Ambohimahamasina, Part 1: Journey and Arrival (6/20)

So we left for Ambohimahamasina Sunday afternoon, more or less around 2pm (as planned). Packed everything into the back of the rugged Land Rover-esque vehicle. Francesca and I commented that you really don’t realize what a car, or even a taxi-brousse-like van, is capable of until you put it on atrocious uneven, unpaved roads and steep inclines. At first when we got here I had to close my eyes when we drove in certain areas – surely we wouldn’t be able to drive there without tipping over! But now I’m used to it: you have to figure your driven knows what he’s doing, as he’s been getting around just fine his whole life here!
Our driver took us first to his place to pick up his bag, then to Raïssa’s (who is in charge of sanitation projects with Ny Tanintsika) to pick up her and her 9-month-old baby Ephraim, who has a fantastic laugh. Raïssa said she normally wouldn’t bring him to the field, but she’s still in the process of looking for a new nourrice (wet nurse) to look after him.
After picking up Raïssa and Ephraim we stopped for gas at a Jovenna station; I stared straight ahead stoically as the station attendants peered curiously through the windows at my whiter-than-ever face (it’s always so cloudy here! I’m convinced I’ll come back to the US whiter than when I left!). I was riding shotgun, but Raïssa had warned me that this was only temporary; “on sera quatre” (“we will be four”) in the back. I hoped this meant Francesca, me, her, and the baby.
Next we stopped by the Fianar taxi-brousse station to pick up Pierre Louis, a French intern, who got to sit shotgun for the drive because he was “wide,” according to Raïssa – by Malagasy standards, not American, that is! I moved back to the back.
But then we stopped at another gas station to pick up Paul (another NT team member, and Raïssa’s baby’s father, I think), who joined us in the back. Four adults and one baby (who alternated between Raïssa’s and Paul’s laps) – needless to say, a bit of a squeeze! And all without seatbelts (let alone a carseat for the baby), I might add!
The drive was beautiful: hills, mountains, valleys, streams, rice paddies, green with red earth. A flash of a waterfall. Over bridges (the only time the driver ever slowed down! I’m pretty sure there are no road rules here…). As we got father and farther away from Fianar, I felt a sense of elation, the thrill of the road and adventure in the air. The past few weeks of back-and-forth between the house and the office right next to each other had given both Francesca and I a bit of cabin fever; now, it felt so good to be out and seeing new things!
We stopped at a panoramic spot so the men could relieve themselves – alas, again, the limits of female anatomy!
After about an hour’s drive we stopped in Ambalavao, the last major town before our destination (another 1½+ hour’s drive away), for dinner at Chez Mamidà Hotely, a tiny little hole in the wall with three tables and benches. A group of singers was practicing in a back room. Everything on the menu consisted of rice with some sort of meat. Hilarious. Francesca and I were still wary of food we didn’t cook ourselves, so I abstained (remembering my Nutella and peanut butter sandwich waiting for me in the car), while Francesca attempted to order just a bowl of rice.
Just rice? Nothing else? Nothing with it? No, you can’t just order rice. “Just rice” is not on the menu… They actually found Francesca’s request for “just rice” to be stranger than my abstention!
Finally they negotiated something and Francesca got her bowl of plain white rice. The others were served rice with an accompanying bowl of chicken or pork in broth. Raïssa fed baby Ephraim little spoonfuls of brothy rice with little torn up bits of chicken. Bowls of dark brown liquid arrived soon thereafter. Coffee? I wondered. Of course not: it was ranon'ampango, Malagasy rice water, freshly made from boiling water in the rice pot filled with stuck-on burnt rice (in this case, very burnt!).
We were soon back on the road again, and began our climb into the hills as night fell. We passed fewer and fewer small villages, and it became harder to see the scenery. The road was very rough, with deep crevasses in the dirt from where water flowed. The driver tended to try and straddle them with the car, but sometimes we dipped down into them a bit, causing us all to get bumped a bit in the back. Ephraim, once so giggly and well-behaved, began to scream, and kept it up for much of the rest of the drive. Sometimes as we drove I could see people walking along the side of the road, illuminated like ghosts in our headlights. I got lost in my own thoughts, watching the seemingly endless road.
Finally, we arrived in Ambohimahamasina in total darkness. We got out of the car with our backpacks and waited for further instruction. We had no idea where we were staying – none whatsoever. Our boss had kind of left out those details…So we had come prepared for anything – including our own pot to cook in and our own spoons to eat with! I had packed a jar of peanut butter, and was fully mentally prepared to survive on just that if it came down to it!
As seems to be the case with all our adventures here in Madagascar, everything always turns out better than you expect. Romain, a French intern with Ny Tanintsika who’s been here for over a year, came out of one of the buildings – although he had not been expecting us, we, along with Pierre Louis, would be staying chez lui. We climbed up a ladder to the second-floor balcony of a building, walked around to the other side, and entered a small candlelit room (there is only electricity for one hour a day, 6-7pm, in Ambohimahamasina, and no outlets). Inside there was a girl who greeted us in perfect English – I recognized her as Gaia, one of the British med students Ambinina had spoken of. She is Sri Lankan, but grew up in Dubai and was educated in Canada and the UK; she just finished med school and is back in Madagascar for a few more weeks, until mid-July. She and Romain are living here in Ambohimahamasina: Romain working for NT on Projet Pailles, Gaia teaching English to high-schoolers and tour guides, as well as teaching some family planning. Although we were unexpected guests, we were welcomed without hesitation.
Romain began to cook, and although I was still imbued with paranoia induced by too many Princeton Travel Health meetings, I gave in to my hunger. Red rice (particular to the Betsileo region, and a welcome change to boring old white rice; plus it has more nutrients!), des breds (a sort of Chinese leafy green vegetable, served in Madagascar boiled in lots of water to be poured over rice), and a tomato and green pepper sauce that Romain called fritanga, one of his pied-noir (French Algerian, before the Algerian Independence) grandmother’s recipes.
Afterwards, for dessert, dark chocolate and a fresh pineapple, cut in front of us on the table. This pineapple put all other pineapples I’ve eaten in my life to shame – literally, it was as if every other pineapple I’d ever eaten had just been some weak imitation of the fruit we tasted that night. It was succulently sweet, not acidic at all (usually in the States I can only eat a maximum of 3 pieces without killing off the feeling in my tongue), and you could even eat the center (usually too hard to enjoy in pineapples bought in the states). Romain and Gaia get these golden miracles directly from the growers, who live nearby.
Before and during dinner, the five of us (Romain, Gaia, Pierre Louis, Francesca, and I) had one of those wonderful conversations that only occurs when you get together a bunch of young traveler/expats from all over the world. We spoke in both French and English, switching back and forth based on our moods and abilities; everyone was understood. We discussed cultural differences, international politics, education systems, pop culture, everything – all by candlelight in good company over good food. It’s moments like these when you’re reminded that you don’t just travel to see new places: meeting other travelers and foreigners is one of the best parts of traveling, too.
After dinner we washed our faces and brushed our teeth outside on the balcony using buckets of water: two clean water buckets with a small cup to scoop, and a dirty water bucket for soapy water and spitting out toothpaste. I saw nearby where Romain had put dinner’s dirty dishes, which would be washed in the morning, once the sun came up. I came to a stunning realization: you really can manage just fine without running water!
BUT, before going to sleep that night I finally had to face my greatest fear: the squat toilet. Romain’s bathroom is outside and a little ways behind the building. It looks like a small shed with four doors. The two on the right are the toilets for the whole village, while the two on the left are for Romain, and can be opened only by key. One is a shower space (literally, just where you take your bucket when you want to bathe) and the other is the dreaded latrine. There’s a hole in the ground and a place to indicate where to put your feet. Some of you reading this are probably thinking I’m being overdramatic, others are probably sympathizing. In any case, please don’t judge – I had never done this before! There’s something very disconcertingly natural about a squat toilet – like you’re forced to face the fact that, much as we’d like to forget it, we humans are still animals. But alright, it wasn’t so bad. For me, anyways. Francesca, unfortunately, made us all aware of a potential peril of squat toilets, though: she lost one of her shoes down the hole!

