There must be something in the Air?

08/23/10
“There must be something in the air?” This is how I feel when reflecting on my banking weekends in Ambato. We all went in to greet the new volunteers who were visiting their sites this past weekend and stayed for a couple nights to do the annual survey for Peace Corps. But I’ll get to that in a minute…

The few weeks I spent back at site after being gone for so long were a little bit tough this time. Readjusting to village life alone, after spending so much time being extremely busy with friends was a little bit of a shock. I had to go back through the whole, “what exactly am I doing here?” question again, and learn not to be so productive with my tasks. (Getting everything done in one day, only means you have nothing to do for the rest of the week.) To add to the readjustment, and probably most significantly, Lucette’s dad got sick and so she took the kids to go visit him for three weeks. This meant (and still means) three weeks with no Malagasy family around. Usually, even when I stay in my house to do work, little Yanza is constantly coming over and chatting with me, asking what I’m doing, watching me type. Haha sometimes I would call it ‘pestering me’ but without her here, It was lonely. Not to mention the fact that Lucette is the one that takes me to all of the things I should do in the town, and Popa is my helper for whatever project I am working on. It’s been mangina be (very quiet) in our yard these past few weeks.

I was kind of bumming about all of it, especially after I realized the Pastor and his wife, and Madam Noeline and her family, were also all out of town. I even went to visit my 12 year old friend, Nadia’s family, but she is going to be visiting relatives until the new school year starts. That’s kind of what has happened, the kids all finished school and are visiting other family members in other towns, and a whole bunch of new kids have shown up here in ambohitsilaozana.

For the last week and a half though things have started to feel like they fell back in place. I started my garden (my burrowing fleas count was up to 6 before I started wearing shoes and socks to dig in the garden) and little things started happening to make me feel tamana (at home) again. When I was talking about how I needed to go get sand in the afternoon to add to the holes for my moringa trees, one of the rice ladies showed up with it at my house after lunch. I thanked her by giving her some seeds and explaining all about moringa. Then one of the other women, Pepe, came to get me to go pay respects to a family, when she realized that Lucette wasn’t there to do it. And then the Noeline’s family from Ambato stopped by my house and invited me to lunch. It’s these little things that really make you feel like people care whether you are here or not.

All this taken into consideration, this was one of my harder months at site, but it still went fast and it ended on much better terms that it started. When I arrive in Ambato it’s always the same. I feel like I spend 3 days laughing more than I possibly could in any other situation. Our lunches at our favorite Gasy place often turn into silly laughing fits that last for hours. We end them usually with a “Are we drunk? Why are we still here?” but in actuality we are still completely sober, leading us to believe there must be something in the air: in that restaurant, our house, and maybe just in the city in general. I think it stems from the fact that the 3 weeks we spend in village are severely lacking in American humor. I have funny Gasy friends here, I laugh with them, I laugh at myself pretty often, and I laugh when I don’t understand what the hell is going on; but I don’t get that laughter, where everyone knows exactly what you mean and all parties find something really funny. Even though much of our laughter stems from us relentlessly teasing each other on our inability to speak English and how weird we’ve become as Peace Corps volunteers, it’s extremely therapeutic. We definitely consume more than enough bottles of THB over the course of the weekend, but it’s the laughing; and laughing hard and truly that is the real high.

I think that while we all get each other, and are all ridiculous in the same ways at this point, we might have scared the new volunteers a little bit. They’re probably wondering, ‘Will I act this weird in a few months? Will I loudly talk over other people about random things? Will I forget how to speak English and relentlessly make fun of other pcvs?’ The answer to all of the above questions is of course, yes, but we’ll have to wait for the newbies to discover that for themselves. We have a great group out here in Lake Alaotra and if they don’t already love it, they’ll grow to.

08/26/10

So yesterday was my first day working with the teachers at the training center in Ambohimanga (the next village over). I showed up after lunch and spent 45 minutes with them just answering questions and speaking in English. They will all be English teachers at the middle schools in the Lake Alaotra region starting in Oct, but they are still in ‘training’ right now. I use this term loosely because I don’t exactly know what they are doing yet. They want to get used to a native speaker’s pronunciation and I think essentially just hang out with me because I’m American. Yes being American makes you that cool here.

It was really fun, but the majority of the class just watched with blank expressions while the director, Serge, and this one other teacher who speaks pretty fluent English asked me questions. Serge is a young guy, and I didn’t think he spoke very much English because when he came to ask me to work with him he was really struggling and so I just spoke to him in Gasy. Turns out he just must have been nervous because he was surprisingly mahay speaking English and was really funny. It’s too bad most of his hilarious questions were lost on the crowd. Some of the simpler things they understood, like when I told them about my family or when I talked about cooking, but I imagine it was how it’s like when they throw me into a meeting with all Gasys and I, frankly, just don’t understand. One of the first questions Serge prompted the class to ask me was if I am married, and my answer excited all the males in the room. Typical Gasys. Noeline is also in the class so when we finished I went to the soccer game, that the women’s team from the school was playing in, with her and her husband and I think all the teachers were pretty excited that I joined them. While watching, one of the guys was practicing English with me and told me in English, “I like slow music, because I am a romantic boy.” Haha why are there no other Americans in my daily life to laugh about this stuff with?

