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.
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