Volunteer

As I walked to the university this morning, I saw the mad man standing out on his corner. His tell-tale ragged yellow shirt, wooly black hair, and all-over dusting of rusty colored dirt were there as usual, but his expression was eerily placid, almost holy in its stillness and seeming permanence. His face was lifted to the sun but not straining towards it. His eyes were shut tight as though one lapse in his effort to close them would have them drop from his sockets like eggs from a laying hen. His hands were lifted from his sides, the palms up and open. People on the sidewalk, including myself, were walking around him. We’re convinced to feel sorry for such people who may be trapped in a decaying mind, but I’d like to think that on this particular day, the mad man, above all others, had been able to surrender, while we’d stepped around him to fulfill our duties and endeavor to be the people we strive so hard to become.

Being in an urban environment, I daily encounter contrasts that inevitably make me feel more like an outsider than ever before in this country. The mad and the sane frequent the same streets, the gaudily rich are neighbors to the destitute, and the healthy unwittingly flaunt their fortune to many a Quasimodo. When I go jogging, my turning point is the richest hotel in the city, La Note Bleue. Just outside its walls sit camps of women who crush rock from under tattered lean-tos. Cool blue swimming pool overlooking the bay; little piles of rock sold by the roadside.

After intentionally seeking a drastic change in scene, I have gone from the southernmost tip of Madagascar to the northernmost. I am now living in the port city of Diego to teach English courses at the University of Ankarana until high school classes begin again in my small southern town. From the capital of Antananarivo I traveled by taxi-brousse, the equivalent of a small mini-van that by the South’s packed-produce-truck-turned-taxi-brousse standards should have been comparatively more comfortable. But it wasn’t. Since most seats were broken, I supported the full weight of the sleeping man in front of me with my knees for the majority of the 26 hour journey. Though fatigued and a little bruised, I was proud I’d made the journey on my own.

When my university supervisor drove me the several-mile journey outside of town to the campus, I was made speechless by the scene before me. Rows of concrete dormitories loomed like the lost teeth of a now snaggle-toothed giant, cavity ridden by neglect. At random, worms of metal beams squirmed out of the buildings’ sides. Plastic, sometimes scavenged plywood or corrugated metal, plugged up the gaping windows or the enormous chinks of wall that had long ago fallen away. Since there was no where else to dispose of it, dirty water, leftover food, and trash thrown from the dorm balconies gave the only proof that the place was not abandoned but haunted by students. Several times I have seen brave souls nearly get rained on by filth falling from an upper story when passing through the landfill cradled between two buildings.

Since the university is perched on a high hill on the edge of the bay, the wind blasts from the sea and batters the small congregation of buildings in a ceaseless gale. The grass is unkempt and high and wind tousled. The way the wind oppresses in a constant, punishing slap up there, it’s no wonder many of my students complain of being ill, considering quality of their shelter. After several problematic attempts, I dare to wear a skirt to class anymore.
Sometimes I laugh at myself for what I had expected to see driving up in the supervisor’s car. It being the only significant venue for higher education in the north of Madagascar, I had expected the university to have a recreation center, immaculate classrooms without the dead trails of recently pulled vines running up the walls, and white. I’d expected a place clean enough that it would be white despite the red earth. A recreation center. What was I thinking?

Before I started walking to and from the university, I took taxis to avoid walking into class with unprofessional signs of sweat on my face and under my arms. Now I go by foot, since simply being punctual to class far surpasses any expectations of professionalism here. One morning, a taxi lifted me off to school blasting American pop music so loud the driver hardly heard the destination I was calling out to him. Along the way, the driver stopped for a mother who was holding her bedraggled-looking teenager daughter by the waist. I very soon saw the reason for their awkward embrace when the daughter, though trembling to control her body, fell into the cab, her head lolled against my shoulder. Some illness was making her so drunk with weakness she could keep eyes only half open. Her mother was trying to pull her daughter back to her own body, to cradle a young woman made a child again in sickness. I tried to explain that didn’t mind the girl leaning on me, but the mother took her off of me anyway.

All the while scuttling through the streets, the driver turned up the volume on the ridiculously happy bouncy pop songs. “Come on, Barbie! Let’s go party!” The lyrics bellowed from another world of skating rinks and college parties. Over and over my mind repeated in a mantra, “Kill the music! Kill the music!” With the limp bodied girl, her calm, doting mother, me trying not to feel so useless in the back seat and the indifferent driver in the front, there was no room for such music, an exuberant, foreign sound that filled the tiny car with the choking smoke of too many juxtaposed things in too small a space. Once the two women had been delivered to their home and I to the university, I nearly bolted from the taxi but didn’t only to avoid looking like a fool.