So what am I actually doing here?, and Why I went to Ambohimahamasina...

The original assignment given to us by our boss was to read all of Ny Tanintsika’s past project reports and come up with some sort of report evaluating the success of these projects and what the organization could do in the future. Sounds simple enough, right?
Our first two weeks here were spent reading past project reports, and it soon became apparent that this vague report-writing task was not going to work out. First of all, the organization has about 20-30 past projects, each one with 2-4 50-page project reports. These reports are written in detailed and technical French (I’ve learned the necessary vocabulary to talk about mutual health insurance, well-drilling, latrine-building, and basket-weaving), and do a very good job of self-evaluation, discussing in detail difficulties encountered and suggestions for future projects. So why does Ny Tanintsika need two vasa (foreigners), here for only two months, telling them what to do?
We proposed a new idea: we could focus on one of the projects that we had already read about: namely, that of “Projet Paille: La vannerie pour la vie et l’environnement” (“Project Straw: Basket-weaving for life and the environment”).
It’s a project that has created an association of basket-weaving ateliers called Soamiray (SOO-mee-rye). Basket-weaving is a craft practiced by all Malagasy women in rural areas, allowing them to produce household items for their own families as well as for sale in local markets, which allows them to bring in some extra income, especially needed during la période de soudure (the hungry season, which comes right before the harvest). Soamiray organizes some of the best weavers into small ateliers that can take on larger orders and improve the quality of the items produced, hopefully earning higher prices in the market; some items even go to boutiques in Tana and abroad. Ny Tanintsika is working with Soamiray to improve the organization of these small workshops and the quality of their work, as well as improving the quality of life of the weavers and their families, in areas like sanitation (building hygienic latrines, digging wells with uncontaminated water) and healthcare (teaching family planning, starting up some sort of health insurance mutual).
But along the way there have been many bumps in the road. For one thing, these women have been used to weaving in the privacy of their own homes, doing things their own way: now they have to get used to showing up to the atelier on time (when the Malagasy sense of time is decidedly non-Western) and learning the importance of quality norms and using standard measurements to ensure a uniform product. There is difficulty getting people to show up consistently, as sick children, the agricultural calendar and local holidays, and the elaborate funeral traditions of the rural areas can all get in the way. So can jealous husbands, who don’t like their wives traveling to the periodic meetings that the weavers are required to attend. Ny Tanintsika is also trying to get the women to stop using the Pandanus plant as a raw material, as it is a native endangered species. Instead, NT is encouraging the cultivation of alternative materials like vinda and forona, and the use of natural dyes (although they still have to use chemical dyes to produce red and green). The results of NT’s efforts have varied by atelier, but overall the trend is motion in the right direction.
Additionally, there has been cooperation with FIZAM, a local solidarity tourism office, which leads treks through the mountains to these rural villages. Tourists can go to the ateliers, watch the women weave, purchase items, even learn to weave themselves! Each village has a hebergeur who provides simple lodging and traditional meals – a truly one-of-a-kind experience for tourists who want to travel far off the beaten path.
So what do Francesca and I, two American vasa only in Madagascar for two short months, have to offer to NT/Soamiray’s Projet Paille? We can look for new markets for Soamiray’s products; with our French and English language skills and two MacBook computers, we can do a lot of online research and find new places to sell these beautiful woven baskets, hats, and other items, both here in Madagascar (perhaps not just boutiques: how about hotel lobbys? Local tourism offices?), and abroad (France, the UK, and the US). We can find out about the possibility of Soamiray joining a Fair Trade Organization, which could get its products to fair trade/worldshop boutiques abroad (like Ten Thousand Villages in the US). We can get the word out about the solidarity tourism opportunities: make sure English language guidebooks know about the place, maybe contact travel magazines, see if they’d be willing to do a feature. And even if none of these efforts leads to something concrete this summer – there are still internal problems that NT and Soamiray have to deal with – we can leave all this information in a report for NT to use when Soamiray has matured enough and is ready for new opportunities.
We pitched this idea to our new boss Nathalie (Sam has returned to the UK to have her baby), and she liked it. Now, driven by a more focused purpose and a project we are actually excited about, Francesca and I are looking forward to the next month and a half – we feel like we actually have something to contribute, and at the same time we will learn so much!
After accepting our pitch, Nathalie said there was a fast-approaching opportunity for us to go into the field and see Soamiray in action. We would travel to rural Ambohimahamasina (pronounced “ambo-ma-MASH-nah”) with some field agents on Sunday, June 20th and stay there until Thursday. We would talk to the field agents, visit the ateliers, see firsthand what was going on, the things that technical project reports simply can’t communicate to you. We didn’t really have details of where we would be staying or who we would be answering to… But then again, IIP internships are not known for their specificity; come what may, we trust and brace ourselves for whatever lies ahead!

