Paris and Starting Over

Paris
Our last few days in Niger dragged on for what seemed like weeks. Extended goodbyes, desert heat, and uneventful afternoons combined to make us all very tired and vary lazy. With almost nothing to do all day we bided our time watching taped episodes of Six Feet Under and Weeds on people’s laptops. We did your best to take everything in, waking up early to watch the sunrise and 13 hours later walking out to the mesa to watch it set over our training site. Our last few hours in Niger were spent sprawled out on our beds watching the stars in silence for almost an hour. At 9:30 we were crammed into vans for a final trip into Niamey. Arriving at the airport, we wandered through three separate metal detectors, two bag searches, and more passport checks than I can remember before we were finally allowed onto the tarmac for our 12:30 flight to Paris. I popped two benodryl as I stepped on the plane and successfully knocked myself out for the entire flight.
Paris was, as usual, a great experience. Being that this was my third time to the city of light, sightseeing was not high on my priority list, but there were many members of our stage who had never seen the city. We checked into our hotel near the airport early that morning and walked a mile and a half to the RER-D stop in the adjacent town. The Peace Corps had generously given us a whopping 20 euros to spend (sarcasm) and the ticket into town cost me 10 so after a fresh baguette, big chuck of cheese, and bottle of wine, I was done spending money. After gracefully scarfing my purchases in a Parisian park, I went on a walking tour of the city with my friend Julie, who had never been to Paris before. I tour-guided for her and a few other friends all around Paris’s major sites complete with visits to the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, and Notre Dame. By dinner we were beat so we retreated back to our hotel for dinner and hot showers.
The Paris hotel as well as our flights to and from Charles De Gaulle turned out to be a great stock-up opportunity for me. From the hotel I restocked on some much needed soap and shampoo. I also acquired two new pillows, two blankets as well as some magazines courtesy of Air France. It also gave me the opportunity to indulge just a little before heading back into the thick of things. I took three very hot showers in a 12-hour period just because I could and I used a hotel hairdryer for the first time in my life, just because it was there. Yet after all that cleaning I still had Niger-colored dust in my toenails.

