8/24
I made it! After a long day and a half of travelling (which has included being in 4 [US, UK, France, and Madagascar] countries, on 3 different continents [North America, Europe, and Africa]), I am finally in Madagascar. My flights were all good and uneventful. On my flight to London, I had the row to myself (as did many other people on the plane) so I was able to sleep some. I then spent the night in a little lounge in Heathrow. I think that I slept a little, but I’m not entirely sure. I had an early flight to Paris (which was super quick, I think it only took about 45 minutes), and then I changed terminals and got on the flight to Madagascar.
Getting on this last flight was a little insane: everyone was pushing to get on and to advance in line, which really didn’t make much sense, but whatever, I made it. The flight was long (10 and a half hours I think?) but pretty smooth and I was able to sleep a little, as well as watch some tv shows. I was lucky because there was an empty seat next to me, so I was able to stretch out a little bit. It was cool to be able to track where the plane was during the entire journey. Flying over Greece was gorgeous, and it was really neat to be able to look down on the desert when we first hit Africa.
The airport in Madagascar was a little crazy. It is super small and I am pretty sure that someone could easily walk through without having their passport checked. Getting luggage was interesting. I found a few other people on my program and we ended up just walking over a lot of random boxes and pushing our way through to the baggage carousel. Thankfully, I found my stuff fairly quickly. Unfortunately for a few people, some luggage got left in Paris. Their stuff won’t get here until Friday, so they are just borring the necessities from others. After we all finally had our stuff, the 9 of us on my program who had been on the flight went out and met one of our leaders and took a bus to a nearby hotel, where, after showering, we hung out for a few hours in one of our rooms. It was really fun and nice to start bonding with the people. I think that this is going to be a fun semester!
Well, it is 3 am as I am writing this (we are 7 hours ahead of the east coast) although it will be posted later (we all get a free hour of wifi in this hotel! Unfortunately, this didn’t end up working. . .) so I am going to head to bed (to the sound of dogs barking and some other weird, unidentifiable noises).
It still hasn’t totally hit me that I’m in Africa, but I’m sure that it will come!
8/25 What are we eating? Tapioca Eggs!
I have officially spent my first full day in Madagascar. This morning was super low key. We woke up around 7:15 and then had breakfast as a group, before meeting our academic director and driving down to our orientation site, on the outskirts of Tana. The drive down was like nothing I had ever experience before. This country is incredibly beautiful, and also incredibly different from the US. Driving through town we were able to see all of the market stands and people walking around. The actual driving was crazy. People here drive pretty fast and really close to one another. When one car is going to pass another, the first car honks and then just zips by in the other lane. It is so weird.
Once we got to our new hotel, we split up into rooms and then just had the day to chill (there was a group that was flying in this afternoon and we needed to wait for them to show up before we could really do anything). We hung around and talked for a while before lunch, and then afterwards, me and a few others went on a walk down a path behind the hotel. We ran into some locals and their children (who were adorable) and also found some run down houses. The plants on the walk were also amazing. The colors of the flowers are so vibrant and rich, like nothing I’d ever seen before (don’t worry, I got pictures).
After our walk, we played cards for a while before tossing around a football and a frisbee. Somehow, we managed to occupy ourselves with this for about 2 and a half hours. Eventually we went up to the balcony on the top floor of the hotel and just chilled again until the final group arrived (which was around 5:45, so we really did have the whole day to kill). Once the group arrived, we all met together for a while and then had dinner, before hanging out again. Tomorrow, we are going to start really going over the logistics of the program and our schedule gets much busier, so that should be fun!
8/27 Tu es un eléphant
Yesterday was our first full day of the program. We were in our hotel for the whole day and had sessions on and off. It was fairly boring, but necessary to get through all of the logistics. In the afternoon, we had a Malagasy (which is pronounced differently than I thought when I came here) dance and singing troupe come who performed for us. That was really fun to watch and they invited us to dance with them at the end. They taught us a simple, but common, Malagasy dance and we went through it twice. Finally, we did a brief overview of the trip we were going to take today.
