a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

(originally written on 10/20/2010)

After a night of much-needed rainstorms, the morning sky from my favorite stoop was the color of pink cotton candy and violets. I enjoyed a cup of delicious coffee (from beans grown right here in Madagascar) while watching the coconut and mango trees outside my hut swaying gently. Their fruits are growing faster as the Malagasy summer begins.

Shortly after a breakfast of oats and bananas, my work counterpart stopped by for a chat. It is good to be easing into conversation in a foreign language with little thought of what I will say, how I will say it or without even needing to translate it in my head. Soon the discussion turned to a tree-planting project that I’ve been waiting to begin for some months now. Today, it finally, almost began, and this lifted my spirits tremendously.

After spending the rest of the morning chatting with friends in town and cooking tasty beans on my fatana mitsitsy (a cookstove that saves on firewood), I went for a great mid-day run down to a distant beach. About a week ago, I discovered a quiet little alcove protected from the wind, perfect for an afternoon swim. The waves are much calmer there and from the rocky outcrop above you can watch many brightly colored coral reef fish. I saw a school of delicate blue and orange fish exploring the nooks and crannies of the shoreline beside me; soon after a fascinating multi-colored striped fish with long leaf-like fins followed suit. With nothing but mangroves and rolling tree-covered hills as far as the eye can see, I swam in the crystal blue water, grinning at my good fortune. I guess if I had to be placed somewhere for two years of Peace Corps service, this is just about as good as it gets.

As I took a moment to soak up some sun and stretch, I saw what looked like a tiny person diving up and down under the waves, perhaps wearing a snorkel mask. How strange, I thought, someone all alone out there in the ocean. But then I looked more closely (yes, I need glasses)! It was a giant sea turtle! It swam a bit closer to shore so I was fortunate enough to get a great viewing. She was huge, perhaps 3 feet long, with a massive green and orange speckled shell, and would dive down under the water for a few minutes only to emerge some great distance further along the beach. It was such an inspiring sight, but marked with a tinge of sadness. Many of those shells become empty of life in my village, as turtle meat is still consumed here in Madagascar despite conservation efforts by many agencies, including WWF.

In any case, it was incredible to see this perhaps 100-year old graceful swimmer making her way through the water that I had just enjoyed myself.

Back in town, I stopped by another friend’s house to help her cook up the cashews we had just gathered the day before on her land. Before coming to Madagascar, I had never even seen a cashew tree, but in the last few weeks I have been on several trips into the forest which is chock-full of these lovely broad-leafed trees. The cashew nut grows out of a sweet-smelling fruit about the size of a plum and needs to be roasted over a fire before they’re edible… and truly delicious! These cashews are sweet, slightly crunchy, and because they’re cooked over a wood fire, have an exquisite smoky aroma. No oil or salt is added; you just eat them as soon as you crush the outer shell, still warm, and best of all: free!

Like the cashews, I have been enjoying many different types of wild fruits that grow everywhere here. Even just walking around the village, I constantly see kids knocking fruits out of some tree or another that I’d never even noticed before. Indeed, children spend most of their free time gathering whatever is in season… climbing coconut trees or foraging for cashews, mangos, papaya or a zillion other fruits you’ve never seen before.

Yep, I like living here. Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood.

my un-birthday.

In the American culture, birthdays are a special day, a time when friends and family come together to celebrate someone’s life and enjoy an excuse to eat cake. In Madagascar, a birthday means pretty much nothing, at least not in villages like mine. One of my friends at site explained to me that in the ambanivolo (countryside) of Madagascar, most people don’t have extra money for parties and gifts, so birthdays are rarely celebrated. In fact, many people don’t even know when their birthdays are. As such, I tried not to feel entitled to anything particularly special happening on my birthday this year, but something truly extraordinary happened… extraordinarily ridiculous, that is.

It started off all right. Having spent the night before partying in Diego, I needed to catch the taxi-brousse back to my village. Unfortunately, I was dreadfully hungover and dehydrated. 90-degree heat. No Tylenol. Bad idea. I’d been waiting about two or three hours in the hot sun when the driver finally showed up (half-drunk as usual) and announced that the brousse was broken. He was still going back to the village in his personal vehicle, but there was no room for me and my bike, he said. I begged, in my best broken Malagasy, “Please, it’s my birthday,” (which means nothing), “can you please take me today? My friends are waiting to have a party with me!” I’d even bought a couple of expensive slices of quickly melting cake to share with my friends; everyone should learn about the funny birthday tradition of candles on top of cake. The driver reluctantly agreed to take my bike and me too.

