for the program, which meant that they set health-related goals for themselves and then members of the community were trained to give "sensitizations" and talk to people about improving public health in the commune (basically what my job is). They had a year to reach their goals and they were supported by an NGO in the area. They were just finishing up when I was installed at site in December, so the festival in January was to celebrate meeting their goals. The festival was a really big deal. I've mentioned that my site is very quiet and very rural. January 18th it was not. We had electricity, via a gasoline generator. There were cars. There was a cameraman from TVPlus, the local station. There was very loud music.

It is malagasy tradition to start all festivals/events of any sort with kabarys (speeches) by all of the officials. Someone mentioned to me during training that if you live in ambanivolo (the country) you will probably be considered one of the important people, and have to kabary. This turned out to be true. At about 5 the day before the festival my counterpart came up to me and said "Jayne, do you want to mikabary tomorrow?" I said no. He said "Hmm, well you have to. I will help you write it." And write it he did. It was about 10 sentences, about how I'm ready to work with the community, and happy that they met their kaominina mendrika goals. So on the morning of the festival I sat up on the bandstand with all the officials -- who all mentioned me in their kabarys, a little crazy since I wasn't actually here for the year they were working on the KM goals -- and then I gave my little speech, into a really loud microphone. I cracked everyone up because my counterpart included a Malagasy proverb at the end of my speech that said something like "thank you to everyone who pounded rice to make it white and cooked food to make it well-cooked." That went over really well. This was all taped for TV, so now loads of people in Mananjary tell me they saw me on TV and that they can't believe I speak Malagasy. And they know my name, which is cool. I haven't seen the tv spot, but apparently the angle was not "M___ reaches KM goals!" but rather "there's a vazaha who speaks malagasy in M___" (I think we're not supposed to say the name of our actual site on our blogs...). Anyway, after the kabarys there were a bunch of other festivities, BUT around noon i started feeling a little funny, and by 2 I was puking into a bucket and writhing with stomach ache in my bed. So, after months of fabulous health, I experienced my first bout of bad food poisoning on the one day of probably my entire peace corps service when there was something really exciting happening at my site. Around 4 they moved the speakers to the yard in front of the primary school (right by my house) and blasted Malagasy music until 5 in the morning. So I also missed the only all-night dance party ever at my site. And as many of you know, dancing all night is pretty much my favorite activity. It was a bummer. But people took care of me, which was nice.

Ok, now here's some random stories from my journal.

I had a scare a few weeks ago when I finally hired a mpanasa-lamba (clothes washer) but then she didn't come back with my clothes for days after she said she would and I told my friend who made the biggest deal out of it and told EVERYONE in the entire village that I had given my clothes to a mpangalatra (thief) without even finding out her name or where she lived (this last bit is true, so I felt very sheepish. I think I was just so excited that someone was offering towash my clothes (not for free but for cheap) that I didn't think to find out anything about her). I ended up getting my clothes back a few days later, but I still get people passing by my house to say "Jayne...we heard you gave your clothes to a stranger who sold them and never came back..." I felt really silly, but I also felt like my whole community rallied to my aid, which was nice. People were making plans to go to Mananjary and find them (on the black market?) and alert the gendarmes etc.

There was a lizard the size of my forearm on my wall the other night, and there have been snails the size of my fist hanging out on the road in the morning. Madagascar biodiversity!!

I have fresh cow milk delivered every other morning. Just a cup, which I boil and put in my coffee. It's amazing. It's from the mayor's family's cow, and their little son brings it to my door.

My neighbor's kids who hang out with me every night and love listening to my radio and belting Malagasy greatest hits at the top of their lungs and doing really exaggerated boy-band facial expressions and hand motions have taken to singing this one song with the lyrics changed to "Mipetraka any ambanivolo i Jayne" -- "Jayne lives in the country" (I should mention that "ambanivolo" has a connotation beyond just countryside. It's not that it has a negative connotation (I don't think) but it kindof means the kindof place where a car passing by is a really really big deal, and people are subsistance farmers, no luxuries at all...). People in Mananjary are always very surprised to hear where I live, and don't understand why I don't want to spend all my time in Mananjary.

AND FINALLY: If I don't get some Bruce Springsteen sent to me pronto, I will become "a shadow of my former self." Really, any music at all would be appreciated. In mp3 format. I have been listening to Jayne's airplane to madagascar mix for 4 months, which was only selected as good 15hour airplane listening, not intended for extended play. But after a mishap with the usb drive that was supposed to carry all the rest of my music I have been stranded with the same 3gb of music. And through some monstrous oversight, I neglected to include any Bruce in my airplane mix. An omission I've regretted every day. Tears. Tearing of the hair. Etc.

I might write again tomorrow. I"m still trying to maybe get some pictures on here. But don't hold your breath.

