Sighs of relief/news/easter
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2003
1
36
70
Trip End
Feb 14, 2006
Banking town,
Madagascar
Saturday, April 17, 2004
i intend to repay everyone by making it my mission to insure that every single person who needs a rabies vaccine gets one. there's a rumor that the town has run out of vaccine, and i know for sure that many people still need shots, so i've been bugging peace corps to send more. (callie and i have been trying to track down the medicin inspecteur - the chief of the hospital - to confirm, but she's been away all week.) i also ask virtually everyone i see if they had any contact with the dogs and, if so (even something as minor as patting lulu on the head), urge them to get a shot. so far this method has uncovered maybe a dozen people who had contact with one or both dogs (though lulu died of worms, not rabies, she was presumably infected and therefore contagious) who didn't know to get the vaccine. i've also received the suggestion to put a message out on the radio (there are 2 stations just for my town - it's a big place), which i'll look into when i get back on monday.
oh, and peace corps decided that we volunteers only need 2 booster shots, not 5, so i won't be returning to tana until in-service training in may, for which i'm grateful.
today i'm heading to a city 2 hours south of here to meet up with fran, one of my best friends from training and my roommate way back in philadelphia in november. our only communication since january has been through letters, so i'm really excited to see her, as well as to see a slightly different part of the country.
other than my trip this weekend and my return to site, the other news is harried preparations for my family's visit in a month (from today!) i wish i could say "final preparations," but we're still working on the basic itinerary. sigh. well, as many of you know, my father is the man who asked me, at the end of my freshman year, if i wanted to go to the dominican republic with him The Next Day, and that trip turned out wonderfully, so i'm sure that this will work out as well.
that's it for now - maybe more on my way back from visiting fran. best to everyone.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
4/18
sara and i went to fran's banking town yesterday and had a great time; it's a major center of wood products and we had a lot of fun looking in all the craft stores. i bought a hammock and a very straight-backed chair, so hopefully my neck and jaw will stop complaining. there wasn't that much to see in fran's banking town (it's actually not that much bigger than my site), so the three of us came back to my banking town today, as fran hadn't been here before.
some old but still important/interesting news:
i finally complained enough about my still-MIA table and chairs (built by my host father, that peace corps was supposed to deliver 3 months ago) that peace corps actually went to get them. lo and behold, my host father, not receiving a return on his investment in the wood, sold them within the community a while ago. so i went furniture-less for 3 months only to have to buy it in my banking town anyway. argh. at least peace corps is going to move the furniture from my banking town to my site on the way back from installing a new environment volunteer south of here.
when i was in tana, i met with the director of habitat for humanity in madagascar, a fabulous american man who was very encouraging about us working together to house the homeless people at my site. my next step is to go to the market at night (in the company of the guardian of my house, who is a friend and, i think, won't mind escorting me) and interview the people sleeping there about how they came to be homeless, what they do in the daytime, etc. i'm determined to do it before IST (in 3 weeks), so that i can discuss the interviews with the habitat director in tana.
big news: callie finally got permission to leave our site. in august, she's going to a town in the north of the country where hopefully she can be of use to someone besides me. i'll miss having a site partner and i'll miss seeing callie every day (independent issues, i think, which shows how close we've become), but i'm really, truly happy that she'll be able to accomplish some of the things she wants to here. in the meantime, we're still hoping to set up the school lunch program together, both because it should be done and to give her an excuse to come back and visit. my respect for peace corps administration has recovered somewhat.
finally, on to easter. being jewish, my experience of easter has been seeing department-store commercials for flowery dresses on tv and watching my elementary school friends bring chocolate bunnies to lunch and my college friends get them in the mail.
celebrating easter in the states would be strange for me, but in madagascar it was completely bizarre.
caitlin was still with me at my site on easter, since we got back from tana late saturday and there weren't taxi-brousses going to her site on the holiday. we put on our nicest clothes and had started down the hill when we ran into lans, the sketchy, sad malagasy guy who had declared his love for me the week before. i'm proud to say that i handled the situation gracefully, explaining to lans that we couldn't spend easter with him because we had plans with natasha's family but allowing him to walk us to her house. (caitlin, who has a hilariously short temper for pushy malagasy men, said she probably would have hit him.) anyway, lans left us at natasha's house, where we learned that natasha couldn't spend easter with us after all because she had to run their restaurant. they're never open on sundays, so i was astonished to see that they were selling on "easter"*, but apparently lots of people eat in restaurants on the holiday, so they (and all the other restaurants) were open for business. natasha, however, was the only member of the family who had to work (with 2 of the family's maybe 8 employees for help) -- everyone else went off for a party.
