When in Madagascar, do as the Malagasy do

As I near the 7 month mark here at site, I’ve gotten to establish a fairly good daily routine, which has helped me to feel at home here. Because some of you have expressed interest in what daily life is like here, here’s a description of my day-to-day routine is.

First of all, when you live somewhere without very much electricity, life’s daily rhythm tends to revolve around the daylight. Right now it’s dark here by around 6:30PM, and people are in their homes for the night as this point, cooking dinner and spending time with family. Even though I have electricity (usually) at my house, I like to be home by 5pm, because otherwise the roads are very dark. By 8:30pm I’ve usually taken a bucket bath in my ladosy (outdoor shower hut), eaten dinner, and washed the dishes, and then I spend the next couple hours checking email on my laptop (I have a USB modem, but I pay by the megabyte so I have to use it sparingly), reading, writing, or watching a movie on my laptop. I’m usually tired and in bed by 10 or 10:30, which is obviously a huge change from my night owl ways back in the US!

In the mornings I wake up around 7, although my neighbors are usually up and making noise by 5 or 5:30 (when they start banging around I usually put in earplugs to prolong my sleeping time.) For breakfast I alternate making oatmeal (thanks to people’s generous care packages!) and coffee at home, or going to my local mofo (fried bread) stand and having mofo balls and coffee there, eating while standing up and chatting with my neighbors.  When I eat at home, I usually have a leisurely breakfast and read a few pages of The Economist, my subscription to which my mom has graciously been forwarding a few issues at a time. Then after breakfast I clean up and get dressed, slather on sunblock, and do some work at home on my computer, or bike to the COLDIS or TIAVO office. I try to work in the office of one of my two counterpart agencies every day, although at this point my work projects are still taking shape. For COLDIS, a collective that buys spices and exports them abroad, I am starting to work on a sustainability project (more on that in a separate blog post); for TIAVO, a microfinance organization, I am hoping to work with some of their clients to do business consulting and advising on credit usage.

One big facet of life here is the sieste, the 2+ hour break in the middle of the day when offices and schools are closed and no one works.  Part of the reason is the heat, but another reason is that students and workers go home to eat lunch. Things close up between 11:30 and 12, and most offices and banks reopen between 2 and 3. They close down again by 4:30 or 5, so as you can see, the workday is not like your typical American one. Usually I go into the market after the office closes at 11:30, in order to pick up food for that day’s lunch and dinner. Then I bike home to cook and fetch water, and then I usually do a bit of reading or studying before heading back to work, or working on a project at home.

On the weekends I am a bit more leisurely and tend to spend either Saturday or Sunday at home, cleaning my house, reading or watching movies, or hanging out with the local kids who drop by to draw pictures or goof around. I always spend one weekend morning entirely devoted to doing laundry, which takes about 2 hours, and I also like to go for a long bike ride every weekend to keep in biking shape. This weekend my plan is to ride to my friend’s site, Lopary, which is 21km north on a very hilly road. Because I’ve been traveling and not biking every day I am definitely out of shape right now, so 21km is going to be a “long” ride for me right now!

So that, in a nutshell, is what daily life is like here in my town. When my brother was just here visiting, with him slightly incredulous at how early I wanted to go to bed every night, I was reminded on just how different my routine is from how it was back home. It was a bit surprising to realize how much I have adjusted my lifestyle and internal clock to the rhythm of life here. But as they say, when in Rome—or in this case, when in Madagascar…

Let's go to the beach, beach

[Lyric from "Starships" by Nicki Minaj-- which is a silly song to be quoting, but it's a favorite among the Sud Est volunteers, so it's very evocative of Peace Corps for me!]

