jacob b.h. morrin

Here in Befandriana-Nord, Madagascar I live amongst the Tsimihety people and speak the Tsimihety language. Tsimihety is one of many dialects spoken in Madagascar and while some of its vocabulary resemble the Official Language of the country, the pronunciation, tone, and delivery of words differ such that to an outsider the dialect is all but incomprehensible. Tsimihety is rarely merely spoken. To emphasize ideas, one must sing—a low bass for things big in size and near in distance; a high falsetto for things small and far. To socialize with others, one must joke. The Tsimihety love to laugh. As you’ll see in the below proverbs, or ohabolana the Tsimihety are adept at recognizing the humor in any situation. While they love to laugh, however, the Tsimihety also love to have a laugh at the expense of others. Thus, to speak, one must boast. The Tsimihety are born proud perfectionists. They have egos made of glass—transparent and easy to break. Hence people yell at each other with a brazen arrogance that can be at once both disarming and alarming. Conversations tend to revolve around magnifying the imperfections of others while defiantly defending one’s own.

Pride here becomes the classic hamartia, especially with respect to education. In the classroom, students cower at the prospect of making mistakes in front of their peers. This is especially apparent in my English classes where students who make the effort to speak aloud in class are met with childish mimicry and heckling from their peers. Like a pack of hyenas, their peers jump and bite at even the slightest mistake—an intimidating prospect when the pack is eighty-five large. The result when students are unwilling to make mistakes is that little learning takes place in the classroom. And as anyone who has learned a foreign language before can tell you, mistakes are, ironically, the stepping stones to achieving fluency.

Anyway, the Tsimihety people’s reluctance to make mistakes has not prevented them from creating the most evocative of proverbs. Proverbs that immediately conjure up vivid images and convey axiomatic ideas, whether quotidian or exceptional. Characters in the proverbs range from common animals—such as chameleons and goats—to common sights in every day life—such as old ladies and old men. Old ladies, however, take the cake though. In the rare proverb book I managed to get my hands on, old ladies take up no less than four full pages of proverbs, which proverbs are mostly at the expense of the old ladies. What can we say? After a lifetime of crouching over charcoal cookstoves, sweeping floors, wading knee-deep in rice fields, and not to mention making babies by the baker’s dozen—some old women have simply had the life wrung out of them and the result is as awe-inspiring as it is laughter-inducing. So, without further ado, I offer, in this post, a taste of the richness that is Tsimihety proverbs.

- Like an old lady full of bread—nothing left to talk about.

- Like an old lady swimming—no time to laugh.

- Like when you see an old lady sleeping at the market—if she’s not your grandma, leave.

- An old lady treading water—getting just enough air to stay alive.

- Like the supple, perky breast of a daughter-in-law—something yet to be seen.

- Like when you’re circumcising a dog and it gets away—you leave it unfinished

- Like when someone catches a crocodile at night—we’ll see what happened tomorrow

- Like the trandraka (forest rat) whose coat changes with the color of the earth

- Those who eat first will be full

- Those who go to bed early, go to bed comfortable

- As the goose lays eggs—every other day

- As the lazy herd cattle—only the cattle on the road get the stick

- Like an old drunk man—heavy on one side

- The rice water is fragrant only once

- Those who are itchy scratch

- The boat goes to the pier—not the other way around

- Like a dog with a turtle—how to eat it?

- Don’t belittle the man who wears the sack as a shirt

- Grasshoppers don’t sleep twice in the doorway

- Like an old man riding a bull—asking for trouble

- Like poop on a butt—in it’s place

- Like a naked wife—no need to wait

- Like when the monkey hits on the eel—do what I tell you

- Like ironing a wrinkle-less shirt

- Goat’s milk—enough for one only

- Only those willing to dive deep get the sand from the bottom

-  You haven’t been sitting long enough to kill the ants!

And of course…

- As the grasshopper says farewell—if I don’t see you I’m gone!

Props to Pacific Love for coming up with a hilarious song that captures what life can be like as a Peace Corps Volunteer regardless of sector or site. 

8:42 PM

Befandriana-Nord is structured around a main, albeit still in wretched condition, road that comes from the big almost-coastal city of Antsohihy (where I bank) and goes to the strangely large inland town of Mandritsara. As the road crosses through the heart of Befandriana-Nord, it forms with a lesser-sister dirt road a crossroad and round-point, which round-point is the heart of the town. Unsurprisingly, the round-point also serves as the nexus of nightlife. Below is a brief description of what one might encounter were one to traverse the round-point at 8:42 on a cool May night.

The first thing one would notice is the total absence of electric light. Rather, a silver silken shroud of starlight envelops everything, pierced only on the peripheries by small handmade oil lamps. The eerie night ambience is enhanced by the fact that when Malagasy ambulate at night, they take on the appearance of shadowy wraiths. Their dark skin melts into the night air around them. Faces are distinguishable only with the fullest of moons. Voices seem to emerge from nothing but inky voids. I can only imagine how I am perceived in such a setting—a ghost among shadows?

On the perimeter of the round point are huddled small clusters of roasted unshelled peanut vendors. While these vendors are a new and most-welcome development to my insatiable appetite for all things peanut, the vendors’ propensity to congregate never ceases to offend my American capitalistic instincts. On one side of the round-point are more food vendors. Cassava, or manioc, is a staple snack food here. Corn, too, can be found occasionally. It all depends on the season.

It terms of what one would hear, first there is the interminable shuffling of flip-flops and cheap sandals. But there are voices, too, and depending on who you are and what color your skin is, maybe even some good old hollering and heckling. Depending on the state of electricity, there may or may not be music playing from the bar located one corner of the round point. And of course there is the incomprehensible cacophony of conversation that seems to attend all public places.

Were one to continue walking down the nicely-paved road to Mandritsara, one would find that night can get unexpectedly dark unexpectedly fast. One would also find, even in good old Befandriana, a number of, what I’ve been told are, “call girls.”

Had one instead ventured north, off the paved road and onto the dirt road leading to the high school and home of your’s truly, one would receive a quainter view of life here. Adjacent to the round-point on one’s left would be the Befandriana-Nord market. Unfortunately, the section closest to the road is the seafood section, which means that the air next to the market is always suffused with the pungent, putrid smell of dried shrimp and fish. Oh, and garbage. The garbage from the market is also right there. A few more paces down the road and one would see on the right now two or three Taxi-Brousses capably staffed by “Mpaneras” getting ready for their early morning journeys on the morrow. 

If one should take this road, however, one should take care not to step into the puddles of urine left by not just drunk people, but even just your average Rakoto six-pack on his way home bereft of toilet.

As one stumbles over the sinewy and dilapidated dirt road leading to the high school, one’s gaze would inevitably be turned upwards, and one would be momentarily hazardously spellbound by the crystal-laced starry sky. Stumbling is the de facto mode of transport on this road during dark nights and even the stumbling is often interrupted by hungry roaming mutts and pigs.