Variation on a theme of “Patates malgaches”

The other day Charles the office guard (who, by the way, is now guarding during the day; he and the other guard switch off every week who guards at night and who guards during the day) said he had some “patates malgaches” for us to buy, since we had liked the first ones he brought us so much (see earlier post about “patates malgaches” and manioc). We bought a bag of them from him, uncooked. While the first ones we tried had been purple on the outside (although Charles called them “les rouges”, whitish on the inside, these were “les jaunes,” pale brown on the outside, yellow on the inside.
Hungry, we went back to our house and immediately cooked them for lunch. Or rather, I washed them in chlorine, then cooked them for lunch. Sure enough, they tasted just like “les rouges” – that is to say, delicious.
Francesca has been frying regular potatoes lately, which we bought last week, in addition to plantains, so when she went to do it again the other night, I proposed we try to fry the sweet “patates malgaches” in the hopes of achieving something like a sweet potato fry. Never having fried anything in my life (no pot of boiling oil has ever been seen in the Shaw-Champion home in my twenty years of life!), I left this to Francesca. She peeled and sliced them (uncooked) with some difficulty – they seem harder and tougher than regular potatoes, very fibrous at the ends. But they fry up just fine – yum!

The Kids! : Malagasy Children

Malagasy children are adorable. There is no denying it. They’re everywhere and they just are.
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In Tana (the capitol) there were a lot of children begging, and heartbreaking as it might be, you had to say no – you don’t want to teach children to expect handouts from every foreign-looking person they see.
Here in Fianar, things are better. The children either go to Malagasy schools where they learn some French, or French schools (taught entirely in that language). The French school kids wear little blue smocks over their clothes, and you see them coming home from school in the afternoons for lunch (remember: 2-hour lunch breaks for all!). Some are fascinated by our appearances (not only are we non-Malagasy, but we are also taller than the average man here!); some like to show off their knowledge of English by saying “Hello!” with a big grin.
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Two children, cousins, live next door to us and are always playing in our yard. Antonio is eleven, very tall and skinny, and speaks good French. He told me he studies everything in school: French, English, German, science, technology, math. He likes it all. I asked him to teach me some Malagasy, pointing at things around the yard: “leaf,” “rock,” “flower,” “dog.” Every word had so many syllables! The only one I retained was something like “AH-la”: spider.
Enola is eight and adorable, with short black curls; she sets out her dolls and bears in the yard and “cooks” food for them and her scruffy little white dog, Pitou. She loves hiding calling my name and waiting for me to look around the yard for her.
A few days into our friendship with the kids, things got a little out of hand. Antonio and Enola and friends decided it was great fun to bang incessantly on the door of our house and yell until we came to see who it was, then run away. And repeat. And when we caught on and started ignoring them, undeterred, they climbed through the bushes in front of our kitchen window and starting making faces at us thee. Francesca had to go out and yell at them twice, threatening to tell their mother. Things got a lot quieter after that! Shy and ashamed, it took a few days of our friendly hellos to get them to smile again.
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But on the whole, the children here are very well behaved. I’m especially impressed with Charles (one of the office guards) and his wife’s four daughters [see picture]. The day I brought Charles’ wife my laundry, they were all there, taking care of each other as their mother did laundry and cleaned the office (using a bristly brush that she puts her foot on top of to scrub the floors in a sort of dance!). The baby (8 months old) was splashing water in a plastic tub and laughing. Nearby the oldest (probably around age twelve) was helping the second youngest (age four?) comb and braid her hair; the second oldest (age eight?) was busy on her own hair. I said “Bonjour” and they smiled shyly. I came back later with my camera to take pictures of my laundry hanging from the office’s second floor, and asked their mother if it was alright to take a few pictures of the girls. The second oldest was bold, smiling wide, and moving the shy second-youngest to pose as she sucked on her fingers warily. But when I showed them the first few pictures I had taken, something about seeing their own faces on the little screen broke the ice. Smiles all around! The oldest held the baby and all of them smiled. The second-oldest grabbed her jump-rope and started skipping, everyone started laughing. “Sautez, sautez, tout le monde saute!” (“Jump, jump, everybody jump!”) I said as I jumped too, which produced this shot [see above, click to enlarge], my favorite of the day. Their mother came downstairs to the yard, and I was able to take a family picture of mother and daughters; I promised to send them copies when I got back to the US.
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I did, however, see something the other day that made me really sad. As we shopped in the market, I saw a little boy, probably around eight or nine, hand some money to a vendor in exchange for two cigarettes. Cigarette consumption by minors in Africa is not a total shocker to me – last summer in France I read an article in Time magazine about how the next big market for tobacco is Africa, where cigarettes are taken out of the package and sold individually. This means that buyers don’t get a chance to read the warning label on the package – that is, if they could read in the first place. Granted, this child could have been buying for a parent, but the just the fact that he could buy, as easily as a piece of candy, something so dangerous (not to mention wasteful – such a terrible way to spend money, especially if you’re already one of the poorest of the poor) was harrowing. As is the fact that Big Tobacco is aware of this growing market (growing literally – as birthrates are high in developing countries) and plans to profit off of lack of education in these countries – well, that’s downright disgusting.
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But what’s impressed me the most about the children here in Madagascar is how little they need to be happy. No fancy toys, no GameBoy or PlayStation or Nintendo, none of the latest Barbie and Bratz dolls, no computers or cell phones. All they need is a doll or stuffed animal, a few tiny plates and spoons, or a soccer ball, and each other to keep themselves entertained for hours. It’s childhood from a simpler time. Granted, they won’t have the same amazing educational resources that American and European children have; many won’t ever leave the town they were born in, most won’t get to reach their full potential. But for now, they remind me of the value of the simple things: that we don’t always need technology, that sometimes ignorance is bliss, that a few well-loved toys, a friend or sibling and our families really can be enough.

