The Sea of Emmess

This board represents the opening of the combat scene from Blight World.

We had a fire a safe distance away from the Trano Be building, which has burned down twice already.

Ellen with the guinea pigs she bought in downtown Tana.

Written October 8, 2012

Manambaro

Update: This situation of not being able to post my blogs normally is driving me out of my head.  Blogger keeps telling me I can’t save or publish anything, but when I keep trying it looks like my stuff actually does get posted, but I keep getting the same error messages saying it isn’t posting...  So whatever.  I plan to e-mail all future posts to myself and then post them from an Internet cafe, instead of the Kaleta.  This may mean that posts will become less frequent.

Halfway there.

Of course I said I was halfway there when Kelsey left, and September 16 was the exact midpoint of my service, but one event concretely marks the median of Peace Corps service: Mid-Service Conference.

I flew out of Fort Dauphin on the 23rd.  Seeing my stagemates at the meva was great, as was having some decent bandwidth for a change.  Only a few people went out that night, since we had to get up early for the trip to Mantasoa.

That place doesn’t seem to change.  Same sturdy buildings, same almost-American-quality food.  Same summer camp smells of earth and pine trees and lake water.  So clean and boreal that the mosquito nets on the beds are almost an affectation.

Instead of the usual schedule of tutorial sessions, the staff introduced us to Open Space Sessions, where everyone is free to show up to the sessions that interest them.  We were free to leave at any time, and to attend as many sessions as we wanted, or none at all.  At first I dismissed the idea as a load of hippie nonsense, but it actually works quite well.  I went to sessions on fruit-drying, gender equality, behavior change theory, and raising chickens for meat.  

All of the lessons were interesting; the fruit-drying seems like it would be the most attractive to the people in Manambaro.  Every year bushels of mangoes go to waste because people simply can’t eat them all.  We could construct solar driers cheaply from wood and plastic sheeting.  Unfortunately, the mangoes need to be pre-treated with a honey mixture, and honey is expensive around here.

If I can price all the components, construct a solar drier of my own, and some examples of the finished product, then I plan to talk to three families who sell fruit in the market.  There are many stories of Volunteers teaching everyone in their town about making and selling some new product; when it comes time to sell the product, it’s almost worthless, because everyone has already made some.  These three families should be adventurous enough to try building the driers for themselves.  From there, the knowledge should trickle outwards to other fruit merchants and other towns, like the knowledge of cake-selling that started in Ampasia.  In fact, if the three families don’t take to the mango-drying I might try to interest the women in that village.

There’s not much time, either.  Unripe mangoes are filling the markets already, for people to make a kind of salad out of.

Having our entire stage back together in Mantasoa meant that I could finally debut Blight World, the tabletop role-playing game (RPG) I designed.  I drew it up back in April, when the thunderstorms kept me inside.

So you don’t know what a tabletop is?  Think of Dungeons and Dragons.  Don’t know what D&D is?  Okay, think of it as playing pretend like you did as a child, only with rules so that everything flows smoothly.

The setting I chose is post-apocalyptic America.  The nine players role-played exiled soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Texas.  They started in Waterloo, Virginia, and decided to head south to seek favor with the Queen of Carolina.  On the way they had several treacherous river crossings, and then, outside of Lynchburg, they were ambushed by a horde of cannibals.  They escaped the savages, but Kimball’s character died covering the rear.  That was probably the most hilarious part of the game, when Private Farris was getting mauled and the others were blasting away trying to mercy-kill him, only they kept rolling the dice so badly they kept missing.  After a turn of that, he whipped out his pistol and committed suicide.  Just as well, he was losing so much blood he’d have died the next turn anyway.

After the battle we called a halt, but we picked up the next night.  The characters came to Greensboro, the Carolinian capital, and ended up foiling a plot to assassinate the queen.  Ellen came in as a non-player character (NPC) to be the assassin, and Sally provided the denouement as the gracious queen.

I had never expected that I’d get the maximum number of players, let alone that the game would go as well as it did.  So now it looks like it’s on me to make up another one for COS Conference.

Thursday afternoon we went back to Tana.  All our mandatory sessions were at the Peace Corps office there.  Along with the standard Financial and Safety and Security sessions, we had two guest speakers from the Embassy come, to inform us about the general situation in Madagascar.

In short, things ain’t good.  I’m sure I can’t go into very much detail without stepping on some State Department toes, so I’ll just leave it at that: things ain’t good in the land of rice and lemurs.  They’re not, ya know, horrible, or Peace Corps would already be gone, but still...

The weekend was pretty relaxed.  I tried to stay at the meva and not spend too much money, but I did anyway.  It’s hard to be among a group of friends like that and still live like a monk.  Saturday night we went to a Thai restaurant, and followed it with a fancy Sunday brunch at a French place.  The brunch was delicious, though.  It was worth it just for the berry smoothies.

On Monday I had my dental exam at the Seventh Day Adventist clinic in Tana.  The dentist there, Dr. Luis, is Brazilian, and one of the best dentists I’ve ever been to see.  He wasn’t patronizing when giving me teeth-cleaning advice, just matter-of-fact.  No cavities, by the way.

I could make up a poem, “Whence the Adventist Dentist?” but it’s too hot to be witty right now.

I got back to Fort Dauphin on the 2nd, and planned to head back to Manambaro immediately.  But as it had for the past few days, the need to be social got in the way.