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???

Officially, my official OFFICIAL address:

After extended trial and tribulation, I finally figured out how the post here works. I've been getting mail for months, I just never knew it! So thanks to everyone who has sent me things in the past...three months or so. Believe me, it was like a second Christmas getting all this great stuff from the US. The post office here is only open on Tuesdays and Fridays from 8:30am-10:00am because this is Madagascar and they can do whatever they want. Just something interesting I learned. Anyway, keep the good stuff coming!!!

For all future use:

Monica Skelton, Corps de la Paix
Commune Rurale Mahatalaky
Fort Dauphin 614
Madagascar

NYE, Speak-singing, and the Escaped Cow: Mahatalaky Musings Part II

New Years in Madagascar

After six months in Madagascar, I’ve gotten used to the fact that nothing is ever set in stone, and Malagasy people are often prone to exaggeration. Like, gross exaggeration. For example, “We’re leaving in a little bit” translates to “We’re leaving sometime in the next 24 hours” or “he’s my husband” can mean “he’s the guy that I’m sleeping with right now.” So when I was told the New Years holiday was ‘maresaky’ (aka happening/crazy/fun/goin on) I thought to myself “Yeah SURE, I’ll believe it when I see it.” How wrong was I! This New Years has definitely been one of the crazier ones I’ve ever celebrated. Hopefully it’s a good omen for the year of 2012.

My first clue that maybe it was actually going to be a happening party was on December 30, the day after I got back to Mahatalaky, when we all piled into the truck and drove into Fort Dauphin to purchase the ‘comisión,’ or all the food we needed that they don’t sell in the village, as well as 30 liters of gasoline for the generator. The next day, New Year’s Eve, the party started at about 6pm, at which point they started the generator and started blaring the music, and it didn’t end for another 48 hours. I got ready with my friends, did their makeup and we shared jewelry. It made me feel a little more at home, just like my New Year’s Eves with my Alpha Phi sisters. :) Except minus the Hilton hotel and a party with Steve Aoki. Anyway. We popped champagne that I brought back from France, and had ourselves a party! By some miracle I managed to keep my eyes open until midnight, at which point things really got crazy. The Dada, the mayor, and his people turned the town hall into a disco, and with the better part of my 500 person village packed into one room, it was a site to behold. Pictures to come soon. Everyone was dancing; people were passing around bottles of rum, and sharing cigarettes. It was a site to behold. I was a little scared!

I fell asleep on Dada’s bed at 1am with Cicia, Patricia, and Christiana (the 3-month-old!) with my guy Erika taking the floor. I woke up again at 3am and went to my own bed, with music still blaring, and hundreds of people still dancing. I woke up the next morning at 6:30am, and music was still blasting, but only a faithful 15 people remained. I went back to bed and watched Pride and Prejudice and got up at 9, keeping with my family’s tradition of spending the first day of the new year doing nothing. When I got up again, the music was STILL BLARING. I then helped prepare our New Year’s brunch! Spaghetti, pork, cucumber salad, carrot salad, rice (of course), bread, soda!!! It was quite the spread. I was stuffed afterward. But the party still wasn’t over. There was another disco that night, and the night after. The New Years holiday in Madagascar is a time for partying, dancing, drinking, visiting your family, and thanking the special people in your life for a good year. It’s like if Thanksgiving and Christmas got rolled in with New Years! I visited the great aunt’s brother’s son, and he treated me like I was his on daughter. I ate goose and drank more Coke than I’ve drunk in my previous 23 years of life. By the time the party finally ended on the 4^th of January, I was pretty happy because I was exhausted.

The Christmas Tree!

Trying to keep our eyes open til midnight...granny alert.

NYE dance party

New Year's Day brunch

Speak-singing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about learning languages and how the way that a language is spoken has just as much importance as the words and grammar that make it up. So the pronunciation, diction, the rhythm of how you say something, and the patterns of speech. I still translate from Malagasy to English in my head, I’m starting to get to the point where I can converse without doing that, but it still takes time. It always amuses me though, because the way people speak here is so different than the way English is spoken, so when I translate in my head it often sounds funny. For example, when I’m walking down the street any number of people, friends and strangers, call out to me, and the exchange goes something like this:

            Person on the street/in their house: Ahoana! Hoeza hanao? [Hey! Where are you going?]