More Malagasy Cuisine: “Patates malgaches” et manioc

We’ve been teaching after-hours English lessons to Charles, one of the office guards, and his wife every night when we stop by to use the internet after dinner. To thank us, the couple has taken it upon themselves to resolve the mystery of the unidentifiable root vegetables I’ve been seeing at the market. On Sunday Charles showed up on our doorstep with a steaming plate of what looked like long whole purple yams. He called them “patates malgaches.” Francesca immediately got very excited; she recognized them as what she grew up with in Haiti, calling them “Haitian yams.” Sure enough, despite their color they tasted like the sweet brown-skinned yellowy-orange yams – the candied ones of American Thanksgiving with marshmellow topping – that I knew.
Yesterday (Monday) around lunchtime Charles was back again, this time with a bowl of long, pale, stringy-looking starchy vegetables, which he called “manioc” [see picture, double-click on enlarge]. I was familiar with the name, and we gratefully accepted his offering. Manioc proved to be rather bland, but piping hot they were satisfying and filling. Last night while on the phone with Robin he pointed out that I had already tried manioc – it’s what Cubans call “yuca,” and we had had it in March at “Cuba” restaurant in New York City. Then, it had been fried in oil and flavored with garlic, so I hadn’t recognized it here in Madagascar! Upon further research, it seems that certain crops are quite popular across the globe in tropical and/or island nations, with manioc/yuca being a prime example!

Market Day in Fianar!

While you can’t walk 15 feet without running into something being sold on the street here, Tuesdays and Fridays are the big market days in Fianarantsoa. Ambinina, a Malagasy sociology student and intern at Ny Tanintsika, had offered to accompany us to this Friday’s market to help us and prevent us from getting ripped off or just generally confused. Prices are not listed, and the people selling produce often don’t speak much French and sometimes give prices in francs, which haven’t been in use since 2003, when the ariary was adopted [for reference, it’s about 1,800 ariary to the dollar, so as Americans we feel like big spenders here!]. Ambinina explained that to get the price in ariary you have to divide by 5; for example, something that costs 5,000 francs is really 1,000 ariary. And yet sometimes when you ask for a price, vendors will give you an outrageous number, assuming you know they’re talking about francs and not ariary! This explains a lot of our confusion at Tuesday’s market, before we had this information!
Friday was foggy and overcast, with intermittent drizzles; this may be the “dry season” in Madagascar, but it’s still wet and cold! I wore a sweatshirt AND a fleece jacket, along with jeans and my boyfriend’s winter socks. Not exactly your mental image of a perfect market day!
We climbed the hill, past the extensive area where secondhand clothes are sold on the street, to the top where produce and other foods are sold. Things familiar: tomatoes (1,200 ariary/kilo), lettuce, eggplant (1,600 ariary/kilo), zucchini, carrots (big fat orange ones, stalks still attached), green beans (haricots verts!), onions (2,000 ariary/kilo), garlic, potatoes, oranges (actually quite yellow), lemons (citron, very round and small), tangerines (1,000 ariary/kilo), herbs (rosemary and thyme), eggs (320 ariary/each). Things less familiar: live turkeys, ducks, and chickens lined up in neat rows right on the walkway, you’d think they’d peck at your ankles, their legs tied together with rope; cuts of meat hanging unrefrigerated and uncovered, flies buzzing around; ground manioc leaf (mounds of green paste; Ambinina said Malagasies eat it with pork); mysterious-looking root vegetables; dark wild honey sold out of old plastic Coca-cola bottles; tall piles of shrimp sitting out unchilled. And best of all: what I thought were little brown crayfish…which turned out to be grasshoppers! Ambinina said that this year there had been an infestation of them in one part of the country, but no matter – Malagasies eat them! This was especially funny to me, having just read a New York Times article that morning about how a massive grasshopper invasion in the US Midwest had called for one of the largest assemblies of insecticide-spraying planes to be deployed (see article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/10grasshopper.html?scp=1&sq=grasshoppers&st=cse). Now if only Americans would eat grasshoppers, this wouldn’t be a problem: no one would go hungry, AND we could spare the already-compromised environment the extra pesticides! It was one of those clear Western-world-versus-developing-world moments for me: when life gives Americans grasshoppers, they bring out the big guns, but when life gives Malagasies grasshoppers, they make snacks!
In addition to produce, we also decided to buy that other staple of the Malagasy diet (besides rice): beans. We found a man chatting on his cell phone selling them out of sacks: white beans, red beans, peanuts. Things like rice and beans bought at the open market and coconut oil (which is sold out of giant vats, used for cooking and for haircare) are bought with the Malagasy unit of measure called the kapoka. It’s a little metal cup that looks a lot like a tin can peeled of its label. We bought two kapoka of marbled red beans for 500 ariary/kapoka [see picture].
As we walked home, bags full of produce, we passed more people selling fruit and vegetables along the road, Francesca (who is Haitian) got really excited: one woman was selling not bananas, but plantains! That night we had an almost-authentic (Francesca wasn’t fully satisfied with the rice and beans, although I had no complaints!) Haitian dinner of rice and red beans and fried plantains. Yum!

