Where is the Line?

I came into the Peace Corps an already tainted ex-pat.  I remember in my first couple months I met up with a recently finished Peace Corps volunteer who had returned to Madagascar.  A wonderful woman and certainly someone who had been a tremendous volunteer, I enjoyed a nice lunch with her in my banking town.  During this lunch she told me about the many reasons she had returned to Madagascar.  One of the main ones was that she was paying for the education and health of a small child whom she even hoped to “adopt” and bring to the states in order to give him the better education (and life) offered there.   I remember thinking that this was sweet and awfully nice, but that it was a kind of dependent relationship I would never allow myself in while working overseas.  If you help one host country national so much, what are his/her neighbors going to say?  I thought back to a critique of the “starfish story” I read in my last year of university (you know: the one about the dude who is caught throwing one starfish after another, out of thousands who have beached themselves, back into the ocean and says something to the effect of “at least I am helping that one”).  This critique (a good, quick article if I could only find it) spoke about the success that is better achieved by working towards community progress; not just choosing the one sea-creature and sending it back to its home but trying to figure out how to prevent them from beaching themselves in the first place, or perhaps how to help them to return themselves.  (I guess what I’m also talking about reaches into the “dead babies floating down the river” story as well).

Okay so where was I?  Right: I was an already-disillusioned, already lived-too-long-in-developing-countries-and-can’t understand-why-someone-would-put-so-much-effort-towards-just-one-person grump.  I’d hear these stories of volunteers developing strong relationships with individuals in country and continuing them in a financial way afterwards and I thought “that’s very nice, but I will never cross that line”. 

But then a strange thing happened: I fell in love.  It was quick, within three months of moving to my new site.  I admit it: I am a sucker for a good laugh, a striking set of brown eyes, and a solid afro.  Each morning I would get myself out of bed excited to see the apple of my eye with whom I’d spend all my free time.  We’d cuddle and teach each other things from each of our cultures and it filled me with lots of joy and after time I found in me this strange desire to protect and take care of….her. 

Oh yeah, I suppose it is important to mention that I have not taken a host country “sipa” (boyfriend).  The new love of my life is a little girl named Shiela.  Here she is

A couple of months after Shiela and I became buddies, her health began to disintegrate.  Energy-wise, you wouldn’t notice a thing.  She was still the chipper young lass who was so excited to wake up every morning that she’d forget to put on underwear as she ran over to play with her friends.  (Often her mom sees me in the morning and throws a pair of knickers at me, telling me to find Shiela and make her put them on).  But Sheila’s appetite began to increase absurdly, her stomach bloated up, attached with bad stomach-aches and diarrhea.  She developed some sort of infection in her eyes, causing her to loose all her eyelashes.  She is sprite as ever, but physically falling apart.  Her parents took some methods towards healing her eyelashes, but her stomach issues (which is clearly worms) have not been addressed, and they have no plans of taking her to a clinic about them. 

I find myself in this very strange position now.  I have always told myself that it was inefficient as a development agent to help out just one person.  But now there is this other part of me that feels a kinship to someone and wonderfully, I have it in my ability to help her out.  It would take very little out of me to get her back in good health.  Perhaps just a deworming pill!  But not only is this against my former principals, it is against Peace Corps rules; we as volunteers are not supposed to give out medication.  If you give it to one person, then everyone will ask. 

But I love her!

Where is the line between being a good, supportive community volunteer and intervening too far?  This is just one example out of so many that have come at me in my two years since being here.  I believe so much in the Peace Corps experience especially in that it is based around building inter-cultural relationships.  But once you have those relationships, how can you watch the people you come to love suffer? 

oh the things we do

If you are looking to go through the most humbling experience a human being can actively choose to do, Peace Corps is a good place to start.  There is this great David Sedaris story about his venture to learn French as a middle-aged man.  He explains that although in body you are an already grown, formed adult person but the way you speak is like a four-year-old kid.  

I'd hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don't talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don't hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say "potty" or "wawa." It got to the point where I'd see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to lie in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up. I wanted to be a baby, but instead, I was an adult who talked like one, a spooky man-child demanding more than his fair share of attention.(David Sedaris.  Me Talk Pretty One Day)

Its hilarious and right on to how I felt coming to my village.  Except language wasn’t the only way that I performed like a toddler.  Tossed into a world where everything from language to clothes-washing is foreign and confusing, one must be ready to see themselves as a newborn baby learning everything from scratch. 