            Me: Mitsangasangana! [I’m just hanging out!]

            Person on the street/in their house: Mandrosoa bageda! [Come in! Have some sweet potatoes!] (Or whatever they might be eating or drinking)

Me: Majotoa! [Enjoy!]

This whole exchange happens while I continue on my way, in a span of maybe 10 seconds. It always cracks me up.

People also speak very sing-songy and liltingly. For example, when someone greets me, it often comes out like “Salam-eyy Monica-eyy, ino vao vao-eyy?” [Hey Monica, what’s up?] The patterns of language are so interesting to me, and I love that I’m getting to the point with Malagasy where I can notice the intricacies of it.

Monica Eludes an Escaped Cow

There’s a scene in Pride and Prejudice (the Kiera Knightley version) where Mr. Collins calls out to his wife Charlotte to come quickly, and she replies, “Has the pig escaped again?” You laugh because it seems very mundane and ridiculous, but I can now speak from experience, and escaped livestock is no joking matter! Yesterday, a giant cow went rogue and escaped the handling of the herders and started running through town. Cows here aren’t like the Happy Cows Come from California cows.  They are big and dirty and they have horns, and everyone pretty much stays out of their way when they’re being herded around I was sitting in the shade with Patricia, Christian, and the baby, when a giant cow comes stampeding into the yard. He looked manic. Patricia ran for the house with the baby, while Christian just started yelling. I froze in place, hoping that if I didn’t move this giant cow would just run back the way it came. A couple seconds later, the herders came chasing after it and managed to at least get it out of our yard, although not under control. Once we realized we were safe from the being speared on the tip of the horn of a giant, everyone was free to laugh at me and how scared I was. Christian, the six-year-old, was literally rolling on the ground laughing and screaming “SHE WAS SO SCARED…. OF A COW!!!!!” Thanks a lot Christian! This is my life we're talking about! 

Even I eventually found amusement in the whole situation, because it was pretty hilarious to watch five grown men chase a cow around town for the better part of a half hour. Only in Mahatalaky! 

Joyeux Noel!

I am currently on the plane headed back from Paris to Madagascar after my 10-day trip. I’ll keep this short and sweet for those of you who could care less about my cushy vacation in the first world! :) Since leaving Mahatalaky and my last post, I had my Peace Corps Inservice Training. It was great to see a lot of my fellow stage-mates again and reconnect on what we’ve each been up to the past few months. We also actually did some work and training too! It really helped me refocus on my role as a Peace Corps volunteer, and a couple of my friends and I came up with some really cool project ideas were going to try and get off the ground in the next three to six months (I’ll talk about that later!) AND THEN I WENT TO PARIS!

Being this far away from home and my family and friends has strongly reinforced a few things in my life, the first and most important being how much I love my family. I feel so lucky that I was able to go on this trip with my sister and spend Christmas with family. Not to mention the whole Paris thing! Emma met me at the airport in Paris, and we caused a little scene since I was so happy to see her. I definitely felt the whole culture shock thing at first (there’s so many cars! And people! And food choices! And refrigeration!), but it’s pretty easy to fall back into old patterns. I also found that since my two worlds (first and third) are so different, there’s virtually no overlap at all so it’s not very hard to keep them separate and fit in wherever I go. The other bid difference of course was the weather. It was a little strange to be cold!! It’s been months now that I’ve wished for chilly weather and then once I got it I was wishing it were hot again! The grass is always greener, right?

Emma and I went everywhere and did everything that we could in the time that we had in Paris. The Louvre, Versailles & Marie Antoinette’s Estates, Museé d’Orsay, the Eiffel Tower, the Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Christmas Markets on Champs Élysées, Cathedral Notre Dame, and that’s not even all! We definitely made the most of our time. I also ate tons of delicious well-stored and refrigerated food and drink, and made up for lost time on eating no dairy for the past three months. I also ate escargot and it was delicious! One of my good friends from college also happened to be traveling in Paris after his study abroad quarter so I got to see him. It was the ultimate jackpot, Christmas in Paris with my sister (family &) and Ben (friend[s])!! I’ve posted some pictures below from our Paris trip.

