Village Recap

10/7 How can I even begin to blog about the past 10 days??? I spent a couple days in a town where our director served as a Peace Corp volunteer back in 1993, then 6 days in a rural village living in the Mayor of the district’s house and then a few days in a hotel to relax before arriving back in Tana. First off, I cannot believe it is October 7th already. And I guess 2nd, I will list some of the things, outside the obvious, that I did for the first time in my life, since I last posted here.

• Took a bucket shower
• Watched a coq-fight (rooster) with 300+ Malagasy people
• Had 21+ straight meals involving rice
• Ate pig stomach, intestines, heart, chicken neck, intestines, liver, beef tongue (okay, I’ve eaten the last two before, but I added them for dramatic effect and they were at least prepared differently) and manioc
• Saw 200+ cockroaches in one confined space (our outhouse)
• Drank beer with a 9 month old baby
• Saved a puppy

As I mentioned, I lived with the mayor and his wife. They have 3 kids, one of whom lives in the capitol with her husband and daughter. Their son’s house is on one side ours with his wife, 2 year old daughter and 8 month old daughter. The mayor’s last daughter lives on the other side of our house with her husband, 8 year old daughter and 3 year old son. It was a big family but only 3 of us plus any grand children spending the night stayed in our house. No student stayed with any of the people who were extremely poor – if they weren’t eating 3 meals a day or didn’t know when their next meal was coming, they probably weren’t going to volunteer and be accepted to host a student – but it was quite a different life in the Bongolava region. My dad spoke French and my brother in law spoke a little bit as well (around my level, maybe less) but the rest of the family only spoke Malagasy. That meant, I did a lot of talking with my hands.

I knew staying in the mayor’s house would be on the upper end of the possibilities but it was quite a strange combination of poverty and riches. We had a big 3 story house and I had a room to myself but we used a bucket shower that was only enclosed on 3 sides and who’s walls covered up to my belly button or so. We also used an outhouse 20 meters away from the house, which is where I saw 200+ cockroaches. The first night, I went there before I went to sleep wearing only my headlamp and opened the door to see cockroaches crawling around every inch of the walls and ceiling. Because I was wearing a headlamp, I could only see about 30-40 at a time but I could certainly hear all of them crawling around. YUCK! But it was what we had. The mayor had a TV in his room but we used candlelight after the sunset, including for meals. We had a separate building that functioned as the kitchen but still all cooking was done over an open flame and by candlelight after dark. I am going to write a separate post just about the mayor himself but I hope you can get my point.

The Malagasy have a term “moramora” which translates as “slowly slowly”. Meaning a laidback, slower paced life, and the village was definitely moramora.. I spent a good majority of my time just sitting around: reading or talking to my family. I also went for a lot of long walks just checking out the village, interacting with people, and taking in the beautiful landscape that surrounded me. Every meal (3x per day) I had rice, which was usually accompanied by eggs or meat or a vegetable. When we had meat, it was all parts of the animal and the mayor would usually tell me which piece to eat so I got the delicacy of intestines and heart a couple times. I visited a couple farms where they grew rice, onions, tomatoes, manioc, bananas and much more. One of them even had a type of fish farm. Sustenance farming was by far the most common work anyone did in the village, most of the people I met and saw were living on less than $1 a day.

The poverty was incredibly evident but it was also interesting that pretty much every single Malagasy person I spoke to mentioned, “this is where poor people live” or something along those lines. I may have been the first American any of them had spoken to and there was a clear inferiority complex amongst the Malagasy to feel as if they had to apologize to me for the village and explain that it was a poor place. As if I hadn’t chosen to come live there with them and experience it, although many people seemed very grateful for that fact and thanked me personally. Multiple students seem to have had similar experiences. Often I would be referred to as rich and each time I wanted to explain otherwise. That the cost of living in the US was high, that I was going to have debt from going to school, that I knew a lot of people who were much wealthier than I but each time, I couldn’t rationalize telling someone without running water or electricity that I wasn’t rich. I mean I had just flown halfway around the world to Madagascar and even that was incomprehensible to these people.

No matter whose house we stayed in, or our living conditions, this was certainly a once in a lifetime experience and I am extremely lucky to have lived it. I have a few more posts that I plan on writing related to the village stay but it is quite difficult to convey what I just did. Hopefully this gets it started!