Little sky, lots of mud

I’ve decided that July and August in Madagascar are akin to April and May in America—they’re our “spring”. Last month, I started seeing scores of baby chicks toddling around, ducklings learning how to waddle, and zebu calves carefully following their mothers on spindly little legs. July was when the “other” annual rainy season occurred—in which it rains but the weather is cool-- and all the roads turned to muck. Navigating the mud pit of the Vangaindrano market made me extremely glad that I brought a pair of rubber boots. The grand vacances (school vacation similar to our summer vacation in America) began at the end of July, and will last until early October. While the majority of students are enjoying their time off, the terminale (senior year) students at the lycee (high school) are busy studying to take the baccalaureate exam, which is being held on Monday. Those who aren’t studying have taken to the sports field, as the vacation soccer leagues have started up. When I work in the Coldis office, the sounds of the referee whistle and kids cheering at the terrain a few hundred meters away are my ever-present audio backdrop.

The vacation also means that there’s an influx of new people in my town who have come to spend their break here, usually visiting relatives. This can be extremely irritating, because all these visitors haven’t seen me before, and so I have to be subject to the kind of staring and ‘eoooooo vazaha!’ comments that I got when I first arrived here. But, it can also be a nice chance to meet some new people, which is the case with my neighbors’ family members who have come to visit. Sweet little Sophie, from Tamatave, is visiting my neighbor Marcelline along with her dad, who has come to buy cloves and coffee. She already knows my name and loves to come over and visit. And my other neighbor’s daughter (whose name I still don’t know), visiting from Ranomena, is so kind and lovely. Her two sons give me big toothy smiles whenever I wave and say hello, and they’ve become star junior gardeners helping me with my yardwork and gardening projects.

For me, however, it isn’t vacation time—it’s the busiest I have ever been during my Peace Corps service. My work on the SSI project is in full swing, and I’ve accomplished more on it in the last 2 months than I did in the previous eight. In mid-July I organized a training on sustainable clove cultivation and harvest for myself and four Coldis co-workers. The training was held in Manakara and was conducted by Christophe, an agriculture technician with MBG (and also my friend Leo’s counterpart). After receiving that training, we were able to set up the trainings with the actual farmers, so last week the five of us spent 4 days in the countryside towns of Masianaka, Matanga, and Manambondro. We trained a total of 58 farmers, most of whom were presidents of their farmer groups. (Coldis organizes their farmers into collectives with 10 farmers in each.) And despite the remote locations, I also MacGyver-baked a gingerbread cake for each of the trainings to share with the farmers, because most of them have never even tasted food with cloves before. I explained that it was a traditional Christmas cookie (or cake) in America, but that all the spices for it are actually grown in Madagascar: cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. I think it was a nice addition to the training, and judging by the lack of crumbs left in the pan, I’m pretty sure the farmers enjoyed it.

Farmers in Masianaka enjoying some cake after the training.

Each of the farmers received booklets about sustainable clove farming (which I sweated and stressed over for months, but finally finished compiling at the end of July), and they are supposed to share these guides with their other farmers and train them on what they learned. Farmers that receive the training are then eligible to receive free zana-kazo jirofo (young clove trees) to plant, of which we are supposed to distribute 15,000 each year. Recently I realized that simply finding 15,000 clove trees to buy would be a project in and of itself... not to mention getting them out to these farmers. So that’s my next hurdle.

The product of my blood, sweat, and tears.

The last time I was out in this area was when I visited Manambondro around July 1^st to meet the farmers there and give them an introduction to the SSI project, and already then the clove trees were beginning to blossom. But what a difference a month makes: driving around these countryside roads, in an area which is essentially “clove central”, I saw hundreds upon hundreds of trees just exploding with buds. It’s also quite different from a year ago, because cloves are an every-other-year crop—meaning that one year they’ll be abundant, while the next year, the harvest will be minimal. So because 2012 was a low year, 2013 should be an abundant harvest. We passed by kids harvesting the cloves using ingenious homemade bamboo ladders; we also passed by kids harvesting them the quicker but extremely destructive way, by just cutting off the branches. Teaching the farmers why this is not a good long-term harvest strategy (because it reduces the number of cloves the following year) is one of the tenets of the sustainability training we’re giving.

