Reason's it's not so bad to travel alone

• When things aren’t going well, you may not have someone to look to for advice or to calm you down, but you also don’t have someone looking at you for the same thing.  On your own, you can make as many mistakes and have as many mishaps without anyone being there to get frustrated with or at you.  You can also sit down for a hamburger, piece of cheese, or bowl of rice (depending on where you are traveling) whenever you need a pick-me-up.  Even if it takes doing that four-five times. 

• Carrying on with the previous point, when traveling alone you can eat and drink as often and as much as you please.  Personally, eating is my main reason for traveling.  I am therefore not interested in holding off on the calories or back with the glasses of wine.  Rather, I’d like to sample as many different delicious food items a place has to offer me.  Yesterday, for example, I sat down at three different café’s for the dinner hour, trying a different cheese and kind of wine at each.  Place number 1 had the best cheese while number 2’s wine was bangin’.  Its kind of my own version of Top Chef Paris.  Or Anthony Bourdain. 

• I can blow as much or as little money in a day as I want (funding allowed, of course).  The first day I came into Paris I felt awful because I had just spent two weeks eating everything I could in America.  My stomach still suffering from this feat, I skipped the usual eating frenzy of the first day, and walked for a couple of hours instead.  That day I hardly spent any money, but the next day I woke up and had my three restaurant dinner.  When you are with someone, it’s harder to break routine like this. 

• You can avoid doing things you don’t care to do.  For me, that is anything touristy.  Sure, I’ve seen some of the famous sites in Paris before, such as the Eifel Tower and Notre Dame.  But to be honest, I’d rather spend my money on a delicious dinner (or three) than for the entrance fee to one of these places.  Perhaps this makes me come off as uncultured or unsophisticated, and I suppose that is okay.  I’d rather take the train out to a ramdom little village and walk around, enjoy a local meal, and yes, a house pitcher of wine while trying to get to know some people. 

• You can get utterly lost but still be fine because you have no one and nothing to report back to.  I do this by matter of walking.  You would think I’d have figure out how to navigate a map by now.  Or at least start using landmarks to get me back. 

• There is no pressure to stop reading.  I know that traveling maybe shouldn’t be about having my nose in a book, but I find it a very relaxing way to lose yourself.  If it weren’t for books I don’t know how I’d have gotten through these past two years.  And I still feel like I have gotten my share of conversation in.  But overall, it’s nice to have something to turn back to when you are out of things to say. 

All that said, traveling alone can be a bit lonely at times.  But I think its always a good experience and you can grow a lot from it.  Not grow in the way that I would actually check my itinerary before I left so I wasn’t stuck somewhere after a missed connecting flight.  No, no, never. 

Roads Diverged (or, the blog for the overanxious)

                For the first time in my life I feel that I have to make a decision that actually matters.  A choice that will change the course of my life.  Up until now I have done everything that was expected of me.  Graduated high school, went to university, wonderful jobs fell in front of me, I went abroad to India where I fell into and in love with farming, graduated, then followed my parents’ footsteps right into the Peace Corps.  I enjoyed all of it and it all seemed to make sense.  But now all of that is coming to a close.

                More than three-fourths way through and I feel that I have conquered (or at least come to terms with) language barriers, cultural differences, even Malagasy men.  What else is there really?  I am going to complete my Peace Corps service and the world feels entirely open to me.  This is exciting but also terrifying. 

                If I think of myself in five years I can clearly see myself in two drastically different lives.  The first is one that would continue on the path I am on now.  Extending or finding more work in northern Madagascar which is a place that I’ve grown to enjoy, and surely would enjoy more if I moved into the city.  I could teach at the university full-time and come back to my village when possible to check on my farmers and friends.  This, I believe, would help me towards entering grad school.  It would also push me towards a career in development and teaching, which is work that I enjoy and find meaning within.  Socially, I’ve already made good friends in the city that I feel I can connect with and would likely feel less isolated than I sometimes feel here in the bush. 

                The second path is completely different and perhaps is the one that I’ve somewhat already chosen.  It involves a plane ticket, an old Toyota pick-up, a banjo, a farm-dog (a bottle of whiskey and a shotgun…).  On this road I would slowly make my way to the US in order to arrive for the next farming season.  To participate in an involved apprenticeship that will further my ag skills and my dream of starting my own farm with conjoining market/restaurant.  This is a lifestyle idea that I share with my brother, someone who I dearly wish to be nonspuratically in my life again.  So I could buy the truck, get my loyal companion of a puppy, and move out west to be near him and work towards this goal.  Hopefully grad school would work itself into this plan as well, though I’m not exactly sure if it would be necessary.  I just like studying (whoa nerrddd). 