Once at the school, one would find the grounds deserted of students and populated only by the principal, his family, the groundskeeper, and perhaps the weird zany American English teacher who lives in the big room next to the office. Of these the groundskeeper merits special attention. At night he is garbed in only a gold and black cloth wrapped around his waist. His chocolate-brown skin, tanned by years of laboring under the hot Malagasy sun, is pulled taut around his every limb. His eyes a cloudy gray, presumably from years of smoking the Malagasy tobacco, the smell of which always marks his presence.

Moonlight here, or diempanzava (the steps of the moon), is stunningly bright. It could be simply that the dearth of electric lights ceases to distract and dilate. Of course, I like to think that the moon is just brighter and better here. Whatever the reason, everything is caked eerie white light and the sky isn’t black, but a deep navy blue. Looking out from my small verandah, the confluence of these night factors is stunning. In the foreground are the vacant high school classrooms, their silhouettes just visible in the silver moonlight. Above, on a clear night at least, thousands of stars literally twinkle against a velvet blue backdrop that stretches down to the horizon. Whenever I see it I think of blueberry jam sprinkled with sugar crystals. At the horizon, the sky’s blue is made apparent by its contrast with the dark-black silhouette of my little mountain. All of this, of course, is accompanied by a night orchestra of crickets.

Night here really is blissful and tranquil and relaxing yet somehow invigorating at the same time. That is, until the godforsaken rats come out in the middle of the night. More on this later … 

What’s your worst travel story? Long layover? Flat tire? Or the classic, a baby that won’t stop crying? I assure you none of these holds even a candle to what you will most likely experience on any given taxi-brousse ride. Taxi-Brousse rides are not for the faint of heart. They involve too many passengers in too small of cars. They involve reckless drivers on dilapidated roads. They involve enough sundry luggage tied to the roof, stuffed under seats, and placed in your lap to furnish a house and, most likely, populate a barn. The gas always goes in a 1.5L water bottle under the driver’s seat. The speedometer sometimes works. The car never leaves on time—”We leave at three. Be here at four,” was what one PCV was told with regard to her departure time.

In other words, taxi-brousse rides bring discomfort and danger to their apogee. A timetable? Forget it. A mechanical (and probably emotional) breakdown? Inevitable. Space to bend your legs? Not if those chickens on the car floor have anything to say about it. Leaving and arriving late and being cramped next to farm animals are simply par for the course. Nonetheless, every brousse ride comes with its own unique surprises, and the weirdness intrinsic to this strange mode of transport manifests itself in different ways. Some brousse rides approach being mildly enjoyable. Those are the ones where after driving one hundred kilometers and still hundreds more to go, you get out of the car, look at the roof and exclaim, “Is that a goat?” And it is! Others seem to suggest some otherworldly sadistic intervention. The following recount is of the latter.

This particular brousse ride began in the city of Antsohihy. Kaitlyn and I were returning from a weekend of “banking” there. Our towns are too small and too secluded to warrant having their own banks, so every month we take a car into Antsohihy in order to withdraw money and engage in debauchery of the lowest order, i.e. having a beer or two. To understand what we go through during these travels is to understand also the road system in Madagascar. One of the strange things about maps of Madagascar, aside from the fact that the country is a giant island, is the glaring lack of roads connecting the country. There are a few nicely paved roads going up and down the coasts and surrounding the capital city, Antananarivo, but that’s it. As for the road going to our sites, Befandriana-Nord and Mandritsara, the road is either dirt or mud depending on the weather. I live one hundred kilometers from Antsohihy (sixty-two miles), yet it takes us four to five hours to drive that. Kaitlyn, who lives another hundred K down the road from me has it even worse—it takes her eight to ten hours. So you can see right away that the scales are not in our favor when it comes making this brousse ride, especially considering that we were traveling in April, the heart of the rainy season here.

The first sign that we were in trouble was that our brousse left unusually late. Usually, if we are scheduled to leave at seven o’clock, we should have no problem arriving at seven, dropping off our stuff (this time I have a heavy propane tank for my gas stove), leaving, eating breakfast, discussing Philip Roth over coffee, and then coming back around nine to watch them load the car. On this particular occasion, however, we didn’t hit the road until ten o’clock. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be a problem, but here in Madagascar there are two problems with a late departure time. The first is that by noon the sun has reached its zenith and is wreaking havoc on anyone who dare venture outdoors. On a good road this is no problem. Flying down the highway at breakneck speeds of sixty kilometers per hour, hair flying back in the wind, watching the scenery while enjoying a nice car breeze is all fine and good in theory, but in practice, when your the turtle instead of the hare, you just get a nasty case of brousse arm (sunburn from having your arm pushed out the window), sweaty shorts, and maybe even fat foot (which ailment this writer is particularly prone to contracting. The second problem is that the market closes at five o’clock.

So at ten o’clock we made our way finally out of the city and towards the three check points that control incoming and outgoing traffic. Yes, there are, within the span of five miles, three checkpoints, two of which are staffed by military personnel carrying AK-47s, the third of which is staffed by police. In Madagascar there are gendarmes and police. No one, not even the natives, are really sure what the difference between the two is. I can say that the police wear blue berets and the gendarmes wear green berets—or are supposed to. Usually they look like they went to the goodwill and found some random assortment of clothes they thought looked militaristic, like huge-ass boots and out-of-date american forest camouflage. I tend to think of them in terms of, maybe, the national guard and the local police? Word is that the last president, Ravalomanana, attempted to disband the gendarmes only to be reprised by the French government. Passing through the checkpoints involves the checking of registration and, more often than not, an exchange of money. On the day of our trip, however, something went awry with either the former or the latter and while we made it past the police checkpoint, we were forced back into town by the gendarmes and had to switch cars. It’s so easy to write “switch cars,” but in reality switching cars takes a large expenditure of effort. Brousses travel with all but a small house on top of them, a house that is, granted, tied down with exceptional skill and attention, but that takes time to switch from one car to another. We make another pass at the checkpoint—no cigar. Now instead of returning to the brousse station, we just sit in the brousse. This sounds completely banal, but try to imagine the frustration of a.) sitting squished between people and luggage, your ass already numb, and you equipped with the knowledge that the ride hasn’t even begun, b.) that the sun is only getting higher and hotter and your clothes are getting uncomfortably damp, and c.) you have no idea why this godforsaken car isn’t leaving (nor does anyone else for that matter). Imagine your brain on loop (insert expletives where needed): WHAT ARE WE DOING?! WHY AREN’T WE MOVING WILL SOMEONE LET ME OUT OF THIS CAR WHY ARE WE JUST SITTING HERE WILL YOU SHUTUP BACK THERE THIS ISN’T FUNNY I NEED TO GO TO THE MARKET IT’S HOT. I’ll spare you the gory details. Suffice to say, we made it out of Antsohihy. But let me also point out that I’m only just getting started. There is so much more to this brousse ride. It makes me wince just to think about it. 