Introducing the project to the farmers in Matanga. We held the training at the local elementary school.

Although Coldis encourages their farmers to leave the cloves on the tree as long as possible to let them grow to maximum  size (and thus be able to sell them for the best price), many other farmers are already going ahead and harvesting their trees, probably because they’re in serious need of the money. Right now cloves are selling for about 14,000 Ariary a kilo—approximately $7, which is a lifeline for a hungry family. But, the price per kilo should go up later in the buying season, so many farmers are also holding on to their cloves as long as they can. The roads in the southeast are now lined with tsihy (woven straw mats) spread with cloves drying in the sun. The ‘raw’ buds are pale green with pink tips, but after three days in the hot Madagascar sun, they’ll dry to a rich brown color. Driving or biking past these mats of cloves tickles your nose with their sweet and spicy aroma.

Scheduling and conducting these training sessions was one of the biggest accomplishments of my Peace Corps service, and something that I was extremely relieved to have behind me (although I now know we’ll have to schedule more.) After our final session was over, I drove back to Vangaindrano with my coworkers feeling relieved and content, and thrilled to be getting back to my house after four days without electricity or cell phone reception. My coworker Titus drove us in his car for these trainings, and on the way back we gave a ride to a local Manambondro woman who was going to Vangaindrano for the week. Funnily enough, her name turned out to be Emilie—the first namesake I’d met in Madagascar, which is surprising to me given how many people here have French names.  As we navigated the muddiest part of the road leading out of Manambondro (during which we got stuck 3 times), we passed through an area called Kidilanitra where a lot of the Manambondro farmers live. In the dialect of Malagasy spoken in my area, kidy mean “little”, and lanitra means “sky”, so we asked Emilie why it was named this. She said that it’s because there are so many trees there that when you look up, the sky is small. Looking out the window at the rows and rows of pink-tipped clove trees, ravinala palms with their leaves spread like an open hand, banana trees with their purple-wrapped bunches of fruit hanging like a necklace, and majestic two-stories-tall lychee and mango trees, I thought about how much I love being surrounded by all of this green. And it suddenly hit me that with only about 8 months left in my service, I want to soak it all in as much as possible. So until April, I’m trying to enjoy and explore as much of my area as possible. I’ve lived here long enough that sometimes I forget what a special and beautiful country Madagascar is, and as much as I love New York, when I’m back there I know I’ll be pining for afternoons spent in my backyard hammock, lazily reading while a tropical breeze sweeps over me and into the rice fields below. If I could bottle that feeling, I would.

Still here!

Recently I looked at my blog and was shocked to realize that it’s been about 3 months since I last posted. I’ve tried to figure out why that is, and the only thing that comes to mind is that because I’ve now been here almost 17 months, and can count down the remainder of my service in months instead of years, I don’t feel as though I have as much to write about! I guess that because I’m pretty settled into the realities of life here, things are not quite so noteworthy-- at least in my eyes.

Now that I am sitting down to write something in order to get this blog up to date, I find myself at once having both everything and nothing to say. When I first think about it, I feel like nothing really has happened lately. But in fact, the past 3 months have been busier than ever. Right after the malaria event that I last posted about, I left site for 5 weeks, which I spent in South Africa, Botswana and Zambia (to take the GMAT exam and then have a vacation with my family), then in Tana for my Mid-Service Conference and to take care of some medical appointments. Then when I returned to site the first week of June, I jumped back into my main work project, as well as worked on preparations for the GLOW (girl’s leadership) camp that I am putting together with some other volunteers in the region. I also worked with my language tutor to develop a listing of words in the Antesaka dialect of Malagasy (the dialect spoken in my area) for inclusion in a new edition of the Malagasy-English dictionary. At the end of June, I went up to Fianar for a small Peace Corps training and to meet with my boss at the Coldis office there, then I returned south for our thrice-yearly regional volunteer meeting (VAC; it’s a boring acronym that I won’t waste your time with), which for the Sud Est was held in Sandrohy, a neighboring town of my fellow volunteer Nick’s site. We chose Sandrohy because our previous 3 regional gatherings had been held in bigger towns, and so for this one, we decided that we wanted some outdoorsy fun. Nick and Rory, our Sud Est regional leader, put together an amazing weekend of camping and hiking in the gorgeous mountains surrounding Sandrohy. We all arrived at Nick’s site on a Friday, biked 14km into the countryside where we had lunch and chilled out at a waterfall, then biked another 2km further into the countryside, imbibed some fresh coconut water, and hiked an hour through rice fields and up into the mountains to our camp site, which was breathtakingly situated on the top of a mountain with 360-degree views. (The sunrises were epic.) We camped for two nights, enjoyed lots of s’mores and ate rice and beans way more than we wanted to, and then on Sunday hiked back down the mountain, which, because it had rained the previous night, was muddy enough to make me fall slam-down on my tailbone no less than 5 times. Even though I was in pain, I still had to bike back, so I did some awkward yoga and stretching in Nick’s friend’s house, then hopped on my bike for the 16km back to Nick’s house. And then 17 of us squeezed into a taxi-brousse (with 14 bikes strapped to the top) back to Manakara, which ended up being the most entertaining brousse ride I’ve ever had.