Eiffel Tower

Versailles

Sacre Coeur

Christmas Eve 

And just like that, I’ve been in Madagascar for six months! I fly back to Fort Dauphin tomorrow (Tuesday December 27) where my Madagascar family will be waiting for me at the airport. I’m excited to get back to Mahatalaky, and I feel lucky that I have people that really want me to come back too! In January I’m going to start work on Nutrition and Sanitation curriculums for kids and adults to teach in the schools and to other interested groups. If all goes according to plan, I want to plant a big community garden as a manifestation of healthy living. I’m also going to start planning and mapping out an idea I came up during Inservice Training with my two friends. We want to develop a Sexual Health and Education curriculum to implement at the school or with the Boy’s and Girl’s Club (which I’m also planning on starting in 2012) with the aim to identify specific young people who are interested in training to become peer health ambassadors. The idea behind the peer health ambassador is to ensure sustainability, so when I leave, other young peers will be able to carry on with the health education I started. I’m really excited about this idea, but it’s a big undertaking so we’re definitely going to spend some time planning and organizing before we get anything off the ground. But I hope that by summer we’ll have the beginnings of a peer health program in the works!

As you can hopefully tell, my New Year’s resolution is to figure out the ‘work’ part of my life as a Peace Corps volunteer, and I am SO excited! I feel so at home in Mahatalaky, and I am ready to really start contributing and being productive and proactive in the community. Remember, I’m always reachable, just call me or send an email! I’m going to try and get on more of a schedule for going into Fort Dauphin so hopefully I’ll be able to start better predicting when I’ll have Internet access. I hope everyone had a happy holiday and enjoy all your New Year celebrations! I think of you all often, and I’m so lucky and blessed to have the love and support from everyone at home, Kisses!

Mitsangasangana, Miresaky, My birthday, Mahatalaky!

And just like that, I’ve wrapped up my first three months of living in Mahatalaky! Since I arrived n Madagascar in July, Peace Corps has been hammering into me the concept of “the first three months.” They’re supposed to be the hardest months, the longest months, and the truest test of whether or not you’ll be able to make it living here in Madagascar. And I made it! I leave tomorrow from Fort Dauphin for Antananarivo, where I have my In-service Training for Peace Corps all next week. Then on December 17 I leave for Paris! I return here to Fort Dauphin on December 27, and will spend New Year’s in Mahatalaky, which I’m very excited about because everyone has told me that Mahatalaky is really “miresaky” aka happening during the New Year’s holiday! Since my last post, I’ve just continued living the mitsangasangana life! So basically waking up, drinking my coffee, chatting with my friends, then doing chores. I spent a few days working on building the new CEG school with the ONG Azafady volunteers, which was a lot of fun. The biggest thing I’ve done is my community Diagnostic Survey, a report that I have to turn in to Peace Corps…

Learning Something New Everyday

I thought that the report was just going to be kind of busy work to make us new volunteers feel more productive, but the more people I interviewed, the more I learned. And what struck me as the most interesting thing was that every kid and teenager I talked to had these big dreams and aspirations, just the same as any kid you would talk to in the US. It took me by surprise to realize that the kids in Mahatalaky are not limited by where they live or what their parents do. They still want to be doctors and lawyers and businessmen. Almost all of the kids said they didn’t want to live in Mahatalaky when they grew up because there weren’t jobs for them there, and that to be successful in the careers they were striving for, they would have to move to Fort Dauphin or Antananarivo. I was even more surprised to learn about the kids who live and study in Mahatalaky but whose parents live in a fokontany far away, so they live alone. There’s three boys in particular who are part of the usual gang of preteens and teenagers that are always around me who I was shocked to find out live together in one room of a hut and cook their own food and wash their own clothes because their families live in a smaller village 20 km away. That kind of commitment to education, moving away from your family and having no adult guidance or support is something that I just don’t think you would ever find in the western world. We go to school because we have to, we go the college because it’s expected, and how else would you get a job. But here in Madagascar, and in Mahatalaky, education is a privilege, and it comes at a price. It tugged at my heartstrings to hear about the big dreams these kids have, and reminded me once again why I am living here. Even more, it makes me so excited to start my new projects when I get back in January.

