Let the journey begin

I heart Manakara.

I’m currently sitting on the porch of my fellow volunteer Matt’s house, adjacent to a spice warehouse in Manakara, overlooking the canal. The air is heady with the scent of cloves being packed up for export to Rotterdam, and the hot afternoon sun is tempered by soft breezes blowing in from the Indian Ocean, just a stone’s throw away. Today I am on day #5 of a monthlong journey away from site, and already it’s a bizarre yet wonderful experience to be immersing myself in new slices of Madagascar after nearly 3 months spent only at my site (Vangaindrano) and my banking town (Farafangana.)

The actual reason for me leaving site is to attend In-Service Training in Antananarivo/Mantasoa during the week of August 6^th. However, because my town is a 3-day journey away from Tana, I made arrangements to bookend the trip with some business and personal travel to take advantage of the time and money investment of getting up to Tana.  So, my original plan was to slowly make my way up northwest to Tana, and spend some time working with Matt in Manakara, before heading to Fianar and then Tana. However, because this is Peace Corps and because this is Madagascar, the best laid plans usually change, and I received a text on Monday morning saying I was needed for a meeting in Fianar on Wednesday—a whole 10 hours from my site, and nearly a week before I had actually planned to go there. At that time I was still in Farafangana waiting to go to the bank, so I had to scramble and run home (2 hours away) that afternoon in order to get to Fianar in time for the meeting. Because I had already planned to leave for Manakara on Thursday, it didn’t make sense to go back home after Fianar. So, as soon as I got home on Monday I rushed to pack up a month’s worth of stuff, find a neighbor to take care of my cat, track down my supervisor to get the travel form approved, and make it back to Farafangana on Tuesday in time to get a taxi-brousse going to Fianar. This, all on top of having a nasty cold and delirium-inducing fever. But I had been waiting to have this meeting for a long time, so there was no way I was going to miss it.

The meeting in Fianar was with COLDIS, my counterpart agency, because their national headquarters are there. I had been feeling really unsure of what my projects were going to be, but this meeting was great, and I sat down with the director of COLDIS, plus Matt and another volunteer who works with them, to divide up ownership of the projects they want their PC volunteers to help with. So as it stands now, I will be helping them explore clove export opportunities to the US (they currently only export to Europe and Asia), plus researching potential value-added activities such as packaging cloves for consumers, plus assisting the director of the COLDIS office in my town develop a business plan, as well as helping them revamp their website to build English and French versions that are tailored to their target audience (wholesale bulk customers.) So now, all of a sudden I have a lot to do! But I am really excited about this, because the work aspect of my Peace Corps experience was stressing me out. Now I feel like I have some direction, and I am excited to dive into these projects when I am back after IST/vacation. COLDIS’s warehouse is in Manakara, and there is wi-fi at the office here, so it sounds like I will be coming here for work quite a bit-- maybe once a month. But I’m happy about that because I really like this town, and it’s also great to get to work a bit with another volunteer.

I spent yesterday morning at the COLDIS office and warehouse with Matt, learning about the operations and observing cloves from last year’s harvest being sorted and packed for export. A truck just left this afternoon to bring them to the port at Tamatave (about a 2 day drive), where they’ll be packed on a container ship bound for Rotterdam. I’ve learned so much about the operations just in the last 2 days, and I’ll write a separate blog post another time all about cloves (for all my fellow food nerds!) Then yesterday afternoon Matt and I (plus 2 other volunteers who were in town) biked out of town about 5k to find vanilla to buy. Matt had been there before but couldn’t quite remember where it was. He said we’d know it was the right place by the scent. Sure enough, right about where he said it would be, the air was suddenly redolent with the sweet perfume of vanilla. The farmer welcomed us into his home and all of a sudden my jaw dropped: there were stacks and stacks vanilla beans on shelves that absolutely filled the house. “How do you say ‘heaven’ in Malagasy?”, I asked my friends, but none of us could remember. I bought some vanilla for myself (I’m curious to compare it to the vanilla from my town), as well as some to send my friend Alexis in the US, who was promised me a care package of American goodies in exchange!