Since getting back to site after VAC, I’ve been a busy bee working on my SSI (Sustainable Spices Initiative) project for Coldis, and biking a ton in order to get back in shape and lose the weight I put on indulging in all the good food in South Africa. The first week of July, I traveled 58km south to Manambondro to introduce the SSI project to the clove farmers there, which was the last of 3 countryside towns that I had to visit. Then I biked to Matanga (Leo’s site) to work with his counterpart on the SSI project, and also fit in an amazing 4^th of July party that included an indescribably good Southern feast of pulled pork, sweet potatoes, and pseudo-collard greens, plus a dance party featuring lots of Robyn songs and a techno remix of “America the Beautiful”. I’ve never felt so patriotic. Then, after a few days at home I left site once again to go to Manakara for the training on sustainable clove farming that I’ve been putting together, then went 160km further north (100km of it by bike!) to Mananjary for a GLOW camp meeting that weekend. After the camp meeting I got back to site, finished writing the training guide for the clove farmers, then returned to Manakara this past weekend for a going away party for my fellow volunteer Meghan, who has finished her service and is about to head home to America. Just when I think I’m going to have a quiet few months at site, all of a sudden I’m busier than ever.

Now that I’ve been at site for more than a year, I’m watching the months tick away and comparing things to how they were in 2012, when I was brand new to Vangaindrano and still figuring out how to exist here. I spent pretty much my entire first month suffering from shock (at the drastic change in living conditions from the training center) and anxiety (over the terrible rat problem in my house). It took me a full 3 months to really feel tamana (settled and at-home) in my house, and because I just didn’t feel comfortable in my town or my home, I spent a significant amount of time socializing with other volunteers in Farafangana, which is my banking town. Now, by contrast, I am hesitant to spend too many weekends away from site. As much as I enjoy socializing, I am extremely comfortable where I live, and I no longer feel like I have to escape. I have my neighborhood kids who come over to draw pictures and color, my little garden that is a never-ending project, my very comfortable backyard hammock that is a perfect reading spot, and still plenty of areas in town that I want to spend more time exploring on my bike. I’ve also become much more integrated with people in my community, which is probably the most rewarding aspect of my Peace Corps service to date. Last year on Vingt-Six (June 26; the Malagasy Independence Day), I was still fairly new to site, and was bewildered about what to do with myself, so I sort of wandered around town trying to figure out how to celebrate the holiday. But by contrast, for this year’s Vingt-Six, I wasn’t worried about what to do. I went to visit my neighbors, then went to watch the town parade with some of their kids, before inviting them over to my house to drink juice and paint our nails. (I also had an unfortunate incident where I was served a plate of potato salad by my neighbor that was covered in raw egg, and I was pretty much forced to eat it. My GI system was not especially pleased about that.) Still, even though I’m finding myself much more integrated and comfortable here than I was a year ago, some things haven’t changed. I still relish being able to close my door at the end of the day and inhabit my own little world until bedtime, free from inquisitive kids and prying neighbors who always ask where I am going, what I am doing, what did I buy at the market. And even though I am accustomed to living without western luxuries, I am still longing for the day when I will once again own a refrigerator and be able to take a hot shower.