My birthday

Thanks for all the emails, phone calls, and facebook posts! It was great to hear from so many people on my birthday. I can’t believe I’m 23; I’m an old lady now! We had a little birthday party here in Mahatalaky with my family and friends; it was a lot of fun. We drank soda and beer (always a special treat) and ate fried bananas and lychees, my favorite foods! I even practiced dancing the Mangaliba, the traditional Antanosy dance, but I’m still terrible at it. All in all, it was a lovely day, if not a little strange what with the 90-degree weather! I’m still getting used to that. J Here are a few photos for your enjoyment and amusement! XOXO

My favorite 12 year old in the world 

Mama

Fafa

Dada

Market Day & Jackfruit: Mahatalaky Musings

A jackfruit tree

The following are some new photos I took illustrating Market day in Mahatalaky: 

My favorite coffee stand

The juice and popsicle man, he's always excited to see me ha!

Town square on Market day

A clothing vendor

Selling mangos

The lychee tree in my backyard

Since I’m settling in here and not everything is not so “new” anymore, I’m going to start blogging about more specific aspects of Madagascar and Mahatalaky to hopefully better illustrate my life.

Market Day

Every Monday is Market Day here in Mahatalaky. People come from every hamlet and little village in the commune, up to 20 km away to sell and buy in the market. Once a week my semi-quiet town is transformed into a bustling metropolis complete with music, lots of people, lots of yelling, and everything you could possibly want to buy. I love Mondays! To start out, all the food stands make the best of everything. Fried bananas, donuts, banana bread, you name it they make it, and it’s so delicious! Second of all, I love all the activity going on. Vendors calling out prices, buyers trying to barter down the price, people saying hi to their friends, kids running around. When I was first here, I found the whole experience to be very overwhelming, but now I enjoy and look forward to it each week. The other wonderful thing about Mondays is that with market day come all the foods and goods that Mahatalaky doesn’t usually have during the week. For example, there’s no bread here to buy during the week, but every Monday fresh bread comes from Fort Dauphin. Also, popsicles! Since there’s no electricity here, there are no refrigerators, and therefore no cold drinks. And yet every day I’m sweating by 7:00 am as the temperature climbs up to 100 degrees. Never before in my life have I craved a cold beer or soda, but here I am in Madagascar wishing every day for an ice cold Coke. I can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea that a lukewarm soda is somehow supposed to be refreshing. So when the trucks arrive early on Monday mornings with coolers full of frozen flavored ice, I’m first in line to buy them. We all know I love Otter Pops; so buying my popsicles is one of my favorite parts of Mondays. The vendor is no longer shocked when I buy at least five, so hopefully that’s a sign that I’m integrating! Then, just as quickly as the town was transformed, by 2 o’clock in the afternoon, everything is packed back up and the town returns to normal.

Lychees and Jackfruit

Although Mahatalaky doesn’t have bread, cold drinks, or meat a lot, one thing that they have in excess is fruit. Bananas, pineapples, papayas, mangos you name it they have it. My favorite new fruits here that they don’t have in the US are lychees and jackfruit. Lychees have just come into season, and they are the most delicious things I have ever eaten. They’re kind of like berries, except bigger, with a big pit in the center. They grow in large bunches on trees and ripe and ready for picking at the end of November, and are gone by the end of December. They are super sweet and juicy, and every lychee is like a little piece of heaven. I have at least 30 per day, but I think eating them in such large quantities is making me sick, so I’m trying to cut back. The other really popular fruit here is called jackfruit. They are the size of a watermelon and also grow on trees. The outside skin is spiky, but the inside is very sweet. When I first tried jackfruit I thought it was ok, but it’s definitely an acquired taste because I love it now. On the mayor’s compound where I live, we have a lychee tree and a jackfruit tree, all my favorite fruits in the same place!