Although at first, I must admit, it was quite irritating to be constantly told that I was “tsi mahai”.  Everything I did from washing my dishes to getting dressed in the morning to reading Malagasy was apparently wrong.  Because of this, I was the endless source of humour, since there is nothing so funny in the eyes of a Malagasy as someone making mistakes.  

In fact, I suppose I am still the endless source of humour, but now that I’ve lived in this setting for two years, I guess I simply don’t mind as much.  And this is what I mean by how humbling an experience the Peace Corps can be for a person.  Once you get used to the fact that you likely are going to do things a bit different, and that you will undoubtedly be called out for said difference, you can learn to laugh at yourself.  Once you stop taking yourself serious, you become a much better PCV.  

So I am far along on my track of finding myself and all trhe world I live in utterly ridiculous (as well as wonderful!).  I now go into each project, each classroom, each training that I do with a readiness to do absolutely anything in order to get my point across.  By now my ‘gasy is decent enough, but there are still plenty of moments where I don’t know a particular word.  I have become quite good at talking around a word, and even better at cherades.  I have no problem with appearing a complete fool in front of a room of strangers.  Ask my best friend in town and I promise she would agree.  

This past Sunday was Madagascar’s Independence day and so, of course, a grand fety was to be had.  My youth women’s group decided that they wanted to do some type of skit or dance or song for the event.  Thinking that I, the American that I am, must be full of cool dance moves (which I am!), they asked me to teach them some American dances.  Now, I fancy myself something of a dancer, but I haven’t been to a dance class since I was 5 years old and in bright pink tights and a Mickey Mouse headdress.  But if they ask, I must deliver (I don’t know where I got that moto) and so I taught them the first dances that came to my head: the Cupid Shuffle and the Macerena.  

Well of course they loved it and decided we needed to do both of these dances on the day of the fety and I sheepishly agreed, wishing maybe that I hadn’t been so eager to please their demands for dance moves.  I figured I’d just stand on the sidelines and watch them do them.  But the day comes and of course none of them has practiced but still want to do the dances anyway.  So I am pushed to the front of the group and, with Shakira’s “Waka Waka” blasting,  we Cupid Shuffled in front of the mayor, town president, police force, all the town elders, and well, the entire rest of the town.  Than we Macarena’d to Jerry Marcos’s “Zaho tsy kivy” (an awesome ‘gasy song if your interested).  

Looking back on this now, I suppose I should be completely embarrassed.  But *shrugs shoulders* I’m not at all.  Though I will hear about it for the rest of the year, and surely my replacement will hear about it during his/her service, and likely the one afterwards too, I have come to a place where it is very hard to embarrass me.  

My friend Chris, who recently COS’ed and might even be back in the states by now (*gasp*) used to talk about this phenomenon of being unshakeable.  I remember him telling stories and always ended with a indignant “go ahead! Just try and make me feel shame!  You can’t: there’s nothing left!”.  So I guess that’s just how it goes for us PCVers.  We fall into a place of not caring and just enjoying the silliness that is tossed our way, whether or not we created it.  It’s actually quite ‘gasy of us.  

I feel I must end this by saying that it might not be all PCV’s who end up feeling this way.  There’s this silly quote that floats around facebook sometimes that goes like this:

‘If you go to Latin America, you’ll come back fomenting revolution; If you go to Asia, you’ll come back spiritually enlightened; And if you go to Africa, you’ll come back laughing”

And I guess this pretty much sums it up. 

Things that are normal now... Part I

1.  Not having any days that feel like the weekend.  Everyday is a workday in the bush!  You try to take a day off to do "just relax" and three hours later you're bored and wondering where everyone is.  Inevitably they are doing something you were trying to avoid like weeding the fields or a four-hour church service. 

2.  Being peed on by babies.  I admit that I always feel lucky when I am passed a baby.  Not only are they all super cute but it also means that the mother trusts you enough to not drop him/her on his head (a trust that most American mothers would likely not lend to me either).  Since I've been a volunteer the kids have been the best part of any day and those little, crying nuggets are no different.  However, diapers are not a luxury enjoyed by the babies of the bush.  This does not, as one might hope, speed up the potty-training process.  Instead it means that you will often be transformed from being the trusted momentary caregiver of the little tyke into the depository for its daily milk intake.  I'm surprisingly used to it now.  I carry around an extra lamba. 

3.  Getting laughed at whenever you talk to someone new.  Perhaps it is out of surprise, but whenever I meet someone here or even if someone simply overhears you they are overcome with laughter at the fact that I am a white person speaking 'gasy.  I know its not a bad thing, but I continue to feel a little confused whenever I saw "good morning" and someone cracks up. 

