happy independence day.

My friend Bri standing proud next to a statue of Madagascar painted with the Malagasy flag.

June 26th marked Madagascar's 51st year of independence. I spent the holiday weekend dancing and partying with my villagers. How do you know it's a big holiday in a rural village in Madagascar? People run around all morning long chasing chickens. For a community that eats fish (and rice of course) three times a day and lives off what they catch from the sea, eating a chicken is a pretty special deal. Everyone gets out of their dirty rags and puts on their finest attire, eats some chicken & rice and dances to accordian club jams blasting at the loudest possible decibel until the early dawn.

A pic of me and my best friend Chantaly on Madagascar's Independence day, 26th June.

sojourn.

The word "sojourn" is defined as "staying for a time in a place; to live somewhere temporarily." Over a year ago, when I was still back in the states, "sojourn" seemed the best fit for the experience I was about to embark upon and thus became the name of my blog. What an incredible process then to move from one culture to another, and finally reach a point where I actually feel like I live in Madagascar, versus just staying here temporarily. With only eleven months of my Peace Corps service left, my sojourn has become increasingly precious and fleeting.

Life over the last couple months has been beautiful. While official Peace Corps business such as meetings, trainings and conferences has kept me out of my village from time to time, it is my life back there that continues to inspire me. Not only because of the surrounding physical landscape, but because when I return from time away, it is heartwarming to be welcomed back home. Everyone wants to know where I've been, catch me up on their lives and of course ask for their voandalana ("gift of the road..." in Malagasy culture, one must bring back a small token from their travels, such as a piece of fruit or -always highly coveted- a loaf of bread). I still get the feeling that I should pinch myself: I really do call Ambolobozokely home.

In work news, my Chef Fokontany (village president) recently asked me to help the community fishing associations obtain storage refrigerators for their fish, and as such I've been writing a proposal to get funding through the Peace Corps Partnership Program (click here for more details on the program in general).

A bit of background on my project specifically: Ambolobozokely is home to around 700 people who rely solely on fishing for their livelihoods. There are currently three fishing associations in the village, with approximately 40 members each, who pool money together monthly for the purchase of motors, gasoline and upkeep of their outrigger canoes. They store their catch on ice, which must be hauled in daily from a nearby city approximately 30 miles away. However, the road becomes frequently impassable during the worst parts of the rainy season, which lasts approximately three months. Ironically, the rainy season is also the high season for fishing, sometimes bringing in over 500 kilos (approx. 1,100 pounds) per day. As such, their livelihoods suffer if they cannot get ice to the village. By purchasing storage refrigerators and installing them in the local fish processing facility, the community will no longer be at the mercy of the road's conditions for keeping their fish cold and ready to sell. More information about this project in the months to come.

The simplicity of living as my community does, eating rice & fish from right outside my doorstep, going for walks with other women to collect wild fruits and leaves for basket-weaving, spending a day out fishing on the sea, reading, writing, studying, doing yoga, dancing; these are the things that make up the majority of my village life. And as my language skills improve and their trust in me grows with each passing month, I am able to spend a lot more time with small groups of women addressing health issues: birth control, family planning, basic hygiene, nutrition, malaria, even simple wound management. Word of mouth is the way of life in village Africa, and that is something that just takes time to work at as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Still. After a few weeks of the beautiful simple life, I admit I do start to feel a bit stir crazy. So I bike 17 kilometres through the sand & mud out of my village, then catch a bush taxi on the main road and make my way into Diego, a beautiful tropical African city and surrounded by the second largest bay in the world. I am suddenly thrust back into that other self, with all its complexities and privileges: the Peace Corps volunteer... the American... the white girl who speaks Malagasy.

Living with these separate selves continues to challenge me. But I also recognize that it's crucial for PCV's to have time together to commiserate about the trials & tribulations of life in Madagascar, speak English, eat pizza and drink beer. We need to talk about the things we miss, and the things we don't. To discuss what it will be like going back, and what we'll do with ourselves. Sometimes we just need to party. To hear American pop music and read "news" from a four-month old People magazine. To know that somewhere out there, the rest of the world is still moving at its breakneck pace.

I long for all those things less & less these days. I love sitting barefoot on a woven mat beneath a massive mango tree, eating fruit that grows only on this island, speaking in a foreign language with women friends, as they weave baskets, breastfeed their babies, sort rice, pound leaves, gossip.