School

Figuring out the education system here has been a big challenge, mostly because there really is no set system or levels of school that the kids go through. Or rather, there is one but there isn’t anyone to regulate it, so school is not of number one importance to anyone besides the more wealthy families. The youngest kids go to primary school, but only like four days a week in either the morning or the afternoon. The older kids (around 13 years old) go to school maybe three days a week for a few hours in the morning. The oldest kids (15 years old and up) go to school the least, three days a week for maybe two hours.

On top of the really small amount of time any of the kids are in class, “school” here is not like school in the US. They can’t afford textbooks for the kids so when the kids go to school, really they just show up, copy down a lesson into their notebooks since they don’t have a book to learn from, and then leave. Depending on the teacher and the subject, sometimes there is lecturing that happens, but there is no curriculum for the teachers to follow so it is up to their discretion how they run their class. There is no annual standardized testing or anything, so students are really only evaluated when they take the exams to pass to the next level of school. For example, my best friend Erika is 12 years old, and he is in his last year or what we would call primary school. This June, he will take the CEPE exam to pass on to CEG, the equivalent of middle school. Since this is an exam year for him, he goes to school six days a week, from 6:00 am to 5:00 pm. The most shocking thing I learned about education here is that a lot of the teachers still use corporal punishment as a disciplinary tool, or often just as a tool in general. Erika has been hit with a stick on his back many times because he didn’t know his lesson well enough. If a child is dirty or doesn’t have shoes, the teachers will often hit them. For this reason, a lot of the more poor children just stop going to school before they’ve even finished primary because they are afraid of the punishment they’ll receive. Another common reason for a young kid to stop going to school is because they have to work and their family can’t afford school, or because they are pregnant are need to get married.

The biggest education problem in Mahatalaky right now is the fact that they don’t have adequate schoolhouses. The CEG (middle school) has no roof and a broken floor and only two rooms for over 300 students. To solve this problem, the siseme level kids (around 13 years old) have class in the town hall, and the cinqeme, catreme, and troiseme kids (15 years and up) go to school in the broken schoolhouse. And when it rains, there is no school at all since there is no roof. Luckily, this problem is close to being solved because a British volunteer organization called ONG Azafady has been working here for about a year building four new schoolhouses for the four levels of middle school. The project is scheduled to be finished around March 2012.



HOME SWEET HOME

 Tying Up Loose Ends

            As I come into my third month of living here in Mahatalaky, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do here in the upcoming years. Even after five months in Madagascar, my reasons for doing Peace Corps and my perception and understanding of my role as a Peace Corps volunteer has changed so much. Being successful and happy as a volunteer is just as much about living as it is about working. I seem to have gotten down the “living” thing pretty well, and I’m still figuring out the “working” part. When I get back from my vacation in January, I’m going to start a couple new projects that are all my own and completely separate from the health center. I spend so much of my time with kids and teenagers and I see how much they could benefit from a more regimented routine than just the few hours of school, and then ‘stay-out-of trouble’ until dinner. I also see when I work at the health center how young the majority of the new mothers are. So I’m going to start a Girl’s Club where we’ll meet once a week to talk and hang out, and learn about sexual health and things like that. I’m also going to work to get the Women’s Association restarted in Mahatalaky because I think that would be a really good resource for me to use to tap into what the community wants and needs the most. Finally, I’m going to hopefully start working with the health campaign of the organization ONG Azafady as a liaison who can travel out to the different fokontanys of the commune and check up on the trained community health workers there and help with health education as its needed. So in conclusion, I have a lot to look forward, I am doing very well, and I miss everyone a lot. Happy Thanksgiving! Eat extra turkey for me. I tried to explain Thanksgiving to my friends here, and it just didn’t translate well, they were just like “…so it’s a party where you eat a lot of food? Because the white people and Indians were friends?” Maybe when I figure out how to explain colonization and race relations in Malagasy I’ll be able to do a better job of describing Thanksgiving. Kisses!

