11/16/2010
I’ve gotten used to the intense scrutiny my life is under, by my whole town, everyday here. I can’t so much as leave my gate without having at least three people ask where I am going, and you may think that these people are my friends and close neighbors, but no, on a regular basis I can leave my house and have a person who is still a complete stranger to me ask “Nicki, where are you going?” And I am not even safe within my own house. Even though you can’t see my door because of my fence, my windows are visible from the street and thus people know if I am awake or home. If I accidently sleep in, (say to the late hour of 6am) I will have to answer to the rice ladies on, why I was so lazy today and do all Americans spend the whole day sleeping?

In some ways it’s been a good thing. When I first got here, having people constantly asking me questions, helped me learn the language and made me feel like more of a part of the community. And I can’t blame them, I mean what I, the crazy American, am doing is infinitely more exciting than the usual topics of conversation: the rice, the weather, and what’s at the market today. I mean even when I am included into those basic conversations it becomes more interesting. “Wow look, nicki bought tomatoes and carrots at the market too. What are you going to do with those? Are you going to eat them with your rice today? You are going to eat rice, right? Do they have tomatoes and carrots in the Etaz-Unis (not to be confused with America)?” Tomatoes and carrots (or insert any food in their place) suddenly become a lot more interesting. There’s never a lack of something to talk about in Ambohitsilaozana, just sometimes a lack of anything intellectually stimulating.
The constant scrutiny and intense interest in my life will also leave me immune to certain phrases and actions for the rest of my life, and maybe cause me to pick up some bad habits of my own.

1. I love you.
This phrase has probably become my cue to tune out anyone in the future or maybe to laugh if it’s said particularly passionately. When someone tells me that they love me here, I take it as a free license to ignore all future statements that come out of their mouth. I recently let the future middle school teachers that I help train, in on the secret that you can’t just say I love you to a girl on the street. ‘I like you’ comes first, and ‘I love you’ only follows after a very long time when you are serious about the relationship. Their response: “what if I said ‘I love you’ right now, because I want to be serious right away?” Hopeless cause.

2. Ngezabe ianao! Or ‘You’re so fat!?’

Oh, this one comes in many forms and luckily you develop a thick skin to it right away because people don’t mean it in a bad way at all. Some of my favorites are:
“How do Americans get so big and fat so young?”
“You must have eaten well on vacation, you’re so fat now.”
Or just the classic, “look at the big vazaha!”

Luckily, I don’t really give this phrase a second thought anymore and all of us female volunteers often joke about it. Some people like to respond with the, “oh thanks you’re a fatty too!” but I usually just smile and say yup I’m fat. Americans are fat. The only time it really bothers me is when a woman who is probably 2 or 3 times my size, decides to take an interest on how huge I am. Like common, our row in the bus is crowded, but I am not the issue this time. How do the rest of you not find this ironic?

3. Starring

For some reason, unfathomable to me, it is completely acceptable for Malagasy to stare endlessly at you, and meeting eyes with them does not give them that embarrassed feeling causing them to look away, but rather is seen as an opportunity to start a conversation with you, sometimes from all the way across a room, a street, from out a window, you get the idea... The sad part is that with cultural integration, this has become more ordinary to me, and sometimes when there is something particularly interesting happening (or maybe there’s just another vazaha around that I don’t know), I find myself unable to look away from what’s going on. However, if I get caught, I still avert my gaze, it hasn’t gotten that bad yet.

4. “How much did that cost?”

It is completely acceptable here to ask anyone and everyone how much they paid for something they have on their person, or something they have mentioned in conversation. At first I thought that they were only doing it to me because I buy ‘extravagant’ things (an entire box of laughing cow cheese! Oh my!) or because they were testing my malagasy knowledge, but really it’s just part of their culture in some weird way. And further, people will often offer up the prices of things as part of their conversation. If I spent a lot of money on something I often tell people that I don’t remember how much it cost, which I’m sure they don’t believe in the least. The bad part of all of this, I notice that I have taken this on in my everyday life. When I am with other volunteers I regularly ask how much they spent on things, and it seems normal when we’re all together. I realized though that this might not be polite when I was on vacation with my parents. We we’re trying to find out how much another hotel was, but didn’t have the time to go to the actual place and my solution was going to be to ask some other vazaha we happened to run into if they were staying there and how much it was (remember our no ATM/no credit card situation). At one point I had to stop and ask my parents if that was acceptable behavior. They told me that it was more weird than impolite, but that it was definitely not normal vazaha behavior.

11/21/10
Well, the vote for the referendum of the constitution is done, and the attempt at a military coup d’etat has been quelled. I was a little shocked when I got the text from a friend saying that BBC was reporting a military coup since local news was still reporting a successful election day and ‘all calm in the capital’, and a then little annoyed that it extended the PCV standfast (first step when there might be a risk to our security, which prevents us from leaving our village). I got a couple texts from friends along the lines of standfast=cabin fever, and I couldn’t help but agree. I mean, I know I stay in my village for weeks at a time normally, but there was something about the fact that I couldn’t leave that had me incredibly restless all week.

On a happier note, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I realized that this will be my third Thanksgiving in a row that I haven’t been home for, and strangely enough, I have now celebrated Thanksgiving in three different African countries. First in South Africa on the end of my road trip where we got fish and chips and made my german roommate participate in the going around the table and saying what you are thankful for game. Then last year, preparing to leave Niger and eating more potatoes than I have ever eaten in my life, and now this year I have plans to celebrate in my village in Madagascar.

I feel like I have missed out on the good American Thanksgiving food, so I am going all out for this Thanksgiving, exemplified by Ted, the absolutely HUGE turkey I purchased yesterday. I’ve been talking about how I want to get a turkey to fatten up and eat on thanksgiving for months, mostly because I thought having a turkey in my yard would be fun, and I finally followed through. He was an expensive little bird, but it’s going to be really fun to cook him and have my malagasy friends participate in the holiday. I think most of them only want to come because turkeys are really expensive and they are jumping on the chance to eat one. When I explain what the holiday is: the holiday of thanks, they all immediately ask, “thanks for what?” When the answer ‘everything’ didn’t satisfy them, I moved on to the task of explaining the Indians and the Pilgrims. Haha but when I finished and told them the story isn’t actually true, they gave up on understanding what it means and went back to talking about eating the turkey….they’re like Americans already!

A previous volunteer constructed this huge wood burning brick oven in my yard and I have been talking about how I have to try it out for the last year, but have yet to follow through. This Saturday (I am postponing thanksgiving by a couple days because there is no way I am going to kill and clean the turkey without lucette’s help!) I will take on the task (with a couple other volunteers) of cooking my first turkey, inside a wood burning stove. Now don’t forget, I come from a household where only half of the adults currently living there even know how to cook scrambled eggs, so not surprisingly I do not have any experience cooking any thanksgiving foods, except mashed potatoes. The turkey will start out alive and not only do I not know how to cook a turkey, but I’m pretty sure there is nowhere to look up how to cook one inside a wood burning stove when you don’t have a thermometer or even a pan to cook it in. It’s going to be an adventure, one I’m sure that we’ll have to consume a few THB beers to survive. It’s going to be a strange combination in the ‘kitchen’ of young Americans who have no idea how to cook these foods, especially with no oven, and Malagasy women who will have never tried these American dishes. If nothing else, we’ll be able to rest assured that the rice will be great (its Madagascar, we can’t cook a meal without it…).

So while you are all enjoying good company and good food this Thursday, think about Ted’s last days of life before I attempt to cook my very first thanksgiving dinner with no recipes and no oven. It should at least make you smile a little. I’ll be thinking of all of you and hope you have a great holiday!