Don’t judge a man’s wealth on the size of his house but on the size of his zebu herd

The ridiculously idyllic beach at Faux Cap Center

Zebu at the weekly market

Americans wearing lambas

Disclaimer: This is a RIDICULOUSLY long blog, so if you get bored reading and just look through pictures I won't even know and definitely won't be offended

We just returned from our week long stay in the commune of Faux Cap, located on another idyllic beach about 100 km south-west of Ft Dauphin. The bus ride took the typical 10 hours on the crazy roads, but we were in a big “TATA” bus which seemed to be able to take on any potholes of any size, even though I was sure that something would break at some point, an axle or at least a flat tire!  The Centre d’Écologie à Lebanon (CEL) students, who are basically the equivalent of Malagasy university aged students, came with us on the trip to act as translators, because Faux Cap is located in an extremely rural part of the Androy region of Madagascar, where the people speak a different dialect than that of Ft Dauphin, and no one speaks more than a few words of French.  We arrived in Faux Cap center, which is the center village of the Faux Cap commune, where there are 14 other villages in which SIT and CEL students would be scattered to spend the week with families there.

Me driving the zebu-pulled cart with Parfait

    Monday morning we woke early, and I was so excited to go for a run on a real road instead of on the beach because sand is so hard to run in, but it turns out that rural roads by the beach are sand, so it was definitely a struggle, but I was, once again, running entertainment to all the local people walking on the road who smiled or laughed, and in some cases imitated me running for a while.  I just keep telling myself that it’s the sight of a blonde vasa (stranger, foreigner, feels like my second name) running for apparently no reason other than to run that’s so hilarious, not my tomato red face or how much of a struggle I look like I’m going through.  We got to swim in this beautiful sort of harbor sheltered by a reef, which was, once again, a place where I could just picture cruising sailboats stopping in for the night providing a little extra to the economy here, but it obviously doesn’t happen because of the political crisis.  After breakfast, we went to the market and split into our groups for the week with the Malagasy students to get to know them, to buy lambas (lambahwane, the large piece of colorful cloth that women wear as skirts or dresses and use to carry babies, and older village men sometimes drape over their shoulders).  I was working with Sylvio and Odassio for the week, two guys who had been there before, stayed in villages, and were very patient teachers, translators, and fellow researchers.  At the market I had my first taste of bagheda, which is their name for the species of sweet potato that grows in the region, and is SO GOOD!  They don’t eat much rice here, which is so bizarre for Madagascar, but it just won’t grow in the region because  of how dry it is.  Odassio had stayed in the village where the weekly market was held, and his host mother from the last semester invited us into their house and gave us steamed baghedas and curdled zebu milk, which I found out later that we weren’t supposed to eat because it might not be prepared well for the weak vasa stomach, but fingers crossed, I haven’t gotten amoebic dysentery or anything yet.  After the market, we returned to the main area to swim, eat lunch, and await the arrival of our families who were to pick us up sometime in the afternoon.  My uncle, Parfait, (the exact family relations are always a little sketchy, so I just mostly go by generation) arrived with a little cousin in a very rickety zebu-pulled cart to pick us up.  The 5 km ride to our village over the terrible road which really was terrible in the zebu cart, mostly because the zebu were working so hard, made me realize that no one has any fear about their cars breaking in potholes because these barely-strapped-together zebu carts sway and creak over the same roads and make it out just fine.  We arrived in our village, which consisted of 8 hut houses, some central tamarind trees, baobabs, a zebu corral, and LOTS of animals (chickens, turkeys, zebu, sheep, goats, and dogs all of all ages), and immediately knelt by the older men in the village and presented ourselves.  Actually, Sylvio, who had stayed in a nearby village before, presented us, and I said thank you and nice to meet you, which were just about the only words of Malagasy I knew.  We presented the woman who was our mother for the week with the provisions we had brought (we couldn’t possibly just show up without bringing food for ourselves + some extra and expect them to be able to feed us), put some flea powder down on the ground, and set up our tents.  All of our meals were held in our mother’s house, which was about 25 square feet and had a bed, all of the valuable things in the village in suitcases, a table, and a chair.  We all ate from our laps, the men on the bed, and Sylvio, Odassio, and I on the char and a little bench.  No women, including the mother whose house it was and who prepared the food, ever ate with us, only entering to bring in the food and take away the dishes.  It made me wonder a little if things would have been different had I been with two female Malagasy students, or if the identityt of visitor/guest elevates you to the male eating status automatically.  Sylvio and Odassio (translating for me) spoke with the men briefly about education in the area, which we had decided would be one of our themes for the week, with the promise to cover more information later, and then, because there was no electricity (or running water, of course), and it was dark, we all went to sleep. 
    Tuesday morning I woke early and did sprints with Parfait, who turned out to be a really sweet man who is very close to legally blind (he can’t really see at night at all, and has to have his meals dished out for him and handed to him) but also an avid student of French, despite having spent only 3 years in formal school from the time he was 8-11.  He has acquired two notebooks, one left from his years in French class as a young boy, and over the years of SIT students visiting, has built up a very crude Malagasy/French dictionary on top of his French lessons.  Throughout my entire visit, he was constantly asking us to write words down in his book so that he had the Malagasy, French, and English equivalents, and our addresses and phone numbers.  In looking at his older book, I found the addresses and names of old SIT students with which he was hoping to keep contact, along with a plethora of phone numbers of old CEL students, a Peace Corps worker, and assorted foreigners that he’d been able to come into contact with.  This was the first in my continuing lesson that one person having a significant impact in these communities is so easy and so important to the local people.