Monitalaky: MY NEW LIFE

Once again for your ease and enjoyment, I have broken up this marathon post into smaller chunks so you can read them at your leisure. 

Background Details

I arrived in Mahatalaky finally after four really long days in the car and then three days shopping for home goods in Fort Dauphin. Even though I didn’t really have any specific expectations, the town was different than I thought it would be. Mahatalaky is the biggest town on the road to Fort Dauphin, so there are a lot of trucks and taxi brousses that pass through, so it’s actually a pretty bustling place. The health center is also really busy, with people coming from little villages up to 15 kilometers away to get health care. It’s not nearly as small as I had expected it to be, which I was really happy about. I live right next to the town hall, on the mayor’s compound. My house is a little two-story bungalow with a table and chairs on the bottom floor and my bed on the top floor. It’s small, but sturdy and comfortable, so I like it a lot. I also feel very safe where I live, because I am so centrally located and live directly next to the mayor, which really helped me feel settled in Mahatalaky more quickly. Mahatalaky has a big market every Monday and there are always all kinds of fruit and meat. There’s also a couple little restaurants to eat, and places to get coffee and bread in the morning. It’s a fun little place.

A Typical Week

            After six weeks here, I’m starting to settle into a routine, but what I do on the day-to-day really depends on whether or not I have work at the health center. For the purposes of this little narrative, I’m going to talk about a workweek. Monday is Market Day in Mahatalaky, so starting at about 4:30am; people are setting up stalls and staking out their places to sell their goods. I usually get up on Mondays at around 5:30am because by that time, the roosters have been crowing for over an hour and a half and people are selling things right outside my house so it’s impossible to sleep! After I get up, I head across the street to the place where I have my coffee every day, and sit and watch all the action going on around me, and chat with my friends. At around 8:30am (yes, I’ve already been awake for three hours) they start blaring music videos, so I’ll go watch that a lot. Then I do a little shopping in the market, and head off to the health center at around 9am. Mondays are busy there because so many people come in for the market. Also on Mondays the nurse does all her family planning counseling with young women and mothers. As I’m getting better at Malagasy, I participate more actively in the counseling, but in the beginning I just did a lot of observing. We also administer free STD testing. I finish work usually by noon, and then I head home for lunch. Then in the afternoon, I pretty much just hang out, go for walks, read, write letters, etc.

            On Tuesdays, we do prenatal consultations at the health center. The youngest pregnant woman I’ve seen was 14, and she weighed about 95 pounds four months pregnant. Most women have had at least one child by the time they are 20 years old, and then keep having babies into their 30s. All the pregnant women get free prenatal vitamins, tetanus shots, and malaria prophylaxis. The nurse at my health center is very smart and hard working, and does very thorough check-ups. Wednesdays at the health center are family planning days again, so we do STD testing and birth control. Thursdays are prenatal consultations again. How busy I am at the health center really depends, but when it is busy, it is really busy with sometimes over 40 women waiting for a consultation.

            Every night in Mahatalaky, they have a movie in the town hall, which people can pay 100 ariary to get into. Starting at about 6:30pm, once it gets dark, they play Malagasy music videos until the movie starts at 7:30pm. The music here is great, it really cracks me up. Malagasy people LOVE Akon, so they play a lot of his songs. Akon is playing in the background right now as I write this! But actual traditional Malagasy music has an island vibe and is very danceable, since everyone here loves to dance. The traditional dance of the region here is the mangaliba, and I’m starting to get pretty good at it. Everyone gets a kick out of me when I imitate any of the traditional dances, but they say I’m actually pretty good! The movie ends at around 9pm, and then I go to bed. On the weekends a lot of times I’ll go to a big market 5 kilometers away, or will go on a little excursion somewhere, it just depends. Mostly what I do is “mitsangasangana…”

