Fort Dauphin

Marco, Me Aina, Claudis, and Claudio (brother and cousins at home)

After orientation we headed to Fort Dauphin (Tolagnaro) for our month-and a little bit homestay with a Malagasy family, and school.  Fort Dauphin is situated on a peninsula, surrounded by the Indian ocean on three sides, and our class/school area is right on the tip of the peninsula, in the area/quartier called Libanona.  I'm living with a midwife, Claudine, and her son Marco (11 yrs old) in a house that is in a small compound with some of her EIGHT siblings and their various family members.  Some of her cousins and their family members live in the compound next door, so there are family members everywhere!  Unfortunately, very few of them speak any French (Marco doesn't, and almost none of the people living in the compound), but a little cousin Aina, who is Marco's friend and also about 11, goes to the Alliance Francaise school and so he speaks quite a lot of French, so he's a translator for Marco and me, and he is also completely adorable and we're friends now.  Claudine works at the hospital 24 hours on, 48 hours off, so she's either gone, resting from having just returned from work, or resting up to go back to work a lot of the time.  We've had a lot of dinners together though, and she's very nice when she's there.  I told my family that my nickname was Kat, which is the word for cat in English, so now they call me Pishu (Peeshoo) which means cat in Malagasy.

My house and some of the compound (no chickens, dogs, or ducks visible, but they're there!

The eating patterns here are WAY different from the health nutty ones in my family, at Bowdoin, and anything you ever read in magazines about healthy eating.  Firstly, the Malagasy eat more rice per capita than any other population of humans on the face of the planet.  They actually pile a mountain of rice onto their plate at almost every meal, and there is usually some meat or fish (they're not super big on vegetables).  As foreigners to the bacteria/viruses/worms that are in the water, we're not supposed to eat uncooked vegetables that haven't been washed in a lightly bleached water solution, but I've cheated a couple times just because I was craving vegetables so badly, and so far I haven't gotten sick (knock on wood).  It depends on the family, but there doesn't seem to be money for dessert, but they dump mountains of sugar in to their tea or hot milk in the morning, and everything is very heavily salted.  The only thing that is keeping me from being 3249327 lbs right now is that they don't have any snacks at all, and breakfast is just bread and butter and tea, so we (the Americans) are either starving between meals, or stuffed right after them.  Luckily bananas grow in abundance here, and when we're at school they sometimes will bring out bananas midmorning if we're all looking really pale and weak and tired.
School is basically intensive Malagasy, some French grammar which isn't too bad, and guest lecturers that come and talk about NGOs, national parks, mining projects, kind of anything about Madagascar is what it seems like at this point.  This is the first time since high school that I've actually sat in a classroom from 8-4 (8-5 some days) and learned stuff with only little breaks, which is hard, but everything is so foreign and new that it's pretty hard for it to be boring.  Most of our lectures are in French, so my notes are a funny French-English mix, but it's definitely helping me concentrate on French comprehension, with a Malagasy accent (they roll their r's which sounds really different).  It's humpback whale migration season here, so at lunch we go and whale watch on the bluff, and the other day we saw a whole tail as the whale dove!  That's part of the really surreal experience of being here: I'm almost comfortable enough to feel like I know my way around and forget that I'm halfway around the world, and then I remind myself that I'm whale watching at lunch and walking to school through a tropical city on a beautiful peninsula surrounded by turquoise water.

On the walk to school

The poverty and lack of hygiene education in the city is really apparent: there is trash everywhere, and people just throw plastic bags and packaging everywhere, and they also poop anywhere in the street, on hills, behind houses, king of everywhere.  I have running water at my house, but I also have some cockroaches and spiders, and several students don't have running water, and we didn't have running water at Manatantely.  This means bucket showers with water that comes from a big oil drum that is filled once a week, so there is definitely a lot of contamination with dirty people and bugs and stuff, and not that many people seem to wash their hands very frequently.
The beaches are beautiful though, and I've been running every morning before school along the beach which is about 100 yards from my house with Marco and some other cousins.  The kids love playing with the camera, and I've had to start deleting some pictures because there are so many unfocused duplicate pictures of them being goofy (I still have PLENTY of pictures though).