So now here I am, with just over 8 months left in my Peace Corps service. I’m beginning to give away unneeded clothing and household items to neighbors and new volunteers, and I’m continually patching my two ratty pairs of jeans because I can’t justify buying a new pair this late in my service. Since I’ve already been here for 17 months, being here for 8 more doesn’t seem like long. But lately when I talk to friends and family, I’m hearing reactions along the lines of “you’re STILL there?”... or, “you don’t come home until May 2014? But that’s still so far away!” As I wrote about in a previous post, time passes in the Peace Corps both at a snail’s pace and at warp speed. You could be bemoaning the fact that you still have over a year left, and then all of a sudden you get busy with a project and realize that you only have a few months left. For me, the next 8 months will undoubtedly go quickly, but not until I get through the months of August, September, and October, which will be chock-full of work on my primary and secondary projects. After that, with 2014 in close range, it will really start to feel like the end.

Being in my final 1/3^rd of service has made me understand why so many PCVs extend their service for the optional third year, because I’m just now beginning to experience the fear of returning to America after working so hard to integrate and establish a life in Madagascar. For the longest time I kept thinking that I couldn’t wait to get back to my life in the US.  But just recently I had a lightbulb moment when I realized that actually, I don’t have that life anymore. I gave up my apartment and left my job, and NYC will probably be so changed by the time I get back that I’ll feel like a newcomer. Friends have moved away, and it seems like everyone I know is moving in with a significant other/getting engaged/getting married/having babies. And where does that leave me? I, too, want to grow and move further into adulthood, but I can’t—yet. I feel slightly stifled and stunted, knowing that I need to make some serious life adjustments when I get back, but unable to do anything about it from here. It’s bizarre and scary to think that I have no idea where I will be living or what I will be doing a year from now.  I’m still planning to apply to business schools, but what if I don’t get into a good school, or get enough financial aid to be able to afford it? And if I decide to go back to work instead after Peace Corps, how on earth can I look for a job all the way from Madagascar? As someone who has always thrived on looking forward and planning ahead, it’s extremely scary to legitimately have no idea where I will be this time next year.

Right now, the best thing that I can do is continue focusing on my work projects to make sure that I finish my service feeling fulfilled. I know that if I think too much about life-after-Peace Corps, I’ll go a little bit crazy, so I’m trying to balance my need to plan and prepare with the necessity of focusing on my work here and living in the present. Luckily, I have enough work projects and travel plans to keep me busy, and I’m sure that by the time my COS conference rolls around, I’ll be thinking “but I need more time! I’m not ready to leave!”

Bug off, malaria!

When you live in a country like Madagascar, malaria is no longer some abstract tropical disease that affects people thousands of miles away. It is very real, and it is very serious. Mosquitoes are more than just annoying, and every bite can be a potential killer. In fact, malaria is the number one killer in Africa—not AIDS, not malnutrition, but malaria. That’s why a large focus of our work as Peace Corps volunteers is all about malaria education and prevention, even if we don’t work in the health sector. And because April 25^th is World Malaria Day, the month of April becomes our busy season when we try to blitz the country with educational messages and awareness events.

Ever since last April, when I learned that I would be serving on the southeast coast of Madagascar, I knew that malaria work would be an important component of my work in Vangaindrano. Although there is malaria throughout the country, it is widely concentrated on the east coast, while it is not very prevalent in the cooler highlands region in the center of the country.  At our malaria event last year during Pre-Service Training, I was able to speak with a USAID representative about the mosquito net distribution program that was scheduled for my area in December 2012. USAID, along with several other aid agencies, funds a massive net distribution plan for the coastal areas every few years. In 2012, the focus was on the Sud Est, and so in early December, every town in my region received a distribution of free mosquito nets for each household.

Because so many people in the area received nets in December, I decided that for World Malaria Month this year, I wanted to do some programming in my town about how to properly care for and use a mosquito net. I thought this would be good follow-up on the distribution from 4 months ago, and reinforce to people that it’s vitally important for them to use the nets every single night, and to take proper care of them so that they’ll last for a long time. So in February, I applied for special project funding from Peace Corps to cover the costs of an event, and I worked with Peace Corps Madagascar’s malaria initiative coordinator, and my region’s malaria campaign volunteer coordinator, to plan out a great event for my town.