At Site

2008-01-13T17:48:00.000+03:00

I have now been at site for a little over a month. Right now I'm taking my banking days in Fianar -- staying at the Peace Corps house, eating ice cream, and watching all of Arrested Development, seasons one and two. The 6-ish hour drive from Mananjary to Fianar is gorgeous - a windy road through the rainforest - so even though we were stopped for an hour when our van broke down, and then another hour when we were inexplicably detained by the gendarmes about 15k out of Fianar, it was a lovely trip.
My site is great. It is...rural, to the extreme. Makes our training site look like a thriving metropolis. But I'm learning to really appreciate it. For one, I don't have to hear "bonjour vazaha (foreigner)" everywhere I go. Everyone has been really friendly, and I'm speaking so much Malagasy. It's exhausting, but I'm learning fast. I live in a two room house/hut; no electricity or running water. Every day i fetch water from a well that has seemed a lot further away now that i've started carrying two buckets at a time. There's a pump right down this hill from my house, but you have to add about half a bucket of water to get it going, which is too much of a hassle for me most days. (Plus you have to remember to go get water while you still have a bunch of water left...) About every 4 days I hike or bike 11k into Mananjary to buy food and hang out with the Peace Corps volunteer who lives there. He speaks English. It's wonderful. The road is super strenuous (the first time I biked it, I thought i wasn't going to make it, but it turns out the trick (which all the Malagasy people do) is to walk your bike up every hill, no matter how short. This seemed ridiculous to me at first, but it's the only way to arrive in Mananjary and not need a half-day recovery nap and a shower), but it's nice to have regular access to a decent-sized town with a market, restaurants, the beach(!), but still have all the community benefits of living in a really tiny town.
Work-wise the past month has been...slow. It's kindof frustrating that we get installed at site right before everyone stops working for Christmas vacation. My site has been super quiet and empty, and none of the people that I'm supposed to be working with have been working. So I've been hanging out and getting to know the people in my community. There is a constant flow of people stopping by my house to stare at me, so I've been talking to them about clean water and healthy babies and family planning. I'm supposed to work at least 3 days a week at the clinic, but I have seen a grand total of 7 people there the entire month, so there hasn't really been anything for me to do so far. On friday I finally gave a presentation about infant vaccinations to 3 mothers who trekked miles to the clinic for vaccination day -- not that there were any vaccines to be had. Sigh. Last week I started hanging out a bunch with one of the health educators in my village, and apparently once the community health educators really dive back into work after the holidays they'll be giving presentations 4 days a week (-ish) so I'll start hiking the bajillion kilometers that separate the villages in my commune to find people to listen to my health presentations. I really need people to go with me at first though because otherwise I will get lost in the wilderness and eaten by giant spiders.
My most critical task for once I get back to my site is to find a cat. My house has a serious mice problem (they ate through my TUPPERWARE!) and at night they completely take over. I think i got about 4 hours of sleep a night last week. They are so loud. I'm going crazy.
Well, I'm going to go buy some more ice cream now, and finish Arrested Development. I should have email access about once a month now, so emails would be greatly appreciated. Also take note that I have a new mailing address. I miss you all loads!

ANOTHER ONE!!!

2007-12-06T09:24:00.001+03:00

Hello again. This time I'm in Antsirabe, on my way to site. I'm traveling in a Peace Corps car, with 2 other volunteers (that's right, not trainees, VOLUNTEERS) , Ryan and Katie, and the director of the PC Mada health sector. We're in Antsirabe for 2 nights, while Katie is installed at a site near here and we do all our shopping. We're all new sites (i.e. we don't inherit the furnishings of the last volunteer) so we bought sooo much stuff. Example: yesterday I bought 6 different types of bucket. Life becomes very bucket-intense when you don't have running water, or a dishwasher, or laundry machine, or toilet you can use at night.

Before I talk more about installation, let me back up and describe tuesday, which was amazing. Our swearing-in ceremony was in the morning, at the US ambassador's palatial residence. I made my kabary (speech) in Malagasy, and there was a translator standing next to me, saying my speech in english!!! (a complete surprise to me; I realized as I began my speech that he wasn't going anywhere (he had been translating the previous speaker into Malagasy) and that I had to pause to let him do his thing every few sentences). I had given our country director a very rough english translation of my kabary to give to the ambassador, but somehow the translator had a copy of my kabary (in Malagasy, i think) that he was holding, and he had a very eloquent translation that I think was a bit sappier than what I actually said (embarrassing), and at one point he actually got ahead of me, so he's lucky I was paying attention him and noticed, or else I would have paused after my next bit but he would have already said it and that would have been awkward. I couldn't stop grinning at him while he was translating because it was so weird to have him translating me into English, when I speak English. But I think the speech went really well, so I was very happy. After my speech our group did a really silly presentation in Malagasy about different health topics. My bit was an interpretivedancepoem about AIDS with 2 other trainees. Basically I made a very serious speech, and then made a fool of myself immediately afterwards. it was great. And it was all filmed for Malagasy television.