As I said before, the road to Befandriana and Mandritsara is one of the worst in the country. Our region is infamously known within the Peace Corps as “the Black Hole” because of its inaccessibility. In fact, the former Peace Corps Volunteer at Kaitlyn’s site was flown monthly to and from Antsohihy—Kaitlyn is afforded no such luxury. The first section of road—from Antsohihy to Befandriana-Nord, my site—is especially dilapidated. Most of the road is dirt, which means that during the rainy season (December to April) most of the road is mud. Indeed, entire stretches of road become non-traversable. It goes without saying that any transport done to and from site during the rainy season will involve alighting from the brousse (to lighten the load) and walking multiple kilometers on foot. And while disembarking certainly helps, it certainly doesn’t guarantee that the car will get from A to B. No, getting to B often involves getting off the beaten path, to use an apt phrase, and driving round about mud ditches through fields or even, as we did one time, up a hill and through a small village. In the worst of cases, passengers actually switch cars en route. The mud here is deep, churned, ubiquitous and cruel. Cars are always getting stuck in the mud, the like of which make a hilarious spectacle (until, of course, you’re the one stuck). I’ve broken sandals in the mud here, lost entire limbs even—sojourner beware. 

During the brousse ride currently under discussion, our driver was making good time at first. He was ably and swiftly navigating through the treacherous trenches of mud, so ably that we were able to refrain from disembarking at most points. Then, a gamble. Our driver was attempting to power through a particularly deep ditch, when there was an ominous noise from below. We made it out of the ditch, but in the process we sacrificed what must have been an important component of the shifting mechanism because low and behold our car was stuck in second gear. This, of course, is bad and culminates in an attempt by our driver to remedy the problem. I should say that while most drivers display a blatant disregard for commonsensical road etiquette, they all appear to be accomplished mechanics. We pull over the car and our driver slips under the car to take a look. At this point it’s already past noon. The sun is high and the air is hot. Now that we’re the ones stuck, we’ve become the scenic fodder for other (few) passing cars. Our predicament is both humiliating and depressing. Not only are we being heckled, but I’ve got a full-on case of fat foot and sweaty thigh to boot. 

And voilà! We’re off again! And now, thanks to the driver’s flash drive, we’ve got music! One of the things you realize living in a developing country is how seemingly arbitrary technological diffusion is. Of course, there’s obviously some Adam-Smithian-invisible-hand market forces at work, but sometimes the juxtaposition, between, say, people complaining about having no food while talking on their cellphones, can be disorienting. Almost all brousse drivers use thumb drives or mini-SD cards to put music on the radio. Unfortunately for American passengers, up to date technology does not necessarily imply up to date music and depending on the driver you could get stuck listening to Celine Deon, a band called West Life, Enrique Iglesias, or just new-age crappy Malagasy music that makes your ears all but bleed. This time I’m just glad to be moving though.

But alas, our optimism was premature. Just a few K down the road our car broke down again. Our driver pulled over in a small village and began seriously overhauling the car. Knowing next to nothing about car engines, I will simply say that large bolts were taken out of the engine, something big was taken out and switched, and that the whole process took about two hours. To make the situation worse, this being the middle of the rainy season, sweltering heat has given way to pouring rain—add soggy clothes to my list of ailments. Mentally, our frustration has transformed into a mixture of jocularity and awe. Our dinner hopes thoroughly dashed, two previously discarded anxieties quickly become legitimate problems. First, the Peace Corps has strict rules about traveling at night, which means Kaitlyn, who lives another six hours down the road, probably won’t make it home tonight. Second, the road going to Kaitlyn’s site is cut perpendicularly at one point by a small river—Ankazambo. During the dry season Ankazambo is nothing more than a small stream, easily driven through by car or even bike. In the wet season though, Ankazambo, according to the locals, can grow considerably in size such that the road is impossible to traverse. And with this rain, things aren’t looking good.

After hours of watching the driver struggle in the dirt mud and making multiple snack runs to the local fruit/cracker vendor, we finally appear to be back in the green. Once on the road again, everything is imbued with a new sense of urgency. The driver knows he is late and drives extra dangerously—I support this. The other passengers are tense because they know Ankazambo is coming up—and of course that they won’t get to the market tonight. By the time we get to Ankazambo (both the name of the river and the village through which it runs) it’s 4:30 PM, which is to say that what should have been a four hour trip has taken us around eight. The river Ankazambo is located just beyond a sharp left turn. Once you make the turn, the road leading down to the river is constructed, and I use this word loosely, of mud of the highest and murkiest order. Thus, this small section of road is particularly precarious during the wet season, and warrants careful attention by either the driver or the “mpanera.” (All brousses are staffed by both a driver and an mpanera. The mpanera is sort of a helper who collects money, inspects road conditions, and carefully organizes luggage. You might ask, “Why is an mpanera necessary?” Well, the mpanera is necessary because even though every brousse ride begins with a car stuffed to the brim, drivers are obliged to pick up hitchhikers on the side of the road in order to make an extra buck. This is especially annoying under the following conditions. If the brousse ride is a long one, more road means more pick ups, and more pick ups means lots of starts and stops to load and unload the luggage. This can seriously upset the “rhythm” or “ambience” of a brousse ride, not to mention the hypothetical timetable. Also, if the driver is particularly “greedy” (their word, not mine) he will pick up people even if it means extreme discomfort for passengers already in the car. It’s telling that the way to get a driver to stop the car if, say, you need to take a leak, is to yell out “OLON-BELONA TSY AKOHO,” which means “People are not chickens.” Apparently, sometimes drivers forget this.) 

So we park the car just before the turn and our driver gets out to take a look at the road and the river. Thinking he’ll be but a moment, Kaitlyn and I start discussing dinner again, which looking back, most likely did nothing but push our luck. The driver appears to be taking his sweet time. We also yell out the window and buy some avocados from a fruit vendor who happens to be located just outside our window. (Buying food on the road is actually one of the highlights of brousse rides. Often little towns will develop a small micro-economy around brousse traffic. Brousses always stop briefly in certain towns for snacks. Rather than have passengers disembark, food vendors stampede the windows of the brousses selling various sundry snacks ranging from chicken, fish, grilled banana, fried banana, banana rice bread, raw bananas, cassava, and of course seasonal treats like lychee and giant squirming insects on a string (grasshoppers just went out of season).) Figuring how to eat avocados sans cutlery serves to temper and distract us from our impatience with the driver. Once the avocados have been consumed, however, our anxiety with all facets of the situation quickly come back into focus. What should have taken the driver five minutes has taken him no less than an hour and lambs that we are we’ve simply sat in the car eating avocados while the rest of the passengers make self-deprecating jokes about our situation. It’s five thirty now. This is no longer even remotely funny. Where is that driver anyway? Are we going to make it across Ankazambo or not? What exactly are we going to do for dinner? It’s worth noting that we’re not the only one asking these questions, but no one does anything about it. People in the back of the parked car are obviously just as restless and anxious as we are, yet they leave it to the “vazaha” (the foreigners) to initiate an investigation. Doors are opened, crammed legs and fat feet return once more to solid land. We march over to the bend in the road where the driver is standing and take a look at Ankazambo. Ankazambo, usually no more than a small stream, a creek even, has been transformed into a raging whitecap infested, full-blown roaring river. Even as we stare at the raging river that the driver is considering attempting to ford, an enormous, ominous tree floats down the river in front of us. Immediately, despite the driver’s admonitions that “it might go down,” the two of us know that there is no way we are making it to the opposite bank. 

