South to the Future

The hills right outside of Fianarantsoa

 Driving towards Ihosy

The dry grasslands between Ihosy and Betroka

The thorn trees of the Spiny Forest, near Ambovombe

The rice paddies and mango groves of Manambaro, looking north

The north beach at Fort Dauphin

Written September 20, 2011
Fort Dauphin

    The past couple days have taken us from the magnificent heights of the central Plateau, to the heart of the most unique forest on the planet, and finally to one of the most singularly beautiful places I have ever been.
    There were five of us: me, Monica, Harry, Donné, our driver, and Jouvin, our Installer.  Jouvin used to be a language teacher with Peace Corps, but has since risen to manage Peace Corps Response.  He and Donné are both from the south, fluent in the Antandroy and Antanosy dialects.
    From Fianarantsoa we backtracked north a little, then turned southwest, following the paved road towards Tulèar.  Like the country around Ankazobe, the rolling grassy hills distinctly reminded me of the Idahoan Rockies.  Only instead of cow pastures, these hills were lined with pineapple plots, rice paddies, and small banana groves.
    After having lunch in Ihosy, we climbed a long slope and then, at the top, turned off the paved road.  Where the dirt road began, the hills abruptly ended, turning into a high, flat prairie that stretched to the horizon.  The road was flat and straight, and we flew along.  Sometimes we slowed and followed other tracks through the grass to avoid spots where the road had degraded.  The road reminded me more of a watercourse as it forked and twisted and rejoined itself over and over.  It was as if Man had endeavored to make a straight, artificial road across the grassland, but had instead been tricked into making something far more organic, something of Nature’s devising.
    The terrain became rockier and drier, and the grass thinner.  We crossed about twelve streams, some no more than trickles.  Maybe half had functioning bridges; those without bridges or with broken ones, we forded.
    We discussed the different tribal areas we had passed through.  Tana is the domain of the long-ruling Merina (mehr-ih-na) clan, while Fianarantsoa was the seat of their neighbors, the Betsileo (bets-ih-lay-oh).  After some distance on the unpaved road we entered Bara (bah-ra) territory.  South of the Bara are the Antandroy (an-tahn-droo-ey), the desert dwellers.  Turning east towards Fort Dauphin there are the Antanosy (an-tah-noose-ey).
    That night we pulled into Betroka, the half-way point between Ihosy and Ambovombe, where the unpaved highway forks directly east and west.  The town has a certain Wild West feel to it, since it mainly functions as a stopover for travelers and truck drivers.  We booked a hotel and took a walk with Jouvin before dinner.
    On the street we saw a man insouciantly carrying a spear made from a length of rebar.  My first thought was, “Huh.  Haven’t seen one of those since Niger.”
    We left Betroka bright and early, munching on plain baguettes.  The landscape kept drying out little by little.  Around 10 we saw the first cactus.  The prickly pears multiplied, along with wild sisal and acacia-like thorn trees.  This vegetation grew more and more prevalent until we crested a hill, turned left, and suddenly were in the thick of the Forêt des Épines, Madagascar’s Spiny Forest.
    What makes the Spiny Forest so intimidating is not that so many of its trees are covered in organic knives.  It’s the fact that some of the trees just seem to scream out, “LOOK AT ME!  I’M COVERED IN KNIVES!”  For instance, there are trees that are just one long stalk, with a layer of tiny round leaves covering the upper sections.  But aside from the leaves, every square centimeter of that tree is occupied by a thorn. 
    But even a place as forbidding as the Spiny Forest offers hidden pleasures.  In this case, Antandroy bananas.  They’re shorter than regular bananas and noticeably fatter, with an incredibly delicious and complex flavor.  Picture the best banana you’ve ever had, with a taste that’s lemony at first, but then expands to encompass flavors that have little right to exist as part of a banana, like the savoriness of whole-wheat bread and the richness of well-cooked steak.
    We made it to Ambovombe at sunset, and this morning left for Fort Dauphin.  The road from Ambovombe is paved, but in bad condition, with one cracked ridge of pavement running down the middle and dirt tracks to either side.  The country slowly became greener as we left the desert behind and moved toward the lush coast.  We passed sprawling sisal plantations as we headed toward the mountains, the Chaînes Anosyennes.
    The mountains turned to be about the same height as the Blue Ridge, so we passed over  them quickly.  At the top we had a fantastic view of the valley below leading to Fort Dauphin and the ocean.
    We passed through some villages where the houses were made of wooden planks and thatched with palm leaves.  Soon we reached my village: Manambaro.
    Apparently Tuesday is market day, so the town was bustling.  Merchants were hawking everything from radios to cherry tomatoes.  Jouvin led us on foot up a hill to the CSB, where we met with my counterpart, Doctor Claude.  The doctor showed us to my living quarters, one room in the former mayor’s house, but we couldn’t get inside for lack of a key.
    Claude said that the current mayor had procrastinated on the repairs to my room that he had promised, and they still weren’t done.  So the five of us (Donné stayed with the car) pushed through the market again to get to the mayor’s office.  He received us in good humor, and listened while Jouvin very diplomatically asked, “Hey, can you do those thing you promised to do three months ago?”
    On our way out the mayor said he was very happy I would be there to teach the townspeople English.  He seemed so pleased,  I thought it would be rude to point out that English ain’t my job.  Oh, well, I’ll deal with that issue when it arises.
    At least my town’s leader isn’t an Islamic zealot, like that piece ‘a work back in Gala Beri.
    As we got back on the road I fell asleep, drained from seeing my new home for the first time.  And I woke up to see the pure blue of the Indian Ocean.
    Fort Dauphin is built on a fantailed peninsula with a round lagoon on either side.  With the mountains as a backdrop, the palm trees, the white sands, and the elegant French colonial architecture, it is jaw-droppingly beautiful.
    And it’s my banking town for the next two years.