                I love farming. Though I work with farmers here, I miss the feeling of belonging to a farm and benefitting from the fruits of our labor.  I crave being back in the field every day, driving farm vehicles, making up speed-competitions when weeding, harvesting tomatoes, then being done at five o’clock and being able to just relax.  But being here I also realize how much I love teaching.  I love working with little kids, figuring alternative education into their lives, planning courses that I think will stimulate them.  Since beginning teaching this course at the university, I also feel that it is a population I connect with.  

                My friend Jake told me a couple months back that I should just relax, that it’s just life after all!  I get that and I’m not trying to sound overanxious, but I am rather anxious over this decision.  I feel like it will dramatically alter in one way or another the course of my life.   And really, who do I want to be? 

                All of this lamentation over, I can now admit how absurdly fortunately I am that I have these two opportunities set in front of me.  My best friend in the village, Corine, is stuck in a place where she lacks stimulus and truly does not connect with the lifestyle that she is being pushed into as a woman of a certain age.  But for her the opportunities seem less bright.  Her choices are less.  And so I must appreciate this as a whine about my own confusion.  At least I get the luxury of indecision. 

Why is Peace Corps so hard?

No matter how many times you pass an iron over the ideas, plans and projections that make up a project plan, it never ceases to come out with more wrinkles than the skin around my ‘Gasy grandmother’s eyes.  

 This past week proved just that way as finally it came time for my AIDs awareness and 50^th anniversary of Peace Corps celebration to come into fruition.  

It started out with a fixable problem.  As I was preparing my tiny hut for the eight incoming volunteers my best friend showed up, days later than I had been expecting her and claiming to be sick.  Because of her apparent illness, she told me, she would not be able to do the cooking that I had hired her to do for our guests.  Always understanding, I told her I’d find someone else and was able to spread our eating over more community members.  This was a good way to bring some money into my town, anyways.

First issue resolved, I go about cleaning up the yards to pitch tents, stopping by the homes of the community members who are taking part in the festival, basically making sure everything was set to go.  It seemed to be, so as my first guest rolled in I relaxed.  Vanessa and I got our final posters in order and went to “misangasangana” around town.  More friends show up, we enjoyed the company with a couple of THB’s and get to bed at a decent time hoping that the morning with run smoothly.  

We get up, have coffee and mokary (fried rice balls, or flour balls…okay they are pretty much just doughnuts) and go over to the school where we have space to work.  The festival is to start at two that afternoon and I am the only person who really knows what the game-plan is due to the inherent communication diffuclty amongst volunteers living deep in the bush.  

As we are going over skits, songs, and weather-proofing posters I notice a lot of the women from my town are coming in dressed up in their women’s group outfits, all green and white and wearing matching baseball caps.  This was the outfit they were all meant to wear that afternoon when they perform at the spectacle I have organized.  Two come over to the classroom and hailed me out.  I walked out cheerfully and asked them if they were ready for the afternoon’s events.  They smile and say yes, except that they want to start the event now (at eight in the morning) instead of the intended two o’clock start time.  You see, there was work to do later in the afternoon, and anyways they are all ready to go!  I sighed, and tried to explain to them that we couldn’t just change the time the day of the event.  PSI, other town counterparts, and a few more PCVs were still on their way and there was a purpose to the timing.  They got kind of mad and said that some of them would have to go home now. 

We move along through the day.  I shake how patronizing my town president is to me when he disbelievingly asks again “so your boss isn’t even coming?” and start assembling the market space, changing into a Peace Corps festival.  We have posters illustrating the history of Peace Corps, current and past projects going on across Madagascar, the Peace Corps goals.  A huge poster was set up with pictures of volunteers and their counterparts.  Apart from that, I had put together posters with information about all of the different sectors that we pasted up (with some difficulty) along the market’s walls.  We start up the music, pull out the red ribbons, and give out lottery tickets.

Of course, a festival with informational booths is not something people from the bush of Madagascar are used to.  People awkwardly stand outside the market looking in on the funny-looking white people.  I walked up to them and explained that if they get over their fear of the foreigners they could win prizes and ribbons, oh my! 

Eventually they do, and shyly they glimpse at the decorations up on the wall.  We try to get them excited, teach them the songs made up about using condoms, protecting yourself, abstinence; all those silly things that they don’t want to know about.  After a little while, I am again reminded that some people need to start walking towards their far-away villages so we start the show. 

