Biker chick

Several years ago I had the esteemed fortune to be visiting London and staying with my friend Jon, whose favorite hobby is riding his motorcycle. Even more fortunate was the fact that Jon invited me to take a motorcycle tour of London. So I hopped on the back, put on a helmet, and off we went for the better part of an hour, before ending at a tapas bar in Islington to get dinner with another friend. When we got off the bike, Jon told me just why he likes riding a motorcycle so much: “it clears the cobwebs out”, he said.

This is an epithet that’s stuck with me ever since, because it’s such a perfect description for the sensation of mental cleansing you feel after speeding through the open air. And recently it’s popped into my head again because that’s exactly the way I feel when I am zipping down one of the local roads on my bicycle.

I’d heard that Peace Corps gives Madagascar volunteers bikes, but didn’t think much of it until I got to site and realized just how vital a bike is, especially in the Sud Est. My house is about a 30 minute walk from the center of town (and therefore the market, the post office, the office where I work, and the taxi-brousse station). But on a bike, it takes a mere 10 minutes. And when I go to my banking town, Farafangana, I always take my bike so that I can make the quick trip to the beach for a splash in the Indian Ocean. Plus, the towns down here in the southeast are all so spread out, so not having a bike makes getting around town much more difficult.

But more than just a simple mode of transportation, I’ve realized how much joy I find in riding my bike. Maybe that it brings out a childlike sense of adventure, reminiscent of when my set of wheels was pink and had streamers on the handlebars, or maybe it’s that it provides me a vehicle for one of my favorite activities—exploring—but whatever it is, I find that I always look forward to getting in the saddle.

Recently I’ve been trying to push myself on longer and longer rides to both get in shape as well as find a fun weekend activity. My recent accomplishment involved biking 25km roundtrip on a back road to find the beach, and then biking 55km roundtrip the next day on a little jaunt with my friend Matt. I arrived home after this ride—my longest to date—feeling a sense of pleasant exhaustion and proud self-accomplishment.  The road leading out of my town, the Route Nationale 12, is paved but extremely hilly, so although it offers beautiful vistas and views of the ocean off in the distance, it’s a punishing ride. But on this trip, I managed to bike up every single hill, without stopping to walk once. (Ok sure, I had to crank the gears all the way down to make it up, but I’d rather go in ‘granny gear’ than walk.) Biking here in Madagascar, especially the southeast, has also brought some uniques challenges that I've proud to have conquered: I've had to become mahay (skilled) at adventurous routes that include biking up sandy hills and down rocky ones. To get to my house I have to bike up an extremely sandy hill, which I'm able to make it up about 60-70% of the time without stopping-- and whenever I do, it feels like a little victory.

My ultimate goal is to be able to bike 100km in one day, and I have a little more work to do to get in shape for this. But I’ve been enjoying using biking as a mode of exercise, because my hip is still messed up from marathon training and I can’t run like I used to be able to. And even more than just a form of exercise, I relish the chance the clear out the cobwebs.

Broken bridges

Sometimes you find yourself having days in Peace Corps where things feel just too easy, and then along comes something to remind you that you're living in a developing country with poor infrastructure. My latest example: two weekends ago I was in Manakara visiting some other volunteers before spending time working in my counterpart agency's office there. Two of my Manakara-dwelling fellow PCVs had just moved into an amazing new house that stands in stark contrast to most Peace Corps Madagascar houses: running water, a real kitchen, a giant living/dining area, 3 big bedrooms, plus a bathroom with a bathtub and hot water heater. I had a lovely, relaxing weekend and was generally just enjoying having some western-style amenities. It was one of those times where I almost forgot that I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer. On Monday morning I worked in the COLDIS office, which is located across the Canal des Pangalanes in an area called Manakara Be, then biked back across the bridge to meet my friends for lunch. However, when I tried to return at 2:00, I found that I couldn't. The main road leading to the bridge was crowded with motorcycles, pedestrians, trucks, and pousse-pousses (rickshaws). I was frustrated and confused by all the congestion, and fought my way through the crowd with some aggressive biking. But finally I figured out why there was so much going on: the bridge had collapsed, and half of it was lying in the river.

Oh.

I have always hated this bridge for its poor design and annoying "bike lane" that is too narrow and full of broken pilings that are guaranteed to pop your tires. In fact, I was cursing it just as I was riding over it on my way to lunch. But never did I expect it to actually break! A large truck carrying salt was apparently the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, and my boss told me that although no humans were hurt, 3 cows died as the bridge went crashing into the river. I feel incredibly fortunate that neither myself nor any other volunteers were crossing the bridge when it broke. Had I gone to lunch just an hour later, who knows what might have happened.

This section of the bridge is not supposed to be here.