Health '07 with Boda, the director of our sector, and Bill, the country director

After the ceremony and a reception we got to hang out at the ambassador's houseand swim in his pool and eat amazing chili and desserts. then all us new volunteers went out to eat and then to a dance club and stayed up way too lateand then woke up way too early to say goodbye to each other for 4 months and then head off with our installers to our respective sites.

today ryan and i are hanging out in antsirabe while katie gets installed, then tomorrow we'll head to fianar and do a little more shopping there. I still need a mattress and maybe a table and chairs. We'll stay at the peace corps house there for 2 nights because we dont want to arrive in my banking town on the weekend because my bank wont be open. So i wont get to site until monday. i am excited and terrified. Duh.

i dont know what the internet situation is in my banking town yet, so it might be a while before i post again. also i think im going to have a new mailing address there, but the one i told everyone before will always get to me eventually. it's just the PC office in Tana.

for real now

2007-12-02T16:59:00.001+03:00

I AM SO SORRY! please don't give up on my blog. i have had almost no internet access for the past 10 weeks and something always goes wrong whenever i do -- eg power outages, google not working. Right now i'm in Tana for swearing in. My training is finally over. I go to site on wednesday.
For the past 2+ months i've been living with a malagasy family in a small, rice-farming village in the center of madagascar. In addition to our formal training in Malagasy language and the health issuyes we'll be working with, i have learne4d to:
-wash my clothes in a river

Like this

-pee in a bucket

-fetch water in a (different) bucket

My host sister Seheno demonstrates

-clean my floor with a coconut
-kill and pluck a chicken (i didn't eat it though)
-live without electricity
-derive meaning from a paragraph-length question in which i understood 2 words
-dance several region-specific malagasy dances
-eat rice twice a day, every day
-drink coffee with absurd amounts of sugar and enjoy it
And much more but I'm tired of this list format. Anyway, my host family is amazing and |I have learned SO much from them. And in return, I taught them to limbo. and play "down by the banks of the hanky panky." A fair exchange, no?

I guess I promised stories about crazy animals, food poisoning, language mishaps, etc, when i wrote that first entry. I have thrown up, but it was less than note-worthy. Worth a mention however, is the malagasy word fro diarrhea: "fivalanana," whcih our last PCV trainer called "the fiva" (if that still doesn't sound funny to you, it's pronounced "the fee-vah").

I have seen lemurs. They are amazing.

My host mama has a special noise for calling the crazy "ducks" back to the house when they waddle (very slowly) off. It's kind of hard to write, but it's sortof like "garagaragaragara, garagaragaragara..." I put the word duck in quotes because the animal in question really looks more like a duck crossed witha large melon. They move about as fast as you would expect the product of a duck and an inanimate object to move, too. I don't really know wnhy my family raises them. Companionship?

So life is pretty good right now. I get 9 hours of sleep a night, so after 2 years i should be about caught up on the sleep I didn't get at Reed. I love the peace corps and I love madagascar. I'll be chanting this to myself when I'm crammed in a taxi-brousse for 14 hours between chickens, babies, and carsick fellow passengers puking into plastic bags, on my way to site.

I love and miss you all. If you haven't written to me yet, you suck, and if I haven't written to you yet, I suck, but it's probably becasue i don't have your address, so write to me first.
MAD(agascar) LOVE,
(did everyone already think of that pun? because I'm really enjoying it right now. my standards for a hilarious joke have sunk to to the criteria: is it in english?)
JAYNE

I should be packing...

2007-09-14T00:13:00.000+03:00

Instead I've spent the last hour choosing a color scheme for this blog. Which I decided to set up in case I have the time or inclination to write in it while I'm in Madagascar, but then I got totally sucked into designing it. But I have to have at least one post in order to format it, so this will be my pre-pre-service-training post.
Here are some things I'm savoring before I leave: refrigeration, kashi go-lean crunch, toilets, my family, digestive health.
Here is my current number one fear about Madagascar: parasites that bury into your feet and lay eggs. Seriously, scroll way to the bottom of this girl's blog entry for pictures and a description
Here are some recent mental hurdles:
-Realizing I'm going to spend all of the money I'd been saving for future travel buying appropriate clothes/supplies for the next two years because all I've worn for the last 4 years are free Reed t-shirts and jeans that don't fit. (Today I bought a pair of sandals that my mom owns. not that she's not totally hip, but it's a little depressing that my automatic approach to 'business casual' is to dress like my mother).
-i thought i had another 'recent mental hurdle' but i seem to have forgotten it.

Well, I think the only thing left to say can be summed up with this ridiculous picture of Nate serenading Dan with 'Atlantic City,' by Bruce Springsteen (definitely worth clicking on for a closeup of Nate's face):Stay tuned. I promise my next entry will discuss one or more of the following: barf, giant bugs, language mishaps, species found only on madagascar, "Why am i dressed like my mom?".