Internet!

I have internet! Painfully slow internet but internet none the less. I am spending my day in Moramanga (my banking town) and am enjoying some of the finer things in life (electricity and food). My main goal for the day is to buy chicken wire for the amazing chicken/rabbit house I am building. Okay, I am not building it. I am just buying everything so someone else (my neighbor) can make it but exciting none the less. I also need to buy a new pot and some groceries. There is food at my site but the only produce I can get is whatever people have extra to sell. Right now that is tomatoes, greens, and just recently, carrots. There are a couple of people selling onions and garlic too but they are way expensive. Plus I am going to stock up on ramen. I eat it at least once a day and the shop owners in my town always judge me when I buy it (plus it [and everything else] is cheaper in Moramanga).

In other news I have been working a lot around my house. I dug and planted two garden beds in what is the hardest clay soil I have ever seen. Not helping was that the area I chose was the site of the former garbage pit so there was tons of trash in the ground. I also planted some moringa seedlings which I am going to plant around my house when they get bigger and give some to my friends. I also have a compost pile and ordered some homemade planters to have flowers in. Whenever I work outside people always come up to my fence and talk to me about what I am doing. It is a great informal teaching exercise. Everyone is really excited about the moringa trees and keep on asking me if they can have some. The answer is of course no (except for special people) because I want to use the remaining seeds I have at the local elementary school garden. I tell people where they can buy them though!

When not working in my yard I am walking around, talking to people, and working on my Community Diagnostic Survey. For the first three months at site we are not supposed to start any grand projects. We just work on our CDS to help us integrate into the community, learn more about it, and identify issues and possible projects. I have been mostly working on the more formal interviews right now (talking with teachers, doctors, village leaders about statistics) but I also just chat with people (especially about what they grow and what animals they raise and cool stuff like that).

I know I want to working in the school garden in some capacity but I don’t have a firm idea about any other projects. I would like to serve as a sort of ag extensionist; answering people’s questions when the approach me (and if I am knowledgeable) and holding monthly or so seminars on various agricultural techniques. I also want to work with the cattle producers to build a more effective chute system and to maybe see about a getting a cooperative together to buy a vaccine gun. As soon as they found out that I know cows they asked if I could vaccinate their’s. In the US vaccinating cattle is not a big deal, generally producers do it (unless it’s for bangs). But here the infrastructure is not very good and therefore most families hire someone to do it (from what I have seen so far they bring a veterinarian in from Ambosary, 20 kilometers north. Not a trivial expense!). Everyone wants me to teach English at the primary school and there is really nothing that sounds worse to me. I don’t know how I will get out of it though. I literally get talked to about it every day. Maybe we will compromise and I can do a weekly English/American club or something….

In other news, obnoxious young guys in my town keep on grabbing my ass whenever I go out around dusk. I can only say “not okay” and “stop touching me” while looking stern so many times. Bitch slaps might have to come next.

Mangahazo

Written May 15, 2012

Cassava (mangahazo in Malagasy) is ubiquitous here. For those of you who haven’t had it is a white tuber with absolutely no taste and just as dismal nutritional value. It tastes like whatever you add to it which is generally milk, sugar, and honey (the leaves however taste quite horrible and are great for you). Even though it may not be the most delicious thing in the world it is pretty great because it is a hardy plant growing in nearly all conditions, is easy to store, easy to replant, and is great at filling up bellies.

People love to give me cassava. Way. Too. Much. Not only do I have a giant bag of it sitting on the floor of my kitchen (getting eaten by ants) but I have gotten it delivered to me three times this past week for dinner. Not only that but I always get giant pots of it which is more than I could ever eat and I have to end up having to shamefully hide the leftovers in my trash pile so people won’t notice. If I have to have a problem though having too much food is a good one. I actually really love the woman who has taken it upon herself to feed me. She and her husband own the house I live in and are my female neighbor’s parents. I have been to their house a number of times (where they also feed me) and spent 5 hours this morning helping her harvest peanuts. My neighbors have been gone the past couple of days because his father is sick and she comes by a couple of times a day to check on me. She is lovely, I could do without the cassava though.

Site!