The next leg of my trip begins on Monday when I leave Manakara to head up to the Tana region. But before I actually go to the capital, I’m heading to visit my friend Eric in Arivonimamo—about an hour outside of Tana. He’s been working with a fruit drying cooperative, and I’m really interested in replicating that in my town, because there is such an abundance of fruit and a lot of it rots before it is ever eaten. Being able to set people up with fruit dryers would help provide income (for selling the fruit) as well as food security (to have healthy food that will keep for a long time.) Then finally, I head to Tana on Thursday to spend a few days there taking care of Peace Corps business and medical appointments before In-Service Training. I can’t wait to see all my friends from my stage during IST—most of them I won’t have seen since May! After IST I’m hoping to take a little vacation in-country, but at this point I’m not sure where I’m going yet. Mahajunga, maybe? A bunch of us have talked about taking a vacation together after IST and I think we’ll get it sorted out then. And so that will put me back at site by the third week of August: just about one month after leaving. It’s crazy that I will be gone so long, but I am excited to see a bit more of Madagascar and have a little bit of a break from site!

Do you want rice with that?

I’ve written a little bit about the food here in one of my previous posts, but now I think it’s time to devote a full post to rice. Why rice, you may ask? Well, simply because it’s the most widely eaten food here, and Malagasy people consume more rice per capita than anywhere else in the world. Even with the acres and acres of tanam-bary (rice fields) all over Madagascar, the country still has to import rice from Pakistan in order to meet the people’s appetite. Why is rice the most popular food, as opposed to other starches like cassava or wheat? It’s because Malagasy people owe their heritage partly to settlers from southeast Asia, primarily Indonesia. So when those intrepid travelers set out in boats and arrived in Madagascar after spending months at sea, they brough their rice cultivation and consumption habits with them.

For many a Malagasy person, a meal consists of a giant bowl of rice, sometimes with some meat or beans, and occasionally a vegetable or two. A meal is not considered a meal unless rice is served. So, nearly every single breakfast, lunch, and dinner is rice-based, and because of this, nutritional completeness is almost always lacking. It’s an issue of not simply having enough calories, but having the right kind of calories. I remember watching in amazement when a few of my host family’s farm workers joined us for lunch one day, and all they ate for lunch for just a gigantic bowl of rice, with nothing else.

If you go out to eat at a hotely, the amount of rice given for one person is equivalent to about 4 American-size servings. They bring out a giant bowl of it for each person, in addition to whatever loaka (accompaniments such as pork, fish, chicken or beef) that you ordered. When I first started eating at hotelys, I always looked at these massive bowls of rice with a mixture of horror and amazement—how could anyone eat that much rice? But now, I’m fairly shocked at how much rice I can put away. I have no problem finishing all the rice they put in front of me. In fact, if I didn’t have a cat that I had to save leftovers for, I would definitely finish it all. Perhaps this is a good sign that I’m on my way to becoming “Malagasy fotsy” (white Malagasy). And amazingly, despite all the carbohydrates I’m eating, I’m not really gaining weight.

There are two kinds of rice that are available for purchase here: traditional white rice, and vary mena (red rice), which is more brownish-red than actually red. White rice is a little more expensive than vary mena: 400 Ariary [about 20 cents] a cup, versus 350 Ariary [about 15 cents] for vary mena. I always buy vary mena not only to save money but because it has more fiber. I have actually seen this for sale in a couple of stores in the U.S.: it’s sold as Madagascar Pink Rice in Kalustyan’s in NYC as well as some health food stores (Lotus Foods imports it.) So, keep an eye out for it!

Eventually I’m going to write a blog post with some of my recipes, but the usual rice dishes I cook are rice and beans, lentil and rice “risotto” (using La Vache Qui Rit cheese, because that’s all we have), and stir-fried vegetables and peanuts served with rice. I also recently made a really delicious oatmeal-style “breakfast rice” dish, with cinnamon, vanilla, bananas, and peanut butter from a care package. However, I want to branch out and start being even more creative with what I can make. So many cultures have rice-based dishes and so I want to explore what I can make using what’s available here. On my list to try replicating are arroz con pollo, arancini (Italian fried rice balls), and paella. If I’m going to make it through two years eating rice at least once a day, I’m going to have to flex my culinary creativity!

