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| A woodcutter walks ahead of me on the road to Marovato, north of Manambaro. |
Written August 2, 2012
Manambaro
One week, half a day, and about an hour until Kelsey’s Air France flight lands at Ivato in Tana. Can Peace Corps blame me if my mind’s not really on Health right now?
Despite this monumental distraction, I’ve been making some good progress in Manambaro. My malaria awareness project is off the ground; even though much fewer people attend the meetings than I’d hoped, those who do come seem pretty enthusiastic about learning the workings of this disease. I’ve switched the topic of my usual CSB health talks to family planning, provoking slightly more interest from the women who show up there. I’ve started up an English club, which I’m calling the Secret English Club, because I’m trying to keep it as small as possible. And I’ve drawn up a plan to bike around to the outlying villages to give specifically tailored health talks once a week.
And I’ve also been waging a sort of cold war with a certain group of children. Cold on my end, hotter and hotter on theirs. Now that schools are on vacation, kids have taken to playing soccer in the open area near the road reserved for the cattle market on Tuesdays. The older ones, young teenagers, form teams in the dust, while about two-score littler kids sit on the walls and watch.
Not content with watching the game, some of the latter have remembered the fact that I dislike being called vazaha, and I flat out hate it when someone asks me for money. As I walked past one day five little boys started calling, “Omeo vola, vazaha!”-- “Give me money, vazaha!”-- to my back, of course. Big mistake to turn around and glare at them; even though I only glowered, it confirmed that they could get a rise out of me.
And the crowning touch on their little game is that I already lost my cool with a fourteen-year-old. I had to appeal to local government officials to try to counteract the fallout from that incident. How much worse would it look if I laid hands on an eight-year-old. The kids know this, they know that I know this, and they know there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
“Oh, Eric, you’re overreacting. They’re just kids, they just want to amuse themselves. They don’t realize how much the word ‘vazaha’ irritates you.”
On the contrary. I’ve never held with the “oh, they’re just kids” viewpoint on these matters. Are children not people, with minds? Can they not draw conclusions based on previous observation? Do they not give in to the baser instincts that afflict the rest of us? They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it out of sadism.
Fortunately, I have gained the upper hand. I have been ignoring them, and getting better at it. Dealing with these kids is like the aphorism about nuclear warfare: “The only way to win is not to play.”
Some of the kids have gotten the message, but not their leader. I don’t know who this boy is, but it’s always the same one, yelling, “O-ME-O VO-LA VA-ZAHA,” as loudly and clearly as he can. Every time I walk past without acknowledging him only makes him more determined. What did I ever do to this kid? Was it his brother whom I attacked before? More likely he’s just a bored, ignorant, ill-behaved worm who sees me as a target, a big person whom he can bring down to make himself seem bigger in front of the other urchins.
Well, he should forget about me while I’m on vacation. And if he doesn’t, he still can’t keep up the taunts forever. And if he can, well, I won’t be in this town forever.
So ha, kid.
I went into Fort Dauphin on the 27th to pick up a package, and see Tatum and Wes. Tatum had just brought a load of books back from her site, so I got some new reading material. My choices were a quartet of Stephen King short stories, a Barbara Kingsolver novel, a collection of short stories from a Nigerian author, a memoir of an American living in Rome, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver.
I picked up the last three and opened Kevin.
Ten hours later I was wishing I’d selected Stephen King instead. That way maybe I would have gotten more sleep that night.
It’s one of the most unnervingly scary books I’ve ever read. The narrator is Eva, the titular Kevin’s mother. So what looks on the cover like a long mope about the drudgery of raising a son actually reads like a masterfully crafted horror novel. Many books and movies have taken the “child of Satan” premise literally, but Shriver takes an entirely down-to-earth look at the question, “What if you had a child who was, simply and without exaggeration, evil?”
Answer: people would probably die, sooner or later. No, Kevin doesn’t kill people as an infant. He works his way up the ladder of malicious teasing and reckless endangerment, until at fifteen he commits mass murder at his high school. What’s chilling is how he plans the act to the last detail, studying previous school shooters’ fumbles. And throughout the book I was amazed at the amount of brainpower the character uses to harm others and deftly avoid getting caught. In fact, I would venture to say that Kevin Khatchadourian is one of the best-conceived diabolical geniuses of modern fiction.
Shriver also brings up some cutting points about the very concept of childbirth. If we in the developed world (y’all in the developed world, reading this) don’t need children to help us farm or take care of us when we get old, why are we still having them? Contraception and self-sterilization have become some of the easiest processes in medicine. Children are expensive and time-consuming. And considering how destructive and ravenous we are as a species, isn’t it possible the planet would be cleaner and more peaceful with fewer humans in it?
Korea, Japan, and Brazil know what I’m talking about. But America’s birthrate still remains at 2.1, according to National Geographic. Let’s get on this, people! Only we can phase ourselves out of existence, thus ensuring that the world will be a better place... for the legions of Nigeriens and Malagasy who will show up to fill the vacuum.
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