A few weeks ago, I posted a short message on here, but it seems to have disappeared, so here is the newer, longer version:
On the morning of February 22nd, my service was officially “interrupted” and I left Madagascar. I landed in Boston late on the 24th after flying through Mauritius, Paris and Amsterdam. Since I left almost all my belongings at my house back in ‘Gascar, I made this two day trip with only a small carry-on backpack. And so, at each customs check-point, I was questioned:
“So, you’ve been in Madagascar since September 28th?”
“But this is all your luggage?”
“Why do you have two passports?”
“And why are your clothes all ripped up?”
“You were in Colombia last year? Why are you flying through Amsterdam?”
This was understandable considering my situation.
My responses, though, didn’t exactly make the interrogations end any quicker:
“Well, there’s this political coup... and I left all my stuff there...”
“One’s a personal passport, and one’s government?”
“These are the only clothes I have, I wear them everyday...”
“My good friend is Colombian, and I didn’t buy this plane ticket,
so I’m not sure why I’m going through Amsterdam...”
I won’t go into an explanation of the complicated political unrest in Madagascar - If you’re interested in how it happened, and what happening currently: you can google “Madagascar” under News and learn all about the coups, the back and forth between the president, the mayor of the capitol and eventually, the military.
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Now we’ll jump back to January:
Despite the lack of electricity, television and radio in my village, we got word that there were rallies in the capitol, run by the mayor and aimed against the president. Then we heard: buildings in the capitol had been looted and burned, people had died inside the buildings, the mayor was attempting a coup against the president. For days, conversations in the village revolved around the “tabataba” (commotion) in the capitol and the soon-to-be rising food prices (food distribution centers, owned by the president, were looted and burned). And the Peace Corps rumor-mill (a surprisingly powerful and fast thing) was turning, and I was on the phone every night with other volunteers, waiting for official word on how this was going to affect us, our sites and the country.
After a week of not completely understanding what was going on, but hearing that some volunteers were “consolidating” into groups, I was called and told to pack a small “emergency bag,” and to sit tight and wait for more information. A few anxious days later, I received a message to get on my bike.
I biked to a fellow volunteer’s house and stayed there for two nights. She had electricity, so we spent plenty of time on our phones, turning the rumor-mill (there were gunshots? where? are we being evacuated? to where? how serious is this?). Then, the two of us got a taxi-brousse ride to a gas station outside the capitol, where me met up with a jeep and traveled to an old Peace Corps training compound a few hours outside the city. Although there were several consolidation points setup, to better prepare for possible evacuation, I was at the largest (over eighty volunteers waiting each morning for more news about the unrest).
Consolidation: While it was nice to re-connect with volunteers from my group and meet other volunteers, consolidation lasted 18 days. That’s 18 days: away from my village, speaking English, socializing, staying up past 8 pm, not having fleas (finally), eating something other than rice and beans, and thinking a lot about my experience thus far and my future in Madagascar.
Although the political unrest continued to grow in the capitol and was spreading to other major cities, after 18 days, Peace Corps needed to make a decision. We were told de-consolidation was next, and we would all return to our posts. Some volunteers felt their posts would always be safe, despite urban unrest, other felt they couldn’t return to their posts anymore. I had my own situation: Before all this, the doctor I had been assigned to assist at the clinic had been relocated by the ministry of health, because my village “no longer needed her.” And it’s true, there are plenty of villages and towns and cities in Madagascar that need a doctor and don’t have one (and my village was doing relatively well in terms of health). For me, that sort of meant being on my own, and having even less work to do. As it was, I was only at the clinic a few hours a day during the week, on those days when people showed up, and when it wasn’t raining...
Throughout this consolidation period, and especially when de-consolidation was announced, volunteers were offered “Interruption-of-Service.” Because of the unrest, and the way things in Madagascar had changed, and would likely continue to change, volunteers could opt for a sort of “voluntary” evacuation. The U.S. gov’t (and Peace Corps) didn’t want to force anyone to stay in a situation they felt uncomfortable with - the country was changing, and so volunteers would live by some added rules, including daily contact with Peace Corps and curfews and travel-limitations when visiting bigger towns, the capitol, etc. With the Interrupted Service status, a volunteer would leave country with some benefits, like health coverage, as well as the option to re-enroll with Peace Corps later on and start service in a new country.
