harvest season

The time has come for my dear plot of land to be turned upside down, its contents spilled into baskets which I will cart off and eventually feed to my chickens.  This week, knowing that the peanuts were well-overdue for harvesting I put all other work aside, threw on my American flag baseball cap (gotta represent) and off to the field I went with as many baskets as I could scrounge up from my hut.  All two of them.  I looked forward to the full day of farm work.  

Come to my plot of land and I find that I am indeed quite late on harvesting.  The entire field has overgrown itself with other weeds as well (it’s been a busy couple of weeks, okay?) and I see that my harvest day is going to be more strenuous than I had premeditated.  So I press play on an episode of “Fresh Air” (man, I miss NPR), roll down my pant-legs, and get to it.  

At first I think that my peanuts have simply disappeared: I cannot find them through the high weeds.  Earlier in the season I had had an intruder to my field, a hungry cow had wondered onto my plot of land destroying a good forth of my corn crop; I thought perhaps she had also taken up my peanuts.  But eventually I started to recognize the yellow-green leaves of the peanut plant and, on hands and knees, scuttled through my fields carefully pulling them up.  Peanuts are of my favorite plants to harvest because, like potatoes, they always make me feel as if I’m taking part in a treasure hunt.  You have to carefully dig them up, sweeping away the dirt carefully so as not to break the roots and forever loose product into the ground.  When you do successfully pull up the shells of a healthy plant it is the most fulfilling feeling; a bunch of peanut shells like you would get at the circus dance about, dangling from the roots of the plant.  

From the beginning of this work I realized that I’d also have to start pulling corn off the stalks.  My field was indeed a mess of tall, stinging weeds and the only way I was going to get a clean harvest of peanuts would be to clear the entire field on the way.  This was fine: the corn was prepared to be harvested, I had just been letting it dry out into the feed it was destined to become for my chickens.  I spent four hours pulling up peanuts, retching off corn, and tearing up everything that was to be left behind.  I am three-fourths way through my field when I realize that the produce already dismembered was going to take many trips back and forth to my hut in the few baskets I had.  If I were a regular Malagasy in this town I would have a cow-drawn wagon to do the work in one trip.  Alas, I am a silly foreigner only pretending.  So it was back and forth to the hut for me!

I am now in the process of drying out the corn and peanuts.  All this means is that I need to set it out on a mat in the sun for a day or two and make sure it doesn’t get gobbled up by chickens.  The latter part of this mission however, is quite a difficult one as the chickens in this town are fierce and I am too hyper of a lady to sit with a stick watching them.  Again, if I were any real Malagasy, I would enlist a toddler to act as guardian for me. 

                                                                                                                                                                   

Everybody's darling

                A large wooden desk is the best protection I can come up with, though still I edge my chair as far back as politeness will allow.  Across from me sits one of my more motivated students, a 23-year-old university student majoring in environmental studies at the public university in Diego.  Currently waiting for the school strike to be over, he is stuck as the guardian of the health clinic in which his sister works.  Bored, he has requested my mad tutoring skills in the aspect of “green-English”.  Always happy to talk ag and environment in any language, I have agreed to come a couple times a week for language-learning.  Unfortunately, he has taken a much deeper interest in speaking English since I became his personal teacher.  It is with my almost-faded patience that I dodge the well-memorized lines of “you do not have a boyfriend?” or “you do not miss me?” and continue to teach this fellow my mother-tongue.  

                This is one of the hardest tasks for me to work through as a PCV.  When I meet an individual that is truly motivated and already showing great work ethic in learning something new, I automatically want to help them.  These people are not the norm, this fact especially bloated due to the first town I lived in, and therefore are gems for me to come upon.  They are the people that we volunteers dream of befriending.  

However, they are not always the most appropriate or secure people to be friends with depending on who you are as an individual.  I am a little white girl.  Or on another day, a petite Caucasian woman.  I am also a farmer.  As a farmer, a lot of the people I work with are men.  This is something I am used to as all of my bosses at the farms I have previously worked on have been men and I have always quite enjoyed these farmers’ company.  But working with men in Madagascar has turned out to be a completely different story.  No matter what our work or discussion for the day is, it will most certainly come up whether or not I am married, and if I am not, why I am not looking for a Malagasy husband.  I always try to take a joking tone so as not to be overly assertive (a trait that I have noticed really turns people away even as friends) and just make a joke of it.  Perhaps I’ll explain that I don’t want a Malagasy “vady” because they don’t know how to be loyal to their partner.  This they laugh at, denying whole-heartedly even though it is absolutely true.  It’s just a promiscuous culture!  Which is fine, just not my “fomba” (style...culture…ah, some words are just hard to translate).  If I’m lucky, it’ll end there with a good chuckle.  But once in awhile, as is with this student sitting across from me, it is impossible to make them let it go.  

And so each time I come for our lesson, I brace myself for the entourage of questions about my love life and why I do not want to go for walks on the beach with him and why I will not give him my phone number.  Ever trying to be the appropriate volunteer (which to me means not blowing up at a villager no matter how annoyed I get), I try to be direct about my discomfort of talking about this.  Perhaps I will get him to lay off for the day, but to be sure the next lesson will have the same kind of examination thrown into it. 

So, what do I do?  I want to help out any who believes that I have something to offer them.  All of my time is devoted to them!  But moments like these are just awful for me.  I deeply want to be seen as asexual in this town!  

But that brings up such an interesting point in the being of a Peace Corps volunteer.  You come in wanting to see yourself as an ideal role model, someone devoted to hard work and public service.  Perhaps you imagine yourself walking around the town helping old women cross streets, teaching children how to read, farmers how to grow food.  But when it comes down to it, you are just a person.  Just an individual who has identities and a background.  Likes and dislikes.  And that is not only how you will come to find yourself in your new Peace Corps life, but also how your community will see you.  Sure, in ways you are just strange enough that they can categorize you as “vazaha” and therefore something very different from themselves.  But when it comes down to it, you are not some savior sent from above but a person who has the potential to be a community member.  And as such, participate in normal community routines.  Such as taking a husband.  Having babies.  Suffering.  It is actually quite beautiful that they can come to see you that way for it means that you have become relatable.  And it’s always a cool feeling when I find that someone in town knows something specific about me and in that, recognizes how it makes me different or the same as someone else.  

Alas, I still wish I wouldn’t be seen as every mans’ potential third wife.