Some of the styles and fashions of Tandroy are worth illuminating. The women here wear the colorful cloth (lambas) wrapped around their waists or rolled up under their arms. Seeing the women go about their day is to witness a parade of patterns and local imagery: a village scene settled with blue huts around a cook’s bust, teal and orange urchin-spiny shapes wrapped about a washerwoman’s waist, and red herds of cattle traipsing along a vendor’s derriere are familiar fashions in town and in the outlying countryside. In my house I also sport the lamba, since it’s too hot to wear anything else. Cotton breathes, you know.
Men here wear round hats (satro_bory) that rise to a point on top. A triangular design around the rim distinguishes this hat from the other round, pointy hats worn by neighboring tribes. I’m still trying to understand the practical use of this hat, as it provides the face no protection from the sun. The men from the depths of the countryside (ambanvoitse) sport sheep and goat hair hats. I imagine that they’ve robbed the poor animals of a buttock, dried it, and placed the pone of startled hair on their heads to scare foreigners.

Our big market day is on Fridays. It’s a day when the town is inundated by people coming by foot, bicycle, truck, or cattle cart from distant and local villages. Most of the men and young boys either carry spears (lefone) or a hatchet (famake). At first I was a little wary walking past these men. What if they went a little nuts for a brief moment and decided to bring down the white girl shopping for tomatoes in the market? The herdsmen typically wear either a lighter baby blanket or a heavier bed throw. It is thrown over their shoulders, mantles the chest, and drapes down to the knees. For a more dramatic effect, the blanket can also wrap over the head. If the specter of a heavily shrouded man wielding a spear sounds menacing, the floral or teddy bear print on the cloth should allay any doubts in your safety. I typically think of these men as long-legged cranes; their sinewy legs showing from beneath the plumage of their baby blanket.
My favorite fashion statements here come from the second-hand clothes piles (frippery) sold on market day. Discarded by Europe and the US, these neglected treasures depict images or words that are of no concern to the people wearing them. A woman who sells fish always wears a scowl above a bright orange tee-shirt with a big smiley face on it. Written above the face in bold block print is STUPID.
The sweaters that men choose to buy from the frippery piles either make me question their wearers’ masculinity or endears me to the display of holiday spirit. They are decorated with holiday inspired themes, such as Halloween or Christmas. I always feel comforted to see little ghosts swimming all over a black sweater or a sweat shirt adorned with Christmas bells, bows, and ribbons. The man who comes by my house to sell bread and yogurt sometimes sports a large red sweater that swallows up his lean body. The image on the front is of a baby tiger with blue eyes and a little bow-tie. The words sewn above the tiger kitty read, “I love my new bow-tie!”
The most curious trend is found among my male students. They grow the nail of their little finger out long and paint it with fingernail polish. I’ve gotten various answers to my questions about it, including “It’s just cool” and “You’ve got to have something to help pick your nose and ears.”