Gathering baghedas in the morning

    After breakfast, we went with a few aunts and Parfait and some little girl cousins to collect grains which they sell at the market to be turned into essential oils, and then dug up baghedas.  For anyone who saw my ridiculous excitement about digging up our potatoes this summer, think of that times a whole acre!!  At first I wasn’t very good at it, because you have to dig into the ground with a shovel that’s way to long for your purpose without breaking the bagheda, and then dig around it until it comes out without breaking, which can be hard because they’re so long and skinny and their skins are so thin.  It wasn’t a tragedy if they broke, you can still eat them, and they showed me how to find which plants had baghedas that were ready underneath them, and eventually told me I was mahay (good, competent) at farming.  We also picked some bagheda leaves which they prepare kind of like boiled/steamed spinach, and went back to the village.  Ate lunch, which included several baghedas, which was awesome and also developed into a theme for the week, at least 5-7 baghedas a day per person.  In the afternoon, we danced, which is a huge part of Androy culture, not to mention that at the party for our departure at the end of the week every village does a kind of dance off, so they had to teach their ignorant vasa guests how to dance FAST.  The women weren’t shy about grabbing my hands and wrists and showing me where to go, they had a few homemade guitars and whistles (think athletic trainer cueing sprints or push-ups: that’s how they keep rhythm), and they told me towards the end that I was mahay, which was great to hear even if it wasn’t true.  Dinner, then spoke with the men in more detail about education in the area.
    Formal schooling didn’t start here until the huge famine in 1986, when region was really starving and the country, and international aid community, paid attention to the poverty and illiteracy of the area for the first time.  A primary school exists in all of the 14 villages in the commune, and they were all renovated in 2010 by the World Hunger Prevention program and WWF, but are still just one or two room school houses for 150 + kids in each school.  Primary education is paid for by the state, but the secondary school and high school require money of the families, and there is only one secondary school for the entire commune, located much to far away for some people to reach on a daily basis.  That and the price (10,000 Ariary per year plus notebooks, which are about 700 Ar each, totaling less than $10 US) means that there are less than 700 kids in the secondary school out of the whole commune (about 200 kids per primary school times 14=not enough going to secondary school).  Of each graduating class from the secondary school, about 75%, according to our host father, have the grades to go to the high school in Tsihombe, 30 km away, but that is also expensive, and to go there you need to stay in Tsihombe, which often requires renting a house.  This means that less than 30% of kids in the region get a high school education, and hardly any go to university.  This is not for lack of want: we verified with the men that they wanted their children to go to school, and not stay and work in the field, and they said that it depended on the wishes of the child, but they would like to have as many children as they could afford go to school.  Our father, who was the Fokotany of the village (administrative leader), had a high school education, but at the price of his younger brother’s education, because the parents could only afford to send one child to school.  They mentioned that a Peace Corps worker had come to teach at the school and done amazing work for the community and wanted me to ask the Peace Corps to send another worker for them, and that they had put in a request with the government to build another secondary school, but that had been thus far ignored.  All of this information about the lack of availability of education made me frustrated, but at the same time almost relieved, because it would be so easy to improve the situation in the region!  Obviously not something you could do in an afternoon, but the people want the schools, and now all they need are the resources to build them and teachers to fill them, which isn’t insane rocket science last time I checked.  We don’t have to go changing cultural values or uprooting traditions or building crazy engineered machines or anything, just build a school and provide the people with a way to educate themselves.  They are all so smart, there’s so much potential, and so many resources could be saved and things operated more efficiently and language barriers broken down and people’s curiosity satisfied with just a measly building and a few willing teachers. 
    Wednesday morning we milked the zebu, which, in this region and maybe in Madagascar in general, is the man’s job, so I just got to tickle it’s butt to encourage milk to come out.  They tie the hind legs together but the mother isn’t put in any special pen or anything, so the calf is also trying to nurse, so a child is present with a stick swatting the calf away as it tries to get at the teats as well, which was pretty shocking and violent seeming for the three of us foreigners who hadn’t seen that before.  We continued with our interviews about education, and were midway through when the mother came sprinting up talking really fast and spitting and spewing words out in Malagasy telling us that there was a marriage ceremony passing and we should go see it fast!  The women were all in a line carrying party implements (mats, suitcases full of marriage things, pots and pans) on their heads, and they even insisted that I join the lineup for a couple hundred yards, which was really funny.  Marriages aren’t nearly as big of a deal as funerals though, so they weren’t dancing their way to the groom’s house or anything. 