To be idle and blessed: thoughts on the NY Times article “The ‘Busy’ Trap”

“You’ll get to be really good at just sitting”, a fellow volunteer recently told me. “I can spend hours just sitting outside.” He’s been here in Madagascar a year longer than I have, so I took him at his word. But I didn’t really understand what he was talking about until yesterday afternoon, when I returned home from a bike ride and found myself, just sitting, on a tsihy (straw mat) on the floor by my front door. I sat and watched the wind blowing through the huge mango tree in my backyard; watched the kids playing in the yard in the house next door, laughing and shrieking with delight; and listened to the jubilant songs being sung in the church past the rice fields. It was a quiet moment, and I embraced its stillness by simply letting myself be present and enjoy it.

Is this something I would have been able to do back home in the US? Perhaps, but enjoying a few minutes of nothingness is much easier to do when you’re not in the midst of a culture, like America’s, that tells us that there should be a something at every moment. And so that bit of time sitting on a straw mat made me think of the recent New York Times essay “The Busy Trap” that so many of my friends are posting on Facebook. The author makes a case for slowing down and actually allowing our free time to be just that—unscheduled, unstructured, unfettered with obligations. His central point is that most of the “busyness” we complain about is self-created out of anxiety over having an unfulfilled life, or feeling like we constantly have to advance ourselves, our career, even our children. I’m hardly innocent of this kind of thinking: back in New York, I constanly overbooked myself with volunteer work, five-day-a-week gym visits, charity events, social outings, and other agenda items, all on top of a 50- to 60-hour-a-week job, and a passion for cooking and baking that saw me making nearly all my own food from scratch. Multiple people told me that I did more with my free time than anyone else they knew—and this made me proud. Look at everything that I was accomplishing! After all, my impetus for treating my “spare time” as something to be filled was due to my appreciation for the very ephemerality of life. Our time on earth is short and precious, and so how better to squeeze the most enjoyment out of this gift of life than by filling my hours with projects and plans and worthwhile activities? But my overscheduling habits also contained a fear that I was wasting my time if I wasn’t accomplishing some task or bettering myself every weekend. I had to give myself permission just to sit and watch TV or do nothing, and even then I felt guilty doing so.

Things have changed considerably now that I’m here living in Madagascar. One main element of this shift is that my very being here is in itself an accomplishment, so mentally it’s easier to allow myself to slow down, because I know that the two years I’m putting in are, in fact, going towards a final goal of becoming the person I want to be. But another huge element is that I simply have no choice, because of the radically different lifestyle here. I do have more free time than I did back home, because I work fewer hours, don’t have a TV, and have to pay per megabyte to use the internet. But I also spend time on things that I’d never have to at home: I have to fetch water from a well, shop in the market every day, soak all my fruits and vegetables in chlorinated water, cook all of my food without the aid of running water, an oven, or a refrigerator, wash all of my clothes by hand, and lock my house and walk outside to my kabone whenever I need to go to the bathroom. And so this has redefined my notion of “busy”: when I’m not working, most of my time is spent on activities that allow me to simply exist. The same goes for nearly every single Malagasy person here. “Busy” means having to walk an hour to the market to sell fruit, with a baby strapped to your back. “Busy” is working all day in the rice fields, or harvesting vanilla, or going out in the ocean at dawn to find fish. “Busy” is going to the river to wash your family’s clothes by hand. “Busy” is walking 2 hours each way to school, oftentimes on an empty stomach. For most Americans, this is extremely far from our daily reality, because modern conveniences strip us of the tasks that should occupy our time: washing machines, refrigerators, freezers, prepared food, running water, automobiles, and the internet all mean that we don’t have to worry about the things that the rest of the world spends their time doing. And because we don’t have to worry about these things, we have a lot of time on our hands.