Laundry time, Malagasy style!

It's been almost two weeks since I left the US, and I was in dire need of shirts (remember, if you will, that we weren't showering for the first few days). Our boss had told us that we could pay the office guard's wife, who also cleans the office, to do our laundry.
Laundry is hand-washed outdoors here in big plastic tubs, and hung to dry on clotheslines, railings, fences, walls - even bushes or on the ground! I knew coming here that my clothes might not fare well with this treatment of hand-scrubbing and sun-bleaching, so I purposely only brought free Princeton T-shirts and cheap (and sometimes rather ugly) items I bought at Target (new jeans, bras, and underwear) with the thought that I could leave them all behind and fill my suitcase with souvenirs when I returned to the US in August.
This morning I passed off my bulging plastic bag of clothes to the guard to give to his wife, and waited to see what would happen.
Later in the afternoon, I stopped by the office to use the internet. I looked up only to find all of my clothes hanging out the office's second-floor windows! [see picture, click for larger view]
Nevertheless, all my clothes were returned to me, most of them dry (the socks and jeans were still a little wet), but everything was clean and fresh, and even the stains were gone!

In light of Madagascar's upcoming Independence Day...

Malagasy Independence Day is June 26th. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Madagascar's breaking away from France on Jun 26th, 1960.
I recently came across this article in the New York Times; although Malagasies dislike being lumped in with "Africa" and see themselves as an entity as distinct as their island is from the continent, there are nevertheless many similarities between what goes on here and on the continent politically.
While I'm not yet sure I agree with what the article ultimately advocates, I do see some of its points, especially as I see everyday here the reality of political instability and corruption. Things as simple as trash pick-up and as serious as education and healthcare simply do not happen, or do not consistently and reliably happen here.

Please read this article and feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/opinion/12englebert.html

Keeping House in the Developing World: Sacrifice, Improvisation, and Innovation

Despite the fact that other interns have stayed here in the past, our house was definitely not ready for us when we arrived. The bednets (necessary deterrent for malaria-carrying mosquitoes and other critters) weren’t up yet and we didn’t have materials to hang them with. The toilet was broken and the bathroom floor was already flooded when we arrived; the fluorescent bulb flickered incessantly like a strobe light – bathroom rave, anyone? The light at the top of the stairs didn’t work at all. We had no hot water whatsoever, and our campstove wouldn’t hook up to its propane tank (read: no way to cook food!). Our mini-fridge wouldn’t turn on. Our employer had provided us with pots, plates, and spoons only – apparently Malagasies don’t use knives and forks much! And, best of all, two COLOSSAL spiders reside outside the kitchen window: the kind of thing out of nightmares, bodies the size of gumballs, legs two inches long!
How did we deal with all this?
We rigged the bednets on our lights and some wooden poles the office guard gave us, using a little masking tape; I keep mine closed at night using hairclips! We held our bladders as long as we could between bathroom stops at the office next door, decreasing our water and food intake (since we couldn’t cook anyways!). Sprayed the bathroom floor with Raid in case mosquitoes tried to lay eggs in the pool of water on the floor (the bathroom window is only covered by a sagging net, which we had to tape up as well). Flashlights to get up and down the stairs (mine is wind-up, so it never runs out of battery!). Didn’t bathe the Thursday we arrived, or Friday (disgusting, I know, especially after the 8 hours in the cramped and crowded taxi-brousse!), but finally Saturday night we gave in and took icy-cold showers, squatting in the tub so people couldn’t see us through the window! The guard next door helped us hook up the stovetop, and we had a triumphant meal of spaghetti with ketchup (made in the United Arab Emirates and purchased by us at Supermarché 3000, a tiny grocery store) – the pasta + ketchup is a favorite comfort food of Francesca’s, and though I am a purist and marinara sauce fiend, I’ll admit it wasn’t bad. We ate it using two tin forks we bought at the street market; later we bought a knife at a tiny shop. In the past week I’ve started sautéeing vegetables, so I finally feel like myself again; Francesca can subsist on pasta and bread, but I definitely cannot!
We figured out the problem with the fridge, in which we now store all foods, even dry goods, for fear of bugs and rodents. I boiled a pot of hot water to wash my face. The neighbors helped up figure out the leak that was flooding the bathroom (turns out it was coming from the shower head and running around the edge of the tub to the floor) and fix the toilet; they also gave us a new fluorescent bulb to replace the old one.
Despite the kind efforts of the plumber called by our next-door neighbor, the hot water tank is still non-functioning; however, we have gotten into the routine of heating a few pots of water on the stove in the morning, filling a large plastic bucket, and carrying that to the bathroom to wash with.
Today we went back to Supermarché 3000 and bought, among other things, rope, so we now have a clothesline hanging in our upstairs room to dry our towels.
And, perhaps one of our crowning achievements (those of you who know we well will be impressed), we decided to spare spiders, indoors and out, on a case-by-case basis; after all, anything that eats mosquitoes is a friend of mine! We named our kitchen window friends: Francesca’s is Shelob, from Lord of the Rings, and mine, ironically, is Ron Weasley [pictured above with a tiny friend; we can't figure out if it's a baby, a mate, or a mooching neighbor], whose character is notorious for his arachnophobia in Harry Potter. We now watch with morbid fascination, cameras at the ready, as they descend from their respective lairs to eat an unfortunate flies!

