America Is Strange, But He Sports A Fine Beard

Written October 28, 2011
Fort Dauphin

Well, one month down.  Many more to go.
    And it has been a pretty good month.  Everything in Manambaro has progressed much as I expected it would; I started out a nervous, green outsider, and now I’m well on my way to being an integral member of the community.
    Physically my living quarters are two rooms on the ground floor of a large two-story house.  The floor is concrete and the walls are plaster, much like the monastery where I stayed in Briançon, France.  Before I moved in the mayor used my room as an office, and before that another Volunteer, Alicia, lived there.  The other half of the downstairs is closed up, because the floor on that side, which is wood, for some reason, has started to buckle.
    The upstairs is home to my host family; they’re not officially my host family, but we’ve gotten so close that they’re a lot more than just neighbors to me now.  The father, Dieu-Donné, is the principal (directeur) of the town’s primary school, and his wife, Josy, is the secretary for the mayor’s office.  Their children, Desmond, Yvette, Joe, Jolin, Faniry, and Jacquino, are 22, 19, 17, 15, 6, and 4, respectively.  Right now Joe and Jolin are away attending high school in Fort Dauphin.
    One of the defining parts of my first week was learning how to cook for myself.  Luckily, Mme. Josy took it upon herself to show me a few recipes for laoka, Malagasy side dishes.  I also drew from the Peace Corps cookbook we received during training.  The most available foods in Manambaro are rice, sweet potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, and several types of greens.  Little by little I pieced together a pretty diverse menu for myself, then threw it all away because it’s easier to just cook the same thing every day.  My favorite dish now is one of my own invention: sweet potato leaves with ginger in peanut sauce over rice.
    Although Manambaro has several butchers (I have to duck around a bloody side of beef every time I go through the market) I decline to buy meat because of the lack of refrigeration.  And it’s expensive.  Same deal with milk and fish.  So I guess you could say my miserliness, laziness, and paranoia about food-borne pathogens are all converging nicely to make me nearly vegan.
    Except for eggs.  I do not compromise on eggs.  Three eggs every morning, cholesterol be damned.
    My diet choice rankles M. Dieu-Donné.  Just about every third night he’s after me in a mix of Malagasy, French, and English: “Éric!  This is not Antanosy food!  Dinner should be rice and meat!  Or... or... comment est-ce qu’on dit?  Fish!  Not leaves!”
    He means well; most Malagasy think that rice is the be-all-and-end-all of food, and all other foods are secondary.  There’s also a social stigma against eating too many greens; they’re so cheap that supposedly only very poor people make a habit of eating them.
    Well, it’ll just be a matter of course for me to change this way of thinking.  Just one of the many challenges for the future.
    In terms of my Health work so far, things are going well. My counterpart, Dr. Jean-Claude, has been extraordinarily helpful and supportive.  Every Tuesday I go to the clinic to observe prenatal consultations and introduce myself to the patients.  They usually come from the outlying villages and have no idea who I am.  I also give oral polio vaccinations to any children who need them.
    Since my only official duties with the clinic are once a week, I tried to branch out and discover other healthcare agencies whom I could work with.  First I tried Manambaro’s Lutheran Hospital, which was founded by American missionaries in 1954.  However, they didn’t really have a system for someone in my position to just come in and start helping, so they referred me to their NGO partner, Project AVIA.  AVIA is a separate organization with a handful of offices around this area of Madagascar.  The one in Manambaro deals with maternal- and child health.  The nurse in charge of it is Hanitra, and she welcomed my help wholeheartedly.  I’ve accompanied her and her manager Lalaina on three trips to other villages: Ebobaky, to the west, Nosibe, to the east, and Italy, a long ways to the south on the coast.
    Visiting those places showed me just how well-off Manambaro is as a fairly large town.  The people in the bush villages subsist mainly on farming, their clothes are noticeably more ragged, their school facilities are in a lot worse shape, and the ratio of children to adults is staggering.
    Working with both Dr. Jean-Claude and Hanitra has given me a pretty nice weekly structure.  In my downtime I do chores, or just walk around the village and try to meet people.  At first when I would mitsangatsanga, go for a walk, it seemed like even the chickens would stop and go, “Wait, it that guy white?  Humans are white now?  What is going on?”  Most everyone hailed me as “vazaha,” the slightly pejorative term for white foreigners.
    However, things have steadily gotten better.  This past week hardly anyone has called me “vazaha,” and it seems like more and more people, especially kids, know my name.  It’s so funny to have six-year-old boys pause in their game of soccer and call all the way across the field to me, “EREEEEK-A!”  A lot of people seem to tack an “a” on the end of my name, probably because two syllables is just too few for the Malagasy.
    The village is beautiful, everything everyone promised it would be during training.  Rolling sweet potato fields, peaceful rice paddies, elegant palm trees swaying in the breeze...  And this is just springtime.  Summer promises a whole new range of delights.  Lychee season starts in November, and from there there should be a veritable cascade of mangoes, pineapples, and citrus all the way through February!
    Sorry there aren’t any pictures.  On the advice of some of the other PCVs I’ve decided to keep my camera locked away for the first month and a half at site.  Around mid-November I’ll begin my Community Diagnostic Report, a survey of Manambaro and it’s history, resources, problems, etc., and I’ll be able to introduce photography as part of my work, rather than as a selfish leisure activity for me.
    I have to go get my money for the next month now, before the bank closes.  Thanks for reading, and I welcome any comments!