Mitsangasangana

            In Malagasy, “mitsangasangana” means to hang out, and that is what I spend a lot of my time doing. The first couple weeks here, I really struggled with the fact that sometimes I would just have absolutely nothing to do, because American culture values productivity and always doing something. I read A LOT. My second week living in Mahatalaky, the nurse was sick and had to go to Fort Dauphin and the health center was closed, so I had no work. After a few days of sitting around by myself, I realized that if I didn’t become more comfortable with just hanging out and talking to people, I was going to have a really hard time assimilating into the culture and community. So after that, instead of sitting in my house reading or staring off into space, I would go and sit across the street at the place where I would get coffee in the morning, and there was always people around there. A 12-year-old kid named Erika, who took me under his wing, also befriended me. At first, he was one of the only people who could ever understand anything I was trying to say, and he would just sit with me quietly in the afternoons when I had nothing to do, not even talking because I was so horrible at Malagasy. Little by little, he started taking me around town and getting me to talk to people and helping me get comfortable in Mahatalaky. When he went back to school a few weeks after I arrived, I would just sit and wait for him to come back because he was my only friend, and everyone would tease me saying I was so lonely without my 12-year-old sidekick! It was then that I realized I needed to make more friends.

            It’s hard to be brave and confident and talk to people in a language you don’t really know, but that’s exactly what I had to do in order to settle myself here. I am so lucky because everyone here is so kind and friendly, so it’s not so hard to talk to people, as long as you have the courage. Once I started being more comfortable just sitting around with people, I realized that they were really eager to get to know me. They ask about all my friends and family at home, and are shocked when I tell them I am not married, nor do I have any children, and I also don’t have a fiancée or a boyfriend. A lot of people think that Andy is my boyfriend, no matter how much I say he’s not, because there are pictures in my photo album of us HA! People just can’t accept that a young woman like me is completely unattached; even though I point out I came here to Madagascar all by myself. I try to explain that it’s normal for me to not be married yet at 22 years old, but they can’t really wrap their heads around that. :)

           

Friends & Family

            I am probably the luckiest volunteer in the Peace Corps, because a huge family here has adopted me as their daughter. Like I said, I live right next to the mayor, and he and his family realized pretty quickly that I was bad at cooking, washing clothes, etc, and they took pity on me. I eat all my meals with them, go on excursions with them, and always have someone to hang out with. I miss my family and friends at home a lot, so I honestly don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have this family to take care of me. They tell me all the time, ‘we know if you’re not smiling, then it means you’ll want to go home, so we will do whatever you need to make you happy.’ The mayor and his wife have one son, and they tell me they are so happy that they now also have a daughter. My ‘brother,’ Fafa, is married with two kids, a six-year-old boy named Christian, and a new baby girl born on September 30 called Christiana. My best friend Erika is the mayor’s nephew, and he has an older sister named Cicia who I am good friends with, and a younger sister named Olivia. The family who I buy my coffee and bread from in the morning is also related somehow, and they have a son, Berthin, and three daughters, Sylvianne, Charlaine, and Nicole. The mayor’s youngest niece is named Elena and she is three years old and very precocious. She calls me “Mama Vazaha” now. I feel so lucky to have been welcomed so warmly into this vivacious and kind family, and I really feel at home with them. I am never alone unless I want to be, and I honestly couldn’t ask for more. Having an understanding and patient support group of people has really made the difference for me in getting better and more confident at Malagasy and settling in to my life here in Madagascar. Now when I come into Fort Dauphin, I stay at Cicia’s house and hang out with my young friends from Mahatalaky who go to school here. But I am so settled in my little routine and life in Mahatalaky that when I’m in Fort Dauphin, I miss my little town, my little house, and my not so little Malagasy family, and really just want to go back!

Having people who care about me and my success and happiness as a Peace Corps volunteer really makes the whole thing more worthwhile and manageable. Any time someone notices that I seem unhappy or like something is bothering me, they immediately ask what’s wrong, and they won’t take ‘nothing’ for an answer! Then they will start playing American music (Shania Twain and Celine Dion are all the rage here), or they will play English music videos that night during the film time. Madagascar is slightly behind the times here, Vengaboys and Aqua are still experiencing momentous popularity, but it always makes me laugh. I also feel a lot more confident speaking to people I am comfortable with and people who reinforce what I’m learning and doing. I’m finally starting to feel more confident about my speaking abilities, and recently people have even been telling me I actually speak Malagasy very well! 