Written May 13, 2012

I’m officially at site! I got installed on Tuesday and it is now Sunday night. So far everything has been amazing and frustrating. My house is pretty great. It is two rooms with clay walls and a metal roof. I share a compound (fenced yard) with another family (a young couple and their 7-month-old baby). We share the wells (there are two of them for some reason) the laundry washing station, and the laundry line and I get my own kabone (outhouse) and shower-area. The yard is pretty small so I can’t really have a big garden or animals like I wanted but oh well. I made compost with some of the neighbor kids and I plan to start a small garden bed tomorrow. Right behind my house is some abandoned buildings for the rail line so I am going to try and see if I can get permission to plant some beds back there too. I bought basic furniture in Moramanga but I am hoping to have some more stuff made for me here. Here is a quick rundown is how everything has been thus far:

The good:

• The local EPP (elementary school) has an awesome fenced garden that I am excited to work in (I already planted carrots with them last week!)
• My town has a lot more shopping opportunities than expected, there are lots of little stores, a couple of produce stands, a hardware store, and a butcher (my neighbor)
• The leader of the town (chief de fokontany) is a woman
• Mosquito nets are very common here
• The chief de fokontany and her husband own a store and they have tons of public health, informational posters up and sell birth control front and center
• I have embraced child labor. They fetch my water, run to the store and buy things for me, sweep my yard, it’s awesome
• People love to feed me and give me food to cook

The bad:

• I have zero privacy when there is daylight, I am apparently very fascinating and am constantly watched
• Setting boundaries is hard. I have a fence and a gate but people just walk in anyway (many also just walk into my house) but because I share my compound it is hard to make rules about that
• Everyone is incredible disappointed that I don’t speak French
• I hear people talk about me all the time. If I hear the word American, foreigner, or English I can be sure that people are talking about me. Even though I can’t really understand what they are saying it is a bit annoying
• There are insane amounts of fleas here. All of the animals are crawling with them and I have tons of bites all over my legs from just walking around
• There are some creepy, eternally-drunk men here who love to make me feel uncomfortable
• I get asked at least five times a day if I have a husband and if I would like a Malagasy husband (and this is from women too, not just the creepy men)
• They aren’t speaking standard Malagasy (the dialect I learned) here. They speak Besanobesano here which is not too different but is different enough that I get confused. Bs are pronounced as Vs and a lot of vocab is different. We use standard, Betsimisaraka, and Besanobesano greetings here. The Besanobesano ones are the worse because they are different for the first time you say hello to someone and each subsequent time so you really have to pay attention to who you already saw that day. Toothless Gasy is a whole dialect all its own
• My house is about 2 steps away from route national 44 and it is loud, even in the middle of the night. It is not a major road and is only partially paved but for other reasons there is a huge amount of traffic (the Chinese aren’t up to much good here in Madagascar…)

I am officially a volunteer!

I am sworn in and officially a PCV! Finally, it took long enough! Our swearing in was fairly low key but awesome. My favorite speech by far was by the mayor of the city where the training center is. He totally called the country director out and said the community deserved a volunteer of their own (they have put in 2 requests already) and then asked the representative from the US embassy to help get the country out of its current political crisis. It was hilariously awkward. We then ate delicious food and my family stole as much food as they could shove into their bag. I gave them some little gifts including Obama buttons which they all immediately put on and showed off to everyone.

We left this morning to come to Tana to do some shopping. We were told to be ready to leave at 6am. Holding true to Gasy time we left at 9:40 minus our luggage (and plus a broken window at the training center due to some individuals who were still a bit drunk, oops). Time is a very different concept here. Now I am at the Tana meva (a house where volunteers can stay) loving the wifi and eating Mexican food and margaritas to celebrate cinco de Mayo!

Joe’s bitch

Written May 4, 2012

Our country director is here at the training center to prepare for swearing in tomorrow and he gave us a wonderful treat. He has been working for Peace Corps pretty much his whole life and he had a tape of a volunteer in Burkina Faso from 1974 called “Joe’s Bitch” where this volunteer has a 10 minute rant talking about how much being a Peace Corps volunteer sucks. Among his complaints was that he used to be “an articulate son of a bitch” followed by a minute or so of him trying to correctly pronounce articulate. But bar far my favorite concern of his was that his teeth were “flabby”. I am not exactly sure what that means but that is going to be my go to compliant whenever I feel the need to rant. He also hates on his dirty Canadian roommate and Nixon pretty hard. He sounds absolutely miserable and as soon as the speech ends our country director told us that he ended up extending a third year. We were told that it is completely normal and okay to have horrible days like that.

Then the country director told us that he had to gives an alcohol, drugs, and sex speech which consisted of “if I hear about it, then you have a problem”. Then we got to eat lots of delicious wine and cheese. He is pretty darn awesome.