I remember it distinctly, the day during training when we found out where we’d be serving as Peace Corps volunteers: our trainers put blindfolds on us then walked us to the basketball court at the PCTC, where a map of Madgascar had been painted, in order to place us on the map, literally, where we’d be serving. I remember whipping off the blindfold, looking down at where my feet had been placed, and exclaiming “I’m going to the beach!” Being close to the ocean wasn’t something that had been on the top of my priority list for site placement, but when it became my reality, I couldn’t deny my happiness. (Ironically, I had originally wanted to be close to either Tana or Fianar, and had specifically not wanted to be in the Sud Est, but it’s funny how much I now love being here, and do not like the Tana/Fianar regions!) A couple of our trainers that week were Sud Est volunteers, and they both told me how awesome my town was, and that it was about 10km from the ocean. And so ever since I got to site, I had wanted to find out exactly how to get there from my house. Sure, I go to the beach all the time when I’m in Farafangana or Manakara, but with the Indian Ocean so temptingly close to my actual home, I was dying to explore how to get there. My friend Matt was in Vangaindrano a couple weeks ago helping me with my painting project, and when I suggested we take the afternoon off from painting in order to go explore how to get to the ocean, he was game.

To get to the Indian Ocean from Vangaindrano, you essentially just follow the Mananara River, which forms the northern border of my town, all the way as it winds its way eastward and spills out into the ocean. So we set off in the direction of the river and followed alongside it as best we could. At first this took us on what was little more than a cow path, but soon it opened up and became an actual road. We kept riding east as the river hugged the tanam-bary, crossing rickety wooden bridges and traversing rock-studded roads. As we went we’d keep asking people “aiza ny ranomasina?” (where is the ocean?), and they’d keep pointing us in the right direction. After about 45 minutes of biking the road began to close up, lushly vegetated on either side by thick clusters of banana trees. And soon after that, I cried out “I see the horizon!”

The road spills into the small village of Ampatsinakoho, dead-ending at the small ravinala huts that fringe the shore. Crowds of small children encircled us and our bikes as we introduced ourselves and asked the name of the town where we were. And then I looked past the huts and saw it: the Indian Ocean, at last. Even though I’d seen it multiple times already, this felt like my beach, in my town, and so it took on an even more special meaning. The beach was crowned with rows up rows of wooden lakanas (canoes) used for fishing, and we had the good fortune to be able to watch a craftsman working on carving a new lakana out of a tree. In order to get in a bit of swimming we hopped back on our bikes and headed south along the shore, biking on top of a grassy knoll that framed the sandy beach below. After a quick jump in the water to cool off after an hour-long bike ride, jumping around in the now-familiar massive Indian Ocean waves, Matt and I sat on a dessicated tree to soak up the absolute peacefulness that this beautiful, deserted spot offered us. I sat and watched the horizon line off in the distance, trying to figure out why there were waves breaking so far off shore. I finally wondered out loud, and then to our astonishment, we realized that what we were looking at was not waves: we were seeing humpback whales, cresting out of the ocean and landing back in the water with a splash to rival the biggest wave out there.

We sat there for a little while longer as I tried to absorb everything around me. I luxuriated in the calm satisfaction of finally reaching my goal of finding the beach from my town, and in the magnificent reward the journey brought me. And I reflected gleefully, with an innate sense of wonder, just how lucky I am to live here. I don’t think it will ever get old.

Ambani-volo adventure

A couple days ago I found myself at a crossroads, literally. I was embarking on my first “business trip”, Peace Corps-style, and was due to go out to the ambani-volo (rural countryside) town of Masianaka to work with the clove farmers. My counterpart and I made plans to take a morning taxi-brousse on Wednesday, work on Thursday, and head back on Friday. As this was to my first time working directly with the farmers, and the start of a new sustainability project that I’m rather excited about, I was nervously anticipating the trip.