Now we face a new dilemma. It’s quarter to six and night is quickly approaching. Since we’re only six kilometers past my town, Befandriana, we decide to try and convince the driver to drive us back. Claiming that we are now trapped in by flooded roads (it’s unclear how he knows this), the driver quickly shoots down Plan A—looks like we’re walking. Walking six kilometers sounds pretty easy, until we remember that I have a large and cumbersome propane tank on top of the car that I need to get back to my house. Reluctantly, the driver climbs on top of the van and unties my propane tank along with our additional luggage. I grab one side; Kaitlyn grabs the other and thus begins our long walk home through the Malagasy countryside.

Normally walking through the Malagasy countryside is reinvigorating. When you live alone and talk English at unmotivated, undisciplined, and uncouth students teach English for a living, sometimes things can get a little suffocating. Spending time in the countryside—looking at the landscapes (we live in the rocky mountains), watching the rice farmers plant, and breathing in the fresh country air—can bring everything back into perspective. This time, however, almost immediately as we begin awkwardly trudging down the road I notice that the country air doesn’t smell so fresh. In fact, it smells rancid. I look to Ankazambo, and wonder aloud inquisitively to Kaitlyn:

—Do you smell that? Is that Ankazambo stirring up some fetid debris? Or is that just us after a day of brousse riding?

—Smell what?

—How can you not smell that disgusting odor? It’s everywhere.

We put down the propane tank for a second and do some scrupulous smelling. All the usual suspects—armpits, hands, breath—prove to be innocent. Suddenly I smell my backpack straps and low and behold there is the source—my bag, and now my shoulders, are soaked in shrimp juice. Apparently, in addition to the warehouse of shit on top of that brousse, there was also a big crate of leaking shrimp juice right on top my bag. (I pause to note that this particular instance marks only the first in a series of putrid predicaments involving leaky shrimp, brousses, and backpacks.) I would carry the bag lower, such that it wasn’t in the proximity of my nose, except that I have to carry this goddamned propane tank in order to make a dinner I can’t cook because the market is already closed. So now, we’re walking with fat feet, cramped legs, sweaty backs, tired arms—all in a malodorous miasma of dead, rotting shrimp. The whole day and situation are so absurd that immediately we buckle over in laughter and have to put the propane tank down. Oh what a day!

Except the joke is still on us at this point. In our desperate desire to get home as soon as possible, we neglected to include in our cost analysis one crucial factor—it’s dusk. In the developed world we take night light somewhat for granted. Whether it’s streetlights or headlights, there is always some form of public light rendering even the darkest of nights passable. Here in Madagascar though, especially during the rainy season when the sky is interminably blanketed in a Matrix-like bank of gray clouds, night comes swiftly and darkly. So our good-natured-roll-with-the-punches laughing session was quickly injected with an element of urgency when we noticed that the sun was receding and the moon wasn’t showing her face. Night, I think, will always carry with it an element of fear. Most of us rely on sight so much to make sense of the world that when our pupils dilate to their limits and darkness still pervades we can’t help but fear. This is especially so in a relatively unknown area inhabited by strangers. More so when your status as “rich vazaha” is betrayed by your skin color. And even more so when those strangers are all sinewy, muscular, uneducated men who carry enormous knives (practically axes) with them wherever they go. During the day here, almost everyone greets each other. The effect is that you feel welcome and comfortable almost immediately. At night, however, this is not the case. Greetings are met with cold stares; axes reflect in the moonlight. The effect is the opposite. After getting some inhospitable looks and meeting some too-curious gazes, we begin to double-time it home. The propane tank grows ever heavier as our arms begin finally to succumb to fatigue. Part of the road is flooded, just as the driver anticipated, and we have to ford the equivalent of a medium-sized river, water up to our knees, all while holding on to the propane tank and keeping a wary eye on the axe-bearers. Once across, we manage to ditch our new friends with some fabricated shuffling and bungling. Now its just us, the trees, the darkness, and the five kilometers in front of us. 

After some time, we manage to flag down a motorcyclist heading back into town from Ankazambo. We ask him if he would please dispatch one of the little taxis to come and get us. He agrees; we continue walking, really, plodding at this point, until, after what seems like a very long time, we spot a van heading our way. It’s not the taxi we asked for but they work for the brousse company. Regardless, we really have no choice at this point but to get in. To put it simply, we are very happy once inside the car and immediately relieved to be going back—

—Oh we’re not going back yet? We have to go and get more people stuck at Ankazambo? We have to…retrace our steps? Huh.

We head back to Ankazambo, past the hatchet-men, past the flooded river, and all the way to where we started and park the car. In a sense we end the day where we began it, waiting for a brousse to be packed and loaded with passengers. All the while we sat there in the car, my shrimp-diseased bag in my lap, just looking out the window reflecting on the day’s events, yearning to be home where we could take cold bucket showers, curl up on my nice, hard wooden bed, and open up a room-temperature bottle of filtered and chlorinated water. Looking around the car I wonder if we’re all in the same boat here, so to speak. As if to confirm my thoughts a fight breaks out between two teenaged boys in front of the car in the headlights—apparently everyone is frustrated with the situation. Their fighting begins to escalate and the driver decides to flash the headlights at them, thinking this will prevent them from fighting. It doesn’t, and with a smack one of them is thrown to the ground. More stuff is loaded into the car. More people squish in—a baby. A baby, so oblivious to the chaos going on around it. A baby, spectator to grown humans battling it out with fortune, the elements, and each other. A baby, which upon seeing white people in the car, immediately begins to cry—and won’t stop.

There’s been an interlude between my last post and this most recent, the reason for the delay being that my computer has a software problem unresolvable in my current location. Islands, it would appear, despite their seemingly boundless advantages that encompass everything from delicious coconuts to breathtaking booty-shaking, are not without their detriments. Doubly so for developing islands. But alas dear reader, all is not lost.In a fortuitous twist of fate, I have kin coming to visit and bequeathed upon her person shall be the necessary software remedies for my computer ailments. Forsake me not dear reader, I beg thee.

The total absence of modern technology has not been without its quaint benefits. Absent my generous stores of quality music, I have turned for solace to the radio and discovered the countless, allegedly different, combinations of sounds that comprise what is haphazardly here called music.

