2008 is over

These are my geese. On the left is Everett and on the right is Pumpkin-head. They remind me of dinosaurs and I spend most of my time with them. They are surprisingly perceptive, recognize me and the three of us quickly fell into a regular routine: In the morning when I open their door, we take a lap around the house and eat some grass, then go into their pen and eat rice bran. Around noon and again at five, I open their gate, and we walk single file (Everett in the lead, followed by Pumpkin-head, then myself) to the small pond in the corner of my yard where they swim around and I laugh at them. Then we cross the yard, go through the gate to my yard, hang a right and walk a half kilometer to the soccer field. There they graze and wander around (they cannot fly, but amusingly try) and after about half an hour, we return the way we came. And of course, throughout all this, neighbors and other folk confirm my suspicions: that I am walking with geese, that the geese are eating, and finally: that we are returning home. Sometimes my dog Potsy comes along, when he is awake. At sunset, they get more rice bran before I lock them up inside their little shed. All in all, we make a pretty good team.

Sorry it's been such a while. I'm rarely in a place with electricity, and when I am, I'm usually busy doing all the things I can't at my site (eating pizza, going to the bank, doing errands, etc). Three things have happened since I last wrote in length: I visited my site, then went back to my host family's and finished up training, then swore-in as a volunteer and moved permanently to my site. So we'll do this step-by-step:

In mid-November, I met my counterpart (the doctor in my town, and my partner in crime) and travelled with her to my site, where I stayed for five nights to feel things out and get ready for the next two years of my life. By the end of my visit, I could successfully pronounce the name of the town (it's a long one). There are two main towns and 8 villages, though there are houses scattered all over the hills. While I live in the largest "town" at site, there are only about 1,000 people and it did not take long for word of my arrival to spread. During my visit, seems I met just about everyone. Five days may not seem long, but I managed to hang around the health clinic (where I now spend a great deal of my time), all five stores, the one restaurant (serves soup and bread), both schools, the government building and the weekly market. I visited three of the smaller villages nearby, and met with the president in each one. I also sat outside my doctors house quite a bit chatting with her 80 year old mother. Really enjoy her company these days, and have never met anyone so capable of making them self really burst out laughing.

After site-visit, I went back to my host family's place, finished up training and said my goodbyes. Thankfully, my site is not far from the training site, so I plan on visiting my host family whenever I'm able. This is me with them toward the end:


On December 10th, us peace corps trainees made promises to the U.S. government and became peace corps volunteers. On the 11th, I moved from a town called "wednesday" (the training-site) to a town called "saturday" (my permanent site). Saturday's smaller than Wednesday, with generally less to do, and market is on Saturday rather than Wednesday. I live right near the center of town, and share my house with a family of four (and couldn't ask for better housemates). I have one room on the second floor, with two verandas. My room has a great window seat, that I eat and read at, and since it's right over the road, I get to see everyone as they walk to and from town. This is a picture of my staircase, my door is on the top left:


This is the view from my back porch, looking out over the valley:


And this is what my room looks like:

I spent the first few days getting settled (built a bookshelf, a table and some other shelves, figured out how to get water, clean dishes, clean clothes, cook food and keep two geese alive), then I started following my doctor around and feeling things out. Now I spend my time at the health clinic in my town and at the SEECALINE centers in the surrounding villages. When I'm at the clinic, I give a health presentation in the morning to the people before they go in for vaccines, pre-natal consults or to see the mid-wives or doctor. Then I hang around and chat with folks about nutrition, upper-respiratory infections, vaccines, pregnancy, diarrhea, the weather, geese, cow thieves and farming. When I'm at a SEECALINE, I give similar health presentations, weigh all the babies and chart their growth, then help out with a cooking demonstration and some nutrition education. Even though plenty of things grow around here, most things are exported to places where they'll bring in more money, and people in my town eat mangahazo mostly (manioc). Some of these centers are a couple valleys over, so I get to spend the morning and afternoon biking around (pretty good deal). Weighing babies can be sort of a nightmare, as the scale is hung in a doorway and each child is forced into a plastic sleeve and then dangled from the scale. And if dangling in a doorway isn't frightening enough for a child that's almost always tied to their mother's back, being forced to do all this by an enormous, pale, hairy guy makes it so. Also, some women in the smaller villages still tell their children: if they're not good, the vazaha (European) will eat them. Thanks a lot, colonialism.

My house with some children who aren't scared of me:


Once my Malagasy is better, I'll add on some secondary projects and do more presentations, at the clinic and at SEECALINE, as well as in schools and at town events. For now, I have a lot of free time, especially in the afternoons and on the weekends. On Saturdays, I spend most of the day at the market, buying all the food that the geese and I will need for the week. People come from all over and it's a big social event. Every week I consider buying a pig, and every week I decide it better to wait. The beginning of each week I eat everything flavorful that I bought on Saturday (mangoes, pineapples, lychees, plums) before resuming my diet of rice, beans, potatoes and coffee until Saturday rolls back around. Once Pumpkin-face grows up, I'll add eggs to that list. Although my diet's boring, I'm feeling pretty healthy and it's a nice feeling to produce almost no trash.

