The First Tempest

There are a number of rather pretty fox-like dogs in Manambaro.

Woman and baby in a bush taxi.

One of Manambaro's butchers at his trade.

A chameleon on the wire outside my house.

Kids in the market.

Big white flower.

This group of kids is particularly friendly when I walk by their house on my way to the market.

The rice section of the Tuesday market in Manambaro.

A few vendors have started selling raketa, or cactus fruit.

The high winds from Cyclone Irina.

Written March 4, 2012
Fort Dauphin

    Well, Peace Corps, is this the cyclone you were expecting?  It’s kind of curious how this one, Irina, came right on the heels of Giovanni, which veered out toward Antarctica without so much as a by-your-leave.  We’ve been getting wind and rain aplenty here.  I’ve been staying inside, musing on future projects and taking care of small chores I’ve been neglecting.
    On Monday I got my normal taxi brousse back to Manambaro.  The vehicle was in surprisingly good condition, probably just off the boat from the Netherlands, which is from where I’ve heard Madagascar imports most of its minibuses.  I squeezed into the back seat next to a gracious old lady who kept asking me questions about the Peace Corps.
    Just after crossing the Nosibe bridge, a guy on a bike swerved in front of the brousse.  And we braked and time slowed down and I thought please please don’t hit him but we did.  Physics of it were just like a slow-motion shot in the movies, where the front of the car hits the character’s body and his head whips into the windshield.  Huge spiderweb of cracks all over the pristine glass.
    At first everyone thought he was dead, just taking for granted that the impact would have been fatal.  But it turned out his injuries were relatively light.  We got him into the brousse with us and drove on to Manambaro, to take him to the hospital.  Blood trickled down his face and onto his clothes; from the way his head was lolling I guessed he was dipping in and out of consciousness.  When we got to the hospital entrance he could stand, but couldn’t walk.  It looked like the worst trauma to his pelvis.
    I wish I could have done anything, being a Health volunteer.  There was no material to immobilize the man, or to make a stretcher, and even if there had been the badly paved roads would have made it almost useless.
    He looked about twenty years old, which is usually the age where men are married with one child.  He’ll probably live, but not walk properly again.
    It was after that initial shock that Irina really began her assault.  Another thing that’s been keeping me occupied is the novel Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.  It’s about two Russian university students in 1860 who return to the country to visit their fathers.  The introduction to the book says that Turgenev based the character of Bazarov on the anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, who was in the same literary circle as himself, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. It’s interesting to see how, at least in Turgenev’s representation of him, the father of modern anarchism was just as pretentious and self-righteous as the average anarchist on college campuses today.
    Yeah, I said it.  Not very diplomatic of me, but it’s my blog.  And there’s more where that came from.  If you get me on the subject of anarchists we’ll be here all day and into the night.
    It’s also interesting to see how nineteenth-century Russia faced many of the same problems as twenty-first-century Madagascar, like bad roads, corrupt local officials, and a large population of insufficiently educated farmers.  So does that mean that Madagascar needs a Stalin to shape it up?  Well, that’s the very thing Peace Corps is trying to work against...