(...more to come)

unteaching

I find myself the center of the room, though eyes are far from all on me.  The classroom is filled with 27 students packed into tight rows and sweating.  A few at the front avidly pay attention, yelling out answers whenever I question the class.  The rest talk amongst themselves waiting, perhaps, to be told to be quiet.  But even once the request comes their conversations halt for mere seconds until the faces turn back to their friends.  I’ve been told the best way to get attention is to bring out the bamboo stick.  Alas, I’ve yet to come to such aggravation. 

I have put into my job title the teaching of middle school and elementary school students in my town.  For the last sixth months I have taught an environment course at the EPP (elementary school), started up a lifeskills course with the middleschool women, and helped the English teacher with his beginner English course, something I feel slightly obligated to do as he cannot carry a conversation in the tongue.  If I have no other skill, I do speak English. 

I enjoy both of these classes.  I’ve always liked working with kids and since joining Peace Corps have certainly found them easiest to work with of any community members.  Ever enthusiastic, not as likely to laugh at me maliciously when I shovel a hole differently.  In general, they seem to like having me around.  And both courses has led to other work such as parents who learn about their kids making composts.

But at times I find the work outstandingly frustrating.  Take for example my environment class yesterday.  These kids are all 9 to 10 years old, have been in school for 5 years now so have grown accustomed to the idea of learning (something that if you walk into the youngest kids’ classroom is surely not comprehended; it’s an absolute zoo of youngsters fighting over oranges or bananas…whatever was brought for snack by someone else).  So I go into my class, having lesson-planned for a couple hours during the week in order to make sense out of this environment material that they haven’t, in the last few months, seemed to receive very well.  It is utter gibberish to them.  So I always bear myself with a game, a participatory model, a field trip, or some activity to make it more fun and gain their attention.  This is a kind of learning that they are completely unused to, of course.  They are comfortable with a teacher writing paragraphs upon paragraphs in French (a language they do not speak nor understand) on the board, and then copying it down).  But still I am convinced that this is the way to make it happen!  To get through to them!  To make a point! 

Anyways, yesterday.  I have come bearing two games.  One is a sort of musical chairs that represents the affects of deforestation on the lemurs.  It goes reasonably well, as I play myself, the big bad human who needs to cut down the trees for realistic reason such as cooking, building homes, and of course, building churches.  As the music stops and one of the students, or “lemurs” is left without a spot I tell him that his tree has been cut down and so he has died because he had nowhere to sleep and a predator ate him.  This goes pretty well and is pretty solidly understood, though its clear the only thing they are interested are the jams leaking out of my ipod. 

The second game is meant to portray erosion.  I’m trying to show them why trees, and their roots, are needed in order to stop water from pulling tons of dirt and sand into the ocean, destroying the land.  So I set up a relay race and make two teams.  I tell the team members that they are all water.  I also set up six kids in front of one of the teams as stones and trees that they need to crawl under (between their legs) or over (leap-frog style).  The other team has no obstacles at all.  In my head this will show them how fast water will move if it doesn’t have obstacles such as tree roots to block it, just a clear path.  Because clearly the team with no obstacles is going to win, right?  Of course not Kelly.  Instead what will happen is the team with the obstacles will do their best to kick each of the students posing as trees or “not quite” lean down far enough to crawl through legs so I end up with five students bruised and the other side hasn’t even begun running.  Point not proven. 

I do not know how to prevent the chaos that happens whenever we do something fun.  Today we (my environment class) planted our pepiniere (tree nursery) and I couldn’t believe how egotistical and undisciplined they behaved.  All trying to steal seeds from each other and me, all jumping in front of the other.  Where does this behavior come from?  Is sharing really something that is taught rather than something instinctually understood?  Sometimes I think it is a reaction to the way they are treated at home since there they are of the age that receives the least benefits and the most chores.  The babies get disgustingly pampered, the papa’s alternatively are able to take the most for themselves and the mama, who is the cook and handler of all things worth wanting in the home, does a good job of keeping herself fed and happy alongside the days chores.  It is these middle kids who get shirked, they receive the least protein or side dish (though plenty of rice) and the most trips to the water pump.  In the classroom they are treated much the same: the teachers are always ordering them around to weed the school ground, sweep the floors, or even fetch the water for the laundry they have decided to bring to work that day.  My nine-year-olds get yelled at, smacked upside the head, and put to work everyday.  So perhaps they see me, who always acts more like a buddy than a disciplinarian, and feel that they are let out of that environment.  They never neglect to take the opportunity to go nuts. 