So what I will say is this: if we are fortunate enough to have extra time in our day, when our work is done and obligations to our existence met, then we need to allow ourselves to enjoy that as such. Embrace the stillness instead of trying to fill a void. I’ve been spending time just watching my cat discovering the world, playing with a butterfly or basking outside in the sunlight. I've been sitting on my front stoop and chatting with the neighborhood kids who stop by. I’ve also been walking and biking around my town, with no real direction, just soaking up the beauty and majesty of my new surroundings. In short, I’ve been practicing, to quote Mary Oliver’s famous poem The Summer Day, how to be idle and blessed. 

The wonders of "frip"

I have a new addiction, and its name is frip. Frip, short for friperie (the French word for “used clothes”) has suddenly become an all-consuming passion of mine. “Frip” is the word for the stalls, found in markets all over Madagascar, that sell used clothing and home linens. It’s big business here because most people can’t afford new clothes or bedding, but it’s a boon for fashion-starved Peace Corps volunteers because you can sometimes find amazing things. All of the items that end up in frip stalls are donated clothing, a lot of which gets sent overseas when they don’t sell at a Goodwill-type store. This is where all those free promotional t-shirts go to die (i.e. “Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago Fun Run ’97!”). But Madagascar actually gets most of its frip from Europe, so you can often find some really amazing, stylish stuff. Frip vendors buy bundles of it sight unseen, by the kilo, so they have no idea what they’re getting, and so the best part of frip shopping is digging through piles and finding a diamond in the rough.

When I first got to Madagascar a lot of current volunteers raved glowingly about the wonders of frip shopping-- we even heard legend of Marc Jacobs boots bought at a frip stall in Tana—but I wasn’t particularly interested in it. After all, I didn’t need any clothes, and I wasn’t that excited by the prospect of digging around for stuff. But something happened last week, and suddenly my eyes opened to the wonders that can be found in the frip stalls. I was walking around Farafangana, my banking town, with my friend Erica. We strolled past the frip stalls and I just happened to glance at one that featured colorful tablecloths and home linens. I spotted a gorgeous piece of printed fabric—white, with blue and brown birds and flowers—and I went for a closer look. It was clean, very high quality, and in perfect condition expect for a small hole that had been already carefully stitched up. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the selvage (the edge of the fabric) indicated that the print was called “Hirondelles” and that it was printed by hand in France. Something about this fabric caught my eye, so I bought it, and yesterday I stitched it up into lovely curtains for my bedroom.

That piece of fabric started my frip addiction because it opened my eyes to some of the amazing finds that are out there. Since then I have found some more great French stuff: gorgeous embroidered hand towels (with only one tiny stain), a St James striped t-shirt (these retail in the US for over $100), a pretty floral dress from Promod, 2 cute tank tops, a pair of cool blue houndstooth chef pants that wouldn’t look out of place going to brunch in Brooklyn, and a Tintin pillowcase! Plus, a beautiful printed silk wrap skirt from Nepal. All of these things cost between 1,000 Ariary and 3,000 Ariary (50 cents to $1.50). I had to stop myself from buying an Asterix & Obelix duvet cover because a) they were asking 7,000 Ariary and refused to budget on the price, and b) I would really be just buying it for novelty, not practicality.

I’m not sure why I was indifferent to frip shopping for so long—after all, I absolutely love hunting for cool finds in used clothing stores back home in the US. One thing I noticed is that it’s more fun to do it with other people, and so when a couple of fellow volunteers came to visit my site last week, it finally gave me the impetus to explore the frip stalls in my town.

For Malagasy people, frip shopping is less about being fashionable and more about just buying clothing for cheap. So you see people walking around wearing the most random t-shirts, most of them printed with some sort of English writing, and they more often than not have no clue what they are wearing. It can create funny moments when you see someone wearing a shirt from your hometown high school sports team (this happened to a friend of mine), and you try to explain it to the person.  Side note: there’s an episode of “How to Make it in America” when they’re looking for a ton of cheap t-shirts to screenprint on, and the main guy (cute one, forget his name) befriends a girl who works at Beacon’s Closet, who shows him a dock where literal tons of unsold old t-shirts are being prepped to get sent overseas. I think of that episode whenever I see a frip seller unpacking mounds of random American castoff t-shirts. So if you’ve ever wondered what happens to that shirt you donate to Goodwill that they never sell, now you know. 