This past Saturday, we set up a booth in front of the Vangaindrano post office, which is in a high-traffic area in my town’s market, and got to work spreading educational messages about bednet usage and care. Two of my neighboring volunteers, Yu and Jeremy, came to help out, so it was great to have some extra manpower. Festooned with banners and posters about bednets and malaria, our booth quickly attracted a large crowd of curious people. Throughout the morning, we held demonstrations on how to repair holes in a mosquito net with a needle and thread, which ensures that mosquitoes can’t get in. We also demonstrated how to properly wash a net, using just bar soap and water (not detergent, which is too strong), and how to hang it to dry in the shade so that the fierce sun won’t disintegrate the insecticide that each net is impregnated with. And, we showed how to easily transform a rectangular net into a circular one, which is helpful for people who don’t sleep on a bed, or don’t have a good ceiling to hang a net from. For each of these activities, we had different onlookers come participate to demonstrate how simple each of these tasks were, and this caused riotous laughter and spirited engagement from many of the people watching. We were also joined by Max, a Malagasy health workers at my town's private hospital, so it was really good to have a community member join us. It ended up being a fun morning, and as I stood on a pedestal in the middle of my town’s market, speaking about malaria, in Malagasy, over a microphone, it was one of those moments that reminded me of how far I’ve come as a volunteer in the past year.

Me, Jeremy, and Max (a local health worker) holding up a net in our booth. The banner behind us says "Fight Malaria" and lists the towns in the Sud Est region which are all hosting Peace Corps anti-malaria events this month.

Jeremy and Yu hold up a net that the woman in the center repaired using a needle and thread.

Yu talking to the crowd about malaria symptoms and what to do when they're spotted.

This little girl is really cute and says my name as "Semolina". She was eager to participate, so we had her show that repairing nets is easy enough even for kids to do.

Yu and a local woman showing how to wash a net with plain bar soap and water.

Me on the microphone, narrating the net-washing demonstration.

Showing the crowd how to use an adapted circular bednet.  We were assisted by Max, a health worker at my town's hospital. (Note the malaria mural in the background, which was done by a group of PCVs last year, just before I arrived!)

After a lunch break, we got back to work handing out informational pamphlets in the market area. Each of these pamphlets was a mini-handbook for how to spot the symptoms of malaria, and how to treat it before it becomes life threatening. Although pamphlets are a dime a dozen in America, and you’ll always find people foisting them on you in the street, they are a lot rarer here. In fact, reading material in general is hard to come by here, so people were grateful to be receiving them, and I quickly ran out of pamphlets after people ran up to me asking for them.

Finally, we ended our day by playing some educational games with the kids in my neighborhood of Ampasy. I was excited for this because I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had a lot of time to hang out with “my” kids. The first thing we did was talk to them about malaria, in very basic terms, and explain the importance of sleeping under a mosquito net. We also used the frame of a halfway-built house to have them learn how to hang a net properly, and how to tuck it in so that mosquitoes are effectively shut out. The kids were already giggling and laughing and having a great time, so they were especially engaged for our next activity, which was a game a la sharks and minnows. We set up two nets on opposite ends of a field (held up by adults who came to help out), and the kids had to run from net to net without being “stung” (tapped) by the “mosquito” (Jeremy) who was standing in the center. The kids had a blast and didn’t want to stop playing. And although it sounds like a trivial game, this is an example of a situation where every little bit counts—each activity reinforced to the kids that mosquitoes are bad and need to be avoided, or else they’ll harm you. Because the kids wanted to keep playing but were full of energy, I decided that a fairly simple game would be in order. So I resurrected the “parasy, parasy, moka” game that we played with the kids in Mantasoa last year! This game is basically just duck, duck goose, but with the animals transposed into parasy (flea) and moka (mosquito), again with the aim of running away from the mosquito. Once again, the kids had a blast, and when the sun began to set on our long and busy day, we reluctantly ended the game and headed back to my house.

Local kids in the mosquito net they learned how to hang.

Playing the 'sharks and minnows' game, with Jeremy as the mosquito (shark) trying to "bite" the kids!