It goes fine.  I start MCing and pull the women’s group up.  They do an adorable dance and song number that talks about working with Peace Corps and Americans.  The president of the town comes up to do a speech that makes him seem much more endearing than earlier.  Then we get to it!  I do my speech about the wonders of Peace Corps (which, despite the cynical tone of this blog post, I solidly believe in).  We do our skits, imposing the late volunteers to try to fake knowing the lines.  We sing songs, which luckily I had taught to the middle-school girls so they fill in the enthusiasm.  Games and speeches are gone through and if nothing else I think that the town saw a good side of Peace Corps volunteers.  I even heard some people asking for condoms.

The event ends after PSI shows a movie on their Cinemobile.  It’s a 40-minute film about “maro maso” (many eyes, an expression that means being interested in lots of women at once).  The town seems to really enjoy it, and the volunteers go off to dinner and for some celebratory beers feeling accomplished.

The next morning we are to bike to another town to do the whole thing again.  It is about a 30 km bike ride and mostly downhill, so we figure we will get it done within 2 hours.  But of course, after the first ten km we notice that a third of the group have fallen far behind.  So we stop and take a breather to wait.  Half an hour later, we see James running alongside his bike, Lily and Jonathan biking behind him.  Apparently he got a flat before he even got past my village’s road.  

I send most of the group off, staying behind to help James find someone to fix the wheel.  It only sets us back 45 minutes and we head off after them, booking it to Vanessa’s village.  

The rest of the day goes fine, the event goes pretty well and the villager’s seem to respond to it.  Happy to be finished, we conga-line out of the festival.  It is a beautiful evening, and Vanessa’s site is a beautiful village.  Right on the beach in a small fishing village.  We decide to go for a sunset walk and glimpse the sunset.  It’s beautiful, and as I’m sitting curled up with Lily and Nicki I have one of those great Peace Corps moments and realize that this is something most people don’t experience.  And that I soon will not.

We walk back and it is already dark outside.  About half a k away from Vanessa’s hut I take a step that I thought would be sand, but turned out to be a sharp rock.  I tumble and fall face-first onto it’s brother rock.  My face fills with blood from the cuts surrounding my left eye, begins to swell up and I am led back to Vanassa’s hut where the health volunteers who smartly brought all of bandages and cleaning equipment wipe me down.  

And here I am three days later, finally back in my village, walking around with a big fat shiner and being gawked at by my community members.  The best line I’ve heard so far is “wow, injuries show much better on white people than on us”.  

(Disclaimer: The festival went great.  Both communities got excited about Peace Corps and perhaps even about safe sex…though that I’m not sure how to tell.  It was the biggest project I have put together and have had to see through the whole way, and I feel pretty good about how it went and how well it was received.  But seriously…why does Peace Corps have to be so hard?). 

playing

The silly evenings out are also worth remembering.  Sometimes when I come out of town and into the city for a “banking night” I feel a desperate desire for everything that is not ‘gasy.  Processed food, cold drinks, English speakers.  But those felt needs are becoming less and less I have found as I progress in my service. 

Yesterday, for example, I came into town to teach my weekly course at the university in Diego.  When I got back from teaching I was exhausted, having been up since 5 that morning to bike and taxi-brouse in, prepare the odd ends of my lesson, and then hold the class.  I was ready to relax and was therefore couchin’ it with my best girl, Nicki, trying to decide on evening plans.  Apparently, she had enlisted us for a company outing with her co-workers at PSI.  I sighed, wishing to not have to go through the charades of being the white girl, the puppet for excited ‘gasy men to twirl around, but she had promised so I told her I was in.  

We go to the pre-decided location and lounge for awhile, drinking brochettes and eating beers (wait, what?) and waiting for them to come.  It’s a bit late so I’m wondering if they have stood us up.  Around 9:15 we get a call and they ask where we are (to which we respond that we are just where we told them we would be).  Three minutes later a taxi pulls up and we are pulled from our benches into the laps of people already in it.  Confused, we laugh and talk on the way to somewhere.  Finally we arrive back in the middle of town, to a ramdom street corner with the entire staff of PSI is assembled and waiting for us.  Apparently by telling a few of them we might be up for something and meant that everyone must be informed and sent invitations to the whole staff to come play with the Peace Corps volunteers.  (Who can blame them?  We’ve got spunk!).  A bit overwhelmed, we shrug and follow them into a tiny bar with a raging bass system that is throwing out the notes of the live band playing at the center.  Drinking and merriment ensues including Macarena-ing, electic sliding, and we end all slow dancing like an eighth grade semiformal event to “Endless love”. 