A cat named Maxwell

I’ve written before about my unfortunate rat problem that gave me serious insomnia and anxiety during my first few weeks here. The natural solution to a rat problem is to get a cat, of course, and most of the volunteers here in the Sud Est are cat owners for that very reason. So after waiting a few weeks to make sure I was settled in at home, in late May I decided it was time to become a cat owner. And that’s how Maxwell made her way into my life.

When I told one of my TIAVO coworkers that I needed a cat, she helped me out by going to the market to buy one for me. So I arrived at the office one Tuesday morning to find a tiny, frightened, and rather dirty orange tabby kitten tied up to a chair. I put her in a box and hurried home, wrestling the entire 20 minute walk with a squirming kitten constantly trying to escape. When I got her home I tied her to my bedpost, gave her a little food and water, and sat on my bed to watch her figure out her new surroundings. I put some music on from my iTunes, and the album that happened to pop up first was “Abbey Road”.  After a few minutes I went over to her to see if she’d warm up to me, and sure enough, she let me hold her and put her on my lap. She started purring after another few minutes, and because the song that was playing when she started purring was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, I decided to name her Maxwell. Of course, at this point she was still tiny enough that it was impossible to tell if she was a girl or a boy—and Maxwell is not exactly a girlish name (despite what Jessica Simpson apparently named her new baby.) But, by the time we figured out she was a girl, she already knew and responded to her name. So, I decided to keep it.

Maxwell on the move.

On that first day I enlisted a friend to help me give her a bath (that was an ordeal), and after about 5 days I let her roam around my house untethered, before finally letting her outside after I’d had her about 2 weeks (to make sure she knew this was her home, and wouldn’t run away.) However, the poor thing was pretty sick: on her second night at my house, I discovered that she had a tapeworm—this explained why she was so tiny and sickly. I ran to the vet the next day to get deworming pills, and since then I’ve dealt with 2 more tapeworms, ahem, coming out, but at this point I think they’re finally gone. She’s grown a lot and finally put on some weight, and generally seems to be really enjoying life. I had my landlord cut a little cat door in my front door so she can come and go. I sometimes wonder if she realizes how lucky she is that I bought her, because Malagasy people don’t dote on their pets quite like Americans do. I will fully admit: my cat is spoiled. I cook her fish with rice every day (because "cat food" doesn't exist here), or give her my leftovers, so she is well fed. Although I don’t let her sleep on my bed, I bought her a big oval basket and put some foam pieces in it to make her her own bed, which is next to mine. I do, however, let her get on the bed for a morning snuggle first thing when I wake up (when I’m awake but still not ready to get out of bed and start the day.) I mean, how can you resist a cute, purring kitten that just wants to cuddle up with you? Her favorite position is to sit on my left shoulder when I'm lying on my back. The first day I got her I was lying in bed watching a movie, and she managed to jump up there and sit this way. I think it's because she was taken from her mom really young, and she wanted a heartbeat to be close to. Even though she's gotten bigger, she still loves to sit this way, and I think it's because she sees me as a mother.

Max has definitely earned her keep, though, so I feel she deserves rewards. Since her arrival I have not heard the army of rats in my ceiling (knocking on wood a thousand times!) and nights have been blissfully quiet. I think the combination of her constant meowing during her first few weeks here, with the special poison my landlord put in the ceiling, has hopefully made the rats realize that this is an inhospitable place for them. I don’t think she’s killed a rat yet, since she is still pretty small, but her presence just makes me feel more protected against them. And of course, the other benefit is having a cute, furry little companion at home. She is very clingy and always wants attention, which can be really annoying, but overall she is just so darn cute, and I love her to death. (I’ll post pics when I get on wi-fi in a few weeks.) Who needs YouTube when you can watch a kitten chasing a butterfly in your own backyard? And really, is there any better way to pass a rainy Saturday afternoon than watching TV in bed, with a snoozing kitten curled up in the crook of your elbow?

Max just jumped up on my lap after returning from exploring outdoors, and as usual she is purring away. I already don’t know how I am going to leave her when I go home in 2014. I think I may need to bring her back with me!