I was nervous about hosting my first event in Vangaindrano, but at the end of the day, I was really pleased with the work that my fellow volunteers and I did. Not only do I feel like I’m a better volunteer now (because I have learned how to talk to people about health issues), but I also feel like the people of Vangaindrano absorbed some helpful information. One of the best moments of the day was during our net washing demonstration, when I overheard one of the onlookers explaining to another woman, who had just arrived, what was going on. She repeated our instructions about using bar soap and not detergent, while her friend nodded in understanding. I was quietly thrilled to realize that not only were people getting the message, they were actually passing it along. And to make an impact on eradicating malaria in Madagascar, that’s exactly what’s needed.

So now you’ve read about what I did. Now, how will you stomp out malaria in 2013?

One year later

1.     At the beginning of my service, I was clueless about bikes and considered 10km to be a long ride. But since then, I have become a bike addict and I crave the feeling of being out on a long ride (30km +), the wind on my face and my legs aching but muscles glowing. If a road is really terrible, I would rather bike it than take a taxi-brousse, because biking is more fun, and often faster. Plus, I now know how to fix a flat, change a tube, and adjust the brakes.

2.     I wear shorts more than I ever have in my life, even as a kid.

3.     Consequently, I have more freckles than I have ever had in my life—on my legs, but also on my face, back, shoulders, and arms.

4.     My hair is sunbleached at the ends and so I accidentally have that ombre look going on.

5.     I can put away a massive bowl of rice like nobody’s business. In fact, I will never look at a bowl of rice the same way again.

6.     I’m able to navigate crowded markets-- both on bike and on foot-- that would have once given me claustrophobia-induced panic attacks.

7.     I consider a 4-hour taxi brousse ride to be a “short trip”.

8.     The colossal magnitude by which I miss New York makes me realize that I am never going to be one those people who just lives there for a few years after college. I’ve realized now that it’s my home, and I can’t wait to go back to it.

9.     I have mastered the public transportation of a massive African capital city.

10. I regularly conduct business in three languages (English, French, Malagasy).

11. Foreign travel will never again be the same to me-- serving in the Peace Corps gives you the ability to exist and move through foreign cultures with much more ease.

12. I’ve turned into a cat person--- by virtue of necessity in this country. (Hate rats? Learn to love cats.)

13. I’ve never appreciated things like toilets, running water, and refrigeration so much in my life. There is nothing quite like a cold drink when it’s 90 degrees out and you’ve just biked 30km.

14. Apples and peaches are “exotic” fruit, while coconuts, bananas, pineapple, corissol, pocanelle, sakoa, guava, avocadoes, and passion fruit are my everyday fare, depending on what’s in season.

15. Speaking of which, I have never before appreciated fruit seasons so much. For they are the bringers of the avocadoes. 10 cents each? I’ll take 5, thank you.

16. I have discovered just how much better a long brousse ride, or a long bike ride, is when you have a friend with you.

17. Uncomfortable, awkward social situations don’t really feel that awkward of uncomfortable. You get used to things always being weird.

18. Sometimes I feel like I could strangle a bear for a toasted bagel and cream cheese. Or a good cup of coffee. Or a decent slice of pizza. Or…

19. Internet is a luxury that I pay by the megabyte for. But when I do get to use unlimited wifi, I really don’t want to open the Pandora’s box of the internet, so I stick with just Gmail and Facebook as usual.

20. I’ve decided that listening to “I Found a Reason” by the Velvet Underground is like inhabitating a world of perfection for 3 minutes.

21. Without trying to sound sanctimonious, my eyes have really been opened to how the rest of the world lives. As a result, I have little tolerance for first-world-problem complaints. Your takeout order getting mixed up is not a problem. Neither is the fact that AT&T won’t let you use FaceTime with unlimited data.  (Sometimes the Facebook posts I read make me want to scream.) Those of us who are fortunate enough to have money to feed ourselves and our families, have access to medical care, and have a sturdy roof over our heads need to remember how lucky we are. I try to do this every day.

22. I fear that I will never again be able to speak English without peppering it with Malagasy words like mahay, fomba, simbasimba, azafady, and many others.

23. I am no longer afraid (or too clueless) to order a whole fish at a restaurant.

24. I physically cannot go to bed without scrubbing my feet. Parasy are no joke.

25. My adventurous streak has come out. When I hear about a waterfall, or a cool but inaccessible national park, my first though is “Let’s bike there!!! I want to explore!”