It All Comes Together

Written September 18, 2011
Peace Corps Maeva Transit House, Fianarantsoa

This post is dedicated to Dan Hodson, the best English-to-Zarma speechwriter the Peace Corps has ever seen.

    Very tired now.  Not gonna try to be articulate.
    The Swearing-In ceremony was brief, intimate, and very appropriate for the Peace Corps.  Since America doesn’t recognize the current government of Madagascar, there was no cause to have the ceremony at the embassy in Tana.  So we had our own at the Training Center, free from the pomp and excesses of the State Department.
    Free from the people of the State Department, too, incidentally.  Apparently the new chargé d’affaires just landed, and the embassy staff decided to have his (her?) welcoming party on the very same day.  And while that seems like a slight from our fellow Americans, it was actually a blessing.  They got to stay in their air-conditioned fortress-mansions, and we got to have a much more personal ceremony with all the host families from Lohomby and Mantasoa.
    We began the morning by setting up tables for lunch, with seats enough for 200 people.  Freshly washed table cloths appeared, as well as boxes of silver- and glassware from a German store in Tana.
    About 9:30 we began to change into our formal attire. The host families arrived at about 10:30 and the ceremony started at 11.
    Kim from Health and Chip from Education were selected to give speeches in Malagasy.  Kim was the only one of us to score Advanced on her final LPI, and I don’t imagine Chip fell short of Advanced by much.  Chip’s speech was one to make JFK proud, talking in grand but honest tones about the history of Peace Corps and America’s commitment to helping developing nations.  Kim’s speech, by contrast, portrayed the smaller picture of how we arrived in Mantasoa with almost no knowledge of anything to do with Malagasy life.  And after less than three months here, we’ve adapted magnificently to the demands of this new land.
    Country Director John Reddy spoke on how PCVs benefit from their service by gaining vast sums of new skills and experiences, and how none of the Peace Corps mission would be possible without the giving spirit of people like the host families.  He then asked us to stand and recite the Volunteers’ oath, and in the space of two minutes, we moved from one stage of this adventure to another.
    It was good to see Joseph and Bakoly again before we left Mantasoa.  Joseph is still laid-back and complimentary, and Bakoly still treats me like a child.  I promised to visit them when I come back for IST in December.  We had lunch together with Ellen’s and Mariana’s families in the main dining hall.  Lunch was fried chicken, roasted vegetables, beans, pasta salad, and of course rice.
    Not long after lunch, one of our number had to leave.  Stephanie from Education was assigned a site in the north, surrounded by rainforests and bordered by the ocean.  She joked that it had nothing to offer but lemurs, whales, and kids that needed teaching English.  The forests isolate it from Madagascar’s road system, so the only option is to fly in.  Amel and John have “fly sites” in the north too, but the flight to Stephanie’s was leaving in a matter of hours.  After many tearful hugs, she grabbed her bags and was gone.
    Spent the rest of the afternoon packing.  Just before dinner, the mortar and pestles that Ava had ordered for us arrived.
    Ava had spent Demyst with Minnie, a Small Enterprise Development Volunteer who works with stonecarvers.  Minnie and Ava had provided us with order forms to get mortar and pestles made from solid granite in time for Installation.  Everyone but me ordered the petite, manageable 16 cm size.
    I order the 30 cm size.  To convert that for y’all, that means almost a 1x1x1 foot cube of solid.  Freakin’.  Granite.  I can lift the thing, but only a few inches, for a few seconds at a time.  Luckily our driver down to Fort Dauphin, Tonnaie, is muscled like a snake and lifted it into the 4x4 without much trouble.
