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| Despite it being winter, my mango trees have been growing well. |
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| And my neighbors' sow had a new litter. They's gonna be delicious. |
Fort Dauphin
Well, the Cult of Frip has a new convert. No, not Odin’s wife in the Norse pantheon, that’s Frig. Fripperie, en français, from the word for “rags.” Frip can best be illustrated with this question:
What does the Goodwill do with the clothes that even the hipsters won’t buy?
That’s right: sends ‘em ta Madagascar.
And that’s not to say that all frip is bad. You can find some decent stuff, even stylish clothes if you want to put in the effort of searching for them. You have complete freedom to take what you can find and build your own look out of it.
My stage has its own connoisseurs of frip: Megan only brought three outfits from the States, so she was buying frip as soon as we got off the plane. Travis has a thing for fluorescent colors.
I should’ve been buying frip long before now, actually. Should’ve been a no-brainer, really, because frip comes from America and Europe, while the new clothes in the markets come from China and the continent. It took the crotch stitching coming apart on two pairs of new pants for me to realize this. Better to have cheap durable clothes than expensive ones that’ll fall apart at a moment’s notice.
And ain’t nobody cares what I wear anyway. I could go around barefoot in a stained, threadbare shirt and gym shorts, and no one would bat an eye.
But I won’t.
I did buy a jacket however; as soon as I arrived in Fort Dauphin on Thursday the brief warm spell we were having ended abruptly. The jacket’s big on me, and more purple than I’d ordinarily wear, but it looks well-made. And I needed a work jacket for my trip out to the bush.
After weeks of delay, the mission is finally a go. Centers for Disease Control agents are flying from Tana to measure the effect of a severe malaria outbreak in the Androy region. They want local Volunteers to help them as translators. Apparently all the Gasy CDC employees are highlanders, and thus can’t understand the Antandroy dialect.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to, either, but Paul assured me that most Antandroy speakers can easily communicate in Antanosy. I’ve also been practicing Antandroy a little with Yvette, M. Dieu-Donné’s daughter, as the rest of the household watches intently. Desmot jokes that since my English Club is stalled I’ve started an Antandroy Club to compensate.
We’ll be traveling to Ambovombe and then northwest to Bekily, smack in the middle of the desert. We’ll probably visit the smaller villages around both. Alyssa, the CDC program organizer, said that we’ll be doing lots of interviews and data collection about the sickness over three weeks. My own anti-malaria project in Manambaro is slowly coalescing, but it’ll keep for three weeks. This is a chance to do something much more concrete and see new country in the process.
True to Murphy’s Law, trouble came up at the last minute and almost prevented the mission from happening at all. There’s violence in Amboasary. The reports vary, of course, but everyone agrees that cattle thieves killed at least four officers of the law; the latter might’ve been police or gendarmes, it’s unclear. In response, the government sent army troops with helicopters to sweep the area.
The government calls these thieves “Dahalo,” but since that’s also the name of a perfectly peaceful tribe in Kenya, I prefer the Antanosy term malaso. They’re organized and apparently getting bolder in the area around Amboasary. There have been some reports in the past few months of pitched battles between malaso and police, but it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s exaggerated. Since Amboasary is on the road from Fort Dauphin to Ambovombe, the CDC and Peace Corps were both nervous about driving through there. The official decision has come that it’ll be safe to drive through Amboasary, but stopping there wouldn’t be a good idea.
The CDC car should pick me up either Wednesday or Thursday. Let’s go find some sick people!
Añy vaovao andafy (in foreign news), Israel and Stephanie got married in Ohio. Israel is looking for a steady teaching job, and once he finds it they’re going to start a family. Which brings up the question, what would a child of theirs look like? They’re both nigh physically perfect specimens of humanity, so their offspring would be... perfection squared? That’s how genetics works, right?