26. Now that I have to use a pre-paid phone, and find myself wanting to talk and text with friends much more than I can afford, I long for the days when I had a contract phone with plenty of minutes and text messages included. And I can’t believe that I would have so many unused minutes and texts left over at the end of every month. Why wasn’t I calling my friends ALL THE TIME? When I get back to America, I am doing that.

27. Also blowing my mind: the fact that I had UNLIMITED data on my iPhone plan. Again, now that I have to pay per megabyte for internet usage, the fact that an unlimited plan even exists is insane to think about.

28. I have become somewhat of an accidental vegan. About 65% of the things I eat just happen to be vegan, by virtue of the limited availability of animal food products here. Another 30% are vegetarian, and the remaining 15% contain a small amount of fish or meat. I get the majority of my protein from beans/lentils, peanuts/peanut butter, eggs, and sardines. And I’ve realized that I feel so much healthier eating this way. I mean, I’m sure the Paleo diet has its benefits, but it’s not really a sustainable way to eat, and it’s laughably impossible for non-Westerners to eat that way.

29. The things that I thought would be difficult before I got here—like health issues, feeling isolated, or having to use a kabone and fetch water from a pump, have not really been a big deal. The biggest challenges are actually ones that I’d never anticipated: figuring out how to have enough work, anxiety about not being a good enough volunteer/not having enough impact on my community, stress about interpersonal relationships with other volunteers (Peace Corps is a bit like high school at times), the constant fluctuation in my weight, and the worry that I spend too much time in my house and that I am not out there in the community enough.

30. For Easter Monday, my neighbor said she would cook for us if I bought a chicken. So I went to the market, negotiated a price, and then put a live chicken in my saddlebag and biked home. And I didn’t really find this activity to be all that weird. Also, the chicken was delicious.

Oranges and goodbyes

Time, and the rate of its passage, is an oft-discussed and frequently contemplated idea amongst Peace Corps volunteers.  As much as we sometimes complain about time going too slowly, a great many of us lament its too-quick passing as the end of our service draws nearer. And in those quiet days of daily life at site when we’ve danced into the rhythm of existence here, we often stop thinking about how long we’ve been in Madagascar, or how long we have left, because where we live simply feels like home. But then sometimes, something hits you, and all of a sudden—BAM!-- you realize that a year has passed.

I’ve just turned the page on my calendar to April, which means that I’ve been in this country for 13 months, and I’ve been at my site for 11 of those months. I was in Tana when my stage-mates and I reached our one-year anniversary in March, but that milestone didn’t really hit me until recently, when I arrived home to Vangaindrano after taking a vacation to India. I stepped off the taxi-brousse and smelled the fruit that the sellers had laid out on blankets on the side of the road, and in an instant, the sticky-sweet smell of oranges sitting in the baking sun gave me a nostalgic whiplash to last May, because the scent instantly reminded me of Farafangana and my arrival in the Sud Est. And that’s when I truly realized: I’ve been here a year.

Thinking about how much time I’ve spent here and how much I have left is an exercise that’s certain to bring about a complex brew of conflicting emotions. On one hand, I get excited when I think that I only have one year until I get to go home to America, see my friends and family, and drink New York City tap water. But on the other hand, I also start to get anxious about having enough time to do everything before I leave. Will one year be enough to make enough progress on my work project so that I can feel content about leaving next April? Will I have time to start an English club and work on a library for my town? And outside of work projects, will I be able to see all the things I want to see in Madagascar, and have all the experiences I want to before I go? As much as I have seen and have done already, there are so many more places that I want to visit and areas in my region that I want to explore. Time is ticking away just as quickly as ever, even on days when I don’t want it to.

