How Peace Corps Made Me an Animal Hater and Three Other Ways I’ve Changed Since I Got Here

[I’ve been here eight months, so it seemed a fitting time for a list-style post.]

1.     Animal Hater

           While I won’t pretend that I was ever a passionate PETA supporter and I’ve never called a bearded dragon my child (Grace..), I’ve always liked animals. Really, who doesn’t? I’ve had fish and cats as pets since I was a kid, and Addie the dog is probably the most valued and beloved member of the Skelton family. But since moving to Madagascar, any love I ever felt for animals in the past has been extinguished. I hate all animals. Chickens, roosters, ducks, goats, dogs, cats, cows, mice, rats: you name it, I hate it. And before you condemn me as a heartless rhymes with witch, please refer back to some of my former posts (read: Monica Eludes an Escaped Cow)! I think part of it is the fact that I live in a village where the main industry is agriculture, so barnyard animals are always roaming around. Sometimes to amuse myself, I just throw rocks at the chickens and see how long it takes me before I hit one. Lucky for the chickens, I have pretty poor aim. And WHY would a rooster crow not only at 4 am when the sun is rising, but also at 3 pm in the afternoon when I’m trying to do something?? Because roosters are stupid. Many of you may not know this, but a goat is one of the most irritating animals on the planet, because it’s bleating sounds extremely human. It’s unsettling. Google “goat that sounds like a man” and you’ll see what I mean. Imagine living with that. I don’t want this post to become a rant on animals, so I’ll end it with this: I recently got a mouse as a roommate. EXCELLENT!

2.     Nature Lover

     Ok, I have always liked nature, probably more than the average person. But, after 8 months living in the most beautiful place in the world, it still takes my breath away. The green of the rain forest, the enormity of the mountains, the blue of the ocean.. I could write poems about it, if only I knew how to write poetry. Take today for example. I’m here in Fort Dauphin to work the cultural center but also primarily to finally finish writing my health curriculum and project proposal for the Peer Health Ambassador program I’m trying to start. I was lamenting to a Malagasy friend of mine about how I had no good place to stay, and she kindly offered me a bed at her house. She told me the neighborhood it was in so I knew it would be nice, but she never told me it would be inspiring! She lives in a roomy bungalow right on the seaside cliffs of the Indian Ocean. Literally, the windows to the room I’m staying in open right out to the ocean. It’s amazing. Nothing compares to the beauty of the completely un-developed ocean side property that is all of Fort Dauphin. I love it.

Photo credit to my friend Amy Stephens, an Azafady volunteer who worked in Mahatalaky. 

3.     Happy Waiter

       I believe I’ve written before about the notion of “Malagasy time.” Someone says be there at 9am, they really just mean sometime in the morning. Someone says a restaurant is open for lunch, they really mean it’s closed from 12-3pm. A bush taxi driver says the broken down car will be fixed in a little, he really means after at least 4 hours. This has all become the realities of my life here in Madagascar. At first, it would drive me crazyyy. Like bang-your-head-against-the-wall-scream-your-head-off crazy. And then I just got used to it. In fact, I can now say that I depend on waiting anytime I ever go anywhere! I always bring a book, and since I’m currently in the middle of the epic that is the Game of Thrones series, I actually look forward to these time lapses because I have an excuse to read! Yay!

4.    My Relative Role

      Every Peace Corps volunteer, whether they admit it or not, wants to save the world. Even if it’s only in the littlest way, it’s still part of the reason you join Peace Corps. But moving to my tiny village in rural Madagascar has really changed my perspective, not only on what it means to “change the world” but the role one person can play in making a difference. I used to think my success as a volunteer would be based on the number of projects I completed or the number of wells I built here. After 8 months here, I measure my success based on how my community values and perceives me as one of its members. I am currently working on the proposal for the project I want to base my entire service around, and I am so excited about it. I really feel like this is an idea that my whole community can get behind, and an idea that I can potentially take to many more small communities around the Antanosy and Antandroy regions of southern Madagascar. I’ll keep you updated as this idea comes to fruition, hopefully I will have the proposal completed in the next week!

In other news, work at the Health Center continues and my responsibilities there continue to grow. My English Club is flourishing; I’ve really found a lot of joy in teaching kids who genuinely want to learn! My camera broke (sad!) but I’m trying to get in the habit of taking pictures on my iPod so I can keep up to date with photos. I should be able to post pictures of the cultural center in Fort Dauphin, my English Club, and the health center in Mahatalaky next time! XO

Waiting for the Hurricane

I'm currently in Fort Dauphin right now waiting out the last bits of Hurricane Giovanna that's been tormenting Madagascar since last week. I'm working on a post, but here's a visual to tide you over: 

And this is a picture of the time my bush taxi got stuck in the mud on the road back to my village. It took 4 hours to dig it out, plus the 4 hours of actually driving the trip takes when the road is washed out. Fun!