I’ll briefly recount the many adventures and escapades that have attended these last two months. First, a tropical cyclone, which cyclone in and of itself was not so threatening but proceeded to make a marked impact on the river, usually small and traversable by vehicle, crossing the road going to my PCV neighbor’s, Kaitlyn’s, site impossible. What is normally a small creek was turned by the cyclone into a raging river of white rapids that no vehicle could surpass. The result was a few days off of work, and a walk across the river on the following day to catch a car. This being the rainy season, such events are not uncommon. Like the other time Kaitlyn and I were going to her site and wre stopped again by the rushing rapids of the river Ankazambo. This time we had to walk on foot the six kilometers back to my town all the while carrying an enormous propane tank. Normally I love walking through the Malagasy countryside, but this time was different. Being so far away from my community (six kilometers is far by Malagasy standards) I was out of my element. And those huge axes and spades that Malagasy farmers carry around perpetually? Well, in the moonlight they and their bearers eyes took on a rather unhomely glow. After traversing more road flooded by water, we finally managed to flag down a motorcycle and have a vehicle sent back to pick us up, but not before having to fend off more a-little-too-curious farmers. I might add that all the while my bag was stinking with the smell of shrimp from being placed under a huge, dripping bag of it for the duration of the trip. And that also even as we reached the safety of our flagged-down vehicle, which proceeded to drive back to the raging river and pick up more stranded people, a baby started crying in the van. Our beer was well-deserved.

Next up in March, the month which has been by far the most emotionally and physically grueling month since I’ve been in Madagascar. In typical developing-country style the month began with a serious case of diarrhea, which case of diarrhea, I tell you, dear reader, in abject and humiliating honesty, proceeded to demolish more than one pair of pants and my mattress, the latter casualty being accompanied by a frantic midnight struggle that involved a headlamp (lights literally out at midnight when the electricity is cut), the biggest knife I could get my hands on, an entire bottle of chlorine, a basin of soapy water, and what I must say were some impressive decision making skills considering the shitty circumstances. So internally, unstable.

During mid-March I was invited to go and weed rice. I’ll have more on the incredible amount of labor that goes into growing the 165kg of rice that the average Malagasy person consumes in a single year, but for now suffice to say that it is labor intensive. For four hours I labored, hunched over, mud up to my ankles in the rice paddies, picking weeds from among the crop. Four hours of non-stop labor and I covered all but a few square meters. That’s not even the worst of it. The next day those hard-to-reach-with-sunscreen places on my back were covered with enormous blisters from the sun. The pain was excruciating. It remains uncomforatable.

Accompanying my physical debalitiations has been the very heart-wrenching realization that teaching eleventh grade English in the Malagasy countryside is akin to trying to grow rice in the dry season. It is a drop in the proverbial bucket. In terms of realistic English ability, my efforts will be for naught - this is just a truth. Now I’m forced to find value in more abstract and intangible forms of measurement, which is difficult and can feel at times self-decieving.

But alas, woe is not me nor does it become me. Now I’m in my banking town, sharing my woes and recharging my batteries. Spring break is coming up and next quarter will bring with it a new beginning. Looking forward to it.

Do you like Mangos? Do you like Diego Mangos? Or Long Mangos? Or do you like the sweet tartness characteristic of Round Mangos? Did you even know there were more than five species of Mango, all of which have their own devotees and inimitable tastes?

How about bananas, do you like bananas? The green ones or the yellow ones? The fat, short ones or the long, slim ones? The tiny ones or the big ones? Do you like them fried? Boiled? Grilled? Just plain? Do you, as I do, love the fat ones sliced up and boiled in coconut milk and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar? Yes, yes, you do — or would.

Who would have thought that one of the innumerable advantages of being a Peace Corps Volunteer on a tropical island would be tropical fruit?

Yes! One of the benefits of living in a country that has yet to enter the supermarket era of all foods all year round is that seasons and regions come to be identified with their respected fruits. For example, here in Madagascar, mango season begins in December and lasts until about March. By November, however, people are already starting to talk about the impending deluge of mangos and indeed have already begun to consume unripe mangos in the form of what is locally called “lasary manga,” or, “mango salad.” The mango salad is made by grating unripe mangos, chopped chives and tomatoes, a little vinegar, and finally salted to taste. People here eat the salad here like a condiment on everything, but its mostly used as a side dish with beef kabobs and fried cassava.

Ripe mango season arrives like a quietly impending storm. You see, it hits different areas of the country at different times so there is a small window of time where you can purchase ripe mangos, for a premium mind you, from surrounding areas and then garner face from people by giving them as gifts. The market is the true barometer of mango season, however. My market is divided into neat little sections, with the fruit peddlers neatly stationed in the southwest corner. At first all they carry are these bulbous green mangos called “manga-esoo,” which are used to make the mango salad. These are sold in bunches of five for the absurd price of one-hundred ariary (about five cents). (Try to imagine this writer’s apprehension as he handed over five cent’s worth of money for five mangos, mangos which I believe sell for no less than eighty-nine cents apiece at your local American grocer. This writer, being new to the whole cheap mango thing, made sure to make steady eye contact with the fruit vendor, searching for any sign that his calculation had been mistaken and incredulously placing each mango within his market basket, and then departed briskly from the market for fear of being pursued by the authorities.) Slowly, ripe mangos enter the market. At first supply is low, demand is high — each ripe mango costs five cents apiece (if you can believe that). But after a week or two, prices come down to the standard five cents a bunch.

Mango season is nice for many reasons aside from the obvious one of gorging yourself daily on delicious golden-orange mangos. First, people cherish it. In my experience, supermarkets leave little left to cherish in terms of seasonal foods and regional delicacies. The closest thing I can think of, in the Midwest at least, is sweet corn season. Sweet corn season in Wisconsin is one of the few times during the year that you might be better off driving down an old country road than you would be driving straight to your local commercial grocer. There’s nothing inherently good about that. Obviously it would be more efficient to go to the grocery store over a farmer’s market or local farmer, but the latter is more conducive to creating connections, in more than one way. One way you make a connection is with another human being. You interact with someone who’s put time and labor into growing food for consumption. A second way, is you are more connected with the land. If you eat according to the seasons, you are in a very real sense, living in harmony with the environment. You know what and when the land is capable of producing. Obviously, this is easier and more fun on a tropical island devoid of harsh winters, but I think it’s worth thinking about.

Here in Befandriana one of the local specialties is a species of mango called round mango. Round mangos are uniformly green and, well, round. They lack the red and yellow hues and the oblong, somewhat-conical shape of typical mangos found in America. Inside they are more yellow than orange, and have a distinct tangy-sweetness that I reluctantly confess is — Starburst-y. Another type of local mango is the long mango. The distinguishing feature of long mangos is their copious amount of veins. Veins are the things that get stuck in your teeth as you bite toward the pit of your typical mango. Long mangos, however, are completely comprised of veins. The downside of this is manifest: Do not eat unless within range of floss or toothpicks. The upsides are firstly that long mangos are comprised of significantly more juice than other mangos, which means an especially succulent mango. A second advantage is that if you don’t enjoy flossing, the social implications of walking around with a mouthful of mango veins is a very good incentive for keeping up with your dental hygiene.