The hospital for the Faux Cap region

    Just as we were about to continue our interview, Mamy, our SIT logistics coordinator burst in saying that he had two other groups that were going to the hospital to check it out and interview the doctor, and maybe we should join them.  The hospital was a two room operation, one room for consultations/doctors office/prescription storage, and the other room had two beds for sick people, and to give birth on.  There is one doctor and no nurses, and for any sort of surgery the people have to go to Ambovombe, which is 90 km away, in a car sent for by the Ambovombe hospital.  We did find out that they gave birth control shots, but there were rumors in the villages that the women who got them would get sick or possessed or would never be able to have children again, so family planning wasn’t too wide spread.  At least the guy didn’t look at us like we were crazy people when we said the words “family planning.” 
    Wednesday afternoon was more dancing, and they started trying to teach me some songs, which is ridiculously hard in Malagasy because they run their words together and fit syllables in crazy places, but they assured me we had some more time to learn songs before the dance off.  Sylvio and Odassio also started trying to teach me a song that all the Malagasy students knew, less typical of the region, which was really pretty but they definitely had to write down the lyrics and I had to look at them every time we played the song. 

The family dancing to the funeral

Some of the village women before
walking in the second time

Sylvio, Me, and Odassio

    Thursday we woke and the men told us that we were going to a funeral!  We first went and my cousin picked coconuts, we saw the cornfield, watermelons, and Malagasy version of scarecrows, which is just sisal fibers strung together in a crude rope suspended over the field.  We had another snack of more baghedas and curdled zebu milk which I couldn’t eat even though it tasted so good because we would need our energy for the funeral.  The village and some surrounding villages which also contained family members started to gather around 10 am, and we began our 3 km walk to the village of the dead man with two zebu, several guitars, whistles, and homemade drums in tow.  When we were about 1 km away from the site, the dancing began, which really meant that we were doing sort of rhythmic jogging and chanting and guitar playing and, of course, whistling.  We made our grand entrance into what could be considered the foyer of the funeral, which was a little side village where we sat for a few minutes and some of the men took swigs of home-distilled cane sugar alcohol before we continued on to the main village, leaving some of the babies and older grandmothers behind.  The main village was about 400 m away, and we of course danced the whole way there, and then danced our way to the center of the village in front of a huge crowd of women and children to the left, and then older men seated underneath an awning-type structure, and then around the house of the dead man, and back to our foyer village, having picked up some bottles of soda, beer, and more cane sugar alcohol from the hosts of the funeral.  I thought that was it, but it turns out that was just our presentation of the village as guests!  Everyone drank a small offering of liquid out of the same cup, orange soda for the women and children, and cane alcohol for the men (Sylvio and Odassio insisted later that it didn’t taste as bad as they made it look).  Next, I went back into the funeral village with two young women who had a lamba folded into a narrow banner with a 10,000 Ar note pinned to it with cactus spines held between them, and three young men who had guitars and whistles.  We did a more structured march/dance to the group of old men under the shade and presented the 10,000 Ar note in exchange for some more beverages, and danced our way out.  I think they got some extra credit for having a vasa with them, I definitely heard “vasa” and some laughing with their exchange with the elders.  Back in the foyer village, everyone prepared for our final entrance into the funeral village by pinning a 100 Ar note to every woman’s right shoulder (again with the cactus spines which work really well as clothing pins), and the men took down some more of the cane alcohol.  This time the men danced in ahead of the women, while we walked in a single file line behind them, so that once we arrived at the funeral village one of the hosting mothers/sisters/aunts/cousins could unpin and collect the 100 Ar note from our shoulders.  At this point we were free to watch other villages dance their way in, and I found out that this party is really the pre-party to the funeral, including only the immediate family, which means about 500 people.  All of these guests bring a zebu and or money, and the hosting family provides food for everyone well into the night.  The next day, the zebu would be sacrificed and the house of the dead man burned and turned into a sacred spot in the village, and several months later, when all the family could gather from around Madagascar, the actual burial ceremony would be held, along with another huge party. 
    My host mother at the village had insisted that we return for lunch, because the people at the funeral didn’t know how to prepare food for my weak vasa stomach, so Sylvio and Odassio and I walked back to our village, leaving most of the family there to dance, eat, and drink.  Our mother had prepared a meal, after which Sylvio and Odassio returned to the funeral and I stayed to take some pictures of the village in the setting sunlight without having everyone there insisting that I take 32497389 pictures with them and their babies.  There were only 5 or six women and children left, and one of the women let me carry her baby on my back, Malagasy style!!  Definitely an efficient way to carry a baby when you have to use your hands and if you’re on a low budget as far as baby carriers are concerned.  People started coming back from the party and I took a bunch of pictures of everyone, who passed around one baby who is now officially the most photographed child in Madagascar, and some cute ones of the little kids.  Luckily we didn’t have to wait up after dinner for the men to come home from the party-they stayed until at least 2 am, which is really saying something in a place where there’s no electricity, that’s a lot of party time awake in the dark!

