The ABCs of Peace Corps Madagascar

A few months ago I was sitting on a taxi-brousse and feeling very bored, so I started writing this out in my notebook. Special thanks to Rory and Briana for giving me additional ideas.

A is for: akoho (chicken), ariary (local currency), ambani-volo (the countryside/bush), Airtel (cell phone provider) and akondro (bananas).

B is for: beaches, biking, brochettes (kebab-like meat skewers), and bucket baths.

C is for: cats (necessary rat protection), Cipro (a miracle drug when you have dysentery), cyclones, composé (sort of like pasta salad), Castel (a type of beer), coconuts, and chocolate (what we’re always craving).

D is for: dysentery, Dzama (cheap local rum brand), Delmonaco (ubiquitous sardines beloved by most PCVs), dahalo (Malagasy version of organized crime—cattle bandits), and Dahlia’s (our favorite hotely in Farafangana).

E is for: eggs (in many places, the best protein source there is).

F is for: frip (used clothing stalls), fish, fady (cultural taboos that vary from town to town), fomba (“custom”, or way of doing things), fiangonana (church, or that thing that noisily wakes you up every Sunday), and FYFG (inside joke with my stagemates.)

G is for: giardia, Gold (beer brand), and gony sacks (how pretty much everything is packaged and transported).

H is for: hard drive (where we store and trade all the media that keeps us entertained at site), hotely (small local restaurant), “How’s Life?” (rule to live by), and Happy (Rory’s favorite cookie brand).

I is for: iPod (don’t even think of getting on a taxi-brousse without one).

J is for: jus naturel (delicious homemade juices made with local tropical fruit), Jumbo (the super-vazaha grocery store in Tana where we tend to waste all our money on peanut butter and imported food), and jirofo (cloves, aka the thing that’s currently blowing up my town with money and buyers.)

K is for: kabone (latrine/outhouse), kaza (cassava—so unhealthy but extremely easy to grow, so people eat a lot of it), and kilalaky (really annoying type of local pop music).

L is for: lemurs, lychees (fresh, and only 5 cents a bunch!), Libertalia (pirate-themed beer brand), lambas (cloth wraps worn by local women), and laoka (the side dish that goes with rice... never enough at hotelys).

M is for: moka (mosquitoes), mangoes (10 cents each), mofo (bread), mud (welcome to rainy season), and meva (the PCV transit houses in Tana, Fianar, and Diego, where we like to camp out to use wi-fi and real showers).

N is for: nap (every afternoon during the post-lunch siesta period).

O is for: omby (cow), Orange (cell phone provider), and Outcool (one of our oft-frequented bars in Tana).

P is for: parasy (sand flea that lays its eggs in human feet, which then have to be dug out), pocanelle (aka the ice cream fruit), pineapple (the sweetest you’ll ever taste), paositra (post office), peanut butter (something we’re all addicted to and stock up on in Tana), and palm trees.

Q is for: quatre-quatre (4x4, and we feel like we won the lottery when we manage to score a ride in one instead of having to take a taxi-brousse).

R is for: ranon’ampango (tea-like drink made from boiling the burnt rice at the bottom of the pot), and ravenala (endemic palm tree that is used to build houses).

S is for: Sur’Eau (chlorine solution that we use to sterilize our water and wash our produce), solar charger (vital for volunteers without electricity at site), Skol (beer brand), Smecta (diarrhea treatment), sambos (samosa-like fried snack), shrimp (so cheap!), siesta (that time every afternoon when it’s acceptable to take a nap), Skype (what we live for whenever we get on wi-fi), and Sud Est (BEST REGION EVER REGION!)

T is for: Telma (cell phone provider), tenrec (hedgehog-like animal endemic to Madagascar), THB (the most commonly found beer brand), toaka (alcohol), taxi-brousse (decrepit, overstuffed, cargo-laden vans that are our main form of transportation in this country), and tacos (what we most often cook whenever there’s a PCV get-together).

U is for: USB modems (which allow you to get online almost anywhere) and Uvita (cheap Argentinean boxed wine that is somehow available here).

