Post # 1

Well, it's Saturday November 8th, 2008 and I'm about halfway through training.

I've been living in a village in a valley below the training site, a little over an hour's ride from the capital city. The village is an island of about twenty homes surrounded by rice paddies and cut off from the road to town by a footbridge. It's sort of paradise. We are inland and on the plateau, so the weather is pleasant and the landscapes real easy on the eyes: very green in the valleys and domes of exposed rock on the mountaintops. This is the view from my house:




My host family consists of Dada and Mama (farmers, lovely people), my sixteen year old sister and my fourteen year old brother. We have fun together and they laugh at me often. They call me "tom-ah" (with a long pause on the hyphen) and are very patient, very generous, very hard working, very calm people. (Dada and Mama often seem to be Malagasy versions of my parents and I predict that their eventual meeting will be monumental.) We're busy folk, what with a flock of geese, some chickens and two pigs, and then all the crops we got going: rice, beans, mango, papaya, squash, coffee, pineapple, kasava, green beans, spinach, carrots, cabbage, etc. We also recently got a kitten and named it Miyel, after the noise she makes. This is our little white house:



Almost every day goes like this:

4:45 Wake up in the dark. Scratch myself for a while (I have fleas)
5:00 Clean my floor, Malagasy-style (rub it with a candle, push half a coconut around with my feet, then sweep)
5:45 Breakfast: Mush Rice, peanut butter, fruit and coffee
6:30 Wash dishes (with small audience)
6:45 Bucket Shower in a building the size of a phone booth, but shorter
7:00 Chores (cutting firewood, geese-watching or making peanut butter) (with larger audience)
7:30 Walk up to training site
8-10 Class (Language twice a day, as well as other sessions on Health, Culture, Safety, etc)
10:00 Snacky (Malagasy for snack), which is often Cracky (Malagasy version of cheet-oh's)
10:30-12 More Class
12:30 Lunch: Rice, vegetables or beans, ranonampango (rice tea), fruit
More Chores & Relax
1:30 Walk back up to training site
2-4:30 Even More Class
5:00 Back home
More Chores/Fetch Water/Hacky-sack//Help prepare Dinner
6:30 Dinner: Rice, vegetables, beans or delicious beetles, ranonampango, mango
Some Prayer, Some Hymn Singing
8:00 Sleep

In summary, my life is very similar to when I lived in India: I eat rice three times a day, do the # 2 in a hole, shower with a bucket, dress sort of foolishly, speak fairly poorly and walk a lot. I go to bed early because I wake up early. Plus, we don't leave the house after sunset on a count of the pamasavys (witches), who are naked, covered in oil and capable of doing horrible things. After dark, we don't even go outside to use the latrine (there is a thing called a "po," which is a plastic bucket, and which serves as the night-time latrine inside the house until it can be dumped at sunrise into the actual latrine outside of the house).


This is a lemur, they live in madagascar:






Wednesday is market day here, and people come from all over. It's a good day. Sunday is church day and the service is longer than long, though real relaxed. My host parents are sometimes there for about nine hours, but I am allowed to leave when I become debilitatingly hungry / bored. The service is mostly singing and the songs are accompanied by a man on a keyboard (with the keyboard set to sound like an accordion). People don't pay much attention to the sermon or the readings, and it's acceptable to go outside for some air, change seats to chat with someone new, eat candy, etc.

What little free time I have I spend with the kids that live next door. Tafita, Santatra, Tatsila, Valysoa, Edena, Santa and Tantely make up my main crew and they are all under the age of eleven. With my current language skills, I am sort of the idiot of the group (though the best at hacky-sack) and always good for a laugh, being the humongous hairy white guy.

"Watching geese" is my favorite chore, and it means the geese (we have 14) walk to the river and I follow them. They swim and I watch them swim. When they've had their fill, they walk back to the house and I follow them back. For some reason, I carry a stick with me, though I've never had to use it. People are always letting me know that they enjoy watching me watch the geese. In fact, I attract a sizable audience whenever I stop walking long enough for one to gather, and Malagasy people love to state the obvious (and I'm growing to love and mimic this). When I lead the geese to the river and sit to watch them, people walking by will come up and say "You are watching the geese" or even "Tom-ah watches geese." This is normal here, and the appropriate response on my part would be: "You are back from the market" or "You are carrying water" or even "You are walking." At first, I assumed this was because of my language skills or because I'm a vazaha (foreigner), but it turns out that this is just how things go here. At the market you tell people they are walking in the market. Everyone is expected to say "hello" and then immediately "goodbye" to everyone they pass on the road, if not a more specific "You are walking/sitting/carrying something." It's pretty fun to tell people exactly what they are doing.


This is the mountain I see everyday:




On December 10th I will swear-in as a volunteer and move to my site, which is comprised of 8 small villages, has about 2,600 people living there, and is where I'll be living until the year 2011. I have been told only a few other things about this place: There is one hotely (Malagasy for restaurant) and not surprisingly, it is named "hotely." The people grow rice and pineapples mostly. My house is one room with a veranda, on the second floor. Beneath my house is some sort of public rice storage room. I will not have electricity, but there is a well nearby and a fenced in area for me to garden. I will be working at a local health clinic about a kilometer away and with an organization focused on nutrition which has a center about five kilometers away. As a community healthy educator, I will help the community with pertinent health issues: diarrhea, nutrition, malaria, STD's, reproductive health, family planning, immunizations, etc. In my free time, I will likely tend my garden and take care of the geese that my host father has promised me.

Recently, there has been some rain (cyclone season). Large, flying beetles called voangory appeared, and at dusk we run around on the little mud walkways between the rice paddies and catch them. Sometimes we tie strings to them and fly beetle-kites. Usually we fill a coke bottle with them, fry them in salty oil and eat them with dinner. Yes, delicious and crunchy.

Other news: Malagasy beer's pretty good, weighing other people's babies is hilarious, I wear suspenders everyday, mangoes are delicious, flip-flops are called "scooby-doo's" here and I have an orange pair with the Camel Cigarette logo on them (i don't understand it either), I have a reoccurring dream in which I travel great distances by chairlift, I saw my first lemur (at the zoo in Antananarivo), the moon looks different in the southern hemisphere (look it up), "mofo-bal" is delicious and almost a donut, I'm to move to my site and begin working, I got flea bites on my toes, so so so it goes.

Lastly, I bought a cell phone. It's expensive for me to make calls, but free for me to receive them, so it makes the most sense for people to use skype and call me if they'd like to try and say hi. To call from the states it's 011-261-332-013-072 I don't have voicemail so don't leave a message after the beep. If I don't answer my phone, I'm either not around or it's turned off, so try back later. Remember that I exist eight hours ahead of the eastern U.S., and that I wake up early and go to bed early.