Drugs are an absolute no-no in the Peace Corps but we have had a very relaxed attitude about alcohol and sex here. They have a bar for us that is opened for us every night and on a couple of occasions there has been free alcohol. We were given condoms in our med kit shortly after arriving and have free access to dental dams and lube from the med unit. Our last full weekend we were here we were told that it has historically been a big party night for the trainees and then a mysterious bag of 100+ condoms showed up in dining room. They prepare us well. One night two people who (will remain unnamed) got caught by the security guards having sex on a table. When we got a lecture the next day it wasn’t about having sex in a semi-public area, it was about how we really shouldn’t break tables (so far we have broken 2 tables, a sink, a toilet, about a billion glasses, and have damaged 2 beds with various bodily fluids). We have also had some group snuggle/sleeping parties that we thought we were being sneaky about but apparently they knew all along and were totally fine with it. We have been repeatedly told that we are a very calm, well-behaved group of trainees compared to previous years so make your judgments from there.

Jazz hands and booty shaking

Written May 3, 2012

Last night our wonderful LCFs (language and cross-cultural facilitators, basically our teachers) held a cross cultural session for us on the different styles of dancing in Madagascar. Our cross-cultural sessions here have been notoriously boring so this was a nice change. They went by region and played music videos of the different dance styles and they had all of the people moving to that region get up and do the dance. I am sure that I am going to love my site, but I will say that the Merina ethnic group has one of the more boring dances. It basically involves hopping up and down and doing some fancy arm and wrist movements (think jazz hands). By far the best dancing is up north where it is all about hip movement and butt shaking (kind of how I dance already….). Afterwards we had a bit of free beer and a dance party to “show off American dance moves”. Peace Corps treats us nice.

I’m almost a PCV!

Written May 2, 2012

I cannot believe I am at the end of training and in less than a week I will be living in my new community! The past couple of weeks have been incredibly busy and I am excited to finally get to settle in somewhere and get to work.

Last week we finished up our technical training and gave presentations in Malagasy. We basically got to choose any topic which was ag or environment related so naturally I chose to do it on estrus detection in cattle. I was warned that the Malagasy would like find my topic very uncomfortable (for sure some of the trainers who were helping me translate were) but over all people seemed generally interested. I had a drawing of a cow reproductive tract which all of the women were very interested in (they may or may not know believe that they too have uterine horns, oops). Luckily the library here at the training center had a book in Malagasy about swine production so I was able to translate a lot of terms from there. I absolutely love the Malagasy words and how they translate. For example, oviduct = road of the egg, uterus = house of the baby, urethra = hole to empty dirty water. My favorites were “the unity” which they used for mating and “the surprise” which they used for estrus. Some words I couldn’t find so I had to make them up a bit. For example, cervical mucus became snot leaving the vulva, close enough right? My host mom was there to watch the presentation and it was great to see her. Holding true to her personality, the first thing she told me was that we had all got very fat and asked how much bread Joel (another trainee who I am pretty sure my host mom likes more than me) was eating. Calling people fat here is a compliment and in this case very true, they feed us well.

My beautiful poster of a cow reproductive tract for my technical presentation.

After the technical presentations all effort was focused on out final language test (called the LPI). Half way through training we had to reach beginner advanced (which I did) and we were supposed to reach intermediate mid by the end. I am very lucky that I didn’t have to learn a dialect so I had a fairly easy time (I placed intermediate high). Supposedly if you don’t pass they will keep you in training for another couple of weeks but that doesn’t seem to be true.

On Friday we have our swearing in ceremony where I will officially become a volunteer! There will be food, speeches, singing, and having fun with the other trainees and our host families. Then on Saturday my installation group (here in Madagascar they “install” new volunteers meaning we have a staff member go with us to introduce us important people and help us get settled) gets to go to Tana for the weekend. Because I and another volunteer are moving fairly close we won’t really pass through a big town on the way to our site so Peace Corps is being nice and is letting us do some real shopping in the capital.

I get about 1,000,000 ariary to move in with and survive off of the first month. I am a millionaire for the first and only time in my life! It seems like a lot (around $500) but considering that I am a first time volunteer at my site and I have to start from scratch I will be living very modestly until I can save up some money. Since Peace Corps returned to Madagascar after the 2009 coup it gives all of its volunteers a flat amount of $500 whether they are a replacement volunteer who inherits a house full of furniture or not, which is awesome for replacement volunteers but sucks for me. We are the first stage (Peace Corps talk for a group of volunteers) to actually be replacements since Peace Corps came back here and they are likely going to change it for the next stage.