V is for: vary (rice, the staple food), vanilla, voandalana (souvenirs; literally translates to ‘fruit of the road’), vazaha (white foreigner—a word that all of us hate being called because it usually means tourist/stranger, which we’re not), voalavo (rats, which are in many houses, and are the reason that I have cats).

W is for: water (something we have to fetch from a pump every day), weaving (a common handicraft), Wi-Fi (a rare luxury), and worms (something most of us contract at some point during our service).

X is for: Xavier, the Peace Corps education program director.... the other programming staff are Stan, Lucie, Hoby, Jemima, Lova, and Tovo.

Y is for: yaourt (yogurt—locally made and so good!)

Z is for: zaza kely (little kids, our constant companions and dedicated fan club), zandry (younger sibling and also used to describe newer volunteers), and zoky (older sibling, or volunteers who’ve been here the longest).

Armchair linguist

One of the most unique—and challenging—componenents of Peace Corps service is that volunteers must learn and speak the local language of where they work. This often means forgoing a country’s colonial language (often French or Spanish) and instead learning the indigenous language, which allows volunteers to work closely with people who need the most help. In Madagascar, French is the language of business and government because it was a French colony until 1960. But the majority of people here speak Malagasy on a daily basis, not French. And getting outside of larger towns and into the countryside, where fewer people have gone to lycee and almost no one has gone to university, French is rarely spoken at all. So when Peace Corps trainees arrive in Madagascar, they are given 2 months of intense Malagasy training before setting off to their sites: 1 month of learning Malagasy officiel, the standard dialect and the one that’s spoken in the highlands (the capital region), and after they learn where their site location will be, another month of either continued study of officiel, or of one of the 17 other Malgasy dialects. Each of the dialects corresponds with the tribe that has settled in a particular region of the country. In my area (Vangaindrano), most of the people are of the Antesaka tribe, so I learned the Antesaka dialect. But if you go up the road 80km north to Farafangana, you’ll be in Antefasy land, so the dialect spoken there is Antefasy. However, unlike many other African countries, the dialects are fairly similar, and most Malagasy people can understand one another, even if one person is from up north near Diego Suarez, and another person is from down south near Ft. Dauphin. My dialect (along with the other Sud Est dialects of Antefasy and Antemoro) are notable for turning all “s” sounds into “sh” sounds, a fact that some of my more northernly peers like to laugh at. (So for example, the word misy, which means “there is/there are” is pronounced “meesy” in other areas, but “meeshy” in mine.) My dialect also has a fun habit of shortening words by dropping the final syllable, especially if the word end in –na, and also boasts lots of local colloquialisms like Da ta andra? Ao ka!, which basically means “what’s up? Not much!” but would never be said anywhere outside the Vangaindrano region.

The famed naturalist Gerald Durrell writes in his book The Aye-Aye and I that “Malagasy is a fine, rackity-clackity, ringing language which sounds not unlike someone carelessly emptying a barrel of glass marbles down a stone staircase.” I don’t know if I would make that exact same colorful comparison (although Durrell certainly does have a flair for language), but I have many days when I truly do think people are rolling rocks around in their mouth. My language challenge has always been more with understanding than with speaking, and that hasn’t changed in my experience here. I’ve struggled (and continue to struggle) greatly with understanding what people are saying, and find myself frustrated on a daily basis that I can’t express myself the way that I want to.  I do have to remember, though, that I have more of an uphill battle than other volunteers, because it’s commonly remarked that language gets more difficult the further south you go, and I live in one of the most southernly towns of all the volunteers here. In the countryside towns that surround Vangaindrano, people’s accents become even thicker and their speech more rapid, which makes it incredibly difficult to understand them. Unfortunately, this is also a country that isn’t known for its dental care, so there are many people with missing or no teeth, which makes comprehension even more mind-boggling.

