23 August 2011

Been back at site for a few weeks now. Things are pretty slow, since my counterpart has had to attend to a lot of meetings and other obligations in other towns. It’s been great to be back, though. Everyone in the village has been excited to see me, especially the members of the women’s soccer team. I was able to get jerseys and two small soccer balls from the NGO “Friends of Madagascar” while I was in Antananarivo for training, so they’ve been motivated to start practicing more frequently now. Even though none of us get to play very often and we’re not very good, we still have a lot of fun.

I’ve found that while language, education level and cultural differences sometimes prove difficult barriers to transcend in order to connect with people, playing soccer is an easy and fun way to enjoy each other’s company and camaraderie without having to worry too much about how to communicate with one another. When I play with them, I feel a sense of solidarity—among the women, among amateur athletes, and among the community members of my village. We recently sent a letter over to another neighboring village, requesting their women’s team to come over and play ours. Everyone says their women’s team is really good—they play like men—so we’re excited to test our skills against them and to break out our new uniforms.

Training the new group of volunteers in Tana went really well. I was there for two weeks and got a chance to meet some really excited and motivated new health and education volunteers fresh from the States (there’s about thirty of them in all). I was impressed with how positive they were and how much energy they had, even faced with the incredibly overwhelming challenges of adjusting to a new culture and learning a new language during their first weeks in-country. I was able to help by sitting in on their technical and cross-culture training sessions and offering a realistic perspective for what their experience and what their potential challenges might be, working out in the field for two years. I was happy to hear that we’re getting one health volunteer in our region who can replace the two of us leaving in December.

Since my two major projects (the solar panel at the clinic and the two wells ) are pretty much finished, I’m going to try to use up my last remaining vacation days before my two years are up in December. I’m hoping to head up to Diego, meet my dad in Rwanda for a week, and at some point hike Marojejy, the beautiful mountain and national park in my region. On another note, in honor of one of my Peace Corps friend’s recent texts to me, I’ll answer her question asking,

“You know you’re a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar when…”:
(many of these probably aren’t country-specific)

*you’re stuffed in a fifteen passenger van with forty other people
*you have eaten a full plate of rice four times in one day
*you have eaten rice with rice water as a side dish for a meal
*the neighborhood kids bring over a dwarf lemur tied up on a string
*you get asked to take someone’s three year old child back to America with you
*you get four marriage proposals in one day
*a woman asks you if you can find her a white man from America that she can marry
*there’s a rat stuck inside the balance at your village clinic
*there’s a renegade chicken circling your house and clucking incessantly for two weeks trying to get in
*the most common gifts you get from people are cucumbers, breadfruit and rice
*the most common visitors at your house are six-year-old kids
*your regular bedtime is 8pm
*you are told by someone that you are fluent in Malagasy and terrible at speaking Malagasy both in one day
*everytime you come back from somewhere, even if it’s only for two days, you get told you’ve gotten fat
*the majority of your daily conversations with people consist of the following: “Hi..how are you…what’s new…okay see ya later” (In Malagasy—“Mbalatsara,” “Mbalatsare” “Ino vaovao?” “Mangina fo, ino maresaka?” “Mangingina fo!” “ye”)
*a mother randomly hands you her 5 month old baby to hold while she goes to take care of something
*you are climbing up a muddy, slippery hill with your Tevas strapped to your feet and get passed by a barefoot, forty-year-old woman in a sarong with a baby strapped to her back, a basin full of wet laundry in one arm and a bucket full of water balanced on her head
*you frequently get asked if people in America eat rice, cook rice or farm rice
*the whole village talks about the fact that you bought bananas in the market today
*there’s a hog living next door, a cow behind your house and flocks of chickens and ducks wandering through your yard
*you have eaten bananas with rice in more different forms than you can count
*your favorite hot drink becomes water boiled in a pot lined with burnt, crusty rice
*every kid within a 10km radius of your town knows your name and shouts it repeatedly when you pass by
*from inside your house, you can hear your next-door neighbors talking about you from inside their house
*people come to your house selling anything from bananas to pineapple to cucumbers
*you have so much free time on your hands that you know how to find someone selling a coconut, crack it open, grate it, and make coconut milk from it in order to cook coconut rice (vary miaro vanio.)
*you can cook all your meals without a cutting board, pot handles, timer, recipe or measuring cups and with only one dull kitchen knife, one pot and one pan
*the only shoes you ever wear are plastic flip flops, even if you know you’ll be walking in the forest for several hours (and even if you have other shoes you could wear)