Thursday, September 11, 2008

Rice and Rocks:

My host mother was a terrible cook. In their house a meal that was ‘bon prepare’ was rice and beans with no rocks, which we rarely had. I’ll give her some credit though, picking out all the rocks and unbroken rice is hard work. I would know, I’ve been doing it myself these days.
When rice is separated from the stalk, it has a husk on it. That is pounded until it breaks, then some of the husks are winnowed from the rice. At this point I buy it in the market. When I get it, I have to finish getting out the broken husks, try to find all the unbroken ones (they look like rice, only browner and pointier) and the rocks. One unfortunate part of the process is that the ones that get missed are the ones that survived the pounding phase. That means natural selection is working against my teeth and only the strongest ones survive to be bitten by me. So far, I have not let a rock or husk into my rice, but I’ve got plenty of time to chip teeth later.
It is amazing all the things I have learned how to do. If I want peanut-butter (and I do) I buy raw peanuts, roast them, peel them and smash them with a mortar and pestle as big as I am. I buy coffee green and it gets the same roasting and pounding treatment. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of coffee, but I think I will soon. Just two days ago (9/4/08) I asked my friend where in town I could get some cinnamon; he took me to his parent’s farm and informed me that these were cinnamon trees. We peeled the bark and it is now drying in my room.
You wouldn’t know until you tried it just how much work it takes to get a good cup of rice.

Oops, I didn’t know that was fady:

Madagascar is a mysterious place. The history is long, and punctuated by new people coming and going. Explorers from Indonesia and the mainland, pirates from India and Southeast Asia. It was colonized by the English and the French. The Chinese have come and left their mark.
One of the results of this is a complex system of regionalized ‘fady’ or taboo. People point with their first knuckles to avoid pointing at a tomb. In Betsimisaraka (my home region) it is fady to eat goat. Sometimes sleeping facing a certain direction is fady, or touching a person’s head. Every once in a while, someone tells me I can’t do something, or I should have done something. It is rude to question fady, so the reasons remain a mystery, even to those who follow all of the fady.
If you enter some houses stepping with your left foot instead of your right, you bring bad luck on yourself and the entire household. Oops...sorry.

The Plateau:

Our training site was a small village about 3 hours away from the capital called Alarobia. My home-stay was not particularly pleasant, so I will not dwell on it, but I do want to tell you some generalities about what it is like.
The plateau is a beautiful place. Rolling rocky hills stretch into the distance dotted by small villages, often partitioned into rice paddies or other crops. Water comes from rivers, or shared wells that only run for a few hours in the evening. We arrived in winter, which means it was cloudy with a misty rain most of the time. It got down into the 40’s at night and stayed in the 60’s during the day. When the clouds cleared it got colder at night and hotter during the day. This is the coldest time of the year, in the coldest region in the country, due to the elevation.
Small farming villages dot the hillsides. Mostly they farm rice, but most of the countries vegetables come from here too. There are also wide patches of forest that are plentiful in birds, and lizards and can support some small rodents (like hedgehogs).
On the plateau, people don’t go out at night. It is strange, but when night falls they go into their houses and close the door. It is not that they are afraid of the dark, it doesn’t bother them inside; but there could be rabid dogs, or witches. That’s right, witches. They are called ‘mpamposavy’ and are widely believed in even by educated Malagasy. You never know where they are going to be, but if they see you there will be trouble, so they just stay inside all night. Night is the time when mpamposavy are most powerful.
Since the toilets in the rural areas of Madagascar are out-houses (kabone), you might ask ‘what if you have to go to the bathroom at night?’. Good question, you go in a bucket, called a po. At my families house in Alarobia, the kabone was inside the locked fence that surrounded their yard, 20 feet from the front door, but still we all used po. You never know what a mpamposavy is capable of.
The plateau also holds the nations capital and is considered to be the center of the country. Most things that are supposedly nationwide spread from the capital outwards and still don’t make it to many of the rural areas. It is considered the place for opportunity, where there are jobs and money. The one university is there in the capital. It is also very polluted. When I go to Tana, my nose gets stuffed from the airborne pollutants, mainly from all the cars. This is inconvenient, but also means that I don’t have to smell the garbage that lines the streets.