After some major confusion on my part, based on the fact that I still don’t speak Malagasy very well, I was somehow informed that there was also a problem that day with the police in Diego, and as such, they were charging brousses extra for carrying cargo out of town. This meant that I was going to have to carry my bike on some other sort of public transportation to the next town south of Diego if I wanted to meet up with the car that was going back to my village. (I’m sorry if this is confusing you, for it surely confused me!)

In the meantime, both my mom and dad were trying to call me to wish me a happy birthday. I was crammed in over-crowded bus, standing room only, sweating profusely, head pounding, wondering if it could possibly get any worse. And oh, did it.

After about an hour of awkward neck wrenching to keep my head from banging against the roof of the bus, I arrived at my stop. I met up with the car going back to Ambolobozokely and in no time at all, we hit the open road with my bike strapped to the back of the car with rope. I watched a gorgeous sunset over rice fields and figured we’d be arriving in my village just in time for my big birthday party. Everything was going so smoothly that I was giddy: this kind of luck never happens, I thought to myself! Turns out, when something’s too good to be true, it usually is, at least in Madagascar. The driver was driving recklessly fast trying to make it to back early; not easy to do since the last 17 kilometers are rutted, gullied dirt road. Finally, we were close to home. It may be hard to fully appreciate what this means, but by the time you arrive in the last village closest to mine, it feels as though you have just accomplished some great miraculous feat.

However, as soon as we made our last stop, mere miles from Ambolobozokely, I knew something wasn’t right. Everyone was arguing, though I couldn’t be quite sure what about. Suddenly, we were speeding back down the road in the direction we’d just come from. I tried to ask the now-very-drunk-driver (he stops in several villages along the way to drink rum) if I could please just get out and bike home. Even though the sun had already set, I knew I could make my way easily by moonlight in no time. He grumbled incoherently and sped up, saying somewhere on the road he had lost someone’s bag off the roof of his car. Why he felt inclined to take me along for the ride, I’ll never know.

I was pissed, and made it known with all sorts of lewd comments -in English- because I was tired of trying to express myself in Malagasy, and anyway, I didn’t really want him to know everything I felt like saying. The driver, laughing, told another passenger, “Vanessa only speaks English when she is really upset!” How astute.

At this point, I felt depressed. It’d been over four hours since we left Diego, a distance of only 30 miles, and I just wanted to go home. I tried to think of all sorts of positive things to derive from this experience. Look at the stars, I told myself. Learn how you deal with disappointment, I considered. Finally, I settled on my go-to thought during times of struggle: hey, someday this will make a good story.

But then the headlights didn’t work, and the driver was driving like a maniac, and I started to fear for my life.

Then we crashed into a big rock in the middle of the road.

Then he tied a flashlight to the front bumper with rope.

Then we waited in some other village for a half hour while everyone argued about the lost bag.

By the time we finally arrived in A-kely, bag still missing, it was about 9:30 at night and the whole village was fast asleep. I lugged my stuff back to my hut and wept like a child, feeling completely, pathetically sorry for myself. My birthday cake was a crushed, gooey mess in its plastic box. I took a picture to commemorate the sorry event.

What could I do in that moment to create joy out of the discontentment in my heart? After a bucket bath in my leaf-lined showerhouse, I took a quick walk along a sandy path to the beach. There I sat gazing out at the Indian Ocean, listening to the lapping waves. A million stars and the entire Milky Way splayed out before me like an ancient fireworks display. I thought of all the people I love in my life, and how fortunate I am to live in this beautiful country, as wearisome as it is sometimes. I made a wish on all the candles in the sky.

My 32nd birthday might not have been the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, but the wave of peace that washed over me in those quiet moments under my own private night sky will stay with me for years to come. And maybe, just maybe, next year’s birthday will be better.

sick.

I spent the last week being quite sick and feeling sorry for myself. I had scabies (mites that enjoy laying eggs in just the places you'd rather not being itching the most) and then had some sort of an allergic reaction to the medication or the bites, and then I got the flu.

Being sick is never fun. But being that sick on the other side of the planet with no running water for showers, or pharmacies stocked with the medications you need, in an increasingly sweltering, humid environment... well, it puts a whole new twist on the word "miserable."

