My Life Part 1

It is amazing how much one’s conception of normal can change in a year. I like to think that as I become adapted to the Malagasy lifestyle, the less material I have to blog about since what would once be considered shocking and worthy of excessive gawking is now literally ‘nothing to write home about.’ A text message from a friend that she had just boarded a taxi-bus with an 8-foot hammerhead shark strapped to the top elicits little more than a smirk and a roll of eyes from me. What I find more fascinating these days is the westerners who are fresh of the plane and are frightened of taxi-stations, have never squatted to use the toilet, and wear white t-shirts. Thus in an effort to better acquaint you all with my normal I thought I would walk you though some typical scenes in my life.
It’s usually some activity over at Rodrigue’s that gets me up in the morning. His chicken flock has been steadily multiplying over the past months up to some 30 obnoxious birds peeping, squawking, fighting, and cock-a-doodle-doing all about my yard. The flock is culled only be the occasional taxi brousse that comes barreling by and graciously kills one or two a month. Then we have chicken for dinner. Rodrigue’s industrious wife is also awake. She has to start a fire and have rice ready for breakfast before she walks Riza and Oni 1.5k into town for school at seven. She is also eight months pregnant. Although all my windows and doors are securely shut, there is light streaming into my house from cracks in the wood and holes under the roof. Soon the sun will commence baking my tin roof making my bed intolerably hot and forcing me to start the day.
One of my first and favorite morning rituals is stumbling about the nursery trying to find the toilet. The story of my outhouse and its exceedingly inconvenient location dates back to my original installation in Ranomafana last January. It is a Peace Corps requirement that each volunteer have their own private shack-with-hole to use. Mine was located less than 10 feet from Rodrigue’s kitchen whilst Rodrigue and company had no outhouse at all and made creative use of the bushes across the road. Eventually Rodrigue began to construct his own facilities back behind the nursery. This, however, resulted in the ridiculous and counterintuitive scenario where Rodrigue’s family would have to pass by my house to use the toilet while I was making daily visits to their house to conduct similar business. I quickly rectified the situation by insisting upon trading, accepting a longer toilet commute so that Oni, two at the time, could potty train at a more convenient location. This actually worked to my benefit last April when the path to the new outhouse passed though the avocado grove and my daily morning ritual resulted in enough fruit to make lunch.
The trouble started when SAF/FJKM decided to mow down the avocado trees and turn my pleasant jungle path into an expansion on the tree nursery. The nursery and resulting bamboo fence forced me to take a prohibitively difficult route over a muddy cliff, though the thick coffee and banana stands, knee high grass, spider webs, mosquitoes, flesh eating moths… etc. A slightly better alternative was discovered when Alison was visiting. This path ironically passed right past my old outhouse and required (don’t ask me how this works) climbing over the same waist-high wall three times. Alison proved not very apt at this and actually has physical scars from her Ranomafana outhouse experience.
Clearly this was not a sustainable scenario and after a serious discussion with Rodrigue, some choice holes were made in the bamboo fence around the nursery. Now, when I emerge from my slumber I squeeze though a vine entangled hole in my fence, climb down though the nursery to the litchi in the back where the bamboo fence has been thinned out, I part the bamboo like a curtain and make my way down the embankment to my outhouse. As I sit inside I take comfort in the fact that although there is no way to measure how much progress I am making in the lives of the Malagasy people in Ranomafana, I am making measurable progress in filling this hole with poo.