Winter?

Maybe I'm adjusting to the climate here, but for the past week its been cold. And I thought I had forgotten what that feeling was, but I remember. And I don't really like it. I wore a sweatshirt for the first time in 6 months, and even though its 76 degrees, I no longer judge all the Malagasy people for pulling out their winter parkas to walk across the street. If I make it home for Christmas in December, Michigan is going to be a rude awakening.

New Roommate

So right before vacation I found out that I had a new roommate...a mouse. And because I hadn't seen it but only heard it, I was okay with that. But then I started seeing it. And I felt like it was taunting me. I would sweep my house and leave for 5 minutes only to come back to mouse poop in the middle of my floor. I finally bought some mouse poison and thought that would take care of the problem. But it didn't help for the first week. The highlight (if I can call it that) of my week was when I woke up in the middle of the night because the mouse was in my bed. I didn't want to turn on my flashlight and actually see it, so I just tried to make a lot of noise to scare it away. Needless to say, I didn't really sleep after that. The next day I saw it sitting on my bed again in the middle of the day. I got the broom and started hitting it, but I think it was on its death bed because it didn't really move. It just stayed attached to my mosquito net not running away. I left for a few hours and when I came back it was the in the middle of my floor twitching. And then it died. I liked my previous roommates better.  

Vaca

A few weeks ago I went on vacation with some other PCVs for the Easter holiday. A group of 7 of us went to Tamatave and Foulpointe, two beach towns north of my site. The great thing about vacation (aside from being with friends) is that you don't have to feel guilty about not working. When I'm sitting in my house reading all day, I feel guilty for not doing something more 'productive'...but that feeling is gone the minute you're on vaca.

Vacation got off to a frustrating start when my friend had the brousse he was on pick me up at my house. That was a nice convenience. However, what we didn't know was that is was a regional brousse which meant it stopped every 5 minutes. What should have been a 4 hour drive lasted 7+hours. We spent the first few days in Tamatave doing touristy things...eating ice cream and milkshakes, eating pizza, fripping and hanging out on the beach. The new group of trainees were also in Tamatave so we got to meet the new environment volunteers (and finally give up our name as the new stage!). We continued northward and went up to Foulpointe where we somehow ended up at the nicest hotel in town. We got a bungalow right on the beach, and since we crammed a few extra people in, it turned out to be pretty cheap. The hotel had a pool, flat screen TVs, a bathroom with a door, and customer service (a rare find in this country). The next few days we lived in paradise, playing in the pool, eating fresh oysters on the beach, drinking coconuts and pretending we made dollars instead of ariary. Our final night we hired some guys to cook us a lobster dinner on the beach. It was delicious and cost only $5. After renting out a brousse for a little extra money and the promise not to pick up other passengers, we went back to Tamatave where we set out to find hamburgers for lunch. Of the three of four places all advertising burgers, zero actually had them. So we settled at a different restaurant where we saw someone eating delicious looking fried chicken. So four of us ordered 'akoho frite' (fried chicken) and we specifically told the waitress that we wanted what the other guy was eating. However, something always goes wrong and when they brought us our food, they brought 4 entire chickens. And the guy who ordered steak ended up with the mea the four of us with full chickens had wanted. You just can't win.

Not wanting vaca to end, we all went to Moramanga for one last night before dispersing to our sites. I should have known it was going to be a bad transportation day because we woke up to a massive storm which turned Tamatave into a very liquidy trash pile. Gross. We found a brousse though, and took off. An hour into our trip we got a flat tire. And two hours later, the same tire bloew out. We sat on the side of the road (conveniently at a house that sold stools) and watched our driver disappear and reappear with tires and tools. We did make it to Moramanga, but about three hours after we expected. Oh well.

I got back to my site on Easter day, just in time for the day after easter festivities. The Monday after Easter, everyone goes on a picnic to celebrate. So I went with the mayor's family to 'manao picnic.' I thought it was odd that we were carrying speakers and a generator to the picnic...but I should have learned by now not to ask questions. It was fun though. We ate a lot and the men all got really drunk, and I somehow became the event photographer. People were lined up to have their pictures taken. And by the end of the day the village president was walking me around advertising 'Easter souveneirs 600Ar'. But now I'm responsible for printing 80 pictures and I have a constant stream of people coming to my house either to pick up their pictures, or have more pictures taken. I'm the new Tsarasambo mpaka sary.

Giardia. So gross. I had dinner at my friends' house after getting back from vaca. It was delicious, but 6 hours later I felt like I was going to throw up my insides. Maybe it was just food poisoning, but I self-diagnosed giardia. I spent 24 hours in my bed not really moving. Interestingly, its as if the mayor's wife has a detector for when I'm sick. Seriously 20 seconds after throwing up she was at my door asking what the news was at my house. It was 2:30am.  