How to articulate the way this sojourn has become my life? That those things that were once foreign, unknown, even insurmountable have now become quite simply commonplace, definitive, mine.

rainy season.

To preface this poem, I should mention that there are two seasons in northern Madagascar: the hot, windy season and the very hot, rainy season. The last few weeks have marked the changing of seasons, with relatively cooler temperatures and a lot less rain. I welcome the end of rainy season; the roads become passable again, it's not unbearable to be out in the middle of the day, and most of all... no more leaky roof!
Here is the poem I wrote a bit ago in my village.


Because the rain completely saturated the leaf roof above my bed and caused me to curl against pre-dawn pillows

and because the roosters insist upon announcing the first light each day regardless of how hard you close your eyes against it

and because no one else in the world had woken before me
and my footprints were the first ones in the sandy path

and the low tide allowed for still-softly-falling drops to patter in their rippling pools

I was able to hear one sound this morning.

One sound building and crashing against itself:
miles away, massive blue waves creating a wall of the same sound
that is never the same.

How do we know something exists without seeing it?

front yard.

This is a panoramic view of my front yard... what I see every morning when I first wake up. On the far right is my "shower" house, then scanning left you see three chicken huts (and the mango tree where they prefer to sleep), in the background is the outhouse, and on the far left is the kitchen hut where the village chief's family cooks and eats.

This is where I live my life, where I eat all my meals sitting on woven mats, where I clean my dishes, play with children, slice vegetables, cook rice, prepare fresh fish and socialize with my fellow villagers. Yards are different in Madagascar... it is where life happens... it is an open, common space. The home is meant for sleeping and storage.

When I first moved to my village one year ago tomorrow, living my life "exposed" in the front yard was surprisingly hard for me. I was used to a certain level of private, personal space; each meal I would cook and eat alone, inside my hut. Slowly over the last year I have come to live more & more of my life in the front yard like everybody else. I moved my one chair outside. I moved my dishwashing station outside. Now I can't even eat sitting at my table (I tried the other day, it felt odd). And I rarely eat alone anymore, because the families that share my yard welcome me to eat rice with them at every meal.

I've moved into the front yard. Year one, down.

three goals and ten steps.

Goals look different to everyone. But as Peace Corps Volunteers, we have additional goals that we strive to accomplish during our two-year service:

1.) Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2.) Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3.) Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

These are all fine and noble causes.

However, I came across something funny the other day as I opened up the pages of what appeared to be a long-forgotten book at the Peace Corps library in Diego. In it, I found a small scrap of paper written by a volunteer who served way back in 2006, listing her version of the three Peace Corps goals:

1.) Don't go crazy.
2.) Don't drive other people crazy.
3.) Have fun!

This seemed somehow so much more illustrative of the Peace Corps experience. Which reminds me of a small pamphlet a fellow PCV friend made recently entitled, "The Ten Step Guide to Surviving the Peace Corps," fully illustrated with cut-out cartoons from New Yorker magazines.

Here they are, for all of you considering service in the Peace Corps:
1.) Stay optimistic.
2.) Cultivate that sense of adventure.
3.) Lower entertainment standards.
4.) Love naps!
5.) Apply problem-solving skills.
6.) Forget that you once had a thing called pride.
7.) Be patient with Peace Corps bureaucracy.
8.) Remember you are doing good and noble things.
9.) Self-motivate.
10.) DON'T GIVE UP.

the chickens go to bed.

A short poem I wrote a bit ago around sunset in my village.

Chickens clucking their way to bed in the mango tree.
Lentils on the stove.
Rain falling steadily. Now intermittently.

Red wine in a rusted tin cup.
Men sewing fishing nets.
Not itching.
Not itching mosquito bites.

Neighbor girl gutting fish. Now frying fish.
Mothers calling their children home.
Me: quiet in the dusky corners of my doorstep.
Wearing blue lamba, loosely hanging over tired legs.

Chickens cluck softly.
Now fall silent and fade into leaves.

I don't want to be anywhere but here,
living my life away from
life
in my home away from home
away from home away
from home.

writer's block.

