Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Smells of Madagascar

There are so many different odors here in Madagascar, some pleasant and some quite pungent. Since smell is one of our strongest senses of memory, I thought it would be significant to describe some of the most memorable smells I've encountered during my time in Madagascar. In order from fragrant to smelly:

papaya : From far away you can't really smell it, but cut open a fresh papaya and the deliciously sweet, juicy, green, slightly floral and very ripe fragrance wafts through the room and lingers on your breath and fingers as you eat it. The smell is so addicting, it makes it difficult to stop eating the delectable fruit.

pineapple : I love the smell of fresh pinapples during peak season. Usually at least one or two are sitting in my house during the months of February and March. It's citrusy, fragrant, sweet and distinctly pinapple when you hold up the fruit to your nose. Some Malagasies have told me that they when there is a death during pinapple season, they sometimes put a pinapple in the casket with the corpse to mask the unpleasant odors of the decaying body.

oranges : When it's orange season here, you can smell the fruit stands from several meters away...especially when someone is peeling an orange. It's a citrusy, lemony fresh smell. I do like them when they're sweet, but it's sometimes hard to tell from the outside because they are all picked when they are green.

jackfruit : Probably one of the strongest-smelling fruits around. I still remember my first month at site when a neighborhood kid came by to give me a wedge of it. I had it sitting on the counter for an hour and it had already stunk up the whole house. It's a very sweet smell,but also very ripe...almost like rotting bananas, which is why a lot of people don't like it. I'm not a huge fan of the odor, but the taste of the fruit is so sweet that I still enjoy eating it.

vanilla : During vanilla season on the northeast coast of Madagascar (June through September) the sweet fragrance smacks you in the face as you walk into a village where people have just set out their ripe, cooked vanilla on mats out in the sun to dry. It's a slightly floral, very sugary and distinctly vanilla scent.

coconut oil : Everytime I smell coconut oil, I now associate it with hair-braiding. The women on the coast have textured hair from their African roots, so they often use oil when they weave their hair into small, intricate braided patterns that cover their heads. It's a pleasantly sweet, thick, nutty, tropical smell, which is really what I enjoy about hair-braiding time in the hot afternoons in Madagascar.

Morenga : Morenga is the miracle tree, originating from India. It's leaves and seeds are edible and provide an extraordinary array of vitamins and minerals. Fortunately it grows like a weed on the east coast, and when Malagasies can't find anything else to cook as their side dish, they will often pick the leaves of this tree to make a stew or sauce rich with vitamins to eat with their rice. Whenever I cook with morenga, the smell of the fresh leaves fills up the house. It's a very green, slightly floral, healthy fragrance. I sometimes like grabbing a branch or taking a fistful of leaves in my hand to smell. Just from the scent, one can tell that the leaves are healthful and full of vitamins.

cooking rice : Malagasies cook rice two or three times a day here, so come meal time, you can smell the sweet, hearty fragrance of the cooking rice wafting through the air. Especially if it's in your kitchen and you've just taken off the lid of the rice pot. I myself only eat rice once or twice a day or every other day, varying my diet with pasta and bread-like foods. I still enjoy the smell of steamy rice, though. It definitely makes me hungry when I smell rice cooking, which makes me feel like I'm really starting to become a true Malagasy!

boiled corn : Over the past month or two, corn has really been in season. Aside from fried cassava, boiled corn is one of the Malagasy's favorite snacks, although I'm confused as to why. Most of the corn here is starchy, tough, feed corn. Once in a while there's a vendor who will have what looks like American sweet corn. I'm sometimes tempted to try it, but always worried I'll end up stuck with a whole cob full of disappointing, dry, hard kernels. Either way, the smell is quite nice--slightly nutty and sweet, fresh and nourishing. It's pleasant when the steam wafts in during a stuffy bush taxi ride, where vendors along the road come up during a pit stop with steaming plastic buckets full of the freshly boiled corn still in the husk to sell to hungry passengers.

roasting coffee : Malagasies on the northeast coast farm coffee, both as a cash crop and for domestic consumption. Sometimes I can smell the burnt, nutty scent from nearby neighbors roasting coffee in a pan over the open cookfire. Normally I love the smell of coffee, but the Malagasies roast their beans so dark, that the smell here is a little to bitter and strong for me.

woodsmoke : Everyone cooks with firewood or charcoal in Madagascar, so you can smell smoke during meal times or if people are burning trash or someone is clearing a nearby field for farming. The smoke also lingers on the clothes and in the hair of the women and young children, who tend to spend most of their time around cookfires.

rain : Sometimes you can smell it coming--the cool change in air temperature registering in the nostrils and lungs along with a dense wetness from the humidity, fresh and clean. When it first starts falling, there's an earthiness to the scent of the rain as the first drops kick up days of accumulated dirt and dust. I love the thick, damp smell it brings as well as the refreshing coolness and the sense of renewal and new growth afterwards.

fresh wild flowers : Sometimes if I go hiking through the forest to another village to do a health project or go biking or jogging down the mian road, I'm treated to the fragrance of tropical wildflowers growing along the path. The northeast being one of the few remaining heavily forested areas in Madagascar, there are a wide variety of flowers and plants that are gorgeous to look at and intoxicating to smell. It's like a faint, natural, floral perfume floating through the air. I especially notice the fragrance when the wind changes or I happen to jog past a particularly thick patch. My favorite wildflowers that I frequently see are bright, indigo, oval-shaped, orchid-like flowers that grow all along the roadside. Another is an elegant, white, unfolding, cone-shaped flower with wide, shiny green leaves.

cloves : I finished up my time in Madagascar in the clove-producing region of the country. As a kid, I never liked the spice. It was always too strong for me. But now I love the smell. It is so spicy, fragrant and slightly sweet. It reminds me of chai. Even though it's not clove season, I looked around and finally found a small sache full to buy and take home with me as a little souvenir from the east coast of Madagascar.