Despite the fact that I may have an unwanted suitor on my hands, I think that working with them will be a lot of fun. I was having a conversation with another volunteer the other day about having ‘real’ Gasy friends. I consider Lucette a real friend and I love Noeline and her whole family, but it’s not the same as having friends your own age. Noeline’s husband was teasing me the other day when he realized that he was 22 years my zoky (elder- usually used in terms of brother/sister). And even Lucette is 15 years older than me, though she’s way sassier than me. And their kids, most of who are in their teens, fight over my attention and, I think, generally wonder why I am friends with the ‘grown-ups.’ In the beginning interacting on a regular basis with respectable women in the community was the best thing that I could have done. They were great people to learn everything from culture, to cooking to language with, and generally speaking I have more in common with that age group than women my age, because my age group sort of disappears in the ambanivohitra (country). Now that I feel more at home with the language and the culture, I would like to get to know some people closer to my age; have some ‘real’ friends here. And teachers are one of the avenues that, that might be possible with. We have more of a shared experience that a lot of other people. Most of them have been to University and are now teaching in a different city, if not region, than they grew up in. That may not sound like much, but believe me it makes a huge difference.
With these teachers, I may run into the same situation as with the interns working with CALA; they probably will only be in the area for a couple more months before they go off to their respective posts, but getting to know them will probably lead to me meeting other teachers already working in the area. I’m optimistic about it though, actually I’m just really optimistic about life at site right now. I had a great vaccine day at the hospital today and tomorrow I’m going to see a ‘turning of the bones’ festival with the rice ladies and then Saturday I’m going to watch some of Noeline’s family get married. I’m busy and meeting new, interesting people. You can’t ask for much more out of site than that.

On a completely unrelated note I remembered an interaction with a Gasy person and feel the need to share it because I found it so funny. On the day after the Gasy independence day (june 26th) I got up really early to catch my brousse to Tana to go on vacation. Now most people party all day, and sometimes all night, on the 26th, so there weren’t too many people out. In fact, I had to take 2 bikes to Ambato because no drivers were up at their usual time. Lucette was waiting with me, and there was a man who came out of his house and was eating some bread and he was dressed up like he was going somewhere. Naturally, Lucette asked where he was going (Gasy people you don’t even know will ask you where you are going, every time you leave your house). He looked down at himself, chuckled and called out “Mbola omaly.” Literal translation: I’m still yesterday. Haha not only was I dying at this reference, but everyone around was too. The Gasy version of ‘walk of shame.’
The Turning of the Bones

8/30/10

Its 7am right now and I’ve already gone running, cooked, eaten breakfast and now I’m working on this blog. My days of sleeping in are long gone. Even when we stay out til 3am in Ambato, were usually up and at breakfast by 8am. It’s a little sad.

So this last weekend was really eventful. On Friday I loaded on to a kibuta (essentially a tractor engine attached to a wagon) with 10 other people and drove off to a location unknown to me. I knew one person I was traveling with, Ravolona, one of the rice ladies. She invited me to go see a Famadiana, the turning of the bones ceremony. In Madagascar, some of the groups, I think mostly just the merina and the highlands people, perform this ceremony. It only happens every several years for any one family, and then only if they have the money to do it. From what I can gather, its also important to do it if, say, a widow wanted to get remarried to honor his former wife and the family.

I was incredibly excited to be invited to it. Volunteers can go their whole two years without seeing one, if it doesn’t occur in your town or if your friends’ families don’t have one while you’re here then you miss out on the opportunity. It was great that Ravo took me, but she isn’t that mahay at special gasy and didn’t really know how much to explain to me, so I will explain what I saw, but the significance of much of it was basically lost on me.

So when we arrived in the town (probably about 25km away) we visited Ravo’s family. The group I went with was all the elder members of Ravo’s family that live in my town (I was told all of their names but I just use the names for grandma and grandpa with elders, bebe and dadabe) and then a couple young guys that are also part of her extended family. They were a pretty cute little group; one guy had only one tooth left and just sat around smiling at everyone. Ravo explained to me that we were going to go to the house, but that we weren’t mamagy (the ritual where you visit a family who has had a death, give them an envelope with some money and pay respects) and she used a different word for the event. But it was basically going to mamangy as far as I could tell. We all crowded into the room and the eldest man from our group gave a kabari about the family in Ambohitsilaozana and about how wonderful it was to be here honoring the family and then the eldest man from the house we were at gave a similar kabari. At the end Ravo’s family gave their family an envelope with money in it and a new piece of white fabric.