I never thought that this would happen to me, particularly while living such an interesting life in a foreign land, but lately I have felt at such a loss for what to write about on my blog. This scares me a little. Every time I've had a chance in recent months to write, I think, what could I possibly have to say? Have I really become so used to my life over here that I hardly notice that it's still really, really freaking weird? Has the interesting become mundane? The life that once seemed so bizarre and unusual has slowly, over time, become more or less "normal." And while even the most seemingly commonplace of tasks, such as shopping for vegetables at the market or traveling throughout the country may seem quite an exciting endeavor to those of you who still read my blog, I have become about as African as I've ever felt. Which is pretty dang relaxed.

So what does all this mean?

It means that it took me about one year to accept the fact (still somewhat begrudgingly) that while traveling in Madagascar I will have absolutely no idea when I will depart or arrive at a certain destination, nor by what means. While recently traveling several weeks ago around the southern highlands, I was struck by how indifferent I felt to this one singular uncontrollable factor that used to drive me insane. Sitting on the side of the road, waiting to catch a passing ride might mean being squeezed in a 15-passenger van with 38 other people (yes, it's happened), sitting in the back of an open-air pickup truck with chickens and buckets of fish, catching a lucky lift in a fancy vazaha (white person) Land Rover or sitting next to the driver of a massive 18-wheeler beer truck. Who knows? And anyway, what does it matter? You'll get there when you get there (fingers crossed).

Getting used to life here also means that I have developed a healthy Malagasy work ethic. You show up for work (such as fishing, painting, house-building, cookstove-making, what-have-you) pretty much when you feel like it. There are two times of day here when you can say you'll start working: morning (meaning between the hours of 7-10) or afternoon (sometime after 3 and before dark). Mid-day is meant for eating rice and sleeping, and evening is meant for eating rice and relaxing before sleeping. So, that limits the true "work day" to about four or five hours, if you really stretch it and take plenty of rest breaks in between. And here's the clincher: if you (or they) don't show up at all, it really, really is no big deal. I've learned to live by this here, particularly when dealing with work: "Mbola misy fotoana" (There is still time). That pretty much sums up the entire Malagasy culture, too.

Another great example of this ethic came to me while staying at a fellow PCVs village last week. I passively observed (my M.O. these days) our work schedules: we'd start building cookstoves with kids or painting a map on her village's town hall in the morning before temperatures reached the upper 90's, and then spent the rest of the day hiding out in the shade or lying on her concrete floor waiting for the heat to pass. By 4PM it was time to start working again, much to the amazement of other villagers, who couldn't believe we were so mazoto (hard working)! When we ran out of painting materials mid-week and had to wait a day for them to arrive from a nearby city, no one from her village seemed to care. In America, if you aren't cranking out work at top capacity at all times, you're pretty much a failure at life. Here, you get things done as you can, when the circumstances allow.

How else has my mid-service writer's block of African proportions manifested itself? Well, for one thing, it takes a lot to get me excited these days. I live in a perpetual state of stoicism and indifference, which is a complete product of my environment. We've all heard of how relaxed life can be in village Africa; imagine added into the mix a stereotypical island culture and voila! you've reached whole new levels of idleness.

The way to survive in Malagasy culture is to seem completely uninterested and disassociated from anything that may happen. You never look someone in the eyes (too confrontational) even if you're having the most uninteresting of conversations about the price of rice. You never show anger or irritation, and if you do, you'll just be met with a slightly amused look that says: that's nice, you weird white person. Want to talk to someone about a work project or presentation? Better be prepared to wait a day, week or month until the person's around and then hope it all pans out. If, in a public place, you hear someone speaking in a voice other than hushed, best not to look in that direction, the person is more than likely insane. Being loud or demonstrative is, above all, unacceptable in this culture. For example, some months ago I attended a concert in Diego in which one of Madagascar's most famous singers performed. You'd think everyone would have been going wild. Not the case. As my friends and I were dancing, I looked around and felt as though I were standing inside a museum: everyone was standing stock still with faces that might as well have been watching a cow chewing its cud. Talk about a tough crowd.

In any case, I don't want this to seem like I look down upon the Malagasy culture, quite the contrary. I think it's been quite good for me to take a step back from the frenetic pace of American life and look at things from another angle. So, next time you're sitting at your office or classroom and staring down at that overwhelmingly impossible to-do list, just take a second to remind yourself: Mbola misy fotoana ("BO-la miss foo-TOO-ah-na"). There is still time.

And if you have any suggestions on how to kick my butt out of writer's block, please feel free to comment!