Post 6: Up to 5 weeks in counting! It feels like five years….

Things have been good here in my bustling town of Maevatanana. I’ve settled into some sort of routine, which is ever changing because of people’s strange work schedules here (also known as “fotaona gasy” which means “Malagasy time”). Every morning, I wake up and sweep…this is around 6:30ish (unless I go running, which is an early call of about 5:00am because that’s the coolest time of day, and with the fewest number of people staring). Then I feed my cute kitty, who doesn’t have a name yet, but responds to kisses and “kitty kitty!”, then I eat…people here still ask me what I eat every day, since I don’t seem to cook rice, but these days I’ve been eating a lot of sweet potatoes, tomatoes, onions, skillet bread, pancakes (I miss my dad and Saturday pancakes, and maple syrup!), skillet cornbread, stir-fry, and peanuts! Every so often, I buy ground beef or sausages and make meatballs…which reminds me of my Italian roots. And just yesterday I made French toast, though probably not as good as the amazing Challah French toast that my uncles are famous for!
After hallucinating about supermarkets and the amazing restaurants and food in the US as I eat my leftover rice with bananas and raisons, I get ready for work! Every morning I do a “sensibilization” (Peace Corps word for teaching normal people at odd places and at odd times about good things) about a health topic (here it’s mostly about preventing malaria or “tazo moka” in Malagasy, or preventing diarrhea or “aretim-pivalanana”) which also involves singing songs about the health problems or how to prevent disease (I’ve even written a song about malaria that goes to the tune of “twinkle twinkle little star”! I can’t wait to get my guitar and then I’ll be jamming about health all the time!).
Then I go shopping. Every day I have to go to the market (which is huge here, since I live in the “banking town” where other people have to come in from their small villages to get money and shop for bigger things). I don’t have a refrigerator yet, so I have to buy fresh food every day at a market that is really ridiculous…there are millions of venders that sell the same thing, and it’s really messy and kinda gross at first, but you get used to it.
Then I do some household chores, chatting with locals, preparing lunch, and then from about 12-3pm, everyone is out of commission because of lunch and the heat. It’s a great time of day…which I just sit and read books, sleep, relax…I like siestas! Then the afternoon is normally free to me, unless I’m teaching English to the doctors that work at the regional health center, or teaching English to the government workers at the department of agriculture office here (I’m trading English for involvement in their projects right now…soon we will start small gardening demonstrations in neighboring communities and here in Maevatanana), or when I have my radio show about health on Thursdays (I even sing! Can you believe it???), or when I teach sex-ed at the local middle school or healthy foods at the local elementary school. It would appear that I am very busy, but I’m not really…there is plenty of time for my epic bike rides that take me away from this crazy, kinda ugly city, and to the beautiful surrounding villages and rolling hills.
So things are going pretty good, and I’ve been able to build some relationships beyond my little clinic, and I think I’m slowly making some friends, though I depend a lot on my amazing family (the doctor’s family with whom I work) who live right next to me; and I also depend on my good friend Devyn, the other peace corps volunteer who lives nearby. It is a struggle to stay positive all the time here though. I sometimes find myself wanting to run over people with my bike or yell when people scream “Vaza!” which is the equivalent of saying “hey, white person!” or “hey foreigner!”, or when I try to work with government officials who don’t really work but just push paper around and ride around in cars. But then there are amazing times when I meet someone new who is super nice and practices Malagasy with me, or when I hang out with my doctor’s family and paint or chat or watch movies, or when I teach about health or English and get to talk to new people, or when I take epic bike rides (I’m up to 30km! or 18 miles for you Americans…I’m hoping that I’ll get really good at biking and then maybe to the Seattle-Portland ride when I return to Seattle!), or when I’m able to take apart and put my own bike back together…Dan would be so proud! I know this is really hard for me, and for many people that I love, but I guess I kind of belong in this life.
Ok, so I want to keep up with my book reviews as well, and I just finished this amazing book called “Oil on the Brain,” by Lisa Margonelli. Basically, as a review on the back cover says, “IF YOU DRIVE A CAR, YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!!!”
This was such an amazing book because it was written in the hilarious and inquisitive style of a very intuitive author. Margonelli looks at oil from the gas pump at the gas station (and talks about the hard work of gas station owners to save pennies, promote convenient store items, and she also describes the battle between independent and brand gas stations), to the tanker drivers (who battle traffic, battle cancer, and battle the rising and falling of gas prices and the politics of who to deliver that gas to), to the refineries (that battle with enormous need of the United States consumers who want more and more…all refineries are operating to the max and there are many accidents because of this), to the oil rigs in Texas (when she talks about the history of oil discovery and drilling that got the US fixated on cheap oil and big cars), to the NYMEX oil market (where she talks about how oil prices are made, and how little connection we have to the price of oil and the way it is brought to us…mostly through war/violence), to the oil producing countries or “petrostates” of Venezuela, Chad, Nigeria, and Iran (where she talks about how the countries function, or don’t; and how they struggle to provide for their own people and for the US’ and the world’s oil needs), to China (where there is huge innovation occurring to make oil dependency around the world a thing of the past).
I absolutely loved this book and I really think that you should all read it!
And I guess that’s it for now! Please keep emailing me (or start emailing me) because I love to hear from you all and keep up with all the happenings! Love you all so much and talk to you soon!