Hodgepodge of language:

Another result of the multiple colonizations is the regional dialects. Someone from the north (Sakalava) won’t be able to understand someone from the east (Betsimisaraka) The west is also distinct, and nobody understands anybody from the south. Even within the Betsimisaraka region (the name ironically translates to ‘the inseparable people’), there are distinct dialects in the north and south.
There is also Malagasy Official (which means Standard Malagasy in French) which is used on the radio and sometimes taught in school. Many people understand MO, but are unable to speak it. It is roughly the same as the Merina dialect, from the plateau region that was the French colonial capital, the historically most successful region at conquering the others and also the richest.
French is also taught in school, and English to a lesser extent. The English is new, so some kids and people my age speak it, but not many adults. This gets complicated. People assume I am French, so they speak to me in French. When we speak Malagasy, they use MO because they want to sound educated and because they assume it is what I know, even if they can’t speak it that well. During training, my host family refused to make any effort to understand the dialect I was learning, so I spoke MO at home and learned Betsimisaraka in the classroom. Peace Corps asked me to study French before I came.
This gets complicated, so I usually just follow the lead of the person I am trying to talk to in deciding what language or dialect to use. Here is an example of me trying to buy a can of sardines in an epicerie. There were 4 other men present, they get numbers: (side note, loka is side dish in MO, fish in BM)
1: bonjour, entre vous!
me: bonjour, avez vous le poisson?
1: poisson?
me: oui, le poisson.
1: non.
2: (points at the coke) misy coca.
me: tsy ti hanana coca. Misy loka?
2: loka? Ia, misy loka betsaka. Ino atao? (we have lots of loka, what do you want)
me: loka.
3: Misy tsara maso, pate, carroty...(there is beans, pasta, carrots...)
me: loka, trondro, poisson, fish (same meaning, different languages).
1234: blank stares....
me: (spotting it on the wall) Voici! Misy trondro!
3: aaahhhh, loka.
2: Sardines!
4: vouz parlez malagasy!
1: Mahay miteny Malagasy! trondro, loka! Ha ha ha! (you are good at Malagasy!)

You will notice that if I hadn’t spotted it, I would never have been able to buy it. This happens often. Many Malagasy people don’t realize that they have to speak slower to a person learning a language, and would not even consider trying a different word for the same meaning, even though there are usually many.
The one thing working in my favor is that Malagasy people love to point out the obvious. That one fact makes it a great place to learn a language. If I have a bag and am walking to the market, they will say “you are going to the market”. My counterpart walked up to me the other day and said “you have blonde hair”. This is completely normal, for them it is the best way to start a conversation.
Another peculiarity about being a foreigner who speaks Malagasy is that nobody expects it. More often than not, when I speak to someone, or just say hi in passing, they are to surprised to reply. I speak, they stare open-mouthed, I leave. If I go for ‘bon jour’, they can always manage a reply. After two or three times, people usually get over it and are able to reply, but the looks on their faces the first time are must be the most surprised I have ever seen.
Before I leave the subject of language I will point out three more particularities: First, subjects are often left out of sentences. They are supposed to go at the end, but usually don’t make the cut. Verbs are conjugated for past, present or future and offer no clues. I lived with a family in Alarobia for 2 months and was never able to figure out whether the dad was saying ‘you eat a lot’, ‘we eat a lot’, or ‘you should eat more’. Secondly: there is no verb ‘to be’ in the language. It simply does not exist, it is implied. This also complicates things. Sentences always sound naked, and I often have to rearrange the sentence in English to cut it out before I try to form the sentence in BM.
Lastly, there is no plural. There is one dog, two dog or many dog. So far this has caused me no problems, but I can tell already that it will be a challenge for my students to get in their heads.