My priorities right now are a small solar light system (which I already paid for, it has two lights and can charge my ipod and cell phone) a small gas stove, a bed, and some food. Once I get settled I will have to find someone to build me some furniture (and then someone else to help me deliver it….). Until then I will be cooking and eating on the floor. The last house I lived in by myself in the states actually had basically no furniture except a bed so I’ll be fine. Peace Corps has already given me lots of goodies: a brand new mountain bike, associated bike lock and tools, water filter, various door locks and window bar holders, and a mosquito net.

My favorite Malagasy words thus far

Written April 30, 2012

Malagasy words are awesome because they often mean things. My banking town of Moramanga for example translates to “cheap mangos”. My favorite word thus far is antsibeandriamanitra which means rainbow and translates to “the big knife of god”. How awesome is that? And yes, many Malagasy words are that long. They are a vowel loving people.

Other notes on Malagasy: even though we are right off the coast of Mozambique, Malagasy stems from the Indonesian language because that is where the first settlers came from. Also, all active verbs start with the letter M. Out of 169 pages in my Malagasy to English dictionary 52 pages are words that start with M.

Can I please just get to site already?

Written April 16, 2012

I’m still alive! Internet access is extremely limited so sorry for the lack of updates. I am safe in sound here in Mantaso here at the Peace Corps training center and almost done with training! I just about 2 weeks I will be moving into my new community to start my service! A lot has happened over the past month and a half so I will only touch on the important things.

I spent my first month here living with a host family. They are awesome and so incredible welcoming to me. There was my host mom and two younger sisters who still live at home (9 and 15). The father worked as a driver and I didn’t get a chance to meet him. My mother always joked that she didn’t work. That’s a lie though because she took care of the kids, the livestock, the garden, and farmed some rice fields and cassava plots. She also loved to gossip with me. A language class was held in our house so she would always tell me who was doing well and who was doing badly. We also lived across the street from a store so she gave me the run down on who bought what and who she thought was getting fat. She is hilarious. They have other grown children as well, 6 in total as far as I know. Two of the older daughters and one of their sons (host nephew) stayed there the last week and a half as well. The little boy was terrified of me at first, all he would do is cry when he saw me but by the end we were buddies. The house didn’t have electricity or running water so it was good to see what life will be like at my site (it’s really not that bad). I got used to bucket showers, squat outhouses (the kabone), and peeing in a bucket at night (people don’t really go outside when it is dark). Since I have moved back to the training site I have seen my younger sister once and I will see the whole family again at my swearing in.

My host mom and sister making fried bananas.

My wonderful host sisters, cousins, and nephew!

Another exciting thing that happened during the home stay period was site announcements! This year they used a new method to decide where people would go. Previously they would just look at people’s resumes and place them where they thought was best. This year we got info on all the sites and got to rank them and write an essay about our choices. I was lucky enough to get my top choice and cannot wait to move to site! I will be living in a community called Ambohidray. It is located on the eastern edge of the highlands (just north of Moramanga if you want to look at a map) and is about a 5 hour drive away from the capital. It was my number 1 choice because they expressed an interest in animal husbandry (which as a protected area management volunteer I didn’t think I would get to do and work with livestock). I am also very happy that it is on the highlands. Originally I thought I wanted to be somewhere warm and coastal, but I am not made for that. The highlands have Oregon-like weather (not extremely hot and not extremely cold). We got here during the end of the rainy season and it would still get pretty hot. We are entering into the cold season now and thus far it is nothing that a sweatshirt can’t handle (though I am told it will get worse). I have a lot more information on my site but most of it is probably not accurate. I am the first volunteer to be placed there so it will be a learning experience for the both of us.

Site announcements: Me finding out I am going to Ambohidray.

After we moved back into the training center us environment trainees went on a weeklong tech trip up the east coast (there are 15 environment trainees and 14 community economic development trainees, one of them decided to go home shortly after arriving). We got to visit current volunteer’s sites, 2 sites where some people from out stage will be placed (at neither of which were the volunteer’s houses built yet), and lots of beautiful parks. Once we got off the highlands it was freaking HOT!  And it’s not even the hot season, I am so happy to be living in the highlands. We got to see lots of wildlife, swim in the ocean, and eat tons of delicious foods.

Tech trip in Tampolo! A beautiful hike through a rain forest ending at the ocean!

Now we are all back at the training center keeping very busy with classes and working towards our final language test and technical presentations.  Training is great and I love all my fellow trainees but I just really want to get to my site so I can start working!

Peace Corps Training Center