(I should note a second hazard that has been known to afflict prodigious consumers of long mangos. Occasionally, should one dispense with the rituals of civilized eating, throw forks, knives, and spoons to the wind, and instead opt to simply consume long mango after long mango, alone, sweaty, and pressed for time during his or her break, by simply masticating mouth to mango (the way mangos should be consumed in this writer’s opinion), there is a small chance that the juicy residue could leave an orange ring around the eater’s mouth, which would, were such an event to occur, lead his or her colleagues to stare impolitely and propel the eater, perhaps already paranoid about his or her excessive mango consuming habits, to all but sprint to the nearest source of water and vigorously scrub his or her face all the while still being watched by suspecting colleagues and students. Eater beware.)

SIXTEEN HOURS A WEEK

Pens; notebooks; a blackboard; chalk; tables to seat eighty students; four hours a week with each section—these are the resources my students and I have to work with. Half of the time my blackboard is a metal slate painted black. The other half it’s a piece of wood painted black. On the first day of school I walked into my classroom and tried to write an exercise on the board—incomprehensible scratches. The blackboard had yet to be painted; my chalk was too old. Ninety students; one teacher; zero blackboards; zero chalk. I leave the room and search out a coworker. The following discussion ensues:

Me: “Look my students can’t see anything I’m writing. There’s this big craggy, metal slab where my blackboard should be and I tried using these little white sticks to write with but, uh, they just break. So…

 Coworker: Which room are you in? Oh you’re in that room. They haven’t painted the board in there yet. You need to find another room on the compound somewhere. But don’t use that room and that room because they just painted the boards there and they need to dry for at least twenty-four hours.

Me: You mean school was supposed to start last week and the boards aren’t painted—won’t be painted until Friday (it’s Tuesday).

Coworker: Yes, you see that’s the problem with developing countries. The proviseur (principal) and proviseur-adjoint (vice-principal) have been dealing with enrollment issues and can’t be expected to take responsibility for everything. It’s we the teachers who should take responsibility for it.

Me: Okay…anyway what about this chalk?

Coworker: Oh (pulls out magic plastic container) take a piece of this chalk. (Hands over chalk.)

Me: Thanks. (Immediately notices the superiority of coworker’s chalk. Mind begins to reel: Why wasn’t I given this chalk? Where can I get this chalk? Where can I get a cool plastic container like that. The mental notes go on and on.)

I return to class. Rally my students and we head across the compound to a different classroom. Rules are laid. Exercises are done. Class. Must. Go. On!

Let me take a moment here to describe the school. The Lycee, or high school, is comprised of a series of buildings which are composed solely of classrooms. Walk out the door and you’re in the middle of a small field the center of which is marked by a Malagasy flag and occasionally by a small herd of goats searching for food.

All students in Madagascar where uniforms to school. The uniforms for all levels of study follow the same general pattern, a rather long button up shirt with no collar and deep pockets at the waist. The shirts are complemented below with a simple pair of shorts, no pockets. Color is the identifying feature of which level of study the student is currently engaged in. Bright pink at the elementary level (EPP), sky blue at the middle school level (CEG), and at the high school level (Lycee), where I teach, the most noxious shade of beige you ever did see. Teachers in the public education system, like myself, have the option of donning a white overcoat that hangs down to the mid-thigh level, comes equipped with two deep pockets (one for colored chalk and one for white chalk), protects your clothes from pesky chalk dust, and also imbues the wearer with tremendous amounts of authority and respect. Why is the coat optional? Because if one wants to acquire a white overcoat, one must buy fabric from the fabric seller, and then take fabric to the tailor, all of which will cost you the not-so-small sum of seven thousand ariary (about three dollars). Yes, all the uniforms, including those of the students, are made by local tailors. You can tell school is about to start because the tailors all have different colored uniforms hanging outside there stores.

I chose to don the white coat for reasons. One, the coworkers who do where the white coat command my respect. Two, try doing clothes by hand—you will do whatever it takes to keep clothes clean for as long as possible. Three, to garner respect both from students and coworkers. Finally, the white coat is a physical manifestation of how I view myself as a teacher. In my white coat I am an English surgeon. I walk into class holding my chalk as though it were a scalpel. “Please class, this will only hurt for a moment—I’m going to cut open your minds and surgically implant some knowledge.”

TWENTY HOURS A WEEK

So first week goes by without a hitch. Standing in front of eighty students and teaching them English is easier than I imagined. “Maybe sixteen hours a week is not enough,” I think to myself. “Maybe I should start looking for other ways to fill my time. For instance, what are the extracurriculars here in Befandriana-Nord? Yeah, I think I’ll mention something about that to the proviseur.”

Now, the proviseur lives right next to me. Our houses are in the same building—along with the main office for the Lycee. More on the details of my house later, but for now suffice to say that we see each other on a daily basis. So one night we’re sitting out just chatting when I think I’ll ask him about the sports teams at Befandriana (I have this fantasy about starting a frisbee team or coaching a track team, and coaching a soccer team too until I remember that the nine year-olds here are better than me at soccer).

How conversation (in Malagasy) sounds in my head:

Me: Hey proviseur, what are the sports like here?

Proviseur: Oh there are a lot of sports. Every grade has their own sports. But we really don’t have enough coaches.

Me: Oh really? You know, I used to do track and I really like running. I run everyday. Who are the coaches here?

Proviseur: Oh Honore and Henri are the coaches.

Me: You know, at some point in the future, maybe not right away, I’d really like to work with them on that. Do you think you could speak to them for me?

Proviseur: Oh of course no problem. Sure is warm isn’t it?

Me: Sure is warm. Gosh I really like it here.

How conversation must have actually sounded:

Me: Proviseur, what do the kids do here for physical education?

Proviseur: There is physical education classes for every grade in which the students partake in a multitude of sports. However, we are currently lacking a gym teacher for some of them.

Me: Well isn’t that quaint. I happen to be extremely qualified to teach physical education. I ran track in college and played frisbe—, er, other sports in college too. I still run every day. Who are the teachers now?

Proviseur: Honore and Henri.

Me: Do you think they’d be willing to work with me right away? I mean, I know it’s short notice and all, but there is nothing more I would like to do with my time that teach PhyEd.

Proviseur: Wow this is great. Of course they’d love it. I’ll speak with them tomorrow. Sure is warm isn’t it?

Me: Sure is warm. Gosh I really like it here.

Conversation with Honore (also in Malagasy):

Me (still flabbergasted by what I’ve gotten myself into): So look, Honore, do you, err, think we could sit down for a minute and go over how to teach gym class here? I’ve never taught gym before, so, uh, yeah anything you can tell me would be great.

Honore: Like what?

Me: You know, like what you do for the first hour…and then the second.

Honore: Sure. First of all, there is a curriculum you need to follow.

Me: Oh great there’s a book?!

Honore: Yes.

Me: Okay could we look at some examples:

Honore: Sure. (Paging through curriculum.) First week: Long jump (this is in French and much time elapses before I figure this out). Second week: high jump.

