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???

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