The Malagasy language itself is a bit of a mystery that is both a linguist’s and anthropologist’s dream: its closest relative is an Indonesian dialect spoken by one particular tribe on the island of Borneo. This gives credence to the theory that Madagascar was first settled by migrants from Indonesia, who traversed the precarious Indian Ocean on a raft for months on end. Malagasy also contains elements borrowed from Arabic, such as the days of the week and the greeting salama; this is due to the presence of Islamic traders who settled in Madagascar several hundred years ago.  And owing to the French colonial influence It also has a large number of Malagasy-fied French words. Malagasy uses no article, so words borrowed from French simply take the “le/la” and string it together with the actual word. So for example, the French for key, la clé, became lakile in Malagasy. (The alphabet does not contain the letters C, Q, U, W, and X.) La biére (beer) became labiera; la bougie (candle) became labozia. Other words are changed only slightly, such as legume, which became legioma. And a large number of French words were simply adopted wholesale, such as verre (glass), restaurant (no translation needed), and epicerie (small grocery store).

Malagasy is a comparatively easy language to learn because there are simply not that many words—one word could have 3 meanings. But this is at once both simplifying and maddening. For example, the word sahirana means “busy”, but it also means “stressed” or “worried”. So if I want to ask my counterpart if she is busy (a fairly common thing for Americans to ask in the workplace), there really isn’t a great way to do it. The all-encompassing phrase tsy mety literally means “not good”, but is also really the only way to say that someone is being rude. If I want to explain to a kid why he shouldn’t yell “vazaha!” at me, I want to be clear that it’s more than just “not ok”, it’s rude, but there literally isn’t a word for that. And the often-used word mazotoa means “good luck” or “have fun/enjoy”. But if my neighbor is on his way to take the baccalaureate exam, I don’t really want to say “enjoy the test!”—I want to wish him luck. This prevention from being specific is one of the language’s most frustrating aspects. However, my least favorite part of the language is that there is no verb “to be”. Think about how often you use some form of this verb, either in English or French, and you’ll realize how exasperating this is.

However, despite the annoyances, Malagasy does have some amusing quirks and features. I’ve written before that perhaps my favorite word in the language is mitsangatsangana, which means to take a walk for pleasure. It wasn’t until I’d spent a couple months studying Malagasy that I learned the utility behind this word, which is fairly fun. Malagasy employs a pattern whereby if you repeat the second half of a verb, it weakens it. So in the case of mitsangatsangana, it means “to sort of amble around”, whereas its parent, so to speak, is simply mitsangana, "to stand" (I guess if you're not really standing, that means walking around.) Same for the verb “to go”, mandeha, which becomes mandehadeha when you’re talking about just kind of meandering along. And one of my most frequent jokes is when people remark with surprise that I can speak Malagasy, by saying mahay miteny ‘Gasy enao!, I self-deprecatingly respond with ehhhh…. mahayhay fotsiny iaho (I can only sort of speak it), and this unfailingly causes a round of chuckles. This repetition/weaking utility is also employed with some nouns, most notably colors: the word manga mean “blue”, but mangamanga means “light blue”.

In all my struggles with the language, I try to remind myself that I’m lucky that I didn’t have to learn a new alphabet, or one of those notorious African languages with clicks and other unwritable sounds. And when I get depressed about my lack of language skills, it’s important to remember that I’ve only been studying and speaking Malagasy for a year—I spent 10 years becoming fluent in French. But above all, I’m proud to be able to (sort of) speak Malagasy because it sets me (and other PCVs) apart from your average French-speaking foreign aid worker or European tourist. It allows us to gain the trust and respect of the people of Madagascar, and well, let’s be honest: being able to blow someone’s mind by being a white person who speaks Malagasy will never get old.

My name is not "vazaha"

Note: I’ve debated about whether or not to write a blog post about this, because it could be interpreted as a rant, but today I decided to—mostly because it’s something that colors my daily life, and is a topic which can be used to illustrate some realities of life for Malagasy people.