But things, as often happens in Peace Corps, didn’t go according to plan. I was sitting on the brousse waiting for my counterpart to show up and meet me, when suddenly my phone rang: it was him, saying that he was stuck working in the office but that I should go, and that he would meet me in Masianaka the next day. So I went, and bounced along the backcountry roads for 2 hours when an idea popped into my head: if my counterpart wouldn’t be joining me until Thursday mid-morning, it would be incredibly boring to be in a small town alone for 24 hours with nothing to do. My friend Leo’s site, Matanga, is somewhat close to Masianaka, and I’ve been trying to go see his site for ages. Certainly, if I just went straight to Masianaka I’d have plenty of time to get my work done in preparation for the presentation to farmers, as well as some time to explore the area and see the ocean. But on the other hand, I’d be alone in an unfamiliar (albeit tiny) town. Perhaps it would be safer for me to spend the night in Matanga at Leo’s house? And I’d been trying to meet up with Leo to catch up for ages, and like 2 ships passing in the night, we just keep missing each other, either when he’s in my town or I’m in our banking town. Plus I happened to be carrying a letter for him that arrived at our shared PO box in Vangaindrano, so it would be good for me to deliver his mail. And so I made the split decision to go to Matanga, which marked my fifth attempt to go visit Leo—but in this case, the fifth time’s the charm!

When we got to the fork in the road where you can either go to Matanga or Masianaka, I abruptly told the brousse driver that I’d changed my plans and wanted to get off there. Somewhat bewildered, he nevertheless stopped the brousse and helped me unload my bike from the roof, which I’d brought because I was planning to bike back to Vangaindrano from Masianaka (about 35km.) So I strapped on my helmet, saddlebags, and backpack and set off on the 10km towards Matanga, with a plan that I would surprise Leo, spend the night there, and then set off for Masianaka early in the morning, which would allow me to be there in time to meet my counterpart.

Instantly I was treated with a taste of the road conditions to come: the first stretch of road was an incredibly rocky downhill slope. But then the road forked again, and although there was a sign, it didn’t say “Matanga this way”—it said something in Malagasy that I didn’t understand. I asked a passerby which way to go, and he said right, so once again, off I went, and was met by even more challenging rocky downhills. My bike was misbehaving and kept fishtailing due to the weight of my saddlebags, which made it even more of a difficult ride. I stopped to pump more air into my tires and wondered to myself, did I just make an incredibly stupid decision? Here I was biking on a bad road with no cell phone reception, going to a town with no cell phone reception, and only the brousse driver and the other passengers heard me say I was going to Matanga. But, the deed was gone, so I kept going, all the while cursing myself as I kept being faced with more and more challenging stretches of road: rock-studded uphills, incredibly rutted downhills, and just generally terrible conditions: this is officially the worst road I have ever seen in my life. Every time I was greeted with another impossible rocky hill I swore out loud and hopped off my bike to walk up it, in a bid to save my tires as well as my hips. Of course, the benefit of all those hills is that they afforded absolutely gorgeous vistas, so I did in fact stop to smell the roses. But every passing minute made me more and more angry with the ride, which was definitely longer than 10km-- although there were no route markers so I had no way of knowing, which was incredibly maddening. My head was a boiling kettle of anger and frustration, which only intensified when passersby would tell me I still wasn’t near Matanga yet.

Finally, 2 sweaty hours later, the road opened up into an actual, somewhat developed town, and when I saw the sign for a school that read “Matanga” I just about passed out from the relief. After asking a few people for directions, I found the right house, and by exclaiming “surprise!”, woke a very confused Leo up from a midafternoon nap.

After I recounted my journey and my commitment to never, ever do that bike ride again, Leo figured out what had happened. “Ohhhh you took the bad road!”, he said. Apparently it doesn’t actually need to take 2 hours to go about 14km—there is, in fact, a better road that is actually 10km to Matanga—it was the other road at the second fork. And the sign that I couldn’t understand? It says “don’t take this road unless you have a 4x4!” Um, yeah, that’s quite a warning. I was furious with myself for not taking the other route, but it made for a good story when Leo was introducing me around town. We spent the day hanging out, cooking dinner, and just generally catching up, before turning into bed early—I was planning to head out at 6:30am to do the 25km ride to Masianaka, but this time on the “good” road!