caitlin and i asked if we were going into my banking town, which is rumored to have the biggest easter celebration in the country, and they said yes. we climbed into their car and ended up at the house of someone distantly related to natasha, along with her dad, cousin holy (my malagasy tutor), younger sister, and a couple other relatives i recognized and about 10 i didn't. all of the women were cooking and caitlin and i wanted to help, but they insisted that we sit with the men, which i guess they thought would be more fun for us; it wasn't, because the men were smashed. natasha's dad in particular, whom i'd never seen drunk before (despite the fact that his brother's drunk at every sunday lunch), drained a bottle of whiskey while we sat there. the men put some music on and insisted that we dance with them, so we proceeded to have a mostly-drunken dance party in these people's living room. (i wasn't drinking because beer and whiskey aren't kosher for passover - and because it was about 10 am - and caitlin abstained with me.) after a couple hours of this, we all climbed back into the cars (about 25 people total at this point); again caitlin and i were told that we were headed toward the banking town, but we rode 30 kilometers in the opposite direction. we got out at a "river" that was brown and literally 2 inches deep; its unattractiveness was only heightened by the fact that many cows were crapping a short distance upstream.
we had lunch: pasta salad, rice, chicken, and beef (no vegetables or fruit.) i was keeping passover and caitlin's vegetarian, so she ate all my starches and i ate all her meat, not really able to believe that i'd been vegetarian at that time last year and feeling like i'd joined my parents on atkins. at least 5 or 6 times during the meal, natasha's dad came over to try to persuade me to drink whiskey with him; i repeatedly explained that i couldn't because of passover but he kept drunkenly asking, "where is your drink?" finally i decided to turn the tables and nagged, "where is your food?"; he held up his (second) bottle of whiskey and said that it was all the food he needed.
after lunch, the family decided to take a dip. they removed all unnecessary clothing and rolled around in the 2 inches of filthy water, then had such a tremendous waterfight that they were all soaked. caitlin and i crossed the "river" on a bridge and sat on a small, actually sandy beach on the other side. once we were settled, we noticed that one of the older, flabbier men was stripping completely and washing himself in the river, just "incidentally" in our direct line of sight. (this man later tried to hit on me - fun fun fun.) i also saw natasha's 13-year-old sister and some other children drinking beer; when i expressed my dismay to an adult, she said that it was ok because it was a holiday.
so everyone splashed around for a while, then dried off, dragged crying children out of the water, and headed home. it was still early enough to head to the banking town for a couple hours, so i asked natasha's dad for permission for nata to come with caitlin and me, figuring that someone else could take over for her at the restaurant. natasha's father explained that no one could take over for her, because he was drunk, holy and her husband were still partying, the beer-drinking sister was too young, other family members all had other stuff to do.... blah blah blah. finally i got really frustrated and asked, if natasha couldn't have time off on easter, when "could" she have time off?
he floundered for a long while, then announced that she'd have the day off on sunday, when the restaurant's closed. what he meant by having the day "off," though, is that natasha would wash the laundry, cook the huge lunch, and clean the house - all of the responsibilities, in addition to working at the store and restaurant and being a high school student, that she's had since her mom died last year. i ended up having a rather loud argument with natasha's father about how she's still a child and needs regular and frequent time off from work, not even getting into how he pulls her out of school every time it's inconvenient for him to work or he needs another set of hands (at least 1 day a week and sometimes 3 or 4.) she's definitely going to fail her BAC (high school graduation exam - she's the equivalent of a senior), and it's her father's fault. callie and i are trying to tutor her in at least english, but not having really attended senior year is going to cancel out any progress we make with her. GRRRR.
anyway, natasha never did get permission to go to the banking town with us, which we didn't end up doing until the next day. easter monday is at least as big a deal here as sunday; in my banking town, there was a total carnival, with people wearing their best clothes and party hats (sold on the street), motorized merry-go-rounds (there was one at my sight too, but it was literally some painted seats attached to a big wheel being turned by a maybe-6-year-old boy), an outdoor art show, even a cotton candy machine. it was one of the craziest scenes i've seen in-country - i started to understand why easter celebrations there are so legendary. we had a great time.
finally, a description of our trips to and from fran's banking town written by sara for her travelogue:
The drive from my banking town to Fran's is absolutely stunning -- broad landscapes of stark mountains, rice fields, woods and rivers blending quickly but seamlessly into one another. Such an experience deserved good music, so I broke out the tape my sister recently sent me -- Billy Joel/Guster (which as Jessica points out, when said fast sounds like the most heinous country singer ever). The driver promptly turned the sound up to wake-the-dead volume, and sped around curves honking his horn in warning, a normally vital but suddenly token gesture, as it was totally drowned out by the heard-in-Mozambique strains of "Tell Her About It."
On the way back we played the same tape, because I was unwilling to subject little old Gasy women to Weezer. Fortunately, the tape happened to be on a Billy Joel song that is a relatively big hit here. So we instantly found ourselves careening around the picturesque hills in a ratty old van filled with Gasy Scouts and little old ladies, all enthusiastically rocking out to "Uptown Girl."
sara's computer was just bombarded by porno spam, so it seems it's time to go.
hope you enjoyed,
love, jess
*****
And now, some legalese:
The opinions expressed and experiences described in this travelogue are those of one individual Peace Corps Volunteer. Nothing written here should be interpreted as official or unofficial Peace Corps literature or as sanctioned by the Peace Corps. I have chosen to write about my experience online in order to update family and friends; I am earning no money whatsoever from this endeavor.
