Mananjary

I realize that last time I ran out of time before I got to the fleas portion of my post so I’ll start there this week. Yes I have fleas. In America, admitting that you have this skin parasite is equated with bad personal hygiene or lazy pet care. Not so in Madagascar. Here maintaining a flea free household is like trying to go waterskiing without getting wet. Everything has them, I assume this includes the rats which still inhabit my walls and I can usually find one each morning on Sharbaraz. Not only are these things as common as tourists on the Eiffel Tower, they are also next to impossible to kill. As soon as you find them they run away faster than a speeding train or jump over tall buildings in a single bound. I wonder if there is any kryptonite available in Madagascar.

The most notable casualty of my flea infestation are my legs. I don’t know what it is about this country but it does not agree with my legs. Between the fleas leeches biting flies and mosquitoes, my lower appendages have been transformed into a minefield of sores, bites, and strange bumps that I itch involuntarily causing them to break open. No amount of medical cream seems to help. Honestly someone needs to combine insect repellent, SPF 30, triple antibiotic, and hydrocortisone cream into a single tube and sell it to tourists as they deplane in Antananrivo. You could call it Crème de Malagas, it would make millions.

This week I had quite the adventure trying to use the bank. There are no banks in Ranomafana, so if you recall I had set up an account in the coastal city of Mananjary and each month Peace Corps allows us to make a trip to our banking town without using vacation time. The plan was that I would catch an early Taxi Brousse out of Ranomafana, pick up Ashley, a fellow PCV along the way and get to Mananjary by 10. Then we would spend the day banking, eating out, and shopping before catching a taxi back and being home before dinner.

I made it to the taxi stop at 6AM on Saturday and proceeded to spend 2 and a half hours waiting for the first taxi in the pouring rain before a rickety white van pulled up and I was stashed into the back seat. Though Malagasy taxi-brousses do not have seat belts, interior upholstery, or water sealed windows they all have a small flat screen television that plays Malagasy music videos on full blast for the entire journey. By the time we picked up Ashley there were already 20 people in the taxi van with me and we would cram in two more before it was all over. It took four hours smashed in a corner with an elderly Malagasy man in a straw hat asleep on my shoulder to reach Mananjary. It was 1 PM if I wanted to be back by dinner I would need to be back in the taxi in less than an hour, and it was raining. Ashley and I quickly made the decision that we would be spending the night and that our first order of business would be lunch. After ravenously consuming a steak frite at the most expensive restaurant in town we asked the waitress for directions to the bank. She told us where to find it but told us that it was no use going there because it wouldn’t open until Monday.

Mananjary was a depressing sight. The steady rain we had been receiving has flooded parts of the city to the point where stagnant water sat in the marketplace and long boats were parked in the streets. News also reached me that there were multiple confirmed cases of Dengue fever in Mananjary in the past week. We stayed in the ‘white person’ part of town, so called because it contains the only structures built out of cement in the entire city. Half of these buildings are abandoned and there is at most a handful of foreigners that live there but no matter. The entire rest of the city is a collection of bamboo huts with leaf roofs. If a steady rain can flood the place, I would hate to see what would happen after a real cyclone. If a big enough ocean swell came with it there wouldn’t be 20 buildings left standing in this regional capital.

Ashley and I looked in our wallets and realized immediately that we did not have enough money to stay in town until Monday and it was already too late to catch a taxi. Desperately we called Ryan, a PCV from another stage stationed in town and he graciously allowed us to sleep on his floor for the night. The next morning we caught another taxi and I limped back to Ranomafana with less than 30 cents in my wallet and only a small jar of strawberry jam to show for the weekend. We are going to try again next Tuesday. Wish us luck.