This morning we had our first Malagasy lesson, in preparation for our trip. We learned basic phrases such as hello, goodbye, and thank you, as well as what to say to beggars (tsy misy – I don’t have anything). For our trip, we first went to a Restaurant in central Tana (our first time there). It was a fairly nice restaurant, built in an old train station. They were very prepared to cater to our dietary needs (as vahaza [foreigners] it isn’t safe for us to eat a lot of what the Malagasy do). Today we had sandwiches and fries, both of which were delicious (better than I have had in the US I think) and a nice deviation from our normal meals. Normally we have rice (vary), as well as a vegetable dish and a meat dish. The meat has been mostly zebu (which is sort of like beef, but has a very distinct taster), although sometimes it is chicken.
After our lunch, we walked in groups through the market. My group had 4 people in it, and we were with Sidoney, one of our teachers (we have 5: Roland [academic director] and Hanta, Candy, Jo, and Sidoney [language teachers – French and Malagasy]. We also have Rivo, our logistics coordinator). She showed us around the main street (Avenue de l’Independence) and then took us off onto some side streets. We saw the president’s house and a lot of really nice fountains.
This trip was the first time we were really exposed to the extreme poverty of some Malagasy. There were people on the streets who would push goods into our faces, hoping that we would buy something, as well as really little children (probably around 4 or 5) who would come up and ask for money. Seeing pictures of these children doesn’t even begin to compare to the real thing. They are absolutely filthy, but also cute as can be and it is incredibly difficult to have to tell them that you have nothing to give.
On our trip back, when we were just leaving the market, 2 young boys came up to the open windows of our van, one carrying a little girl on his back. They were sticking their heads and hands into the window, asking us for anything (I’m assuming, they were talking in Malagasy so I couldn’t understand them, but I can’t imagine they were talking about anything else). As we drove on, they ran with the van. And running with a moving car in Madagascar is not an easy feat.
Driving here is crazy. The busses we’ve been on have been like big vans (I think they can each hold about 15 people) but there are no seatbelts, and as far as I can tell, there are no speed limits on the roads. People drive as fast as they’d like, and simply honk to pass one another. The cars come within inches of one another, all while there are people walking just inches away on the side of the road. I could never manage to drive in a country like this.
When we got back to the hotel, we had a snack (the oranges here are delicious, and peeling them is infinitely easier than at home) and debriefing session and then were given an hour and a half before dinner, during which I am writing this entry. Tomorrow will be another day mostly in the hotel, during which time we’ll be talking about the logistics of our classes and the daily schedule, as well as having a session talking to a previous SIT Madagascar student, which should be enlightening. I hope that everyone in the US isn’t being too badly affected by the earthquake and that the temperature isn’t too bad (here, it is freezing in the mornings and nights, but really hot in the afternoons – Malagasy winter for you)!
8/29
I have now officially been in Madagascar for 5 full days! Crazy! Yesterday we basically spent the entire time at Ralais du Rova (the hotel) but we did have a fun visitor. Her name was Buyong and she was a senior at Bard who had done this program last fall, and was currently back in the country doing research for her senior thesis. She was able to talk to us a lot more candidly about homestays and what to expect than anything we had been previously exposed to.
Today was a more exciting day. We took a trip to a palace, Ambohimonga. This is where many kings and queens had lived. When we first drive into the neighborhood, we walked a little through town and went down by a sacred lake. The lake was a disgusting color, but apparently its water used to be used for religious purposes (of course, while we were being told this, we saw a bunch of random teenagers walking in to wash off their feet). The walk down was crazy. The roads were all either stone or dirt and all of the stairs were stone, but not even and with different drops between each step. Then we went on to the actual palace. We first visited the house of a king from the 18th century. The house was small (just one room) and had a lofted bed in the northeast corner (the sacred direction) for the king and another bed in the south (the inferior direction) for his wives (it was customary for the king to have 12) and children (who were considered, in the patriarchal society in which he lived, considered to be inferior). While we were in this house, there were a few different groups that came in to pray (this was a holy day). It was fascinating to watch, as their practices are so different from everything done in the US. Apparently we were lucky to be able to witness this as Hanta, one of our assistants, had never even seen it and she has lived here her entire life.