It's times like these when you really need some serious motivation to stay. The Peace Corps talks a lot about volunteers hitting a wall of doubt around the six or seven month mark, which as it turns out, is exactly where I'm at right now. These days, the end of my two-year service (May 2012) seems like light years away. Luckily there is a huge support system here of fellow PCVs to commiserate with... and the ones that are near their ends of service keep reminding me that the time really does fly. I know I want to be here, that I would feel disappointed in myself if I left early.

In fact, just a few weeks ago in my village when I was on a little run along the beach, I was suddenly struck with this euphoric thought: All I have to do is stay and the rest will come to me... the work, the purpose, the way, the reason.

the last day of september.

the unusual gift of rain and cool breezes
has been given to me this morning
to ease the burden of autumn's absence:

the slow turning of seasons,
the transformation of leaves into patchwork landscapes,
the way the air becomes as crisp as the golden grasses underfoot.

how i always dread the coming of this season
when i am overseas-
little can be done to remedy the longing for all that october is:

searching for apples in the orchard,
lazy walks home from school through maple forests, shuffling through dried, decaying leaves,
climbing that old worn down mountain that i swear belongs to my grandmother, in her infinite wisdom,
hiding in leaf piles my father so carefully raked,
the shock of that first frosty morning: nose cold, fingers stiff, frost shimmering on gold, red and still-green leaves.

there is nothing that can be done about these things,
nor perhaps should there be.
they need to stay where they are, to live as they have, in memory and in time.

i am here, in the tropics.
knees sweating,
summer coming.

the burden of choice.

Many years ago I read an interesting book with an even more interesting title, called “The Burden of Choice,” by R. Stephen Warner. Essentially, the book suggests that Americans are in many ways hindered by the amount of choices we have, from the big, life-changing decisions to the small options that inundate us daily. Over the last few months, I have given much thought to the “burden of choice” we face in America and as such, how little of it exists in Madagascar. Of course, I cannot generalize an entire country, but the contrasts between the two worlds are astounding.

For example: do we really need to choose between 30 brands of toothpaste and 50 kinds of shampoo at the grocery store? As Americans, how do we decide where to live, when we have all the means necessary to travel far and wide across the country, or in any other country around the world? We are told from infancy we can be anything we want to be; which career path to choose, with a seemingly endless array of livelihood opportunities at our fingertips? Where to go for vacation? Which school to go to and what area of study? What loaf of bread should we buy? What television show should we watch, on which television and in which room? When to have kids, and how many, if at all? Which drive-through to go to? Which bagel, from the 15 to choose from, the 20 cream cheese options, and anyway, from which bagel shop? How to choose a spouse, when we can meet a million people on the internet alone? Would you like fries with that? Window or aisle seat? Paper or plastic? Pick-up or delivery? The choices are infinite and so pervasive that we hardly even realize how burdensome they’ve become.

What would life be life with fewer decisions to make? In some ways, I’ve come to find out since moving to Madagascar. For certain, life is a whole lot simpler here. And I keep wondering, is this why Malagasy people seem so much happier than Americans? The jury is still out for me; I offer the following observations for your consideration.

The impetus for some of my thinking started after a conversation with my father on the phone during my first month or so in Ambolobozokely. At the time, I was deeply concerned about what work I could do in my village (and to a large extent, still am, but more on that another day). There is no clear job description for me here; I am meant to assess my community’s needs and work to improve people’s livelihoods, while taking into consideration many of the dire environmental issues facing Madagascar. There is no Malagasy organization or person I work for, or with, and nothing specifically I am supposed to do from day to day. I was telling my dad how distraught I felt at the time about this and he suggested I try to find a side job to keep myself busy in the meantime. I laughed! As if there were a lot to choose from! Here are the career prospects available in my village, with job descriptions:

Fisherperson: Go out fishing everyday; repair nets as needed; put the fish you and your family don’t eat on a truck that goes to the city fish market daily.

Mother: Care for children, wash your family’s clothes (scrub by hand), clean the house; polish the floors; gather, kill, prepare and cook all food; clean pots and pans (more scrubbing); carry water from the well to your kitchen hut on your head; weave baskets when you’re not doing everything else.

Then there’s a smattering of shopkeepers, who buy wares from time to time in the city; a couple of hotely-owners, whose daily duties include killing and cooking food; a few carpenters, a couple teachers.