It was a goofy and wonderful time by all and it is those moments when you are exchanging dance moves with a 45 year-old Malagasy dude that you realize Peace Corps is maybe not about getting overwhelmed and then needing to take a break from 'gasy culture, but more finding those parts of the culture that feel like home to you.  That bring out the giddiness that sometimes feels hard to find.  

Silly, sweet night.  It also involved a foam party…but perhaps that is a story for another day. 

Comfort foods (or, where there is no Big Macs)

Being stuck in the bush leaves one far away from the comfort of ready-made or microwavable food.  This is something we all expected coming into Peace Corps, and have all evolved different methods to overcoming it.  My friend Katie, for example, receives monthly packages from her mother which cost her a fortune just to receive at the post office.  However, once she “mandoa vola” (throws up her money) she is treated, and generally shares, treats we forgot existed.  

My parents live in Rwanda and Togo, so I have little expectations of them to send me goodies of which I might crave from home.  So I have been forced to develop my own comfort foods that I can enjoy right here in my hut.  It really started after one particularly bad day at my first site when I was frustrated with language and hadn’t eaten anything besides tomatoes and rice for a week.  I lay on the hut of my floor thinking about what I really wanted to eat.  Surprisingly the first thing that came to my head was not pizza or French fries but a food that is a staple of my diet in the states: a veggie burger.  The first problem, of course, was that the freezer section at the town grocer was out of order and so I could not pick up a packet of my favorite spicy black bean burgers (the sarcasm in that last sentence is clear right?).  But really, I am in the land of nothing pre-made so if I wanted a veggie burger, I was going to have to get creative.  I walked the 5 k to my closest market where I found the basic things that are always there: tomatoes, onions, beans, rice.  That day was a lucky day, as a truck had dropped off a rice-sack of flour.  

So I loaded up on all of these things and went hungrily back to my hut.  I pulled out the yeast I had bought back in the capitol before getting to site and set to making the buns.  Let the yeast soak for five minutes in warm water, throw some sugar in, salt, and enough flour to make a good dough, then leave it to rise.  Second step was the burgers.  Since my favorite veggie burgers in the states are of the black bean variety, I figured I could scrape something together with the beans I had brought back from the market.  They were white, but who am I to judge on color anyways?  So I set them to cooking, which takes at least an hour. 

This is the funny thing about having a food craving here and actually trying to ease it, it will generally take you so long to make the thing that by the time its finished you will be fine with rice and tomatoes again.  Alas, by now I had put in enough effort that I figured I’d finish it out.  The dough had risen so I set my “oven” to heat.  This oven is really just a huge pot with sand in the bottom of it.  I put it on a burner or over a fire and wait for it to get good and warm, then I throw a pan with the buns in it and the lid back on and it bakes!  There is of course no temperature gage, so it requires standing by, but still…it feels like a luxury here.  When the beans soften I poured out the liquid and mashed them up.  I then added chopped onions, a bit of sugar, some vinegar, some ginger powder I happened to have, and an egg that I had begged my neighbor to spare from her chicken.  I stirred it all together and made it more solid with flour and the crumbled up stale end from a baguette I had bought on my last market trip.  Finally, I made them into patties and fried them up as the buns finished baking.  Slice up the tomatoes and a pineapple I found on the walk over and assemble it all.  It was freakin’ delicious.

Since this episode I have ventured to make many different foods.  Some have turned out terrifically like the veggie burgers while others, like any Indian food I have attempted, just don’t quite taste right.  I have been amazed though how, with an ever-flowing amount of time, so many things can be made that I could never have imagined the process of before.  Bagels, English muffins, pretzels.  I made an entire Thanksgiving dinner for twenty on my tiny double-burner.  Fermented a pineapple trying to get a taste of wine.  Have you ever made fried chicken where the recipe included killing and plucking the chicken first?  If curiosity killed the cat then I guess it was the desperation of a PCV that killed the chicken.  

 I suppose it’s good that these things that have turned out so delicious are on the more time-consuming time or else I’d come back to the states looking much more American than I did when I left!  (Is being overweight still an American stereotype?  I don’t even know anymore…perhaps Michele Obama has straightened out today’s kids after all).  But once in awhile it’s nice to know that they are feasible.  

I wonder if when I go back to the states I will go back to buying buns, pre-made veggie burgers, and pasta.  It’s almost absurd to imagine it possible.  Will I dive into the conveniences of instant cooking or will my food habits forever be changed by knowing what food tastes like when it comes not from the glossy supermarket?