                It might sound like I am being a pushover.  However, my ability to stay relaxed and kind to misbehaving kids is practiced and purposeful.  I think kids should have the freedom to create their own dynamics.  So often adults interfere within the play of children because they see that they find something distasteful.  I can relate to that; I always feel irked when I see kids engaged in physical fighting.  But plenty of people would prove that this is natural.  And who doesn’t like a good wrestling match among friends (my buddies and I used to play “street fight”…)?  When I see it, I try not to react to my bias and overanalyzed thought that these kids are showing violent behaviors.

                But it is still hard to see kids act selfishly and thoughtlessly towards each other.  I don’t know how to teach them the value of respect, besides showing it to them.  This method, as of now, has not worked.  Yet I still resist the seemingly midevil practices that the other teachers use to gain it. 

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. 

the good days and the bad (or, the emotional bootcamp that is Peace Corps)

Ask any PCV and they will tell you similar stories as to how you can go from feeling so great and fulfilled and “this is exactly where I want to be, man!” in one moment to wondering why the hell you have put yourself in such an isolated, lonely, and degrading situation the next.  These feelings are especially fresh in your first year of service, when things are new and language still difficult.  I guess I had a particularly bad year due to problems in my first site, but I know that the feeling is mutual among us all.  Some days are so good and others are so, so bad.  Oh the bipolar disorder of the Peace Corps volunteer.

My best days as a Peace Corps volunteer have been the ones where we are out all day farming rice.  We start early in the morning and go until after noon.  If I’m with a good group, the morning will be spent gossiping (or at least them gossiping and me listening along).  Then we find our way to some pre-chosen tree where the cooks of the day have been building fires and cooking rice for the last two hours.  Farming days are always the best for food; we always get beans.  And Malagasies know how to do rice and beans, let me tell you.  After I show how good of a Malagasy I can be by eating a mountain of rice, we clear the mat and it is naptime.  I love the tradition of siesta-ing, though I can never really fall asleep.  To me it’s simply reading time placed right into my day!  After about an hour, we start up again.  The afternoon planting is always fun because people are tired and therefore goofy but also want to get it done so they move faster.  I like this because I once had (before joining Peace Corps) a serious need for efficiency and so it is the one time in my life here that I feel I can act on this virtue (or fault, depending on how you look at it).  And I am secretly quite competitive so I get to challenge myself to transplant faster than the rest.  (Okay, two annoying personality traits brought out there…but I am who I am).  The best part of the day comes around 5 when we are in our last half hour of planting and the evening has set in.  It is outrageously beautiful out there, gazing across all those straight green lines of seedlings as the sun goes down across the farm.  I have always loved a good mountaintop view, a sunset at the beach, but there is nothing to me like the night fading into a field freshly planted.  

My worst days as a volunteer are those where I feel the most isolated.  I’ll say that thus far in my second year I have been quite content at site, feeling really welcomed by my community and finding sincere friendship in the people.  The days that are bad for me now are actually those where I go into the city for work or market and end up having to crash there by myself.  Where in the village you can never quite feel alone, the city engulfs me in solitude.  Interactions with people on the street are not the friendly ones of my village, but are based on my white skin and the idea that it determines how much money I must have.  Either that or its being called “vazaha” or “Cherie” constantly by every man you walk by.  For the most part, I’ve gotten used to the harassment of the Malagasy men (who by the way have NO game…a fact that has been confirmed to me by many a Malagasy woman).  Generally I just make a joke out of it and cat-call them right back, surprising them with my Malagasy.  But when you are alone in the city for a couple of days it really gets to you.  Or to me anyways.  Furthermore, when I’m stuck in the city for too long I end up on the internet too much.  Which is something that, if you are not used to it in your life, can make you go a bit crazy.  It always makes me go crazy and I generally end up getting upset over something in my past life (back when I was an Amerrriicannnn).  My friends back home must think I’m nuts by now and I hope that if I ever move back near them they will forgive me for making them listen to my lamenting about completely irrelevant things.  

Of course, people have good and bad days everywhere in the world.  I know that even in the states I went through down times that felt the worst and high times that felt magnificent.  I think that the real difference is simply the pace in which you can move from one emotion to another.  In this blog I have written about full days gone well or terrible, but in reality its more like an hour of this that dramatically changes to that.  I can wake up in the morning and cringe thinking “There is no way I can speak ‘gasy today” and twenty minutes later I am out at my coffee stand gossiping away with Mama Café.  The next  minute someone makes fun of a mispronounced word, everyone laughs, and there I am all discouraged again.  Then of course I am handed a little nugget of a baby to hold while the mother runs an errand and I am uplifted again.

It’s a very emotional time, the Peace Corps-ing!