Blog #5 "When it Rains it Pours"

Blog #5

11/8/2011

“When it Rains, it Pours”

So the title may make it seem like things are bad in general but they’re not. It’s just a true statement for today. Last night I was woken up a couple of times by how hard it was raining. I’d roll over and go back to sleep…until at 3:30 in the morning I felt water dripping on my forehead. I sat up, dazed, wondering how I could lay down in some way to not be bothered by the rain so that I could sleep and deal with it in the morning. Just then, part of my ceiling (which is made out of some kind of board that’s thicker than cardboard and kind of looks like the material of a thumb-tack board) gave and a lot of water came down right onto the bed where I was just laying.

So I got up, moved the bed, grabbed a bucket, dried the mattress, changed sheets, and then went back to sleep for another hour or so...kind of anyway. Now I have the fun task of getting my ceiling and/or actual roof fixed today or tomorrow. I knew coming into this the ceiling looked suspect in a few places, but I guess I thought it wouldn’t happen. Anyway, this is really nothing. Just last month I met a Volunteer who is about to finish up, but in her first month at site a couple of years ago she actually fell into her latrine. The floor broke because it wasn’t built correctly in the first place and she fell into her latrine. Think about that for a minute but not in too much detail. She has a great story now but that’s a pretty bad situation to be in and for some people experiences like that during the first few months “alone” seem amplified and all compounded anyway, so for some people it could have seemed like the right sign to go home. Little things like my roof leaking are really not even enough to make me angry. It’s actually refreshing to have things like that or like losing some food that I thought was safe to a rat or the ants happen and my reaction be all about how to fix it and what to do differently rather than think about coming home.

For other site stuff, I’m in the midst of starting my Community Diagnostic Survey, which is a site overview and report to help new PCVs get integrated quickly. It requires meeting with local officials and with different recognized committees in the community. The main idea is to summarize the different needs and assets of the community as objectively as possible by gaining perspective from a good cross-section of the population. The results should help lead to project ideas too and keep us from subconsciously pushing our own agendas and ideas when coming up with projects. I’m excited to meet with different groups of people and to see how they view their community.

In-Service Training (IST) is coming up in the middle of December. It will be the first time that a lot of us see each other since PST. We’re trying to plan some cool vacation stuff afterward, so I might be going north to Nosy Be (pronounced Noo-see Bay). Traveling is still super-expensive on the PCV budget, especially if we need to fly, so we’ll see how it works out, but something like a week to a week and a half shouldn’t be too bad.

A few recent photos…

The part of the ceiling

Here’s a couple of photos of bats. I’m not really bothered by them, but this one was in my shower during the day because I’d left the door open all night. Every time I went to wash my hands at the tippy tap or went to grab something, he swooped at my head repeatedly. You’d think the sonar would at least tell him to avoid the giant thing in the room.

This photo is kind of funny. He looks like he has an afro, and it’s because he’s been electrocuted. He’s hanging from an electrical wire! It’s just like a cartoon or something. We just knocked him right down.

A better photo of that train wreck…

Here’s some fresh vanilla! There’s vanilla, cinnamon, and of course all kinds of fruit.

This is really common, unfortunately. Slash-and-burn at its finest…

That’s a new laptop sticker from RANO HP. It’s really a sticker people put on their houses to show that they are progressing and now use latrines.

Okay, that’s it. Hope to have cool updates next time, especially since the main infrastructure for the new water supply project is being implemented this month.

Blog # 4 "So How Does this Thing Work?"

Blog #4

10/19/11

“So How Does this Thing Work?”

So I’ve been at site a few weeks, and I still haven’t done too much actual work…but that’s the plan. It’s weird telling myself not to worry about not having something to do. I walk around and talk to friends, buy things at the market, and “mitsangasangana”, which is to walk around at leisure, like hiking. These things give me a chance to practice Malagasy and make myself familiar to the locals. To be honest, most days it feels like just sitting around. At least education volunteers from my stage have a job and responsibility already in their towns because school has started.

The health volunteers in general can help writing things down at the hospital or “menentana” (advise) about health. The big project and even the secondary projects are typically not started yet, but these other things can be done at any time. I’m getting some things ready and will start to do this semi-regularly soon. There’s still no pressure since my responsibilities lie more with the water project than with the normal health agenda. But WASH (water, sanitation & hygiene) education is a big component of the RANO HP project and plays an important part in the sustainability of larger projects, so it’s not too difficult to see that the hospital and schools are a good venue for this. I’ll advise people about other health topics too, like indoor air quality. I might even be able to do an improved cookstove project in my community and have my primary Peace Corps project be different than my research. Then again, it’s pretty early to get into all of that. For now I need to work on my community diagnostic survey, which does help to figure out potential community needs and spark ideas for projects, and continue doing what I’m doing.