Starting Over in Madagascar

Madagascar is a place that everyone seems to like in theory but no one really knows anything about. Most people know where Madagascar is and seem to enjoy the animated children’s movie set on this island nation, but that is all. I must admit that my knowledge of Madagascar was no more extensive. Once the transfer from Niger to Madagascar was announced, the 10-page section of the Lonely Planet Africa featuring Madagascar became a sacred text to all us trainees. Now I realize why so little is known about the world’s largest island nation: No one who comes here ever leaves. Madagascar is a stunningly beautiful nation of mountains, rainforests, rice paddies, and intense thunderstorms. Though Peace Corps has only been active here since 1994, there are at least 64 former Peace Corps volunteers that decided to make Madagascar their homes after their service was completed and after just 2 weeks here, I can’t say I blame them.
Our stage arrived in Madagascar at 1:00 AM on the morning of December 10th and since then we have been living at the main Peace Corps training facility. The term ‘training facility’ is not really a good term to describe the place where we live. If the training site in Niger could be called “Fort Peace Corps” the place in Madagascar could be called “Resort Peace Corps.” Located hour’s drive east of the capital Antananarivo, the center is built on a green peninsula jutting into a massive mountain lake. Our dining room boasts splendid mountain vistas with large bay windows and our accommodations are complete with beds, flushing toilets, hot water, and big closets. When I am not in language class my time is divided between long bike trips into the mountains or canoe rides into unexplored coves on the pristine lake.
Our afternoon activities are only restricted by the weather, which is predictably rainy. It has literally rained every single day since our arrival. The day can start out without a cloud in the sky, but every evening without fail a massive thunderstorm will roll in off the Indian Ocean complete with searing lightning and rolling thunder. The clouds usually begin to assemble by three of four and by dinnertime a full-scale monsoon is barreling down on us. After most meals a group of us assemble on the dining room porch to watch the towering clouds conquer the green mountains as brilliant lightning strikes on the distant hills. On one particularly eventful evening, we could see the moonrise, sunset, and lightning storm move in all from one chair. It is like nothing I have ever seen anywhere. I can’t imagine what this place is like when a cyclone hits.
After almost two weeks in language classes here, I can now say with some confidence that Malagasy is the worst possible language to play Wheel-of-Fortune with. The language is guilty of the drastic over use of the letter ‘A’ and every word seems to contain one ‘M’ or ‘N’. One can actually form a complete sentence using only these two consonants. (Manao inona ianao?) Additionally, Malagasy words are ridiculously long. Common verbs in English that require just a few letters require four or five syllables in Malagasy. The verb ‘meet’ translates to ‘Mahafantatra’ and the verb for ‘run’ is ‘Mihazakazaka’. If one can manage to pronounce these gargantuan words, Malagasy is an exceedingly simple language grammatically. All the verbs start with M and to change a word in to past the first letter changes to N and in the future the first letter is H. The language, however is nothing like anything I have learned before as it is actually most closely related to a language spoken on the Indonesian island of Borneo.
In the coming days and weeks there is allot of excitement planned. On the day after Christmas we are going camping in Madagascar’s most famous national park where we anticipate seeing some interesting wildlife, including the world’s largest lemurs. After New Years, We are going to be transplanted from our resort into the village at the bottom of the hill to live with Malagasy host families for three weeks. We have had some opportunity to explore our new village and it is a really fascinating place. It is located in a valley filled with lush green rice paddies and teeming with life. Ducks and geese patrol modest yards sporting huge pink hibiscus bushes and roses. The Malagasy people are all about six inches shorter than the average European so all the homes, while usually two-stories tall, look like they are build for dwarves. I anticipate that this will be a problem for me once I move into my Malagasy house considering I already have to duck to enter most of the shops and stores.
Yesterday also marks my first Christmas away from home with Peace Corps. Curiously enough, the holiday season in the third world is markedly different from what I have grown accustomed to. A brick of newspaper failed to arrive at my doorstep to mark the eve of Black Friday, I have seen no inflatable Santa-and-reindeer snow globe lawn ordainments, and I have yet to hear any Christmas advertisements to attract me to the malls. Christmas in Madagascar has really been a low-key affair. In all honesty it is really hard to get into the ‘holiday spirit’ when you are around no family, in the middle of a jungle and you wake up early on Christmas morn to attend a 2-hour Malagasy language session. There has been a concerted effort to bring some holiday cheer to our training site. Each of us was assigned a Secret Santa and a budget of 5000 Ariari for gifts, one of the girls has been playing carols off her IPOD during meals and during a long drive to the market town our van stumbled though as many Christmas tunes as we could remember. The real ‘presents’, however, come when someone gets a phone call from home and the lucky recipient always hangs up with a smile on their face and a little Christmas in their hearts.
I can say with some confidence that Madagascar is the exact opposite of Niger. Niger was hot, dry, flat, landlocked, and Muslim. Madagascar is cool, green, wet, hilly, Christian (for the most part) and a tropical island. The currency here is called Ariari; the exchange rate to the dollar is approximately 2000 to 1. In terms of dollars, things here are even cheaper than they were in Niger. One can buy a kilo of rice for 50 cents and a chocolate bar will put you out a solid 12 pennies. The national beer in Madagascar is called Three Horses Beer and one can buy a .65 liter bottle for approximately 80 cents. Surprisingly, Three Horses aka THB is actually really good, better than any mainstream American brew I have tasted. However, on our budgets 80 cents is rather expensive so I have limited myself to just two bottles since our arrival.
As I expect my mother has already written, I got my site announcement a few days ago. After I swear in as a PCV at the end of January, I will be moving to the village of Ranomafana (Malagasy for ‘hot water’) a few hours south of the Capital Antananarivo. Although I know very little about this place that will be home in a little over a month, I do know that it is adjacent to one of Madagascar’s biggest and most renown national parks so I expect to get very close with some of the very unique wildlife that calls Madagascar home. In terms of flora and fauna, Madagascar really is in a league all its own and Ranomafana is reported to be one of the great sactuaries of Mother Nature. There are 12 species of lemur and 68 species of bird that are only found in Madagascar which can be found in this park and the plant life is supposed to be just as impressive. Thus I am very excited to FINALLY finish Peace Corps training and become a volunteer.
While Madagascar is a paradise in almost everyway, politically this place is an absolute mess. Isolated up here in the mountains we don’t receive allot of news, but what we have pieced together about what is happening in the capital is not very encouraging. The coup d’etat, which ousted the president in March of this year, is still in full force. As a result the man with the power in Antananarivo is a 34 year-old former DJ who is constitutionally forbidden from assuming the presidency. There was a transitional government formed, a government that has one president and two ‘half-presidents’ however, many foreign governments, including the US, do not recognize the transitional government. In November the three presidents went to Africa for some confrence and in doing so perturbed the DJ turned dictator who now refuses to send a plane to bring them back to Madagascar. In playground terms the new kid pulled up the rope ladder to the tree-fort that is Madagascar. So while the only government with any thread of legitimacy is hundreds of miles away in Mozambique or South Africa, the economy of Madagascar has gone to the dogs. What once was a healthy tourism industry has taken a 90% hit. Some generous trade programs with Madagascar have been suspended and a bunch of factories may be forced to close. As a result many Malagasy have been forced to turn to illegal logging for income. The rainforests and wildlife here is some of the best in the world but it is impossible to keep people from logging when the starvation of their families is at stake. I anticipate much of what I will be doing at Ranomafana will be related to preventing this from taking place. Even here at the PC training site deforestation is evident. Entire hillsides are left barren exposing the red soil underneath. When the cyclone rains come later this year, much of the topsoil will be washed into rivers, which will turn a crimson-hue as a result. During past years of heavy deforestation, astronauts have commented that after a heavy rain, Madagascar looks like it is bleeding into the Indian Ocean, and in a very real sense, it is.

I hope everyone back at home is enjoying their holiday and the cold weather, although mail service to Madagascar is reportedly even slower here than in Niger, letters are highly sought after and appreciated.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Michael