And so the next day, after some mofo balls and coffee, I took off in the cool morning air. My first challenge was the “bridge” (or should I say, lack thereof) just outside of town. Leo surmised that the kid giving me directions probably told me to go the way he did because the bridge on the “good” road is broken, and is only passable by walking a bike over it. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but followed Leo’s instructions to dismount, walk my bags across, and then come back for my bike. As I carried my bags over walking on a single plank, my fear of heights resurfaced, and I was terrified at the thought of both having to cross over it again, as well as carry my bike across it and cross it one more time. Thankfully, a nice man saw me struggling and carried my bike across in a 5 second trip, making me feel quite untalented. And so once again, I set off, and although there were definitely some rocky hills that I needed to walk up, I made much better time: it took me about an hour to do the 10km to the fork in the road, and then another hour to ride the 13km south to Masianaka. The second section of road was mostly blissfully flat, and a few kilometers south of the fork it becomes the town of Nosy Omby (“Cow Island”, though it’s more of an inlet than an island) with gorgeous views in the distance of the Indian Ocean, sun twinkling off the water in all its glory.

I arrived in Masianaka mid-morning and found a place to rent a bungalow for the night. Masianaka is a very small town, and most of its reason for being is the fact that it’s home to a ferry crossing that anyone driving south to Ft. Dauphin needs to take. With only a few hotelys and one epicerie, there isn’t much going on. There’s no electricity, no cell phone reception, and no water pumps anywhere in town. And so when I asked the proprietress if there was anywhere I could take a bucket bath, she said there was a place “over there” and pointed off in the distance. Her daughter offered to take me, and off we went along with 2 other girls. What I thought might be a quick trip ended up being a 20-minute walk through the tanam-bary (rice fields) and towards the ocean: the “place to bathe” is actually a natural freshwater pool on the beach. It was a beautiful walk and I was thrilled to be standing on the beach, but I declined to bathe there after seeing two of the girls pull down their pants and pee directly in the water.

I went back to my tiny little hut and managed to clean enough of the biking grime off of me using baby wipes that I’d luckily brought (thanks to Bridget and Shelly for sending them—you have no idea how useful they were!), and after changing into “work” clothes, I finished writing notes for the talk I wantd to give the farmers. And then I set about waiting for my counterpart. And waiting. And waiting. I luckily had a book with me, and spent the better part of a day sitting around outside reading and looking at any arriving car or taxi-brousse to see if he was on it. Sadly, he never showed. I was ready to give up and get a ride back to Vangaindrano when it started to get dark, and I actually saw a car with 2 of my TIAVO coworkers pass through town. When I told them what happened they offered to give me a ride home, but when I said that I had a bike with me, they realized they had no way to strap it to the car. Damn. So night fell and after eating another rice-and-fish meal, I went back to my bungalow to turn in for the night, praying that it was not a place that rats liked to frequent. 

I fell asleep listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the beach, and luckily didn’t hear any rat activity. I woke up early today and after downing 6 small bananas, set off on the road to Vangaindrano. It was a pleasant ride, probably the more so because I was so happy to be getting home, and I covered about 34km (on a fairly bad road) in approximately 2 hours and 45 minutes. The best part of the ride was the fact that I beat the pickup truck that was leaving Masianaka around the same time and had offered me a ride, which I declined because a) I fixed the issue with my bike, and b) the driver was being an condescending, misogynistic d-bag by implying that I couldn’t possible know what to do with a bike because I was a girl. (The best feeling was when I zoomed past him and gave him a big “eff you” smile in the process.)

The first thing I did when I got to Vangaindrano was stop at the office to find my counterpart and ask, essentially, why the hell did he leave me out there alone? He said that instead of going to Masianaka on Thursday morning as he’d said on the phone, he ended up going Wednesday afternoon. And when he got there and asked around, people told him that I’d gone to Matanga, so he assumed I wasn’t coming and went to a different town to do work. He said he passed through Masianaka on Thursday and people said I wasn’t there, but that doesn’t make sense to me because I was there from 9am onwards. (I could have been misunderstanding him though, because I’m still working with a language barrier.) When I got home, I was a heady mix of emotions: happiness and relief to be back at my house, anger and frustration at the fact that I had wasted 3 days and a lot of money, disappointment that I went all the way out there for nothing, but also pride in the fact that I conquered that road by bike. I’m not sure when I’m go back out to Masianaka, but it’ll probably have to be soon because the project needs to get started. Whenever it is, though, next time I am not going alone!

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.