Sometimes Tsihombe lives up to its name. Meaning "no room", Tsihombe can often feel very claustrophobic, like a small sphere inhabited by too many big personalities. When the heat of the afternoon settles in the sticky sweat of your clothes or slows your walk to and from the market to a dull plod, you feel like running wild and naked to the closest water source, the Manombovo River where you have to dig a hole to find water. Or when teaching English to Second students (the equivalent of sophomores in high school), whose behavior often bespeaks of their rebellious teenage years. I feel like gliding from the higher elevation of the lycee and into the spiny forest that begins at the outskirts of the town and stretches out into the horizon, the low level of thorny trees and cactus only interrupted by the protrusion of a Buddha-bellied baobab tree.
My small one room concrete house is located in the same compound as a large Antandroy family (Antandroy being an ethnic group and tribe with more African than Asian roots in the southernmost region of Madagascar). The width of a standard swimming pool is the short distance between our houses, a distance that proves useless in maintaining our American love of privacy. Sitting alone to read a book or to daydream is unheard of here, and I often entertain my new sisters of students in my home at times when I would rather collect my thoughts and reflect on the day.
One "fomba", or tradition, I still struggle with is the sharing of food. Often, Antandroy families eat from the same dishes, everyone taking their share by the spoonful. Some deep seated American feeling of entitlement and ownership bubbles up in me when one of the many children in the yard or one of my sisters and I are hovering over the same plate. Especially when a spoon dives into my side of the dish and steals away with a piece of meat I'd been eying.
Perhaps it's not the custom of every Antandroy family, but when returning from the market, I am questioned by my sisters and my mama as to the contents of my basket and am expected to hand over a share of my sweet potatoes or mangoes. At first, I balked at these demands for my food, leading me to hide my grilled sweet potatoes, a favorite snack, in my school bag and to eat them rapaciously in what brief privacy I had in my house before my gluttonous rampage could be discovered and my begedas ( sweet potatoes) taken from me. Fortunately, I have learned to adapt to the passing of food from hand to hand, a poetic lesson in sharing. When fresh fish travels 18 miles from the sea and arrives in the market, my family ensures I have my share, head and all (the brain and jaw muscles considered the most delicious part). I in turn buy a little extra of each item in the market in case my daily basket inspection is of particular interest to my family.
But Tsihombe is not always oppressively hot, not always a town with "no room". There are days when the wind cools the sweat on your brow or the clouds purge themselves of violent bouts of rain and leave the children pointing at the heavy colored brush strokes in a fresh rainbow, their bicycle tire jump ropes left slack in the sand.
There are days when I don't feel like I have to run a cultural gauntlet, when the Antandroy people and myself are just people; people taking pleasure in little things, forgetting for brief moments that we are living in an impoverished country and perhaps even disregarding that I am pale and a foreigner among them.
Nearly every morning I go running down a road that cuts through the Spiny Forest. Never alone, I am accompanied by my friend and student, Resaka. Together we go as far as a pair of baobab trees before returning home, and sometimes, as I am cumbersomely trying to mount a hill and staring at my feet, Resaka scoops up a rock in a flash and hurls it at a forest bird. So far he's missed, and I often tease him, saying, "Where's the bird? I'm hungry".
It's the days of unexpected, random pleasures that make you feel like the world has just breathed deeply with a sigh of relief. My life fenced in by classes, conversation groups, the heat, and people's demands for more conversation groups, food, or money, suddenly expands and finds the space it had so long craved.
One morning, after reaching the baobab trees at a steady jog, I spied several large, crimson and purple cactus fruits ("raketa" in Antandroy). After mentioning I hadn't yet tried the fruit, Resaka started to maneuver his fingers through the labyrinth of thorns to snag a handful. He carefully rubbed the short, hair-like thorns away on a mat of moss and then showed me how to pull the peel back with my teeth. My stress lifted as I laughed with my new friend eating the cherry-flavored treat, and watching the peach-pink sunrise burn into a cloudless hot day. I ran home feeling as lucky and free as a bird that Resaka had failed to hit.
I cannot document all the moments in which my decision to join the Peace Corps has been affirmed in a most enlightening way--they are many, and you would need to be in the midst of the food, the landscape, and the people--the beautiful, proud, and unique Antandroy people to understand this new life. The smells of the spiny forest, especially after a rain; the look of galloping joy in the eyes of my students when they understand and relish a lesson; being brought stomach settling grilled fish by my family when my trips to the kabone (or sheltered hole in the ground) are much too frequent; being given free coffee by my favorite grilled sweet potato vendor and sharing the events of the day with her as I swill the drink down to the sugar settled at the bottom of the cup.
I am given so much here. I only hope I can begin to inspire the same wonder of the wide world that this little town with no room has inspired in me.

The following news has been taken from letters to Leslie's Grandmother Anderson and Grandparents McAbee. These letters were written 7/28/07.

My training schedule has been intense, as we just finished 2 and 1/2 weeks of teaching training. For the 1st week, I was having so many discipline problems with the students that I wondered if I actually had the talent to teach. But after some advice from the trainers, I learned how to give the naughty students a death glare, move those who talked to their neighbor to another desk, and yell at them to be quiet. So far, these tactics seem to work, and I now have confidence that I have a place in the classroom. The best day was when I taught the 7 year olds a lesson about the environment. My vocabulary included "to drop" and "to pick up", but none of the kids seemed to be paying attention as they were focused on something under a girl's desk. I told the girl to pick up what I thought to be her pen, but the commotion continued on that side of the room. As I continued to try to explain the vocabulary, the girl kicked something out from under her desk in my direction: a dead mouse. I was so flustered that I unthinkingly picked up the mouse by its tail and kept pointing at the word " to pick up" on the board to illustrate that what I was doing was relevant to the lesson. Then I walked the mouse body over to the trash can, all the while pointing and repeating the words " to drop".

The women in my homestay family have particularly befriended me and have shown me how to survive here cooking and cleaning-wise. You'll be proud to know that I can wash my clothes without a machine and can make my own peanut butter by pounding it with a blunt staff by hand. The fresh peanut butter is delicious. We eat it with watery rice for breakfast, which sounds revolting, but it is actually quite good. It's better than eating the rice plain. Alas, the eating of rice can be tiring, since we eat it 3 times a day. But there are always side dishes (laoka) to eat with it. Believe it or not, but they eat a lot of collard greens here, and I look forward to them every time my family buys them at the market.