I have been able to see some of the commune besides my town with Flavien, pictured below on one of our hikes. He is a health advisor in my town that works with RANO HP. We’ve gone to a few towns so far, one pretty close, just across the river and up a bit, one about 11k away on a pretty intense hike, and we’re going pretty soon to a place 22k away. Each town in the commune has 1 advisor, and their responsibilities go further than the WASH education, like helping the people prepare for the huge renovations that are about to take place over the next few months. Many of these towns are building latrines for the first time, and they are about to have very affordable access to safe water with new water systems brought to tapstands at a rate of 1 liter of water for 1 Ariary (the last I saw the exchange rate, it was about 1950 Ariary to 1 dollar, to give you an idea). This means we’ve been coordinating when certain events will happen and when to check on the progress with different facets of the project like latrine construction. We’ve also had some meetings about hygiene and all, and pretty soon I think I can lead when teaching about water and sanitation.

Flavien leading the way on the railway before we divert up into the mountains.

Here’s one of the towns. Many of the volunteers have houses like these, which is honestly what I expected, bamboo and leaves. But no complaints here…

This is a sweet aqueduct irrigation system I saw.

And here’s what looks like a derailed train. Actually, it was a head-on collision in 2009. Comforting I know, but surprisingly no one died. They also weren’t passenger trains. Anyway I don’t want my family to freak out, I feel pretty safe on the train. The roads are much worse, and much more dangerous. I find it strange though, that sometimes the train will sit in one spot for 8 hours if it’s been raining because they don’t want to derail…there’s a rainy SEASON, so I don’t see how that works. The only answer I get out of people is that it’s slippery, haha. Whatever we’ll see how reliable it all is here pretty soon.

I’m definitely lucky to get to see some action so early and get familiar with the commune like this. It happened to be great timing because a lot of these facets of the water project are being implemented now. This opens the door to a lot of research opportunities, whether it be assessing the sustainability of the water systems in my community or something else like the point of use treatment technologies promoted in the places too rural and sparse to receive systems with significant infrastructure and safe water. There are a ton of ideas already bouncing around, so hopefully I can narrow them down in the next 3-6 months.

A little off-topic now…Clemson football is #8 the last I heard, and is still undefeated. Too bad it’s hard to believe when you can’t actually see any proof. Right now I’m listening to the new album “Major/Minor” by probably my favorite band, Thrice. It makes me think of all the new music coming out right now that I was looking forward to, and a lot of great shows that I can’t road-trip to with my friends. I’m looking forward to when I can come back and see some shows and make it to a Clemson and some Notre Dame games. The point is that I miss a lot from home, some things more important than others, and I want you guys to know that. Tricia swears in tomorrow in Panama along with some of my other friends from USF. It’s another little event that makes this all more real for me. Anyway, let’s hope they have a great time celebrating in the city and then get to site okay!

More details as I get them/have time to submit them. Bye for now.

Blog #3 "The Train 'Home' and a Cracked Screen"

Blog #3

10/10/11

The Train “Home” and a Cracked Screen

I copied much of this from my journal.

The train leaving Moramanga actually ran this morning, and it’s where I sit to write now. It even left around 7 A.M. instead of the scheduled time of 7:30. I barely had time to pay for my bedframe transportation and get my ticket “home”. It’s interesting to try and call my town “home”…

When I was at Clemson, even so close to home, able to get there in 30-45 minutes, I called the dorms—and later my apartment—“home”. It happened so quickly and so often that I stopped noticing this peculiarity after a while. It was the place I lived most of the time during college, and so with my life there, it followed that it was “home” for me. That’s not to suggest that it replaced Greenville for a minute, it was just different.

I was at USF for only a year but witnessed the same phenomenon, though truly a bit farther from the place I’d grown up. I believe that it took a little longer for me to feel like I had ownership in the new town and maybe several things played a part in this: I had a more measurable and palpable separation from my actual home, and my life had to be built up a great deal more than at Clemson because I couldn’t carry my good friends or family with me, and definitely couldn’t drop by on a weekend at random.