I’ve written before about one of the challenges of being a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar is that you’re constantly telling people that you’re American, not French. The assumption by many Malagasy people is that if they see a white person, then they must be French, both because France was the former colonial power here, and the majority of tourists the island sees are French. So, the greeting that most people give a white person is “bonjour vazaha”. Or, they call out to you “eh! Vazaha!” To me and many other PCVs, the term “vazaha” is rather insulting, because it means that we are being grouped with all other white foreigners simply based on our skin color. We all work really hard to integrate within our local communities, and so being called a vazaha just like any other white person means (to me at least) that people don’t understand what you’re doing and why you’re different. I am always reminding people that I’m not a tourist, I’m not wealthy, and I’m here to help. After all, if I were a “normal” vazaha like they usually see, why would I be studying Malagasy, fetching my own water, doing my own laundry, and shopping for and cooking my own food? The goal for us PCVs in Madagascar is to be considered “Malagasy fotsy” (white Malagasy), so getting called vazaha is like a slap in the face that you’re not there yet. There are days like today when I feel like I make so much progress, where I have good conversations with the people in my neighborhood (who now know my name), and I just generally feel very Peace Corps. And then I’ll bike to work and a kid who I’ve introduced myself to 3 times already will shout “bonjour vazaha!” at me. Seriously? How many times do I need to tell you that a) I’m not French, I’m American, and b) I speak Malagasy?

The thing is, I know that for kids here, it’s hard to wrap their heads around the fact that there could even be a vazaha who isn’t French. To many of them, it’s ingrained in their heads from an early age that any time you see a white person, they are a vazaha, and you say to them “bonjour vazaha”. (They also seem to pick up the phrase “Donne-moi de l’argent” fairly young, too, because I get that a lot. Does someone tell them that dermanding money impolitely in French actually works?) I’ve literally seen, on multiple occasions, mothers teaching their babies the word “vazaha” by pointing at me. Depending on my mood that day, I’ll kindly inform them that no, my name is not “vazaha”, it’s Emily, or I’ll roll my eyes and walk away. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve responded to a kid saying “bonjour vazaha” by saying “Akory aby, tsy Frantsay iaho—Amerikana iaho.” (Hello [in my dialect], I’m not French, I’m American.) I feel like I’ve said this to every single schoolkid in my town by now, but even if I have, they still say “bonjour” to me. Today I got especially frustrated by it, because even though my town is big, you’d think word would have spread somewhat that the white woman who rides around on a bike wearing a funny helmet, and who shops in the market every day and fetches her own water, is actually American.

This weekend I tried explaining to a 17-year-old kid in my neighborhood, who is obsessed with speaking English and loves to practice with me, about why I hate being called a vazaha. (We went to the town soccer game, and the staring, laughing, shrieking, pointing, and shouting of “vazaha” just pushed me over the edge.)  However, my Malagasy is not quite at that level yet. What I want to explain to people is that when you point and shout “vazaha” at me or someone else, it means you’re only seeing them for the color of their skin. How would it make them feel if someone did that to them? But, the main difference here is that unlike America, in Madagascar people know that if your skin is white, you are not Malagasy. The idea of America and other countries where people of all difference races live together in general harmony is a pretty far-fetched idea for many people who live here.

I’d be remiss if I wrote a post on this without discussing what life is like here for Asian- and African-American volunteers. To start, for many Malagasy people it’s unfathomable that someone could be American but not look white. My African-American volunteer friends often get the assumption that they’re Malagasy (which can be a good thing), but when they say they’re American, people still ask “no, but where are you from?” The fact that you could be dark-skinned but be from America is hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around here. It’s also similar for Asian-American volunteers, who are unfortunately subject to the type of comments (“you have slanty eyes”) that would be considered horribly rude and offensive back at home, but here are just simple commentary-- not meant as an insult, just an observation. Last week on a taxi-brousse with one of my Asian-American friends, a guy kept calling her “Japonais” until I got so sick of it and snapped at him that she was American. So, for volunteers who are American but not Caucasian, they have a different set of challenges to overcome.

So, the “vazaha” issue is something that will continue to be a challenge for me at site. I can only hope that more people in my town will get to know me and I’ll cease to be as much of a novelty, but I know that I’ll never stop getting called “vazaha”. Some days it will affect me more than others, but hopefully I can turn some of these situations into opportunities to teach people about what I am doing here and how I’m different. And, that my name is Emily, not “vazaha”.