I spend the rest of my weekend reading, cooking, cleaning the house, washing clothes, roasting and pounding coffee beans for the coming week, making peanut butter, preparing for health presentations, working in my garden (which is really coming along, I've got: beans, tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, carrots, squash and pineapple growing so far), and walking around with the geese. I am thankful everyday for my shortwave radio, and I keep it on every time I'm at home. There are some bizarre things broadcast on shortwave, including a station that I am beginning to believe exists in some kind of time-warp, as it's never played a song produced after the mid 1990's (The theme song to "Friends," Blues Traveller, The Wallflowers, Alanis Morisette, the Spin Doctors... it's pretty sweet). I also listen to the world news according to England, the U.S., China and India (all pretty different), and found a station that plays an American Country Music countdown every Friday morning, which is helping keep me sane. I also switch it over to FM and listen to Malagasy music sometimes, which is growing on me.

This is the infamous Potsy doing what he does best, just layin' round in the shade:

Everyday has its ups and downs. All this free time can be boring, as town is dead quiet during most days (everyone down working the fields in the valleys) but I've met some great people and will surely have more things to do the longer I live here. My neighbors have been especially welcoming, helping me with the geese and garden, as well as cooking with firewood and charcoal when I ran out of gas a few days before Christmas. Although I'm not far from the capitol, the road isn't great (especially if it rains), so it's nice and quiet here, no electricity and rarely any cars or trucks passing through. My transportation situation is hilarious: only one taxi-brousse comes through here each day on its way to the city, and that's around 3 or 4 in the morning. Whenever I need to get out of town, it means waking up at 2:30 in the morning and putting a candle in my window, then waiting. Hopefully, a taxi-brousse rolls into town sometime in the next hour and a half, honks a bunch and I run outside and jump in. If it's rained recently, someone else trying to get out of town calls to me from the road on their way by, to let me know the news: where the taxi-brousse got stuck in the mud and the driver refused to go further in. Then I walk a few kilometers toward the main road, with everyone along the way (most biking to the rice-fields to work by sun up) giving me updates on the location and approximate departure of the brousse. Somehow, it seems to always work out, and somehow, there are always people around in the early morning spreading the word. The ridiculous nature of these early morning taxi-brousse hunts keep them from being too stressful.

Another shot from my porch (I sit there a lot):


I am currently visiting the capitol for New Years, and will return to my site in a couple days. Didn't think Christmas would feel much like Christmas here, as it's hot and sunny and rainy- but I spent Christmas Eve with my neighbors at the church singing hymns by candlelight and then in the morning went back for the holiday sermon. I relaxed the rest of the day and found a shortwave station that played the same six American Christmas songs over and over, which I listened to for approximately ten hours. My host family from training called with the epitome of a Malagasy phone conversation. The way cell phones work here: you walk to a store, and if the store is open and if they have credit, you buy a little scratch-ticket type thing. They have a code on them, which you enter into the phone and then have a certain number of seconds to call or text messages to send before you need to go back to the store and buy more. Stocking up on credit isn't an option, as stores are always low and people are always in need of credit. This being the situation, people tend to text mostly and keep conversations to a bare minimum (no pleasantries, just the message). So on Christmas morning, I received a call from my host family, which meant all four members took turns saying, as fast as possible, the exact same thing: "Tom-ah, I hope you are settled in your town, Merry Christmas, goodbye." I barely got a word in, as they took turns shouting the same thing at me and then hung up, and I just laughed the entire time.

Well, Sunday is still the day I try and keep my phone on to receive calls. When it's sunny, I charge my phone off a solar panel at the health clinic. Recently, I've been paying someone in town to charge it off a car battery- so on Sunday from around 6 am until 8 at night (my time, GMT +3) is the time to call to say hi.

I've read most of the books I brought, twice over, and re-discovered this passage from Calvino's If on a Winter's Night A Traveler, which I like a lot: "...a local legend, it tells of an old Indian known as the Father of Stories, a man of immemorial age, blind and illiterate, who uninterruptedly tells stories that take place in countries and in times completely unknown to him. The phenomenon has brought expeditions of anthropologists and parapsychologists; it has been determined that many novels published by famous authors had been recited word for word by the wheezing voice of the Father of Stories several years before their appearance. The old Indian, according to some, is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develops; according to others, a seer, who, thanks to his consumption of hallucinatory mushrooms, manages to establish communication with the inner world of the strongest visionary temperaments and pick up their psychic waves; according to still others he is the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, of the author of the Popol Vuh, as well as of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce..."

Some other things that have happened: I ate a guinea pig (pretty good), a band of cattle thieves came through town and nabbed some cows in mid-December (big upset), I was told that my geese "have brains, but not hearts, so they make a lot of noise, but never say anything," I still have fleas, I finally found out how to make "mofo-bals" and plan to open "trano-mofo" (house of bread) upon my return to the States (I predict it will do well), and I saw an enormous dragonfly left over from the Jurassic period (but wasn't quick enough with the camera).


People have asked about what I miss the most: other than you people, food (mainly processed cheese, bread, hummus, avocado and wine), as well as what I'd most like mailed to me: books written in English, as well as any kind of powder that can be mixed with water (gatorade, iced tea, hot chocolate, mac and cheese mix, etc). Well, hope everyone had a nice time during the holidays, stay in touch, mail me things.