Now I’m on this train back to this place where I live, the farthest I can possibly be from my home (really, the other side of the world), with the greatest amendments to my daily life that I’ve ever encountered being made. Maybe this is why I can’t bring myself to call Lohariandava my “home”, at least not yet. I’m thinking now, though, about how I need to let this place be a part of me if I want to be able to affect people and help to bring about any sort of change and let it change me as it should. The attitude of being a visitor here would keep me from properly integrating, would keep me on a different plane than the Malagasy people, and therein would keep me from being a true stakeholder in my community or with projects here. The biggest advantage that the Peace Corps has in working in these countries an-dalam-pandrosoana, “on the road to development”, is that its volunteers live in the communities and really try to become a part of one before trying to accomplish anything else.

I think it won’t be easy or quick that I plant lasting roots here or mean it when I call my site my “home”, but I’ll be interested to see when, how, and if it really happens. I will say that during training, especially when living with my host family, I felt different than I do at this moment. Now I’m in the business of finding out what life is like out here compared to the training town of Montasoa and am looking forward to making some great relationships like the ones with my host family. It’s time to make this place my home. First reasonable goal: by January the people I see walking around town will know my name instead of saying “vazaha” all the time.

Also I cracked my laptop screen. It fell off of my hotel bed, so that's genius. It's hopefully not a big deal because there aren't exactly any Apple stores near me. Haha that sounds whiney. Anyway, that's all I have for now, but I hope to write again soon.

Blog #2 "Installation and getting to site"

Blog #2                                                                                                                     9/24/11

“Installation and Getting to Site”

So after swearing in on September 16, 2011, we were all officially volunteers! The next day groups of us shipped out to begin installation. I went with a group of people to Tana to do some shopping for installation. This would be the only place to get a non-stick pan, a good chef’s knife, a spring mattress, and some other random items. I was installed with one other person, and so the day after shopping, we left the capital to head to our banking town, Moramanga. This place can either mean “easy blue”, or “cheap mangoes”, but we found out actually referred to cheap labor/cheap slaves during the period of colonialism in Madagascar. Not as pleasant, so we kick around the other two translations…

This town is basically a stop on the way to the coast from the capital. It has a pretty big market, a couple of nice hotels and some “vazaha” food like pizza. Vazaha is the equivalent of “gringo” by the way. It’s something I’m called everyday even in my own town. Usually, when people see that you can speak Malagasy they’re blown away and any negativity is replaced with laughter. I was supposed to be in this town for one day, but then I encountered my first roadblock: the train didn’t run.

I can only get to and from my town, Lohariandava, on the train. It goes to my site from my banking town on Mondays and Thursdays, and eventually on to Toamasina or “Tamatave”, a beach town that is a popular tourist destination. I had to stay in Moramanga until Thursday afternoon, so each day I did a little more shopping and a little more eating, taking advantage of what was around me, but watching my money evaporate.

When I finally got to town, I was surprised at how small it actually was. I had thought that 13000 was the population of my town, but this was in fact for the entire commune of Lohariandava. My population is more like 1300 and it’s all little shops and houses on either side of the tracks for a total of maybe 2 kilometers. Basically if you walk more than 10 minutes in any 1 direction from leaving my house, you probably reach the limit of the town. I felt a little suffocated for a minute, particularly because there is no road to get in or out, but this size of a town is really what I expected.

The staff who were helping to install me could only stay part of 1 day in order to catch the next train back to Moramanga, so a lot of stuff couldn’t really get finished. I was lucky enough, though, to have a person who works with RANO HP come back the next week to help me get some things done.

Here are the “before” photos, and the “after” are yet to come. I probably won’t have the house the way I want it until mid-November.

Yeah, I’ve got a lot of new roommates. We used ant poison but that worked for a few hours only. I think I’ll always have these guys around…but they don’t bite me, they’re organized, and they clean up the place. Drew and Tyler couldn’t even do all three of those things. But seriously I’d much rather have people-roommates.

Here’s a general photo of the room, without any furniture of my own, just some things borrowed from the commune and the hospital.

Here’s a shot of my “ladosy”, or shower.

Here’s the kitchen where I may or may not put a table and chairs.

Here’s my water source, a spring in the mountain. There are several of these in my town, but there are still long queues: I sometimes wait about an hour to fill up a couple of buckets.

Here’s the train station, the biggest building in town.

And here’s my terrifying bridge. There are a lot more holes and every metal plank moves and bends as you walk across. Oh well, at least it’s pretty high up and people have fallen in the past…

Here are a couple of shots outside. One photo is with the doctor, who lives beside me and is an awesome guy (called Buddha by friends). Another one is with a kid named Giovanni. He’s a great kid and is really patient in helping me communicate and learn more Malagasy. A side-note here…I didn’t learn a dialect during training, but in this town, many of the people are of a different ethnic group—another one of the 18 tribes—and I need to pick up on a new dialect as well as continue on with Standard Malagasy. Luckily people understand my Malagasy because it’s taught in schools, but many of the vocab and verbs are different for everyday language, so understanding people will be difficult for a while.