Monitalaky in 2012

Another Peace Corps volunteer told me recently that San Francisco is the exact global polar opposite of Madagascar. Meaning I am as far from home as it is possible to be without getting closer. 11262.79 miles to be exact. Here’s what’ up and what’s new on the other side of the world:

New and Improved in 2012

As some of you know, I struggled in my first three months at site to find things to do and figure out work. But with the dawn of the new year, that challenge has effectively eliminated itself! About a month and a half ago, I rode the taxi brousse with the nurse back to Mahatalaky, and we had a talk. She asked me why I didn’t work more and I asked her why she was always leaving Mahatalaky without telling me. The end result of this conversation was the two of us sitting down and making a work schedule for me. And since then, I have been so busy! I work 3-4 days at the health center, usually from 8am-12 or 1pm. The past six weeks in Mahatalaky have really opened my eyes to the reality of the health situation here. There is one nurse trying to serve and help every patient that walks through her door. On any given day, there’s at least forty pregnant women waiting for a prenatal visit, plus ten or twenty other patients who are just sick. Seventeen women have given birth in just the last six weeks alone. And it’s just the nurse and me! [A quick note on the giving-birth culture here: the birth room is just a table and a bucket. Mothers in labor come to the health center and just walk around until its time to actually have the baby. No one talks. During a contraction, the woman in labor just closes her eyes and waits it out. Even during the crowning of the baby, no more than maybe a peep escapes her lips. It’s amazing.] I do everything I can to help her. Typically, I do twenty to thirty minutes of health counseling with the waiting patients before I go in and help the nurse with her consultations. I fill out charts, weigh patients, take blood pressure, hold down a kid before a shot, and distribute vaccinations. The fact that I can actually speak Malagasy now is the most influential factor in me taking on a bigger role at the health center. I can converse with the patients and communicate medical information to the nurse without getting flustered or bungled. I love what I’m doing, and it is great to feel like I am a needed and integral part of running the health center in the village.

Project idea: Solar panels for the Health Center. Women giving birth at night do it by candlelight. We keep vaccines on ice blocks!

Malaria in Madagascar

We are currently at the height of malaria season. The rainy tropical weather is the ideal breeding place for blood-hungry plasmodium falciparum, or malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Born and raised in the western world, I had never seen malaria before, and nothing can prepare you for it. Most often seen in children and babies, malaria makes a kid too sick to even move. At least ten children every day come to the health center carried by their mothers. Glassy eyed and unresponsive, these kids have a temperature over 102 degrees F. The highest I’ve seen is 104.6 degrees F. Oftentimes, they are so late into the progression of malaria that they are comatose or convulsing. It is unsettling to see a child not even stir when their finger is pricked for a malaria test or an IV is inserted into their arm to try and revive them. I am still shocked every day to see children so sick coming in to receive care. Sometimes parents have to walk 10 km or more to bring their child to the health center, which is why a lot of times kids come in really late into the progression of the disease.

Watching malaria ravage the children of my community has been perhaps the most personally frustrating thing I’ve witnessed since coming to this country. Using a mosquito net at night is the single most effective way to prevent malaria, and it is SO EASY, but for some reason people don’t do it. USAID has sponsored numerous free bed net distributions over the years, but still people do not use them. I see bed nets used a lot to fish in the ocean and to store cassava, but never to actually sleep under. The worst is the families who have a mosquito net hanging over their beds, but don’t let them down to sleep under at night. People know they need to use the nets and understand how they protect from malaria, but there’s a disconnect somewhere along the way. I’m still trying to figure out where those disconnect lies, but that’s all part of my job as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Project idea: Malaria awareness workshop/campaign, bed net distribution for a nominal fee.

Black Nadia or How I Got Converted to Liking Malagasy Music

Some Malagasy music is really terrible. Actually, MOST Malagasy music is pretty terrible. But somehow over the course of my seven months here, I’ve been converted into a Black Nadia fan. Black Nadia is basically like the Britney Spears/Rhianna/Beyonce of Madagascar. She’s sassy, independent, and sings catchy pop songs. I don’t know where along the way it happened, but I love her. The music video for her latest song features her dancing in front of a Hummer. How can you not love that??

Apples: The Most Delicious Food on the Planet?

Madagascar has every fruit you could ever imagine…except apples. I never thought I would actually write a blog post about apples, but let me say, you’ll miss apples when they’re gone! I’m here in Tana, the capital of Madagascar, for some business, and Tana has supermarkets. And supermarkets have apples!! I ate my first apple in seven months a couple days ago, and I legitimately GOT CHILLS. Then I ate some apple slices with peanut butter and I almost cried! Have apples always been this good???