I can’t stop listening
to the song “All The Sand In All The Sea” by DeVotchka, which a fellow volunteer
put on a mix. Not only do I find the lyrics strangely prescient at this time in
my life, I also couldn’t get it out of my head during my vacation in
Foulpointe. Plus, it’s the perfect soundtrack for a taxi-brousse trip down the
RN7, with the Indian Ocean visible in the distance, and the wind blowing your
hair through the window.
I’ve now been back at site for just over a week after
spending a month traveling all over Madagascar: first to Fianarantsoa for
meeting at the national office of COLDIS, my partner agency, then back down
south a bit to Manakara to check out the COLDIS operations there, then up to
Tana for a night and then on to Arivonimamo the next day (to visit my friend
Eric and check out the fruit drying cooperative he works with), then back to
Tana for a few days, then to the Peace Corps training center in Mantasoa for a
week of In-Service Training, then back to Tana for a night, then a short
vacation in the beach town of Foulpointe, then back to Tana for a few more
nights, and then finally home to Vangaindrano last Tuesday. Whew. I was away
from site for a full 4 weeks, and when I left it blew my mind that I would be
traveling for an entire month, which in America would seem like a much bigger
deal.
I had been looking forward to IST ever since I arrived at
site in May, because one, it would mean that I had officially made it to 3
months at site, which by some accounts could be considered the most difficult
time at site. Two, it would give me a chance to reconnect with the other
volunteers from my stage whose sites
are way too far away for me to visit. And three, I was looking forward to the
training we’d receive and then translating those skills to my work at site. It
was unnerving and otherworldly to drive out to the training center from Tana,
retracing the very same road we traveled on the day we arrived in Madagascar
and were picked up from the airport, jetlagged yet wide-eyed out the 4x4
windows as we drank in everything that was new and different. I tried to
imagine myself back on that day 5 months previous-- I thought about how far I
had come, and how everything now-familiar seemed so foreign then.
But I have to say that as much as I was anticipating IST, I
came out of it feeling depressed and dejected about my work here. Part of the
role of IST is to provide a forum for volunteers to present their Community
Diagnostic Survey (CDS) reports, which is what we were supposed to be spending
our first 3 months at site working on. Coming into IST I felt pretty good about
my upcoming work projects, as established in my meeting in Fianar, as well as
the work I had done on my CDS. But hearing everyone else’s CDS presentations
made me sink deep into a pit of despair. I had a lightbulb moment that made me
realize I was missing a very crucial part of my CDS: although I had dutifully
gathered information about my town, what I had failed to do was ask people the
most important question: what do you need
help with? That central tenet is what separates Peace Corps volunteers from
other aid workers, because we don’t simply come into a town, decide what needs
to be changed, and commence work without community input. On the contrary, it
is the very fact of working alongside
a community, and thereby sharing skills and knowledge, that makes Peace Corps
work so special. And so even though I had a beautiful PowerPoint presentation
and a slide full of ideas for ways that I could help the town, I was missing
the most important piece: community input. And even though I have a full list
of projects to work on as decided with my counterpart agency, they didn’t come
from my townspeople. Of course, things are a little different when you’re a
Community Economic Development volunteer, and when you work for a counterpart
agency that is more business-like. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I
am doing is not “Peace Corps” as it is supposed to be. This is an existential crisis
that I am continuing to work through with my supervisor at Peace Corps, and I
hope to find a way to balance the needs of counterpart agency with the needs of
my community. And I plan to do further work on my CDS before presenting it to
my town, conducting more interviews with general people around town to ask the
simple question: how can I help you?
In doing so, I hope this will also give people a better understanding of what I
am doing here, because as the first Peace Corps volunteer in my town, I don’t
feel like people really know why I am here.
After IST I took a short vacation with some other volunteers
to chill out for a bit before returning to site, as well as take advantage of
being centrally located in Tana (which makes travel to certain areas much more
accesible.) After toying with a few ideas, we decided to head northeast from
Tana to the beach resort town of Foulpointe (say it with a French accent: fool-PWENT). Although I am lucky enough
to have a beach very close to me at site, it was the first time seeing the
Indian Ocean for a few of my inland volunteer friends. The beach at Foulpointe
is calm and swimmable thanks to a sandbar, and what I liked the most about it
is that it’s not a “vazaha” vacation
spot; rather, it’s a place where Malagasy people (albeit wealthier ones) go on
vacation. We spent a very relaxing 3 ½ days staying at cute but rustic
oceanfront bungalows, eating lots of seafood and coconut items, and splashing
around the ocean. The best part about hanging out on the beach in Foulpointe
are the plageistes that rove around
selling everything from bonbon coco (delicious
and addictive coconut cookies) and mofo
coco (fried coconut bread), to shell necklaces, little raw oysters called taky-taky, and fresh coconuts that
they’ll crack open for you and give you a straw to drink the water out of. You
can even order lunch and a cold beer from a nearby hotely and have it brought to your beach chair. So all in all, it’s
an enjoyable place to spend a few days relaxing. On our last night in Foulpointe
we all went out to a celebratory dinner at Chez Stephanie, a local French
restaurant, and then planned to have a bonfire on the beach. After dinner, I
went to get some rum and Coke to bring with a couple of friends, and on our way
back I got a phone call from another friend that delivered news that would
ultimately put dark clouds over the general sunniness of the trip: one of our
bungalows had been broken into while we were at dinner. We all raced back to
the bungalows to assess the damage, and although I was fortunate that my
bungalow wasn’t broken into, I had the bad fortune to have had my iPod charging
in the other bungalow, for the “if only…” reason that my wall charger wasn’t
working and so I needed to connect it to someone’s laptop to charge. The thief
made off with a total of 4 iPods, 3 laptops, a camera, a cell phone, about
200,000 Ariary (approximately $100), and most comically, a backpack that
contained lots of dirty underwear. So sadly, the four of us who were victims
had to spend our last day of vacation at the gendarmerie filling out reports and issuing statements, while the
others frolicked on a deserted stretch of beach and took some envy-inducing
photos that it pained me to look at.
I feel very fortunate that I only lost my iPod, and that
although my friends lost much more, none of us were hurt. Who knows what could
have happened if one of us was in the bungalow when the thief broke in? The
next morning I sat on the bungalow porch awaiting the gendarmes with one of my friends, and we both agreed at how lucky
we were to be safe and unharmed. If it’s one thing that Peace Corps service
teaches us, it’s that we all need much less stuff in our lives than we think.
At the end of the day, things are just that: things—even if they make our lives
easier. As we sat there, counting our blessings, I recounted a memory to my
friend that I had from the day I left the Training Center and began the journey
to my site. The morning sun was cresting over the hills surrounding Mantasoa as
I sat in the back of the 4x4, tears streaming out of my sunglasses-hidden, sleep-deprived
eyes as I thought of all the friendships I’d made during training, and of all
the people I’d miss seeing everyday. But I also thought of how happy I was to
be embarking on this next great step in my Peace Corps experience, and
throughout all of this I listened to a song on my iPod that reminded me so much
of those past 2 months: “Intro”, from the newest M83 album. It was one of those
moments where the song fit the moment so perfectly, and all I could think was
that no matter what happened in the coming months or years, no matter which of
my possessions were lost or stolen, no one could take this memory from me—that
moment where the sunrise met the song, and tears rolled down my cheeks to meet
a smile borne by bittersweet happiness. And so while I mourned my loss, sitting
on the bungalow porch that quiet beachside morning in Foulpointe, I reminisced on this memory, and was calmed.