"mokari": Early morning in the village or anytime in bigger towns or on the bush taxi--especially after stopping at a large town along the road--the heavy odor of fried snacks (called "mokari" in northern Madagascar) and cooking oil saturate the air surrounding the vendors and eaters. Alomost all street foods are fried here--bananas, plaintains, breadfruit, cassava, balls of dough made from flour or cassava, taro root and sweet potatoes. Oil is relatively expensive compared to other food items, and the vendors only sell each fried snack for 100 ariary (5 cents) a pop, so who knows how many times they reuse that oil to deep fry everything. Given that the frying oil isn't the freshest or the cleanest, the scent of fried snacks often has a rancid quality...not very appetizing, especially when you're crammed in a stuffy bush taxi and everyone around you is munching on the stuff with greasy fingers. The worst are the cassava-based snacks. They have this somewhat sour, off, indescriable odor, which always makes me wonder why it's one of the Malagasy's main staple foods outside of rice.

kids : I don't want to seem mean or judgmental, but the kids here for the most part do not smell very good. It's understandable, since they play in the dirt all day or work in the fields and sweat so much from the heat and humidity. They also bathe in the river, most of the time without soap, and they have one or maybe two pairs of clothes, which are usually stained, ripped and faded. So the dirt and sweat lingers on their skin and hair as well as the woodsmoke. Many don't have toothbrushes or toothpaste and they tend to snack on that fried cassava or whatever fruit is in season regardless of whether or not it's actually ripe. So their breath doesn't help with the odor. The woodsmoke stubbornly lingers in their hair and on their clothes, as the kids--especially girls--are usually assigned to help with kitchen duties. If they're really young, they also smell of urine, since there's no such thing as diapers or a toilet (especially for peeing). If they are older, they might still smell of urine, because they often take care of their younger siblings who may have an accident on their lap at any given moment.

cow manure : My neighbors at my last site had a cow that they tied up next door during the night. The westerly breeze in the mornings often brought with it the lovely scent of fresh cow poop. I don't know how else to describe it other than it smells like shit. It is shit. There are a few people in the village that herd cows, so they leave huge steaming piles of manure all along the walking paths conveniently for pedestrians to step in (there's also a lot of dog shit too, which is much more disgusting.) So unfortunately the cow manure is a fairly common stench throughout the village.

sweat/b.o. : The last and perhaps strongest smell I've come across here is that of body odor. I think it is an African thing, because I've experienced it in Niger and in Tanzania too, but it is surely a strong odor here in Madagascar. I'll even admit that my body has started to produce a similar smell when I sweat a lot, even though I still use deodorant, bathe with fragrant soap and change and launder my clothes regularly. It's especially strong on me after I come back from a run or bike ride. It's especially strong on them when I'm crowded with Malagasies on the bush taxi or when I'm helping out at the village clinic. It is so strong in fact, that the smell of b.o. has permanently saturated the walls of the clinic (and it's not just because it's a small building made of wood.) The big concrete hospital at my very first site had the same permanent, salty stench. I remember the very first time I walked into that hospital on the day I was installed by Peace Corps. The salty, stuffy, stale odor hit me like a barn door in the face. Unfortunately it's not one of those smells you get used to after sitting in the same spot for a while. As one person leaves and another enters, the odor renews itself.

I think part of the reason the odor is so strong here is that everyone does hard, physical labor out in the fields and it's a hot and humid climate. Deoderant is nonexistent and nice-smelling soaps are a bit of a luxury. All the shops sell fragrant soaps, but they are a little more expensive than the everyday, locally made lye soap. As far as laundry goes, some people do actually use the powdered soap, but most use the common bar soap and they don't really soak their clothes. They just suds them up, bang them on a rock or log and then rinse them in the river. I don't think the whole process actually ever gets rid of the stench, though they are pretty good at getting out stains and rubbing and whacking the clothes so hard that they stretch out and wear paper thin and get holes in them. Most people can only afford one or two changes of clothes too, so it's understandable that their clothes quickly start smelling again or never really get rid of the body odor that has seeped in.

As far as the odor itself though, it is different from the body odor in America (which also is unpleasant, but in a different way). I don't know whether it's the diet or just the intensity or something in the air or the soap, but the smell of my sweat here is definitely different than it used to be back in America. Whatever the case, that is one unpleasant smell I am looking forward to leaving behind. I will however miss all the other wonderful and exotic tropical fragrances I experienced during my time here.

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