And not only is time ticking away for me, the Peace Corps clock is now running out for my friends who came to Madagascar in March 2011, one year before me. When I arrived last year I always envisioned this stage of volunteers having one year left—until I realized last fall that no, if I had less than two years left, then they had less than a year left as well. This group of volunteers is one that I feel a very close kinship with, because for me, their friendship, guidance, and assistance shaped my experiences in my first year more than anything or anyone else. A great many of them were volunteer trainers for my stage, and so I got to know them very early on. And since being in the Sud Est, the six of them in my region have shaped some of my favorite memories of my service: bike-exploring and discovering the beach in my region with Matt, relaxed Manakara weekends cooking and watching movies with Emily, long afternoon talks with Maria at her house, night-swimming in Mananjary with Bryan, being entertained on long taxi-brousse rides by Al, and bridge adventures (he’ll know what this means) with Paul. And so to think of them leaving the Sud Est, as they are all doing today, is almost unfathomable to me. What is Farafangana without Maria? Or Manombo without Paul? I can’t picture going to work in the Coldis office in Manakara without stopping by Matt’s house in the compound to say hello, just as I also can’t believe that I won’t get to go to Gourmandise for breakfast with Emily the next time I am in Manakara. At my last lunch with Maria I unsuccessfully fought back tears when I told her how much I would miss biking down the main road in Fara towards her house, and the happy feeling I’d get when I’d see her door open and know that my friend was at home. And what I realized last week is that as Peace Corps volunteers, we strongly associate the places we know and love in this country with our friends who live there—and then when they leave, as we all will do at some point, it’s almost like the heart has been ripped out of the town.

On Thursday I paid one last visit to Paul in Manombo (about 45km north of Vangaindrano) to celebrate his two years of service and participate in the going-away fety that his town was throwing for him. When I coasted down the hill into town on my bike and saw him, as I often do, standing on the road checking for cell phone service, I realized that it would be the last time that I’d see my friend’s Scandanavian-esque blond head on the side of the road. I’d never be able to wave at him from a taxi-brousse window again, or share a brousse home from Farafangana. But as sad as that was to think about, it was wonderfully bittersweet to be part of Manombo’s celebration for him and honor the work he has done here. I can only hope to be fêted as Paul was when I leave next year, and seeing what it’s like to say goodbye to your town as a volunteer made me realize for the first time what a difficult time I’ll have when I leave next year.

During my visit, Paul jokingly said to me that we should continue to call Manombo ‘Paul’s site’ even though he will be replaced by a new volunteer in May. We laughed about it, but on my ride home I realized that there’s no way that I will be able to disassociate that town from him, nor can I do so for any of my friends who are leaving. So I say this to all of my volunteer friends who are finishing their service and heading home this month : you may be leaving Madagascar’s soil, but to both your Peace Corps and Malagasy friends, you will always be a part of this place. And next year, when it’s my turn to head home, my wish is that I’ll be thought of the same way.

Then and now

It’s amazing to think about how much my life has changed since I arrived in Madagascar. When I do a mental comparison of what my life was like a year ago versus today, it can be almost comical to compare the difference. I saw another volunteer post a similar entry on her blog, so I thought it would be fun to replicate it myself.

THEN:
Ah, the convenience of a washing machine. Just press a button and wait for it to be done.

NOW:
I hand-wash everything (including sheets) in plastic basins. It takes me about 2-3 hours, and I do this once a week. I also sometimes pay a woman to help when I have too many dirty clothes to deal with.

THEN:
Pre-work Starbucks visits.

∫NOW:
My local coffee and mofo stand, with endrini' Arnaud, its proprietor. 10 cents for a small cup of coffee.

THEN:

Barre workout classes at the Physique 57 studios all over NYC.

NOW:
Physique 57 DVDs in my house, using sand-filled water bottles as weights.

THEN:
Commuting to work on the NYC subway.

NOW:
Commuting to work on my trusty bike, via rutted, muddy roads.

THEN:
Monthly air-travel.

NOW:
Monthly taxi-brousse travel.

THEN:
iPhone.

NOW:

Crappy circa 2007 phone.

THEN:
Drinks at cocktail bars (especially my favorite, scotch on the rocks.)

NOW:
Cheap rum that has been steeped with vanilla beans (known here as rhum arrangée) to make it taste better.

THEN:
Running water in my kitchen and bathroom, with NYC tap water-- the world's best!

NOW:
Water from a hand-pump about 50 meters away from my house. I fetch about 3 buckets' worth per day. My "running water" setup is a jerry can that I've fitted with a tap so that I have a good place for handwashing.

Shake it!

Some funny videos of my neighborhood kids dancing.