How much rice can that kid eat?!?!:

Hold out both of your hands like a bowl, and imagine that you are holding a heaping pile of cooked rice. Now triple it, and picture yourself eating it 3 times a day. I would consider that a conservative estimate of how much rice people here eat. Even Jeremy would be hard pressed to eat as much as an eight year old Malagasy girl.
In Madagascar, there are 3 parts to a meal: rice, a side dish (loka or ro) and ranomapongo. Along with the rice, there will be one or two loka, the first is usually beans, meat or sometimes pounded greens. The second will be a shredded or sliced raw vegetable on the plateau, where such things are widely available. Ranompongo is a fantastic drink made by boiling water in the pot you just cooked rice in. The burnt rice at the bottom makes a tea that tastes like...burnt rice. Maybe you have to try it to appreciate it, but it is fantastic.
Food is largely dependent on region. For unknown reasons, all the vegetables are grown on the Plateau and shipped to the coast, and fruits go the other way. As a result, vegetables are unappealing and expensive here on the coast, but were fantastic on the Plateau. Rice is grown everywhere that there is water, potatoes in the south where there is none.
My new favorite food is called soupe chiniose garnie. This is Chinese soup, written in French, served Malagasy style. Basically it is ramen soup with dumplings, meat, eggs and sometimes vegetables. I can get a huge bowl for 2,000 ariary at lunch and not need to eat dinner.

The Peace Corps experience:

To those of you who are familiar with my brother’s writings I will say: Peace Corps Madagascar is much different than than PC Nicaragua. Peace Corps sets guidelines, but expects PCV’s to be independent and creative. It is the same with different countries: each country that PC is in works under the same goals and guidelines but is expected to be independent and meet the needs and particularities of it’s own culture.
One difference is that Greg left training and arrived in his site to live with a host family until he found a suitable place to live and decided to move out. In Mcar, if the community wants a volunteer, they must provide suitable housing that is pre-approved by PC. Due to PC Mcar’s long history of success, we also enjoy several special privileges, like the Transit Houses located in three of the countries major cities. These used to be standard in PC, but DC has made a rule of shutting them down. They don’t like that we still have them, but we have thus far resisted the pressure to shut down.
I would like to note that the whole country is not as rural and isolated as I will be describing it. There are places where people are well educated (they can even go to French universities if they do well enough on their exams), have running water, couches, even toilets. However, that is not where Peace Corps works. We go into rural areas, where our lives might be a little more difficult, but our work is much more meaningful.
I live in a town of 20,000, I have power, but no running water. My town has one paved road and exists as a gateway for crops to leave the countryside for the larger towns and sometimes export to Europe. As an education volunteer, I live in an area larger than most health and environment volunteers. My job will be to teach English to 6th graders and Juniors, I will have a schedule, goals and reports to write.

Introduction

Introduction:
For the next two years I will be living in a rural Madagascar town called Vavatenina. I will be teaching English and working on sustainable development projects. I know from comments before I left and from my brother’s experience in PC Nicaragua that many of you will be interested in my life here. I will try to provide you with some stories and facts about what it is like, but you must realize that many aspects of my life are completely different than yours and will evade good description. Also, much of it seems normal to me already and may be over looked.
Once a month I will have internet access and will be able to update this blog. I will do my best to meet your demand for information, but have already realized that two years of this will only showcase a portion of what my life here is like. If you have questions, feel free to email me, but expect to wait as long as 2 months for the answer. If you want to write a real letter or send something, my address is:

PCV Brian Fraser
Lycee de Vavatenina
518 Vavatenina
Madagascar

If you want to call, I think skype charges 39 cents a minute to call my cell. The # is:

011 261 33 174 8521

My Dad helped me get this right, just dial those #s. Note that I am in GMT +3 time, try not to call in the middle of the night.