In the end: some chose to interrupt service and began the process of leaving, some returned to their sites, and others waited to be assigned to new sites in safer parts of the island (in some cases, waiting for reassignment until just before full evacuation).
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Many of you are probably surprised that I opted out early, considering my other posts on this blog and what my Malagasy life was like, but: 2009 began in strange, unexpected ways. I lost a close friend (the woman whose home I rented a room in) when my house was struck by lightening on New Year’s Day. Soon after that, I lost another friend, a neighbor, who fell down her well. And then, of course, my doctor (and best friend) left, and my day-to-day life became something I wasn't sure I wanted for another 22 months. The idea of returning to my village after consolidation, with little to no work to do, with the political situation worsening, and with the added stress of thinking re-consolidation and evacuation could happen any day, well, it didn’t sound right to me.
My site was “just outside” the capitol city, which meant it took anywhere from 4 hours to a day and a half in a taxi-brousse. When it takes a day and a half, it’s because part of the road has literally fallen into a rice paddy. This means no food, no water, sleeping in an overcrowded van and waiting. But in terms of transportation in Madagascar, this is still a fairly quick trip. My trips to the capitol had to be frequent: for supplies, money, Peace Corps business stuff, and some sanity-saving time away from village life. Returning to my site would have meant severe limitations on when I went to the city and where I could go once I was there - not to mention the protests, looting, city-wide curfew and public shootings.
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Soon after I interrupted my service and came back, all of Peace Corps Madagascar was evacuated to South Africa, where some volunteers were re-assigned to other countries, to start the Peace Corps thing over, and some returned to the States. Once the military became involved in the mayor’s coup, the US embassy, all non essential personnel, non-profit groups - all of them evacuated. All of this happened quickly, and sadly, Madagascar has now been kicked out of the African Union and a lot of foreign aid is suspended - it basically went from a mess to a much bigger mess.
If I had returned to my site for those few weeks, been bored out of my mind/anxious about the growing unrest, and then evacuated: I’m sure I would have taken the same interrupted status as I did originally: the idea of starting a new 27-month service in a new country, learning a new language and culture, etc... not so appealing to me right now.
I could probably go into further detail on my thought process, why I decided over the course of consolidation to return to the States rather than to my village- but I think it would be an even longer post and I would have a difficult time expressing it all clearly and succinctly. There wasn’t a single reason I decided to leave - a lot of things changed for me before the unrest began, and then all these small reasons came together at a bad time.
On my flight home, I kept thinking: had things been different, had I been posted in a village with more pressing health issues, had it been a larger town with things to do in my free time, had my doctor not been relocated, had I been posted further from the capitol, etc, etc..
I did enjoy living in my village and the relationships I formed there, but in terms of being a health volunteer with three months of intensive language and technical skills behind me, I wondered if 22 more months there weren’t worth it in the end. I was in a very small community (just over five hundred people), a community that the Ministry of Health didn’t think needed a doctor, where the health clinic was utilized and the people were in good shape, using family planning, getting vaccines, etc...
In the end, I’m glad I went to Madagascar and am thankful for the time I spent there. But, I’m happy to be back and hopeful for what will come next for me.
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Had I stayed in Madagascar after Consolidation, and had Peace Corps not evacuated, I probably would have updated the blog by now with some absurd stories from my life. So here they are:
Back in January, before my Doctor moved, she invited me into the capitol with her for a few days, to stay with her mother and brothers, and to attend what I believed to be a “doctor convention,” as well as their family reunion. Their apartment was very nice, with electricity and a television and dvd player, and grapes growing out on the porch.
First, the “convention” in brief:
The “doctor convention” was at an old French hotel outside the city. There was one giant room with a stage, and then a white marble patio outside. We arrived at 8:00 am. There were 600 doctors from all over the Analamanga province, and then me. That’s 600 Malagasy people, mostly women, dressed very well, and one tall hairy pale guy with ripped clothes who didn’t speak Malagasy so well. So, it was weird.
First, there was an hour of Catholic church-service. Then, awards were handed out to doctors, for their work in 2008. My doctor received an award for malaria prevention, as there were no cases of malaria reported in my village last year (Stranger, since we do no malaria prevention education at the clinic. There are almost no mosquitos in my region, and no one uses a mosquito net. Plus, in villages in the highlands, everyone is in their houses with all the windows shut long before sundown anyway).