Public Transport

Yesterday was just a typical day. I had to go to my banking town to pick up some stuff at the post office and use the internet, so I got in the first brousse that passed. Unfortunately, it had seen finer days. Everytime we stopped to pick someone up, the car would stall. And the only way to get it going again was to do a Little Miss Sunshine start. So that was fun. They didn't ask me to help though. After a few stops the driver started to get frustrated so he asked me to hold my foot on the gas while he got out and let people in. My Malagasy was good enough to copilot a bus here! Yay me.

And then the driver said we should get married. When I said my husband was in the States (my usual response when I get marriage requests) he said it didn't matter because that was far away. The other marriage proposal I've gotten included a free vacation....

And then we hit a chicken.

If NGOs Did Musicals...

Oh wait, they do. At least in Madagascar.

Last Friday was water day, or so said my friends who work for the water NGO. I went to Vatomandry to help out with water day activities, but when I got there I walked into a planning meeting for the NGO. Not water day. So I hung out for awhile while my friends worked, and I thought that after lunch we would do some water day activities. But the afternoon activities turned into a musical. Seriously. I sat for two hours and watched 30 adult NGO workers sing and dance as a rehersal for some future event.  I couldn't figure out if they were singing about God or about water (it was a Christian NGO) , but their dance moves were great. And it was quite an entertaining afternoon. I never made it to water day though.

Life Goes On...

Its been about a month since the first cyclone and people seem to be right back to normal. If it weren’t for the houses still flattened, or the huge food distribution (thanks USAID) or the Unicef tarps serving as temporary classrooms, it might be easy to forget that Giovanna ever happened. It seems people have moved on…back to gossipping about maditra guys in town, what couples are fighting and why the crazy woman is drunk at 8am. As long as another cyclone doesn’t hit the East Coast again…I think things will be fine!

One of the most obnoxious post-cyclone problems is the huge increase in mosquitos. Luckily my 8 yr old friend takes it upon herself to come over every night, and with bug spray in one hand and a towel in the other, kill as many mosquitos as she can. I admire her ambition. She doesn’t let the impossibility of her task get in the way of trying. I could probably learn from that.

March 8^th was international women’s day. When I opened my doors in the morning there was a huge group of people holding brooms. My first thought…WITCH HUNT. (The day before my friend told me-in all honesty-there was a witch in town making the little boy next door cry). It turns out they were doing a town clean-up for international womens day. But they wouldn’t let me (an international woman) help. Ironic?

I’ve also done some detective work to figure out why the houses are destroyed so quickly…they cost $15. For the whole thing.

And while my new house is mostly done…there are still some minor issues which are driving me crazy. One day I went to go for a bike ride but when I went to lock my house, the door broke so locking it was impossible. So rather than being locked out, I was locked in. I couldn’t leave because I had to wait for the builders and of course there was no time estimate. I waited all day and then when it was getting dark the builder came to say he couldn’t do it before dark. FML. They fixed it enouch so I could sleep without my door flapping in the wind…but anyone frustrated with home repairs in the US should come to Madagascar.

And the last few days I went out in the country side with Sahondra. And while the first day we hiked an hour on a nice, paved road. Day two was quite the opposite. We pretty much swam through flooded rice paddies. I was midthigh deep in mud. My counterpart was wearing a dress and I was a vazaha, so of course we were a sight to see. When we showed up in the village, 2 hours later, the women laughed and asked why we didn’t take the new, dry path. That would have been nice to know.

And now I’m here in Mahanoro for a day or two, using the internet, charging things and catching up on tv shows while I have electricity.  But the countdown has begun. Two weeks until Easter vacation. And 8 weeks until my dad comes! Until then, I’ll weigh babies, figure out how to get 1000 kilos of books to Tsarasambo, work on planning a girls camp…and read of course.

If You See Giovanna, Tell Her I Want My House Back...

As much as I joked about cyclones and how my house would fall over if a cyclone ever hit Tsarasambo, I never thought that would actually happen. But it did. And although I only have half a door to remind me of my old house…I have a new house, a pretty good story and the claim to fame as the only PCV to lose their house in a cyclone.  

I ended up spending about a week in Tana after the cyclone actually hit. And while it was nice to have electricity and wifi and hot water, you can only spend so much time in Tana without going crazy and/or spending all your money. Giovanna hit on Tuesday morning (I think?) and in Tana we just had a ton of rain and lots of wind. But it wasn’t too bad, and the meva had a generator so we had wifi the entire time. But after the cyclone hit no one heard anything. All the cell phone towers on the East coast were down, so no one could reach anyone from their sites to hear how things were. After about a week, news started trickling in from the East coast, and we started seeing pictures and stories in the newspaper. “Brickeville, Moramanga, Vatomandry…DESTROYED.” And I live right outside Vatomandry, so that didn’t bode well. I finally got in touch with my friend from site, and she sent me a text saying, “simba tanteraka tranonao” which translates to…”your house is completely broken.” And she wasn’t kidding.