Me: Oh wow? I didn’t think we had a high jumping pit.

Honore: We don’t. Third week: Javelin.

Me: We have a javelin?

Honore: Yes. It’s in the closet. Fourth week: Judo

Me: That’s amazing! You know judo? No way.

Honore: No I don’t. You just do the punches (punches air).

Me: Huh….

Honore: Fifth week: Karate.

Me: You know Karate?

Honore: No (Punches air again. Smiles.)

Me: Look Honore this is all great but I was more thinking along the lines of just how to teach a class. You know, like what you do for the first half an hour, and the second…how you fill two hours of time with physical education…

In the end I just made my Malagasy students run for half an hour, watched my them do calisthenics like drunken marionettes, and blew some minds with a couple of cones and some frisbees.

Perhaps, in a distant café,
four or five people are talking
with the four or five people
who are chatting on their cell phones this morning
in my favorite café.

And perhaps someone there,
someone like me, is watching them as they frown,
or smile, or shrug
at their invisible friends or lovers, 
jabbing the air for emphasis.

And, like me, he misses the old days,
when talking to yourself 
meant you were crazy,
back when being crazy was a big deal,
not just an acronym
or something you could take a pill for.

I liked it
when people who were talking to themselves
might actually have been talking to God
or an angel.
You respected people like that.

You didn’t want to kill them,
as I want to kill the woman at the next table
with the little blue light on her ear
who has been telling the emptiness in front of her
about her daughter’s bridal shower
in astonishing detail
for the past thirty minutes.

O person like me,
phoneless in your distant café,
I wish we could meet to discuss this,
and perhaps you would help me
murder this woman on her cell phone,

after which we could have a cup of coffee,
maybe a bagel, and talk to each other,
face to face. 

- George Bilgere, “Bridal Shower.” http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/02/25.

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong.”

- Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Vintage: New York, 1998), 35.

“To be or not to be, that is the question”—at least in English it is. In Malagasy, however, not so much since, while there is a verb for ‘to be’ it’s almost never said, but simply implied. When I questioned Robert, the Malagasy training manager, about this I was met with a mischievous grin and an enigmatic statement: “What is ‘to be,’ anyway?” To which I replied: “Well yeah, isn’t that the question?”

In this post I want to talk about the hurdles I’ve encountered while attempting to learn not only official Malagasy, but also a variant patois of it called ‘Tsimihety,’ which is spoken in my region—Sofia. I’m going to talk briefly about the Peace Corps philosophy about language and community integration, describe the rudiments of the language’s structure, discuss the dearth of language resources in Madagascar, and finally touch on the strong oral tradition found here in Madagascar.

Language training in the Peace Corps begins in the classroom, with daily four-hour sessions that incorporate rudimentary vocabulary and basic dialogues that get progressively harder—SOP as far as language learning is concerned. However, the classroom is only where the plowing is done. The real planting in is done on the home-front through one’s daily interactions with one’s host family members, interactions that not only employ one immediately with survival vocabulary, such as ‘spoon’ and ‘eat’ and ‘I really don’t eat meat,’ but also create constant opportunities to put into practice the material learned in the classroom.

In this regard I was particularly fortunate to have a peer to converse with. Josef, my twenty-one-year-old Malagasy brother, and I would pretty much sit down daily with dictionaries and notebooks and just talk about whatever came to mind for a few hours over delicious coffee and peanut butter—I’m already nostalgic. Our conversations helped me to progress my language skills quickly and before long Josef could explain words in Malagasy to me instead of having to ask a teacher the next day during class.

Peace Corps encourages its volunteers to learn local dialects in order to garner support and respect from native inhabitants. For the first two weeks of training, all volunteers in Madagascar study the common speech, that is, the speech spoken by the people in the capital city, Antananarivo. Once we found out our sites, however, volunteers were segregated by region in order to begin learning their regions’ respective dialects. In Sofia, the region where myself and three others are stationed, they speak a variation of the standard speech known as “Tsimihety.” Literally translated “Tsimihety” means “those who do not cut their hair,” and it is both the name of the region’s language and tribal ancestors who, in honor of a fallen king, forbore from cutting their hair.

If you think learning Malagasy is difficult, try learning a variation of Malagasy spoken only in a small region of the country. I’m not even talking about linguistic difficulty here. Indeed, it’s fairly easy to gain a rudimentary grasp of the Malagasy language. With regard to temporal tenses, for example, there are only three ways to convey the time at which a verb is occurring: past, present, and future. To change the tense of the verb, simply change the first letter of the verb. Past tense is denoted by verbs beginning in ‘N,’ present tense by those beginning with ‘M,’ and future tense by an ‘H.’ Take, for instance, the verb ‘mianatra,’ which means ‘to study.’ Following the scheme just outline, to denote the past tense ‘mianatra,’ the present tense form of the verb, becomes ‘nianatra,’ while to denote the future tense it would become ‘hianatra.’ Obviously it gets more complex than that as you venture into things like the passive tense, but you can see how one could easily and quickly gain functional and even conversational fluency.

But I’m getting carried away here—the difficulty I really want to describe here is the difficulty of finding resources with which to study with. Walk into a bookstore in America and you will find a department devoted to selling you whatever resources you need to study whatever foreign language you want to learn. You don’t like books? Buy Rosetta Stone. Don’t have a computer? Put these tracks on your ipod. Walk into a bookstore in China and you’ll find an entire department devoted to selling you the latest and most effective ways of studying English. Choose from a plethora of textbooks, tapes, CDs, DVDs, and maybe even a seminar or two with ‘Crazy English.’ Walk into a store—I have yet to find a bookstore—here in Madagascar and try finding a Malagasy dictionary. That’s right—there is no official Malagasy dictionary.

Let that sink in for a moment—no dictionary.

Well there is one dictionary. It’s this flimsy little pink booklet that missionaries compiled years ago. And of course there is the yellow one on Amazon.com available for purchase, but word on the dirt road is that the pink one, which is not even a centimeter thick, is better.

In China I bought the newspaper everyday, sat down with my electronic dictionary, and cranked out a few articles no matter how hard they were. In Madagascar there are neither Malagasy dictionaries nor Malagasy textbooks. In Befandriana-Nord, the town where I reside, there aren’t even newspapers. In Antananarivo, the capital, where there are at least newspapers, most articles are in French—such is their legacy. No dictionaries, no textbooks, no newspapers—for official Malagasy, the common speech. Now imagine the situation for Tsimihety, my dialect. Needless to say, the tiny notebooks fill up fast.

The Peace Corps language training staff has worked hard to create a textbook suitable for learning the rudiments of the language. And it’s a good textbook filled with all sorts of useful dialogues and vocabulary and cheesy pictures and clipart from Word ‘97—but, it can only take you so far for two reasons. First, they only contain two months worth of information, which is enough to get you off the ground, but if you’re aiming for the stratosphere it’s going to take a lot more than that. Second, try sitting the staff down to get into the real nuts and bolts of the language and sometimes you’re just met with stares. They’ve come up with all these silly pseudo-grammatical terms like ‘substantive’ and ‘relative’ to describe verb transformations, but I could never get anyone to tell me when exactly to use them! Recently I asked a colleague, Honore (see below), the Malagasy teacher, if there were any famous Malagasy writers.