The View from Our House in Fianar

We arrived in Fianar in the dark, so we really didn't get a sense of what everything looked like until the next day. I took this picture [double click on it to view it large] out our upstairs window on the first morning (since I was up at 4:30 and couldn't fall back to sleep). You can see houses along the hillsides - everything is sprawling and terraced, built on the slopes. The roads are unpaved - which is why I slipped and fell the other night as we walked home from the office next door (I now have a lovely purple bruise on my right side!).
In the yard you can see the turkey sitting on a car parked near the clotheslines. The edge of the wall is lined with large shards of bottle glass sticking straight up, to prevent intruders from climbing over the wall; for some reason, this actually makes me feel quite safe!

June 4th: First taste of Malagasy Cuisine!

Friday, June 4th we woke up for our first morning in Fianarantsoa. Our arrival was perfectly timed so that we could attend the entire Ny Tanintsika (the organization that the Scottish charity Feedback Madagascar set up on the ground in Madagascar; pronounced “Nee Tee-nahn-tseek”) team meeting, which included everyone from the office, plus the field agents. It was a large group, perhaps 30ish people, so we couldn’t all fit in the office. Instead, the meeting was held in a classroom at a nearby convent.
The meeting was almost entirely conducted in Malagasy, so even though Sam (our boss, who is British and fluent in Malagasy) translated a bit, we were still pretty lost. But what I can tell you about quite distinctly is the food!
At around 10am we had a break for tea, coffee, and snacks, which the nuns had prepared for us. The tea was lemony, and if you were pouring from the bottom you might end up with little green pieces of herb. Everyone was adding sugar cubes to theirs, but I found it just fine without the added sweetener. For snacks there were what looked like samosas (those savory triangular pastries of Indian cuisine; Indian empanadas, if you will) which had meat them, scallion pancakes (often found in Chinese cuisine; fried crispy and delicious!), and – get this – noodle sandwiches! That’s right: a piece of French baguette sliced lengthwise and filled with Asian-looking noodles! Talk about carbo-loading! Since there were also a few little pieces of fresh lettuce in the noodle sandwich, I abstained; I’m still not eating fresh produce unless it’s a peel-able fruit that comes from a tree. But the scallion pancakes were wonderful! You’ll often see them being sold on the side of the road, along with other fried items, or a plate of noodles; there were even some being sold behind the taxi-brousse kiosk in Tana. Of course, we were warned against buying non-packaged items from street vendors, so I was glad to get the chance to sample some local flavor, trusting that, perhaps by some diving power, the nuns’ food wouldn’t make me sick!
Around noon we breaked again for lunch. The nuns had laid out quite a spread! At each of the four or so tables there was a large pot of rice, a dish of cooked carrots and peas garnished with hardboiled eggs, a basket of bananas and tangerines (mandarines, which are delicious and in season and sold on every street corner and doorstep here) and a salad of some sort (looked like grated carrots and cabbage?). At each place setting there was a whole fish – head (with eyes!), tail, scales, and everything in between – as it was Friday. I served myself some rice and was passed a large bowl of water with greens (herbs?) in it; this was to add flavor to the rice, and it was really good! I also helped myself to the peas and carrots dish, and half a hardboiled egg (still proceeding carefully when it comes to food, especially since I had discovered that, should the need arise, the convent only had squat toilets). Content with my grain, cooked veggies, and protein source, I proceeded to enjoy myself…
Until suddenly, mid-bite, I felt a sickening crunch. I grimaced. Sam laughed.
“Oh, that’s something you have to remember when you buy rice from the market here. There might be gravel in it.”
We also got the chance to try a classic Malagasy beverage called ranon'ampango. Wikipedia describes it as a drink “made by adding water to the toasted rice left sticking to the interior of its cooking pot, and…served at every meal as a sanitary and tasty alternative to water.” It can vary in strength and intensity depending on how burnt the rice got in the pot; sometimes it is light-colored and opaque, while other times it is almost black. While we anticipated something interesting, it tastes exactly how you would expect it to taste – kind of like dirty, rice-y water. Yuck. At least we can say we tried it!