PC, not wanting to send me back to site without knowing anything what I would find, decided to drive me and three volunteers back to our houses, since they were right in the path of the storm. The first few sites had some damage, but nothing too major. Missing part of a roof. Cracks in the foundation. Fence destroyed…Leaking and flooding….But as we got closer and closer to the coast, things started looking way worse. Houses completely collapsed, electricity poles down, mud slides blocking parts of the road…and so many dead leaves and trees, it reminded me of Fall in the midwest. On our way to drop off a volunteer, we saw a car that was 98% underwater which had been carried away in the river, and then we saw a family living in a chicken house because their house had collapsed. As another volunteer put it, Moramanga looked like a war zone. There was no logic in which buildings had been destroyed….a huge cement church had lost an entire roof, and a thatch hut next door was still standing. Just like many other things here…it just didn’t make sense.

And after a few more days we got to Tsarasambo. We pulled up to where my old house had been, and all that was left was half a door. I guess that’s what ‘completely broken’ means. As I got out of the car, my neighbor across the street started laughing as he saw my reaction. And just like in the Wizard of Oz when the munchkins appear, all the kids started to emerge from the houses and trees and from who knows where. They just kept telling me how broken my house was…which was pretty obvious since I was sitting on the pile of sticks. Within about 4 minutes, the kids had brought me my favorite baby in town to hold, because how can you be sad when you’re holding a really cute baby. And it worked.

It was really depressing to see how much damage had been done to my town though. Almost half the houses in my town were just a pile of sticks. And the weirdest part was that no one seemed that concerned. People would say, “yeah, my house is completely destroyed!” And then just go about their business. I think I was the most upset out of everyone in my town. But aside from destroyed houses, the middle school was completely destroyed, as well as the teachers’ houses. Not to mention all the rice fields and fruit that constitues the main source of income for 90% of the people in my town. Not so good.

Since my old house consisted of half a door, workers were trying really hard to finish my new house. But as quickly as they seemed to be working…nothing really got done.  I ended up staying at a hotel in Vatomandry for  few days, and stocked up on supplies to help with repairs. But just like everything else in this country, things I thought would take a few hours ended up taking days. First we had to find wood, then a machine to cut the wood, and then soewhere with electricity to run the machine. It was like a scavenger hut, but no candy at the end. When we finally got to my house to bring the supplies to the workers, we had to go find the workers.  I feel like a whole day went by with 5 workers, and all that was done was half a window. I don’t get it. Not that I could do it any faster…but still. Everyone seemed to take their time, until it started getting dark and the workers decided we needed to prioritize. So they poured cement for a step outside my door? And then by candlelight I tried to move my bed and other stuff into a construction zone so I could stay in my house and PC could finally leave. It was an eventful few days.

I had been in my new house for about a week when the next tropical storm came my way. It rained for 5 straight days and nights. And surprisingly (or not) my new house leaked way more than my old house. With the high winds, the horizontal rain found its way through my doors and windows, and right over my bed. It rained so hard that I couldn’t even really leave my house.  The kids would come over and ask what I needed from the market and run all my errands for me….they even built me a rain catching system. I managed to fill two 15 liter buckets in about 10 minutes. That’s a lot of water. And what made me especially nervous was that my latrine (roofless because of the cyclone) started filling up really fast with rainwater. I tried to ignore it because I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it overflowed… That would be an awkward conversation to have with the mayor. So I crossed my fingers and pretended it wasn’t happening….(so far so good).

One day I ventured out with some kids because I thought if I stayed inside any longer I would go insane. We went to go look at the flooding at the market and we got stuck in a torrential downpour. The whole town was laughing at the vazaha in the rain….they used to think that I would melt if I got wet….so at least I proved them wrong. (Side note-I also need to find a way to explain to my counterpart that standing barefoot on cement won’t make me sick…but I don’t have the vocab for that yet). But the flooding was insane. The rice fields have turned to lakes, complete with people canoeing through them. The soccer field, completely under water. The river has probably risen 10 feet. But with all the destruction, life still seems to go on. The next few weeks are going to be interesting though. All the crops are destroyed so people won’t have any money. People also don’t have houses because those were destroyed by the cyclone. And another cyclone is coming this way….So I’m not really sure whats going to happen, but I’ll keep you posted. If you want to hep with cyclone relief you can donate to UNICEF, MEDAIR or the Red Cross who are all working in my area.

Hope all is well in the States! (Ehale I finally got your Halloween card! Brooke-I got your Xmas card! And Mary I got your letter….responses are on the way!)