     “Yes,” he said, “Jean-Simone (I think).”

     “What did he write?” (Meaning, like, book)

     “He standardized Malagasy about fifty years ago.”

     (Astounded) “Any fiction writers?”

     (Honore looks at colleague) “Do we have any fiction writers? No? Nope. All French books.”

The point of recounting this interaction is threefold. First, Malagasy, at least in its ‘official’ form is a young language. It’s only been standardized for less than a century. Second, French colonization, as one might expect, has had its way with this country and this country’s culture. Linguistically, anything and everything official is usually in French and numbers too to boot (the woes and headaches of communicating in French numbers and the arcane financial system here shall be recounted in great detail in the future). Finally, modern Madagascar is heir to a very strong oral culture. Here the spoken word trumps the written word. In my region, for example, degree is expressed by differently intoning the voice. A low pitch for something big—’GEEEEEDDDAAAA;’ a high pitch for something small—’kkkkkkkeeeeellllllyy.’ Furthermore, the Malagasy are a breed who love to give speeches on even the smallest of occasions. It’s not uncommon for me to be at a staff meeting and to hear the all-to-familiar and by now ominous, “Tompokolahy sy tompokovavy”—”gentlemen and ladies,” which is, without exception, proceeded by a long and windbagg-y thank you to every who is at the meeting and a small speech about the desks that are broken. Another example that I find to be revealing is the Malagasy word for history “tantara,” which stems from the verb “mitantara,” meaning ‘to tell,’ which, in this writer’s humble opinion, is a marked improvement on its English counterpart.

I have lived in Madagascar now for close to three months. In that time, I have witnessed dusk change to dark at seven in the evening. I have read, studied, and done dishes by candlelight. I have gone from not being able to say my name in Malagasy to being capable of discussing the historical significance of Martin Luther King, Jr.. I have made family of people who I once considered strangers. I have made my own peanut butter. I have gathered water from a rice paddy in buckets and then taken a shower with it—many times. I have lived among a people whom, despite living in poverty, remain the warmest and kindest breed of folk I ever did see.

I have run barefoot with Malagasy and American friends at five-thirty in the morning, and witnessed the sunrise daily. I have learned to discriminate between different types of mosquitoes and felt the majesty that is to sleep under a mosquito net. To this day, I have taken nine pills of Mefloquine malaria prophylaxis and had the dreams to prove it.

I have been greatly embarrassed by many of my compatriots; greatly emboldened by a few of them.

I have danced with skeletons. I have danced with drunken old men, hand in hand. I have danced, and taught, the Hokey Pokey with fifty Malagasy children. I have taught English to Malagasy children of all ages. I have worn an apron in front of class and made a banana and peanut butter sandwich. I have learned the difference between ‘some’ and ‘any.’ I have been inspired by Malagasy pupils whom, despite lacking ample resources and teachers, speak impeccable English.

I have watched forests disappear and be turned into coal. I have been served pitchers of, for the past two months, the blackest, freshest, and most delicious coffee—”the sort of coffee,” as one author put it, “you marry somebody for being able to make”—no less than twice a day. I have eaten no fewer than three different species of banana, and can assure you that the smell of certain species of banana can offend a sensitive sinus. I have not, I assure, drunk Malagasy Moonshine—’tokagasy’—, as it’s not only not allowed but also illegal, but can also assure you, based on unimpeachable sources, that the stuff is vile and wretched and illegal for good reason.

I have killed a chicken—and eaten it too. Ironically, I have become a vegan. I have seen rolling hills turn into rows of palm trees, and green highlands transform into yellow savannah. I have seen, walked in, and been covered in, distinctly red earth. I have seen spiders as big as fists, and now know that lewd drawings transcend cultural boundaries. I have not , much to my chagrin, laid eyes on a lemur.

I have seen clouds like giant steamships, and clouds that look as though the gods themselves were plowing the sky. The sky. I have never seen a sky so big. I have seen diurnal skies that look like upside down oceans, like great blue canvases on which terra firma is but a splotch of paint. I have seen night skies like black velvet adorned with crystal stars. And in one night’s Madagascar sky I have have witnessed more stars, I think, than in a lifetime of skies. I have learned that stars really do twinkle. I have, with the help of friends, discovered a constellation—an enormous brontosaurus traipsing across the Eastern sky (she’s there, you just have to look). I have seen a milky way that was positively creamy.

I have gone hunting for chameleons and in the process walked across tartan rice paddies that meld and bend with the land. I have gotten lost in the mountains, only to find my way home again hours later. I have been proud of myself for hiking six hours, and have been humbled by meeting others who had been walking for three days.

I have met the police, the military, the superintendent, the town council, and the mayor of my small village. I have hired a carpenter to make me furniture. I have now lived alone for seven days. I have looked at my door with unadulterated fear and had to summon courage just to walk to the market. I have felt the oppressive and impressive weight of solitude and ‘otherness’, but also the intense satisfaction of fighting it and winning. I have made new friends. Already I have perceived the once-alien streets and faces change to familiar places and people—unfamiliar characters falling into familiar roles.

I have begun to call this place home. I have lived in Madagascar now for close to three months. My time here has only just begun.

Peace Corps Madagascar Site Visit: ‘The Black Hole’

I am committed to maintaining this blog as a way of sharing my Peace Corps experience with friends, family, and all those who are interested. At present, I have a list of topics I will be addressing in the future. I’d like to do a series discussing various aspects of the Peace Corps; a series talking about Malagasy culture; a few blog topics on my home stay experience and the dynamics of Malagasy family life; and of course, my life as a teacher here. At present, however, I am in the midst of what is known as “Pre-Service Training.” Training takes place in the Malagasy countryside and when I’m not learning to speak Malagasy or how to teach, I’m spending time with my lovely host family. I love them. Once training ends, I’ll be going full-steam with the blog. With the above caveats in mind, I just had a wonderful week driving around this amazing country and since I have some time and the experience is still fresh, I’d love to share. So without further ado, my first blog post.

“Now then, my lad, you’re still young, and as time goes on you’ll come to adopt opinions diametrically opposed to those you hold now. Why not wait till later on to make up your mind about these important matters? The most important of all, however lightly you take it at the moment, is to get the right ideas about the gods and so live a good life:—otherwise you’ll live a bad one. In this connection, I want first to make a crucial and irrefutable point. It’s this: you’re not unique. Neither you nor your friends are the first to have held this opinion about the gods. It’s an illness from which the world is never free, though the number of sufferers varies from time to time. I’ve met a great many of them, and let me assure you that none of them who have been convinced early in life that gods do not exist have ever retained that belief into old age.”