Madagascar is like Hamlet: Beautiful, inspirational, and amazing but inexorably tragic. I have lived here for two years now and standing on the precipice of another significant life transition I am filled with so many seemingly incompatible feelings and emotions about this place. I love it. I hate it. I can't wait to leave but I don't want to go. I came here under the impression that I was going to give something to the people of this island, and I am leaving wondering what it was that I really gave and if what I gave did more harm than good.
It’s not a secret that Madagascar is a political, social, and economic disaster. Forbes magazine recently ranked Madagascar as the worst national economy on the planet. There hasn't been a peaceful transition of government in living memory. The country has been in a protracted state of political anarchy for going on three years now.
The sad part of this is that Madagascar has so much going for it, so much unrealized and underutilized potential that it breaks your heart to watch the forests burn, hillsides erode away and poor Malagasy farmers be paid a couple dollars to export their natural resources to China. There is also a sense of helpless complacency permeating the people of Madagascar. They know things are bad, but lack the will to do anything about it, knowing that anything they do is just as likely to make things worse as it is to improve them.
It is not my intent to conclude my experiences here on a depressing note. I have written extensively already about some of the unforgettable people, places, and things I have encountered on this spectacular island. Despite Madagascar's depressed outlook, I find hope Rodrigue and his family who live happy, spectacularly uncomplicated lives and in a small way are making Ranomafana a better place everyday and I am honored that I was allowed to be part of that for a time.
95% of the people who join Peace Corps have no idea what they are getting into. Not unlike others I stumbled uncomfortably through the questions from mildly concerned friends and relatives regarding my goals and motivations in making the decision to volunteer in the developing world. I was much more comfortable discussing concrete things like the application process or departure timeline than about serious questions like "What made you want to apply?" or "How did you become interested in the Peace Corps." Looking back I can see that I lacked eloquence on the topic because I hadn't convincingly explained the decision to myself yet and instead proffered statements to the effect of wanting to help people and see the world. At our final Peace Corps conference, our training director handed us the statements of purpose we had written during the application process, one of those superfluous application hurdles that asks you to explain your inspirations for joining and what you hope to accomplish as a volunteer. I glanced at the first sentence and quietly slipped the paper into the back of my folder and pretended to read from a blank sheet of graph paper for the remainder of the activity, fearing the uncomfortable string of fallacy that it inevitably contained. When I got back to Ranomafana I burned the document without reading it.
I joined Peace Corps because I didn't like where I was and I needed to be somewhere else. I had no direction in what I wanted out of life, no work experience, and nothing tying me down to anything. Somehow I hoped that Peace Corps would transform me into someone new. Turn me into one of those smiling white faces surrounded by a village of adoring African children. I would do as John the Baptist or Jesus and disappear into the desert and emerge completely changed. Unfortunately, Peace Corps does not do character transformations, it does character amplifications. Living alone as a foreigner in the middle of no where, I quickly learned that I was not going to be able to live with myself if I tried to force myself to change into something I wasn't. My house was not big enough for me and the person I thought I should be. Instead I made an unconscious decision to become comfortable with who I am, and let that person flourish. I learned lots of new things about myself. I am not good at cooking. I really like John Stienbeck. Most television is a waste of time. Cats are stupid. I'm an organizer. I like to please people, just to name a few.
Yet the number one misconception I had about Peace Corps is that I was doing this to help others. It has become clear to me that I gained so much more than I was able to give to the people in my community. As I discussed earlier, development is a messy business and the whole concept of 'helping' in the developing world is fought with complicated pros and cons. was my presence in Ranomafana over the past two years beneficial in the long term? Who knows? I certainly hope so, but in the context of observations I made about the culture, history, and direction of my village, I am not optimistic that my impact was significant.
Though there will come a time when most of the people in Ranomafana will have forgotten who I was and what I did. There will never come a time when I forget them. Ranomafana gave me a new family, gave me the freedom to be who I am, gave me direction and purpose to my life. Yes I put a bunch of trees in the ground and yes I painted maps and did projects. But I know my lasting impacts in Ranomafana are going to be on the relationships I forged with the people around me and how those relationships affected me and my neighbors. As I talked about previously, Madagascar is a broken place and no amount of aid money or Peace Corps projects is going to change that. What does make a difference is love and friendship between two people across the cultural and linguistic boundaries. And maybe I only made that connection with a few people here. But for me, that makes it all worth it.
(photo credit: Alison Thieme)