Unfortunately, because this is a developing country, no one is holding their breath waiting for a replacement bridge to be built-- it will without a doubt take months, if not year. But Manakara Be is a vital part of town: not only is the COLDIS office and warehouse located there, but so are 2 of the city's 3 banks, plus the post office and the offices of the chef de region and many municipal ministries. (Plus, the town's beautiful beach is located in Manakara Be... let's not forget that.) And so in the meantime, people have found ways to get around the lack of a bridge. Many people take the somewhat risky path climbing up the broken section of the bridge and walking over by foot. And the lakana (canoe) operators who live by the canal have started doing brisk business ferrying people, bicycles, and goods across the canal, for 200 Ariary a ride. (Imagine owning an epicerie in Manakara Be and having to transport all your goods via canoe after buying them in town.) In fact, as an economic development volunteer, it's been quite intriguing to see all the little businesses that are cropping up in response to the crash. There is one guy who just started a service watching people's bikes for 200 Ariary, so they can bike to the bridge and then leave their bikes when they cross over.

View from a canoe.

It remains to be seen how the bridge collapse will affect COLDIS's business operations, but it's unfortunate because there really isn't any other bridge crossing that would allow them to transport goods by truck. And although they just sent several trucks worth of cloves to Rotterdam (via container ship at the port in Tamatave), there are still several tons remaining in the warehouse. And pretty soon it will be the clove harvest and clove buying season, when this season's crop will start coming in.

People say that Peace Corps service is about adapting to new and different obstacles, and this is definitely one of them. I probably would not be dealing with this type of infrastructure challenge if I were working in America, so this is certainly another way that my business experience is being tested and expanded.

An isle of joy

(Lyric from “Manhattan” by Ella Fitzgerald, where she sings “we’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy.” If any song whisks me away to New York, it’s this one.)

Homesickness hits me in strange and unexpected ways. This afternoon I was standing on my front steps sorting rice in my sahafa, listening to music, and suddenly I found myself with tears in my eyes, drops falling into the grains of rice as I bent my head to hide my sadness from the neighbors. It was because of the song that had just come on: Ella Fitzgerald’s “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”. Sentimental I did get, because ever since I fell for Ella’s voice as a teenager, I’ve always associated her songs with New York—even before I had the great fortune to live there—and so the music instantly swirled up a cloud of memories in my head. It was a pastiche of classic New York-iana: cocktails at Café Carlyle and the Oak Room; movies at the Paris Theatre; a crosstown walk through Central Park; a screechy subway ride over the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset; a moment of calm amidst the midtown crush in the reading room at the New York Public Library. I stepped back inside my house, closed the door, and allowed myself a few private minutes to shed tears over the city that I once called home.

I’ve only experienced a handful of bouts of truly impactful homesickness, because in general, I am happy and content with the choice I’ve made to live in Madagascar for 2 years. But each time I’ve found myself felled by homesickness, it’s been over New York-- not Vermont, the place where I grew up, and would be more considered my “home”. But New York is the city where I truly felt like I grew into myself, and made the most progress towards being the person I want to be. If anything has been made clear in my 6 months in Madagascar, it’s just how much I love the city, and how much of an indelible mark it has left on me.

I’m in a somewhat different position of the majority of other volunteers in that, as a friend put it, I “had a life” before joining the Peace Corps. (And oh, what a life it was.) So the difference between me and other volunteers is that coming here meant making a swift and decisive identity change. I’m no longer a city gal walking to the office every morning and switching into high heels from an under-desk collection, getting morning coffee at Balthazar, ordering groceries from FreshDirect from my iPhone and having them delivered to my door, going out for burgers and bloody Marys at Minetta Tavern, and then sweating it all off at Equinox and Physique 57. Certainly my time in the Peace Corps has reinforced for me just how privileged my existence was. Of course, this is an existence that I worked very hard to achieve, but here, hard work has been redefined. And of course, before coming here I certainly knew how things would be different, but there are times when I feel such a painful burst of love and longing for the city, and I wonder how I am ever going to make it until 2014. (And I was not helping matters last month by rewatching my old high school favorite show Felicity—all the scenes set in Dean & Deluca made me really crave a good latte!) I know that the city will be there waiting for me when I return, and with good fortune I’ll get into Columbia Business School and will be able to move back in fall of 2014. But that doesn’t stop me missing it now, especially since August has turned into September, and I reminisce on the ephemeral beauty of New York in autumn, air as crisp as its namesake apple, yet buzzing with life and promise as the city revs itself up again after the end of the lazy summer.

If you’ve ever been a New Yorker, you know the one constant that applies nearly all over the world: as soon as you say “I live(d) in New York”, people instantly classify you as a certain type of citified, cultured, probably-over-caffeinated urbanfolk. Being able to say that you’ve lived in New York is a unique type of social currency, but it’s one that doesn’t really have reach where I’m currently living. When people ask where I lived in America, and I give them my answer, there usually isn’t much spark of recognition. However, I am fortunate to have a Malagasy friend in my town who not only lived in Paris, but also in New York (talk about an extraordinary life). I recently ran into him after we both returned to Vangaindrano after traveling for many weeks. After talking about being in the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, we both agreed that we much preferred the beautiful landscape of the Sud Est to the dirty, smoggy city of Tana. And I said to him, “you know what? We both lived in the greatest city in the world. How could any other city compare?”

All the sand in all the seas

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.  

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.