Then, from around 10 am until 8 pm, six hundred doctors ate pig, got completely drunk and danced to a horrible band that played “YMCA” and “Hotel California” about a dozen times each.
That night, I watched a documentary on saving sea turtles on the BBC with my doc’s mom, whose constant commentary was: “Why are they saving them? They shouldn’t be saving them. They’re delicious, they should eat them.”
During this trip, I also finally solved the mystery of “ooly-voo.”
Throughout December, every few days my doctor would bring up this thing: “ooly-voo” and ask me random questions about it. I’m not sure why or how, but it got to the point where we talked about this “ooly-voo” thing so much, and I apparently liked it and American people like it and Malagasy people like it, and ooly-voo is just so amazing, that I couldn’t ask her what it was. Then, when we were at her mom’s apartment, she showed me some magazines and DVDs very proudly, because they were about “ooly-voo,” which it turns out, is just how my doctor pronounces “Hollywood.” Wow.
The family reunion:
My doctor had to get her hair done. I had to go to the bank. So we decided we’d meet at her cousin’s at noon for the reunion. The doc’s mom and brothers would meet us there too.
I’m sitting in the public taxi-be (a mini-bus) on my way from my doc’s mom’s place to the bank. I’m at the window in the back row, and have my backpack on my lap with my arms resting on it. I notice that the man sitting next to me is reading a newspaper but leaning awkwardly into me and glancing at me sideways. I look down between us, because I feel something, and he pulls his hand out of the side of my backpack and is holding a switchblade. We make eye contact. He stands up, folds the knife, puts it in his pocket, takes a step back, jumps out of the bus and runs down the road. I yelled “mpangalatra!” (thief!) and everyone else sort of screamed.
Turns out, he had left three big knife gashes in my bag, while it was on my lap. We pulled over and everyone in the taxi-be was very concerned that he had stolen my money or my nice vazaha (European) things. Well, that guy picked the wrong vazaha bag to knife into, as all I was carrying were a pair of pants and a jar of honey. I had literally no money. I was on my way to the bank.
And of course, it took me a few minutes to explain to everyone in the taxi-be why a foreigner was riding around the capitol with no money, with just a pair of pants and a jar of honey, and why he was speaking malagasy.
I finally got to the reunion, right at noon. There were about forty people at three long tables in a fairly small room, and lunch was being served. My doctor, her mom, or her brothers weren’t there yet. I said hello to a few people, and was told to sit at one of the tables. Strange enough, no one seemed to notice that I was not Malagasy but that I spoke Malagasy, and even stranger: no one seemed to care that I was clearly not in the family. I guess I assumed that my doctor had already explained to them who I was, so I just ate the lunch and chatted with the people sitting around me, had a pretty good time.
Around 2:30 pm, the doc, her mom and her brothers showed up. Immediately, she stands by me and introduces me to everyone in the room, explains Peace Corps and how we worked together, etc. It became very clear that up until then, no one in the room had any idea who I was or why I was there. Suddenly, everyone was comfortable asking me who I was, what Peace Corps was, what America was like, etc. Possibly the most bizarre lunch experience I have ever had.
The reunion ended with a two hour debate over who would host the reunion next year. It began sort of business-like, and then moved quickly to finger pointing and some serious debate. People were quick to point out who had never hosted it, and the accused were quick with excuses (my house isn’t big enough, i’m poor, etc) before redirecting the accusation onto some other family member.
I’m sure I could think of other stories, but I think this short post and the previous, longer post from December sums up my life in Madagascar.
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Sorry that this post was longer than long. Had to get it all out so I’d be okay never posting on here again and moving on. Thanks for reading.
And huge thanks to everyone that mailed me letters and packages- they probably seemed small to you, but my mood and the mail i received were often directly related...
Currently, I’m back in Boston. I’m looking for a job, sending out cover letters and resumes and hoping to move somewhere in the near future, preferably to Portland, OR.
This blog will not be updated after this post.
I just set up a new blog, for photographs and things (some from Madagascar, as well as from other travels), and it will be updated, so check it out:
-Tom
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