    But more to the point, why would I do that to myself?  30 centimeters?  How did I not see this coming?  How did I not think that a hunk of granite that big would really be that HEAVY?  It’s times like these when I question my right to think of myself as an intelligent, capable adult.
    After dinner we played cards, then settled down to watch a movie on the projection screen.  We settled on Role Models, which I recommend if you don’t mind gratuitous nudity and copious profanity.  I especially liked how the movie captures LARPing culture (look it up) and how romances between awkward but mutually adoring nerds can go.  We followed Role Models with Mean Girls.  No one seemed to want to go to bed, because it would mean saying goodbye.
    But say goodbye we did this morning.  I left Mantasoa with Monica and Harry, following the misty mountain roads with Tom Petty on Harry’s speakers.
    On the trip down to Fianarantsoa we got to see a lot of the Plateau.  We passed such sights as a huge buckled concrete bridge spanning a gorge and a rock formation that looked like an Easter Island head lifting itself out of a hillside.  My favorite was a boy tilling rice under huge cliffs of what looked like red chalk.
    Had dinner near the Maeva, then I been on the Internet catching up with a lot of things.
    Got two days left on the road, and them’s gonna be fun.

The Tech Presentations

Written on September 15, 2011
Peace Corps Training Center, Mantasoa

    Tomorrow’s the day.  Tomorrow everything changes.
    Since we returned from Tech Trip, we Health Trainees have been busy as ants.  Immediately after my last blog post from Tana, we went on another trip: Demystification, or Demyst.
    Luckily the destination wasn’t so far afield this time; the fourteen of us were divided into four groups to visit current Volunteers relatively close to Tana.  Kim, Kimball, Monica, and I traveled with Health Volunteer Brianna Janz to her site in Ankazobe, about three hours northwest of the capital.
    The four days of Demyst passed pretty sleepily.  We slept late, cooked American-style meals with Brianna, and explored the town.  I’d been expecting a little more excitement, but I’m certainly not complaining.  And that’s the point of the Demyst trip anyway, to show you what life’s really going to be like at site.  Looking back on the week I spent in Gala Beri, it’s much the same.  If there’s no clinic-related work to do, your chores for the whole day may take you half the morning.  Time passes at a crawl that can actually be quite pleasant.
    The chance to see Ankazobe up close carried a special significance for me, since Manambaro is a town of about the same size, around 25,000 people.  That may seem tiny to a city-dweller, but I’m from Clarke County, Virginia.  And not even from Berryville, but from the middle of the forests and fields, the definition and epitome of countryside.  Gala Beri had 400 people, and that number seemed perfectly manageable for me.  But 25,000?  That’s like a metropolis, at least in my head.
    However, now that I’ve had the chance to walk around Ankazobe, my site down south doesn’t seem so intimidating.  Brianna seemed close with her neighbors and the many shopkeepers near her house.  And it was easy to get out of the town and find the open fields and country roads that I’m used to.
    This time next week, Manambaro’ll be my home.
    When we got back from Demyst, we hit the ground running on our three Technical Presentation.  This presentations are basically designed to make sure you can competently give health-related lectures to Malagasy audiences in our respective Malagasy dialects.
    The first presentation was a short ten minutes, to be performed for the language training staff.  I chose to speak on vaccines (“vaksiny”), because I had an idea in mind for a short allegorical story, a fable, that would communicate the importance of vaccinating children.
    Here it is, in short version:

There is a strong wrestler.  He can defeat all of his opponents.  But one day, he hears of six opponents whom he will not be able to defeat, because of their special moves.
    The wrestler’s friend comes up with a solution: he will watch the six opponents and study their special moves.  The wrestler and his friend train hard.  When the opponents come, the wrestler defeats them, because he knows their special moves.

The wrestler is a person, his friend is the vaccine, and the six opponents are Tetanus, Whooping Cough, Diptheria, Measles, Polio, and Meningitis.  After the story, I had a spiel about how mothers should think of the diseases that can be beaten, but only with proper vaccination.  Tovo gave me feedback on how I could improve the presentation with more illustrations, or even by getting actual wrestlers to act out the parts.
    The second presentation was to be at a school.  We had to speak in pairs for two classes for an hour each.  Kimball and I prepared an interactive lecture on nutrition (“sakafo ara-pahasalamana,” literally, “food for health”).  We were assigned to teach Cinquiéme (seventh grade, approximately), and Troisiéme (ninth grade).  Having never taught a group of kids before, Kimball was dreading the task, groaning about how he has no patience for children and how the whole thing would probably end in disaster.  I assured him that, if anything, he would come off as cantankerously charming.
    We filled up forty minutes for the Cinquiéme kids by explaining the three main food groups to the kids: grains, proteins, and fruits and vegetables.  Then we divided them into two groups and went out side to read from a picture book.  The book, Boky Ara-Pahasalamana, “The Book For Health,” was put together by former Madagascar Volunteers and has text for the stories in both English and Malagasy.
    Kimball had gradually warmed to the kids over the hour.  He read faster than I did, and ended up with a final three minutes with nothing planned for the lesson.  So, since the story had been about hygiene and had-washing, he improvised.
    “Oh no, maloto ny tànana, my hands are dirty, don’t let me touch you!” he cried.
    The kids shrieked in glee at the game of tag Kimball had started.  They chased each other round and round the school yard, darting around the other groups of children each surrounding a Trainee.  The students clustered around me stared longingly.  Clearly they had received the less cool of the strange, bearded white teachers.
    After the first class, teaching Troisiéme was a piece of cake.  A little less enjoyable, though, since the older kids were more skeptical of the nutrition lecture.  I guess it takes a lot to convince a Malagasy that you need less rice, not more.
    All of us left the school feeling pretty good about the day.  Teaching Health topics to schoolchildren turned out not to be nearly as hard as we’d thought it would be.
    But after that it was a mad scramble to finish our third Tech Presentation; we only had four days to work on it.  This one was supposed to be on the topic that we hoped to make our main focus at site.  I chose AIDS, STIs, and condoms.  As a flourish I added a little bit at the end reminding teenage boys that getting a girl pregnant may not just ruin her life, but yours as well if her family insists you get married or decides to make you pay child support.  Rigobert, my Antanosy teacher, was very patient in helping me translate the whole six-part spiel.
    We presented in the school in Lohomby for our families on Tuesday the 13th.  The lectures took all morning, but everyone did a fantastic job.  We arrived back at the Training center for a late lunch and a well-deserved nap.
    That night we got the news that all twenty-seven of us in the stage had passed our final Language exam.  So no one gets left behind.  During Training, no one has Early Terminated, nor been Medically Separated, nor been dismissed.  The twenty-seven of us that met in a hotel in Philadelphia will all take the next step together.
    Tomorrow.