google madagascar

You don’t even realize how connected to information you are until you are completely cut off from it. And I was not even someone with a fancy phone that could get on the internet in the states. And forget about fancy phones, the iphone, ipad gadgets that some of the new volunteers are bringing with them to country kind of just blow my mind. When I was helping to install a new volunteer to their site, one of my other friends suggested he copy the names and numbers of all the emergency contacts that his town had provided Peace Corps with so that he would actually know the names of the people in his town. (It’s amazing how many of my friends in my town remain so and so’s wife, or the lady that works at this place). Anyways, instead of getting out some paper and a pen, he busts out his iphone and took a picture of the paper. What? I was dumbfounded and there were iphones before I left for PC.
Anyways, with the lack of internet capabilities to answer my many questions about life, I have to resort to other resources. I remember joking in college with friends about what the hell we would do without google in our lives? Would we actually have to go to the library and use an encyclopedia or something? Turns out without the infinite wisdom of google, you don’t refer to other legitimate resources, but rather use a little thing us Ambato volunteers have coined ‘Google Madadgascar’. Google Madagascar is essentially 2 or more PC volunteers sitting around making up answers, that we deem logical, to all of life’s questions that we have no way of answering. This can take place at any point in time, ohatra (example) while riding our bikes back to site from Ambato:

“Why do you think the rivets form only in the center of the (dirt) road?”
“Well I bet it has something to do with the cars compacting the dirt on the two sides”
“Yeah, that makes sense, because it would then loosen the dirt in the center, huh”
“Yeah, and the same type of thing happens with concrete roads when the hot and cold causes potholes right?”

Once a decision has been made, some involving more arguments than others, it becomes a perfectly logical fact in our minds. I’m pretty sure that these two years in Madagascar will forever ruin any of my chances at jeopardy or a trivia game of any sort…

Once in a while a particularly important question will pop up while we have limited access to internet, such as the day when we realized that if the mayonnaise that we love to eat with our fries in Ambato is homemade AND made from raw eggs, then how is salmonella prevented? Turns out, there is a precise process of heating the egg to a temperature that kills the salmonella but doesn’t cook the egg. Aka something they definitely don’t do here in Ambato and thus we are always at risk for salmonella while eating mayonnaise. We didn’t deem salmonella dangerous enough for us to stop eating mayonnaise though, and decided not to google it to find out if it was. There are some questions though that have me completely stumped, which is where google mada 2.0 comes in. You all tell me the answers.

1. First and most importantly, I have recently learned how to make yogurt. Essentially you just have to add a little bit of yogurt to whole milk and the cultures do the work of making the milk into yogurt. But what if you don’t have yogurt? Where did that first culture come from? Can you make it or find it naturally?

2. How does international mail work? If the package has to travel through multiple countries then who is picking up the tab on it? Do governments pay per item or by weight or is it like a set agreement of 1 cargo load of mail is a certain price? And when you’re sending mail to or from a country like Niger or Madagascar where there is no money and government is corrupt, does that bill ever get paid?

3. What is the difference between regular corn and popping corn? Was popping corn naturally grown or was it some sort of weird mutation that we created?