At this point we were all given coffee or tea, and then the toaka came out. Toaka Gasy is the moonshine that malagasy make. There are some different types, I think, depending on who makes it, but it all smells like rotten bananas and tastes even worse. I had the privilege of being introduced to it on New Years Eve last year and have avoided it ever since. The toaka got passed around the room by a couple of men and all of them men drank an entire glass of it, and some had two. To generalize, Malagasy men cannot hold their liquor and a few sips of this stuff probably would have been sufficient. I think the toaka is a big part of the ceremony, but like I said, no one explained to me exactly why.

At this point we went and ate. It was about 9:30am and we had a meal of rice and beef. I was a little unprepared to eat this early, but I had to prove my Gasyness and eat my plate of rice so I did. At this point people kept coming into the big tent and asking “wheh! Who brought the vazaha!?” Haha to which my response became, I’m not a vazaha; I’m gasy fotsyfotsy (whitish malagasy). Some jokes are always a sure hit with gasy people, and this is definitely one of them.

After this the families all gathered together. The individual families within the larger extended family we’re wearing clothes that distinguished them from one another. One family had all made their clothes out of mint green cloth, another had made blue t-shirts, ect. They started the event by putting the names of the family members they were going to rewrap on the white cloth, putting the cloth on the end of a long stick and then having a parade of sorts down the street and back. Everyone was chanting and there were people with drums and trumpets. This went on for a little while and then the whole town followed them up to the top of the hill where the tombs were.

This particular family tomb was created in 1958. They had a famadiana back in 1978 and this was the first time since then it had been opened. They brought all the bones out and each family gathered around them. I guess I should clarify, the bones were still wrapped in the cloth from the last time; didn’t have a bunch of human bones just sitting out in the open. One family member held up a picture of the deceased family member while the others wrapped the new cloth and said some prayers. When everyone was ready, they started up the music (there was a whole band of 2 drummers, 1 trumpet and 2 clarinets) and the families lifted the wrapped bones above their heads and started dancing in a circle around the tomb. The person with the picture of the family member always, leading the way.

Everyone had been asking me if I was going to dance at the ball later, and invited me to dance with them, and I just kept saying ya, you know I’ll dance. I always dance when malagasy want me to. It makes them incredibly happy. What I didn’t understand until later that this dancing around the tomb was the ball. I danced a little bit with Ravo and then with this man that asked me to be his partner. And I literally had an entire town, where I had never been before, watching and cheering for me. I didn’t partake in the holding the bones and dancing around the tomb because I felt like that might be disrespectful, since I am obviously not a part of the family. Turns out that was exactly what they wanted me to do, but I didn’t find that out until later. The whole thing was pretty intense, but in a really interesting way. At some points it started bordering on disturbing though. Many of the people were so drunk on toaka that they started fighting over the bones and trying to tug them away from each other. These are the bones of their ancestors. It was weird. Also, some of said drunk people would inevitably fall over and the hundreds of people who were dancing around the tomb would not stop for them, thus we watched two old drunk men get trampled. Ravo kept telling me how its really easy for people like that to die at a famadiana. Sometimes people don’t actually mean the word die, when they say it, but I checked and she did.

There are so many people dancing that by the time the ‘ball’ is over, the white cloth was completely brown. And so were we. When we walked away and rejoined the rest of the group Ravo and I laughed at each other and how dirty we were. I was wearing a black shirt and was literally covered from head to toe in dust. This was another thing I didn’t believe my friends before I left. They told me that I needed to wear something over my head because the dust would be really bad. They say this on a regular basis so I just ignored the recommendation, but they were not lying this time. Getting the dirt out of my hair was disgusting. Hopefully I can go to another one, and learn more about what everything meant, or maybe ill interrogate the language teachers when I go to Mantasoa next week, but it was definitely an interesting thing to be a part of.

On the tractor ride home, my favorite of the dadabe’s was rambling away at me, his original shyness eliminated by the toaka. He kept telling me how wonderful it was that I came with them and that I wasn’t like the French. They have mihauvinhauvina (snobbiness/haughtiness), but I don’t. I ate rice with them and rode a kibuta and I like talking to them in their own language. He was really excited about all of this and it was really cute. The longer I am here, the more people open up with me about how much they don’t like the French. I’m just glad I get the ‘you’re nothing like the French’ comment afterwards.

Then on Saturday I was supposed to go to Ambato with Noeline and her husband, but I was waiting around for them and they were already an hour late when Megan showed up at my house. She had forgotten her key to the flop house and came to get mine. She also told me that Hoby (one of Peace Corps best teachers and staff members) was here for his cousin’s wedding and that 2 volunteers were invited to attend. She was going and wanted to know if I wanted to go with her. I made the split decision to go to that instead since who knew when Noeline would show up. It was really fun and I got to meet Hoby’s adorable wife and 4 month old baby, Tia. The wedding was surprisingly like an American wedding complete with a first dance, cake cutting, and tapping of the glasses for the newly weds to kiss. We played our part of the token vazaha at the party well, and danced and took pictures. I’m really glad that I went.