Now for the views…

This place is beautiful, tucked away in the mountains and the forest, overlooking a river. It’s probably ~60 km from the east coast and is already much hotter than the training site.

So now I’m settling in at my Peace Corps site, the place I’ll live for the next 24 months. Hopefully soon I get to start exploring the commune with some of the people who work with the various NGOs involved in the water project. I don’t want to leave site too much too early, but I’d really like to get to see some more of the region, and some actual work would be nice. I don’t know if I idle too well, but that’s the mode that Peace Corps has its volunteers in for the first few months. It might be even longer until I really figure out my projects.

For now this is where I’ll leave off. I’m really just getting started with all of this, and I’m excited to see what I can do with the Malagasy people over the next couple of years.

P.S.

Politics is not forbidden in this blog because I have a nice disclaimer, but it is still cautioned against. I just want to say that just before coming to site I read that former president Ravalomanana (the names get much easier to pronounce when every word looks like that) will be allowed to return to Madagascar after 2 years of exile and that he can participate in elections and the transition. I’m excited that Madagascar may finally have elections so that the government can be recognized by the African Union and the rest of the world again. But Peace Corps has already been evacuated from Madagascar twice in its short history here. Let’s hope we avoid a third and instead witness a peaceful process whenever it comes about.

Blog # 1- "SUPER LATE!!"

Blog #1!                                                                                                                     9/4/11

“Super-Delayed Ramblings About Pre-Service Training”

Okay so this is the very first entry that I’m doing since being in Madagascar (warning it’s long). I have had internet a few times during training for a few hours each time, but I didn’t have the foresight to start writing before I had access. It’s been at least a couple of months since I’ve talked to most of you, though I have been able to receive some Skype calls from the fam and from my sipako (Malagasy for girlfriend), Tricia. I’ll go ahead and put my number here because I can receive texts (Skype is pretty cheap) and can send to your cell and it’s not too expensive if it’s just every now and then: +261-32-26-228-42

It’s crazy to try to boil all of what’s happened down to a few pages, and it’s hard to imagine what parts are most important or how I can best paint a picture. I’ll start with homestay. We got to the Peace Corps Training Center (PCTC) in our bubble of a town, Montasoa, on July 13^th and had a couple of days of introductory “survival language” before being driven into town and dropped off. The beginning of homestay was the first day that we felt like little kids. Our host-moms were waiting to walk us home, and all we had were bookbags and an extremely limited vocabulary. Below are a couple of pictures of some of the family. My mom, Veronique, sister Oni, then below is a photo with my other sister Felana and brother Njaka. I had 2 other brothers that I met a couple of times each, but who lived in the capital to go to school. My dad was a merchant, and traveled a lot around the larger cities, so I met him only once for a couple of days.

My mornings started around 5:30 A.M. when I’d help my mom heat up water on the fire for a warm bucket shower (it was usually around 50^oF in the morning). Afterwards I’d eat breakfast, then spend some time cleaning around the house, primarily sweeping and brushing the floors with half of a coconut, called a “cocobruss”. This was used to keep out and kill parasy (fleas), which some people had a big problem with during homestay. By 7:30 I’d leave for the E.P.P., the children’s school, where we would begin with some kind of game and then move into classrooms in small groups of 2 or 3 to start learning Malagasy. This was another reason to feel like children, having class in a room for 6-7 year olds, where we couldn’t fit in the desks, starting the day off with games, and becoming very dependent on snack time at 10:00 everyday. We walked home for lunch and came back in the afternoons for tech sessions in health. The day was done at 4:30 P.M. and then I’d play with my sisters and their friends around the neighborhood for a couple of hours until dinner. By 7:00 P.M. I would be escorted to my room and given a candle. People go to sleep pretty early, which was an adjustment for me, but I’d read or write, maybe get to talk to Tricia(!), and by 9 or so I’d be ready for bed.

About those tech sessions…Meghan and I fit underneath the public health umbrella better than environment because here environment is mainly about protecting natural resources (especially forest), gardening, etc., while a big part of health is education in sanitation and hygiene. It also looks better on paper for the particular funding we get through some of the partners and when we wrap up, the major water project is due to wrap up as well. We received trainings in a lot of areas though, like STIs, nutrition, vaccinations, and malaria. A lot of the health volunteers work closely with their doctor’s offices, (CSB I or CSB II) which will either have one doctor and a nurse, or just a nurse. Rural access to medical services is a problem, and often a CSB II, with just one doctor, is the only option for places from miles around.