Baby on my back!!!

Village children under one of the baobabs

Princess Leah hairdo by Mom

    Friday was the day to dance back to Faux Cap with the village, so we packed up our tents, did one final interview on medicinal plants, which they use for fevers, diarrhea, muscle soreness, on open wounds, and as re-energizers, but go to the hospital for the flu, broken bones, and birth so that the babies can be vaccinated.  Mamy came from Faux Cap with the truck to pick up our bags so that we could dance our way there unencumbered, and we gave our host mother the rest of the presents that we had brought for the village, including notebooks, pens, a blanket, our remaining (ineffective in my case) flea powder, my Frisbee, my bandanas, and one of my Maine hats.  Seeing “Vacationland” and a moose on the head of a Malagasy villager was really something.  The village insisted that they were going to do something about my hair, make it into an Androy style hairdo, so my host mom carefully combed my hair and braided it into a style that looks good on the women in the region but made me look like an indigenous Princess Leah.  It felt really nice to have such sure, careful hands playing with my hair, though, and they were all so pleased with the result that I really started to think I was looking good.  Took a last family photo, and hit the road with the usual guitars, drums, whistles, and crowd, dancing and walking on and off all the way to Faux Cap center, and I got to carry the baby for more than half the way, which was amazing, as usual.  Danced marched chanted our way up to where Jim (our program director) and our teachers and drivers were sitting on the hill by the “hotel” where they were staying in the same sort of presentation dance style as the funeral, and then we were free to swim and be with our families on the beach until the last villages arrived. 
    Laying on the beach having sand brushed off my face by a little cousin, my braids fixed by my mom, and given a little massage by one of my aunts just felt so great and at home and comforted that I didn’t want to leave them.  They drew a sun symbol on my forehead with eyeliner (one of the other girls on the program had hers drawn in permanent marker, so I got lucky!), and we had the final dance-off, where I semi-successfully sang the songs with my village and we did the traditional dance as well, and after that we offered them sodas and watched the other students and their villages do their performances.  Once the final dances were done, the SIT and CEL student groups each presented our families with a live sheep as a final thank you gift, and we could say goodbye.  Parfait gave me his bronze ring with a zebu carved roughly in the middle as a present, and another of my aunts gave me one of their bowls and a spoon, which was so incredibly generous considering how little they had already.  I promised to write and send them the pictures, and they dance/marched their way home with the goat. 
    This village stay was so special in that no matter how little I knew about their language or culture they were there to teach and get excited about my baby steps of learning, and that they willingly offered to be interviewed and researched.  I wish that I didn’t love and miss everyone at home so much that I could send in my application to the Peace Corps tomorrow without a second thought!