The Rhythm of Life in Fianar: Mornings and Evenings

I awoke before 5am on Friday, but not just because I was jetlagged. The rest of Fianar was starting to wake up, too. From our tiny, thin walled house (which is walled on a little plot with two other houses, three families) I could hear a rooster I hear everything that goes on outside with incredible clarity. Roosters crow – they roam unchecked through residential areas, and it’s not uncommon to come across a hen with little chicks cheeping as they hurry along behind. There’s an enormous turkey that lives in our yard, being fattened for Malagasy Independence day on June 26th; that first morning his “gobble-gobble” sounds kept catching me off-guard, but now they’re just part of the soundtrack of life here. Two calico cats live in the yard, too, and sometimes meow loudly. The family next door has a little furry white dog, but he’s pretty quiet. The father in one of the families is himself a taxi-brousse driver, so sometimes you’ll hear his van coming or going late at night or early in the morning. Just outside my window, between our house and one of the others, a woman starts a fire and boils water either for breakfast or for washing laundry (an all-day affair). If I spoke Malagasy, I would know a lot about our neighbors, because you can hear every word that anyone says outside!
So why is everyone up so early? Well, for one thing, the sun starts to rise around that time; we are, after all, in the Southern Hemisphere. It gets really dark early here, too; dusk begins around 4:30 and it’s quite dark by 5pm. So things quiet down here early, other than not infrequent dogfights that erupt in the middle of the night.
But Sunday night was an exception. Starting around midnight, I heard singing. At first I thought it was drunken singing (drunk in Fianar on a Sunday?), and it was sporadic enough that I was able to fall back to sleep. But by 2am it was relentless and unending singing of hymns – and badly, I might add. It was coming from the house just behind ours and it went on all night long! Cranking up the iPod didn’t even help. I lay awake for hours listening to untrained two-part harmony, the same song, over and over. It was a hellish, sleepless night.
The next morning I asked the office guard (one of the two office guards is always in the little shack in the office yard, every night) what that was all about, and (I think – his French isn’t the best) he said that there had been a death.
From my pre-trip research I knew that people in rural areas have very elaborate funeral rituals (including the exhumation of bodies by the family a year after to re-wrap dead relatives and to “tell” the corpses about recent family news and gossip; this is actually a celebratory event, not meant to be sad), but I guess that night I got a taste of how death is dealt with by Christian Malagasies in the cities.
Since we're talking about the rhythm of life in Madagascar, I should also talk about afternoons. Everyone in Fianar, businesses of all kinds, all have a two-hour lunch break from 12 to 2pm. Everyone goes home from the office, children come home from school, to cook and eat together. For Francesca and I, this makes shopping difficult. Produce and such are still sold on the street, but when it comes to little grocery stores, they are all closed during the only free time we have during the workday.
As I said in an earlier post, there is a different sense of time in Madagascar. A lunch break from 12 to 2 does not mean that everyone is back at their desks at 2pm on the dot, ready to work. Punctuality is flexible. Our afternoon English classes for the office staff are supposed to start at 4:30. People filter in one at a time between 4:45 and 5pm. It can be incredibly frustrating, but, as we were cautioned back at Princeton in the "Living and Working in the Developing World" meeting, it is something to to accept and get used to.

June 3rd: The road to Fianarantsoa, adventure en taxi-brousse!

We awoke at 5am Thursday, and were out of the hotel by 5:40. Our trusty taxi driver (we forgave him for overcharging us, since he did carry our bags up the tiny hotel staircase) drove us to the taxi-brousse station. Now, when you think “station,” imagine a long, unpaved row of tiny shacks, dim and loud, with little vans behind. As soon as we pulled up, men were running up alongside the taxi, trying to get us to go with their company. Francesca got out to find the kiosk of the company we were supposed to have reservations with, while I stayed to watch the bags in the taxi. Apparently when Francesca went to the kiosk and gave her name, the person claimed they had no such reservation, but another man sitting in the kiosk immediately jumped up and said we were with him. « Francesca ? Oui, oui, vous êtes avec moi ! » Turns out he was from another company, but before we knew it men were at the taxi, put our suitcases on their heads and were carrying them away to another kiosk and strapping them to the top of another taxi-brousse! There was nothing we could do but follow along. We called Sam, our employer, (waking her up – it was 6am!) and she said we would be alright, we just had to cancel our reservation with the original company. The new company was going to charge us 5,000 more ariary than the one with which we were supposed to have a reservation, but when Francesca started to try to go find our original company’s kiosk to cancel, the new company guy thought we were trying to leave him and offered us a discount of 5,000. So no real harm done, right?
There are two kinds of time in the world: real-world time and Madagascar time. We had left the hotel that morning at 5:40 to be at the taxi-brousse station at 6am to leave at 6:30. Did this happen? Not exactly…in fact, we didn’t end up leaving until well after 9. We kept asking when we would be leaving, and they just kept saying « Trente minutes » (“Thirty minutes”) again and again as the hours passed…
So we stood there at the side of the taxi-brousse, keeping an eye on the suitcases strapped to the top, waiting and saying a polite « Non, merci » to the countless vendors who passed by, offering crackers (biscuits salés), cookies (biscuits sucrés), candies, cheese, sausages, broken watches, bags, belts, stickers, and cheap toys. We watched two women with small shovels dig a little ditch to move some water that had pooled next to the kiosk.
And we made a new friend. A small, wiry Malagasy man with a battered Équipe de France baseball cap approached us timidly, wanting to know if we spoke English. We were very wary, but it turns out he was just curious and wanted to talk. He introduced himself as Jean-Baptiste; he is an artisan from who makes clay pots at an atelier (workshop) in Fianarantsoa (pronounced “Fianarantsoo,” or Fianar for short). He taught us some Malagasy words, but the only one we were able to retain is misaotr, “thank you” – most Malagasy words are SO long! He also drew us a map of Madagascar in the condensation on the side of the taxi-brousse, showing the road we would take, and the six provinces, which he explained all had different dialects and pronunciations. He was impressed with our level of French; most people here are, as they’re used to clueless Americans only speaking English, or a little French with terrible accents! He also said something about Americans and Canadians drilling oil in Madagascar, but “Shhh!” it’s a secret, he said – not sure what he meant by all that!
Finally, at long last, we all piled into the taxi-brousse: driver and fourteen passengers. Our original reservation would have insured us a seat behind the driver – more legroom. Our new seats were in the second to last row...oh, well…
As soon as the engine started, the music started playing as well. To me, Malagasy music sounds a lot like Spanish-language music. But as I dozed for long hours during the journey, I know I heard some American music, too. Rest assured, dear readers, Lady Gaga has made it all the way to Madagascar!
The landscape is exquisite: rolling hills almost like that of California, often terraced for rice cultivation. Unfortunately, this also means deforestation, which is a huge issue in Madagascar. The New York Times recently published an article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/world/africa/25madagascar.html?hp) about how political instability leads to lack of enforcement of forestry laws, meaning lots of illegal logging of luxury woods like rosewood. The earth is a reddish orange-y color, which made me wonder if the colors of the Malagasy flag (red, green, white) are drawn from the red earth, green hills, and white clouds.
Francesca and I decided the night before that we were not going to eat or drink all day, out of fear of the bathroom situation during the taxi-brousse ride. So besides a tiny sip of water to swallow my vitamins and anti-malarial drugs that morning, I had nothing all day. Turns out this was a good call: in our 8-9 hour drive, we only made three stops. Two were on the side of the road, where – oh my! Look away! - only the men were able to relieve themselves. Alas, the downside of being female! At least we got to stretch our legs. The other stop was so passengers could get lunch at a hotely (snack bar/small restaurant). We stayed in the taxi-brousse – no point in tempting ourselves. The other passengers thought we were crazy and several asked if we were hungry and why we weren’t eating. Was the gum we were chewing really all we needed? Did all Americans not eat?
We spent most of the drive sleeping, finally arriving in Fianar after dark. Sam, our employer, was waiting at the Fianar taxi-brousse station for us, and driving us to our house to drop off our bags, we went back out to get food – spaghetti!!! - at a small restaurant serving mostly European dishes; I think it was called “Espace Relaxe” (Relaxed Space/Place).
Ainsi, we made it to Fianar in one piece. Going abroad also teaches you a lot about yourself, and I now know that I can survive an entire day without food, water, or bathrooms! (without too much pain, either!) Impressive!

