Bloody Sunday in Manambaro

M. Dieu-Donné and Desmond on the right.

Baking the hair off the pig carcass.

"Pork with pineapple?  What kind of abomination is this?"  "A delicious abomination, sir."

All of us together upstairs.  Dieu-Donné took the picture.

A typical Malagasy pork dish.

A gecko, just outside my door.

Written January 3, 2012
Manambaro

    If you’ve never heard a pig getting slaughtered, they are LOUD.
    This New Years was a lot more sedate than last year in Niger, when I’d only been sworn in as a Volunteer the day before.  My friends Emily and Nick, both veteran Volunteers, took a handful of us out clubbing in Niamey, and we ended up accidentally crashing a party reserved for super-rich high schoolers.
    The Antanosy are not very nocturnal folk, so most of the festivities take place on New Years Day.  I ended up going to bed around ten the night before, waking up just before midnight to receive a call from my girlfriend Kelsey back in the States.  So I was awake for midnight, but I didn’t mark the exact moment when 2012 began.
    I woke up again at 3:45.  It’s not that early, really, considering I usually get up at five, and hardly ever sleep in past 6:30.  It was still pitch black outside, but pleasantly cool.  Outside I found Dieu-Donné, Desmond, and two other guys who must have been hired butchers.  They dragged the big pink sow out of its pen and pinned it to the ground.  One of the butchers drew a large knife.
    Blood flowed.
    After the hog was all the way dead they piled dry brush on top of it to singe off the hair.  As they got down to the butchering in earnest I went over to where Rodin was helping slaughter a ram; after the animal’s death, butchering isn’t very exciting.  When I got back, the pig carcass lay in two identical halves, as if it had been cleanly guillotined from nose to tail.
    We rest of the morning preparing food.  Well, the women and I prepared food, and the men drank.  I made “American-style brochettes,” or simple shish-kebabs with the skewers my parents sent me.  Dieu-Donné took one look at the pork cooking beside deliciously charred pineapple and proclaimed in English, “I like not.”
    He likes not ANY kind of non-Gasy food that I make.  Recently he tried to persuade me to change my diet with the argument that it’s part of my Peace Corps mission to adapt to local customs.  Yeah, it is... but that adaptation does not extend to things I cook in my own kitchen.  My house is a little slice of America, to about the same extent that Robinson Crusoe’s cave was a little slice of England.
    The rest of the day I spent with the family, eating pork and drinking beer.  Dieu-Donné asked me to buy five bottles to contribute to the party.  Since everyone else was drinking rum, I ended up drinking four bottles myself.
    During the party I found out that I think I’ve made a breakthrough in Malagasy.  My vocabulary is improving steadily, but my fluidity and comfort with the language seems to have shot up in a very short time. 
    I actually won a brief argument with Plaisir, a cousin of the family.  I was drinking beer out of a glass multivitamin bottle, which I had brought from my house because I knew it wouldn’t get confused with the other glasses.  Plaisir said that such a vessel is unacceptable in Malagasy culture because it makes me look like I’m too poor to afford a proper cup.  I responded that in American culture I would be praised for having thought to repurpose a medicine bottle as a drinking cup.  To the Malagasy there are few things worse than looking poor.
    After lunch, after I stumbled downstairs looking forward to a long nap, I reflected on how the twenty-first century is moving along.  I mean it’s 2012 now.  It was easy to see the last decade as just an extension of the twentieth, because it wasn’t really substantial enough to stand on its own.  And 2011 was kind of an extension of that decade.  But 2012 represents something new.
    Think about the stuff that’s happened so far in the twenty-first: September 11th, the War on Terror, the economic collapse, the Arab Spring.  There's eighty-nine more years in front of us for the world to shift and change.
    Welcome to the future.