I guess you guys have already heard that I'll be living in the southernmost tip of Madagascar. The location isn't quite a desert, though it is very dry there and the vegetation is called spiny forest. Don't tell mom, but turtles abound in my region, because it is fady (forbidden) to eat them. In ancient times, it is said that a turtle carried a woman lost in the forest on it's back all the way to her home, and so it is highly disrespectful to kill them.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Hello all,

Since coming to Madagascar, there have been several instances in which I've forgotten my name; once when I scaled a mountain outside Manjakandriana, where I found a royal tomb and a lone tree on the deforested and windswept peak. Again, I forgot when standing with other volunteers in the house of a woman whose godfather had died. We offered our condolences with money and a polite hand shake, telling her in low, solemn tones in Malagasy not to be sad. Though the room was dimly lilt, I saw her expression wore the same shock, the same quiet despair I've seen at funeral wakes and at gravesides in Georgia. These feelings of disembodiment or loss of self accompany moments in which your American experiences and American identity synchronize with Malagasy culture most unexpectedly. All at once you feel isolated in a foreign setting and alternately enveloped in the commonalities that unite us. And in the midst of this contradiction, I continually search for my name in all three of the bowls of rice I eat each day, hoping that by the last spoonful I'll be closer to equilibrating the raw material that is me to the enormity of simply being human.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

I've lived with my Malagasy host family for two months now, and like most true, realistic familial situations, I've experienced more joys and frustrations with them than with any other aspect of my life here. After having established myself as a family member by integrating myself into the daily chores, I thought it time to cook a meal after the second week. Chili seemed like the most appropriate cross cultural exchange, since it's so distinctly American and because I'd been craving it in this cold and wet highland weather. The responsibility of preparing the evening meal meant much more to me than simply putting food on the table; it was an opportunity for me to graduate from my linguistic and social status of an infant to a competent participant in the nourishment of my host family. With the help of my sister, I practiced bargaining for the ingredients in the market, and with pride I demonstrated with excited gestures to my family how the flavors would blend and complement one another. My neny (mom) and rahabavy (sister) helped me chop the vegetables and sprinkle the sakay (chili powder) into the broth. I presented the dish to the table with pride. "Here's a dish they'll tell their neighbors about. New flavors they've been missing all this time," I thought. My dada(dad) helped himself first. As he gingerly touched the spoon to his tongue, the indifferent expression on his face curdled into a scowl of disgust. His spoon clattered as he dropped it into the bowl. The table remained silent. I waited for his apology: that it wasn't to his liking due to being too spicy for his taste; but he only stewed in his discontent and made movements of the mouth so as to divest ownership of his own tongue. In a fluster, my sister ran to the kitchen to cook her father an omelette, but in hurrying, she forgot to clean the pan that had cooked French toast earlier in the day. Again, my dada spit out the syrupy sweet egg with a grunt. For the rest of the meal I stared at my plate while my mom and sister made apologies for the pastor. He, however, didn't muster a one. After clearing the table, I helped my sister, Hasina, wash the dishes. "Maybe chili wasn't a good idea," I tried to explain in Malagasy. Hasina replied, "Maybe eggs and sugar aren't good either." Eggs and sugar, the idea was enough to set us laughing hysterically. The culmination of dada's toady reaction to the food, my mom's attempts to allay the tension with humor and apologies, and my fallen pride kept me laughing alongside my sister for half an hour.

Not every Malagasy family is the same, but the patriarchal dynamic I see in mine will disturb me until I'm no longer part of it. While my brother or dad sleeps in the morning and afternoon, the women are building the coal fires, cooking meals, and constantly cleaning. One day my sister washed so many clothes that her knuckles bled. Sometimes I wish that for my home-stay, I were a man so that I could be an example of how inconsequential some gender roles can be. And so that I could show my dad and brother that life is hard enough here in Madagascar without assigning the most arduous daily labor to any one sex. I've never been so happy to brag about my American dad's French Toast and other culinary talents as when the pastor is piling mountains of rice he never cooked onto his plate.

Our house here in Manjakandriana has electricity, and every room has a bright, florescent light, except the kitchen. The light hasn't been changed since I arrived, and at night a dim reading lamp barely illuminates the most used and useful room in the house. I spend most of my time here talking with the women in my family, helping prepare meals, and wash dishes. I may have to bend close to see the onions I'm chopping in the shadows of the kitchen, but it will always be the place I found the most light during my stay in the Highlands.