My host family was great, and I think I could have easily stayed with them for the other half of training. With them, I learned a lot about Malagasy culture and life. My sisters loved helping me with language so much that part of every day was filled with little quizzes. About 2 weeks in, Felena and my host mom started making fun of Oni because she had been talking in her sleep, saying “hoditr’akondro” which is banana peel. I knew at this point that I was really attached to these people. I made fun of her for it during the rest of the time I was there, just like I would for Brandon.

She got me back a little later though. One day when I was practicing new vocab, I was trying to give directions from the school to our house in Malagasy. To turn left is “miviliana”, but I said “mivalanana”, which instead is a command/imperative form of “have diarrhea”. So yeah, my sister had fun with that… I wish I could remember more of the little stories like that, but I was a big slacker about writing things down during training.

The PCTC…

Well after 4 weeks with the families, we got our things and moved out. This was pretty familiar seeing as we’d all just left our real homes a month before. We came back to the PCTC to dorms, a dining hall, classrooms, a lake, volleyball court, basketball court, and a general summer-camp vibe.

We continued with language and technical training, but had a new thing to deal with: immersion rules. Being in the same place as all the other Americans tends to make you want to speak English (whoa, really?), which tends to work against any kind of immersion for a new language. So we had rules against speaking English from 7 A.M. to 7:30 P.M., the beginning of breakfast to the end of dinner. If you were caught, you’d be given a red card, which made you pay money at the end of the week. You could receive green cards if you avoided red cards for an entire week, or if you had general conversations in Malagasy with the staff. Some people hated this, but I didn’t care so much. Overall it was pretty awesome living here with all of the other volunteers. We’d do our work, hang out and watch movies after dinner, then “fety be” or party on the weekends. I made some real connections and am looking forward to In-Service Training to see these people again, along with my Malagasy family.

RANO HP!

So this acronym has multiple meanings. In English, it stands for Rural Access to New Opportunities in Health and Prosperity or in Malagasy, Rano HamPivoatra, which means literally “water for progress”. I want to quote the UN on water really quickly, to help explain the theory behind the overall objectives in the provision of water and sanitation. “Water is fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a healthy life in human dignity. It is a pre-requisite to the realization of all other human rights” – United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights¹. It is also a factor in productivity and general development. If we can keep people from losing time for work and school because of easily preventable, but potentially deadly illnesses, then we give the people a better chance at success in other areas as well.

Before leaving for Madagascar, we received a few maps and plans from USAID and RANO HP, all in French. It didn’t really mean much to Meghan and I, other than that our sites would most likely be in the eastern half of the country. Honestly, we were a little uneasy that the trainers, our “boss” in health, and even the country director were all unclear on what our responsibilities were. People at least knew of our projects and that we would work with water more so than with the CSB, but people were surprised that we didn’t know more than they did. We also had no access to internet so we couldn’t really talk to Jim, our advisor at USF, about it.

But just as we were getting to be pretty anxious, we finally met our counterpart, Jonathan, on week 6. He did the health training on water and sanitation for the health volunteers. Jonathan is also a former student of Jim’s who did his MI program in Madagascar and ended up staying to keep working here. He’s a really nice guy and we’re really lucky to have someone who can relate to us as a resource. He works for RANO HP and played a part in linking USF to the overall water project.

He worked out a way for us to come see the headquarters and hear the general presentation about the project. This also meant a nice trip to Antananarivo (Tana) for a night. We ate at a cool place that used to be a train station and saw a live performance from “Olombelo Ricky”, who is pretty great. The next day we saw the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) office and the broad overview and progress in the project. We didn’t exactly find out our role in the whole thing because that’s actually still up to us. The research will deal with water supply and/or water quality, and we’ll use our sites and our communes to collect data or do case studies, but the specific topics we have to come up with. We can also work in other areas within the commune if we see a need. I could do a project about cookstoves, for example, and have my research be on the totally different water project.

We finished training and swore in as official Peace Corps Volunteers on August 16^th in Montasoa. The very next day people started leaving out for the process of installation…

If you read my blurb all the way to here, then thanks. I miss you guys and hope I get to post this soon.

Ref

1. United Nations Economic and Social Council. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. (2002). General Commitment No. 15. Substantive Issues Arising in the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: The Right to Water. Twenty-ninth Session. Geneva, November 26.