The family takes me on lots of little excursions to see and learn about the place I’m living for the next two years. There are two big rivers within a five-kilometer vicinity that I’ve been to a number of times and gone swimming. I’ve also been to the mayor’s little village waaay out in the country and to his wife’s village waaay out in the mountains. They have a 4x4 truck, so they always take me along too, if I can go, when the mayor goes hunting, or to Fort Dauphin to visit the little baby. [Side note: Malagasy culture dictates that if a woman has a baby girl, she has to go back to her parent’s house, and stay in bed for three months, so Patricia won’t be back with us in Mahatalaky until December 30.] It is so ridiculously beautiful here, with huge mountains on one side, and a plateau on the other. The rivers keep everything lush and green. I try and explore as much as I can, but there’s still so much for me to see.

Funny Stories

            After the first week when I had absolutely nothing to do and Erika went back to school, I was feeling really lonely. I would sit all day and wait for him to be done with class at 5, and then we would go on a walk and I would practice speaking and tell him about my day. This particular week has been really difficult since I hadn’t really figured out the whole “mitsangasangana” concept yet, and I was feeling a little homesick and frustrated. We went on a walk with some other kids, and Erika led us all up into the mountains behind Mahatalaky, and I was getting more and more pissed off since I was wearing cheap Madagascar flip flops trying to climb up a mountain. Then we had a cross a rice paddy, which is essentially just a giant mud puddle with a skinny little path that crosses it. Christian was with us, and he had already had his bath that evening, and I knew that his grandma would be mad if he got all dirty again, so I was carrying him across the rice paddy so he would stay clean, when my foot slipped of the little foot path and I fell in. I held Christian up in my right arm while my left leg sunk thigh deep into the nasty mucky mud. Falling in was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me on a tough week and I just started screaming out “I HATE YOU ERIKA WHY DID YOU BRING ME ON THIS WALK I HATE YOU ERIKA I HATE YOU I AM STUCK IN THE MUD I HATE YOU!” all in English of course. The kids were all rolling on the ground laughing so hard and imitating me screaming “IIIIHATECHUUUU ERIKAAAA!” I finally extracted myself from the muck, but I lost a flip flop in the process. Now, all the kids in town will just yell out at me “IIIIHATEEECHUUUU” whenever they see me because the story of me failing in the rice paddy has gone all through the grapevine, and it never ceases to amuse people.

            Laundry is a consistent foe of mine, I already wrote about it during my time in home stay in July, and unfortunately I haven’t gotten any better at successfully washing my clothes by hand. It’s hard! So any time I do laundry, I always attract a crowd of onlookers who come for the show. Now that I am better at speaking, if anyone laughs at me, I just retort back “If you think you’re so good at washing, why don’t you do it!” And thus, I get other people to do my laundry for me!

            Everyone here is always really interested in my long hair, since all the women braid their hair back and have curly hair. I found out that a good way for me to pass time and also talk to people was to let them braid my hair in the traditional style! At first I just let them do it because I had nothing else to do, but now I really see the benefit to having all your hair braided back because it’s so hot here! So pretty much every other week, I have one of my friends do my hair. Right now it’s in a bunch of tiny little braids, and I’ve been told that I blend right in, and am “tena ampela gasy” which means like I’m really a Malagasy woman. HA!

My time here at my site has shown me that Peace Corps is about a lot more than just the work that you do as a volunteer, but also about the relationships you form and the presence you have in your community. All the people of Mahatalaky are so happy and excited to have me there with them, speaking Malagasy and living and working. They are so kind and welcoming, and everyday something or someone makes me laugh or smile. Already they have given me so much more than I could ever give to them, and I feel so lucky to be having this experience. 

Me and the family! Erika is standing next to me, my constant companion. This photo was taken when we went to my surrogate dad's little village.