So, that’s about all you would find in the Help Wanted section of the newspaper here, if there was one, that is. Since I am not interested in being a Malagasy mom (not yet, anyway), I do go out fishing quite a bit, which I thoroughly enjoy. The work can be quite hard on the hands and back, especially when the seas are bad, but I’ve always been happiest when I’m out on the water. When the fishing season is poor here on this side of the island, many fisherfolk head over to the west coast where the waters are calmer and the fishing better. Unfortunately, this leaves many women to fend for themselves and to care for their families; as such, prostitution is rampant in the nearby port city of Diego. So, not a lot of career options, as you can see. (However, I don’t want to create the impression that there are not “normal” jobs in Madagascar; I have met many Malagasy people working for NGO’s, law firms, development agencies, etc. Obviously work varies from city to village level.)

In any case, maybe you think the job market in Ambolobozokely sounds depressing, but here’s the clincher: everyone here seems as happy as can be, save for the inevitable money concerns. No one is going to career counselors or meeting with therapists to discuss what to do with their lives. They’re just living them, peacefully. Yes, many are dreadfully uneducated and painfully unaware of the issues facing the world outside of their little village, but I offer this up solely for conjecture: Are we Americans better off because we are brought up believing we can be doctors, astronauts or even president if we just try hard enough? Are we happier spending our lives chasing down that ever-elusive perfect job? What if we were just content to go out fishing everyday, eat what we catch, and sell the rest?

But wouldn’t it be boring to do the same thing everyday? Then again, I wonder if boredom is actually wrought from having too many choices. Kids here never seem bored at all, even though they have not a single toy to their names, so to speak. They play in the dirt, with sticks, with leftover bits of whatever is around (aka trash), and keep themselves occupied all day long between playing games outside and doing housework and chores. At first I found this sad. But then I started to ask myself, why? Kids here never, ever whine or complain about having nothing to do, the way many American children do. When you have so little, it’s easy to be overjoyed just to have a crayon and a piece of paper. Maybe it’s all the choices we give our kids these days that leads to so much discontentment and entitlement.

I don’t know. But here’s more on living with less.

When I stroll down the one road in my village, I have two choices if I want to buy something, and those places are small, seaside shacks, as I’ve already alluded to many times throughout my blog. It doesn’t really matter which place I go to anyway, because they both sell the same things on their three or four shelves: two types of pasta, cans of tomato paste, one brand of toothpaste, several types of cookies, one brand of condensed milk, one type of bread, one brand of beer… and in bulk: salt, flour, sugar, rice, soap, cooking oil (bring your own bottle and fill up as much as you need). That’s about it. There are other small items, but you get the gist.

Do I miss spending an hour wandering up and down the grocery store aisles, often feeling bewildered and overwhelmed by which cereal or yogurt to buy? Do I yearn for the long checkout lines filled with impatient shoppers and crying children, taking a number just to buy some cheese, scanning my groceries on a machine that talks to me, wandering up and down the glowing fluorescent lanes just to find that one last item on my shopping list? No, not really. Sure, I would love more diverse food options, but I don’t miss the over-excessiveness of the American grocery store.

Anyway, if I’m not in the mood for cooking, I can always stop by one of the two hotelys (Malagasy-style restaurants; read: hut with a table and benches) in my village. They pretty much serve the same delicious things day in and day out, depending on what the shopkeepers have killed and/or what’s available: chicken in an oil-based tomato sauce, fish (smoked or ground up with onions and tomatoes), beef with cabbage or papaya, shrimp in coconut-based sauce, or boiled, fresh crab… and ALWAYS served with rice. (As a side note, Malagasy people eat more rice per capita than any other people in the world. Rice is what they eat as their main dish; the rest of the food is eaten in smaller portions, as a side dish.)

Sometimes when I’m cooking at home, or just wishing I didn’t have to cook, I wistfully think back to the culinary choices I had in America. Anything I wanted to buy at the store, from practically any corner of the earth, was readily available to me. Breakfast might be Mexican chilequiles, lunch could be Indian dahl and naan, a dinner of spinach tortellini, with a glass of Australian wine or Belgian beer. (I salivated just writing that sentence.) So many food choices! That, for sure, is something I miss. Or is it? Read my recent blog, “food,” in which I talk about how much I enjoy eating locally.

So, since everyone here is eating more or less the same things, doing more or less the same work, living in more or less the same type of house, does that relieve some of the pressures that we as Americans feel constantly in our lives; the insidious one-upmanship and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses?

I find myself asking: Is life less burdensome in Madagascar because there isn’t a wide-array of choices inundating people on a daily basis? Are the Malagasy people happier in general because they live "simpler" lives? Or are we the fortunate ones in America because we have the world at our fingertips? What do you think? I’d love to hear your comments.