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!