June 2nd: Arrival in Antananarivo, Madagascar!

[I finally have internet on my own computer! It took a while, so I'm a little behind in my blogging. The following is an excerpt from my journal written the night we arrived in Antananarivo, describing first impressions and whatnot...I'll have updates about more recent stuff soon!]

I awoke on the flight some time before landing, and waited for Madagascar to appear through the clouds. At first, green, hills, rolling ones, some terraced with rice paddies. Still later, drier, flatter, more agricultural – the product of deforestation. A patchwork quilt landscape in yellows and greens. Finally, Antananarivo, “Tana,” a sea of small buildings all vying with one another for a spot on the hill.
Disembarking from the plane, it was warmer than South Africa, but still on the cooler side; lots of moisture in the air and big billowing clouds with blue underbellies.
The police officers at customs were wearing green, not blue, and had those little berets and big army boots. It’s the dress you’re used to seeing in videos of political unrest in Africa, which produced in me a little twinge of unease. And yet this was just customs! Later, driving through the city on our way to the hotel, we passed officers directing traffic clad in the usual blue. It’s amazing how something as simple as uniform color can change your perception. (The next day, on our taxi-brousse ride to Fianarantsoa we stopped at a gas station where the attendants were clad in orange jumpsuits – the garb of American prisoners!)
Our taxi was a tiny beige French Renault. Seatbelts? Ha! It was a bit of a drive; we paid 40,000 ariary (although after we realized we should have only paid 30,000, according to our employer’s e-mail). We took pictures out the windows, trying not to bump the lenses around too much. People along the side of the road, some begging, some selling, some in transit themselves. Men, women, children carrying large baskets on their heads with ease – no hands! The sellers offering a miscellany of things – produce, sausages, peanuts, rice by the cup, fried snacks, packaged snacks, cheap toys, broken watches, secondhand clothes and shoes - no real rhyme or reason to it.
The best comparison I can make, based on my own experience, is the Tijuana area in Mexico, but obviously the culture and people are completely different. Everyone we have encountered so far has spoken good French, and the accent isn’t hard to understand. The faces of Madagascar are varied, some looking very Indonesian, while others look like continental Africans.
Once installed in the hotel we made an excursion down the winding streets from our hotel to buy Malagasy cell phones and get cash from an ATM. We stopped at two different little electronics stores; the woman at the first was Muslim, wearing a headscarf, and looked Middle Eastern. At the second, a helpful Middle Eastern man spoke to us in fluent English.
The younger men eye us, one touched my arm in passing and I rushed forward with an angry glare back. Next time I’ll have some French profanities at the ready! Often little children try to get your attention, sometimes asking for money, sometimes just for attention. In one little alley path some boys set off a few poppers and I jumped a foot in the air – just as I did all last summer in France, between Bastille Day and August 15th – I HATE firecrackers!
There are some other young Americans staying at the hotel, said they’ve been here for two months. In two months we’ll have that same confidence and ease getting around.
Everything is still so vivid and different; we’re still at the phase where taking pictures of signage in French and Malagasy is exciting. Hard to believe that soon, once settled in Fianarantsoa, it will all cease to be such a novelty as it becomes a daily reality. That’s part of the beauty of international internships: achieving some sort of assimilation, reaching that point where you’re no longer a tourist just passing through. That best part is the people will cease (hopefully!) to see and treat you as such a novelty, too, thus opening up a freer dialogue and greater understanding.
Ate a delicious Thali végétarien (traditional Indian dish with naan, rice, and little bowls of different vegetables) at an Indian restaurant called La Medina, just down the street from the hotel. Beautifully decorated, with bright cushions for lounging and smoking hookah; it seemed like a place you could find in any cosmopolitan city in the US. Refrained from fresh vegetables for the moment, even though I was craving them, out of fear of being sick on our 8+ hour taxi-brousse ride to Fianarantsoa tomorrow!