Next we visited the house of some of the queens, after the British had arrived. There was a stark difference. This house was decorated very nicely with much more attractive furnishings and looked a lot more modern. We saw the bedroom, bathroom, sitting room, and dining room, as well as the outdoor meeting room. Then we left the palace and went out onto the top of a mountain. It was the most gorgeous thing that I think any of us had ever seen (and yes, I have a lot of pictures). We just sat up there and talked for a while, during which time we all took pictures, as well as taking a group photo (I have a copy on my camera and it turned out really nice – I’ll try to upload it ASAP so that you can all see who I am spending a lot of time with and who my new friends are).
Finally, we got back on our busses and drove to another prayer site. On the way, we quickly stopped at a sacred rock. At the prayer site, we got out and listened to the visiting professor who was with us talk about what was going on, and then we got to walk down into and through the town. While there, we saw a goose being sacrificed and one of the boys in our group was blessed. Me and a few others also got to spend some time with some children. We asked Rivo (pronounced REE-voo), our logisitics coordinator, how to ask if we could take a picture in Malagasy and so we were able to use that phrase. One of the mothers emphatically told us that we could. We would take a picture and then show it to the kids (who would get incredibly happy seeing themselves on the screen) and then repeat the process. This kids were adorable. Interestingly, there was also an albino girl among the children, which wasn’t something that any of us had expected to see. She had very coarse hair and obviously got along with the community, but a man (who I would assume was her father) tried to get us to give her money because she looked like a vahaza (a white foreigner) just like us.
When we got back in the afternoon we had a debriefing session and snack (they have been feeding us a ridiculous amount of food) and then had a session to talk about homestay families. We talked about what we can expect from our family, and about what would be expected of us, and then we were all given a sheet containing a bare minimum of information about our host family. I will be living in a house with a host mother (Bakonirina – Restaurantrice), a host father (Jacques – commercial agent), a host brother (Mickaël), and 2 host sisters (Tania and Cynthia). I don’t know how old the kids are. I will be living in a part of Antananarivo called Soarano Behoririka, which is just a neighborhood over from where the SIT classroom is. I don’t think that there is anyone else living in my neighborhood, but there are 2 girls living in a neighborhood on the opposite side of the school, so hopefully we’ll be within walking distance of one another. We will officially meet our families on Wednesday in the SIT classroom and then head home with them for good. I’m nervous about it, but I know that in the end I know that it will all work out!
8/30
Today we had our first trip alone to the market. Roland, our academic director, stayed behind and sent us off with Hanta, Rivo, and our drivers. We split into 5 groups yesterday night. My group also included Charlotte, Emma, and Maddie. When we got there, we had 2 specific goals: buy some kibu (the local specialty, which we didn’t know what it was) and get some sort of a snack to buy with the group. We were all given a total of 3800 ariary (a little under 2 dollars) to spend. When we first got there, it was incredibly overwhelming. There were people everywhere, and everyone stared at us because we looked out of place. All of the groups went in separately (although we did briefly run into a few other groups along the way). When we got in, we started just walking around and saying hello (manahoana – pronounced mana-own) to the people who were staring. Whenever we use Malagasy, they are always happy and surprised and like to respond to us. It was cool to be able to actually carry on small conversations with the vendors in Malagasy, even if all we were talking about was the price of goods. I did walk by someone and said hi, who then asked me “Ina na vaovao” (what’s new [basically how are you?]) and because my Malagasy group had gotten a little ahead on Sunday, I was able to respond with “tsy misy” (not much is going on).
We ended up getting kibu (one of our goals) for the lowest price of all of the groups (we got it for 200 ariary [about 10 cents] when most groups got it for 500 or 800. We had a lot of difficulty figuring out what it was. Charlotte kept trying to ask for the name (we needed to make sure that it was actually kibu) and Emma was trying to ask what it was. One of the funniest moments was Emma asking if it was made of fish, but the vendor didn’t understand, so she acted out a fish and said “poisson,” and he just looked at her like she was crazy then made the same motion and said “des petits poisons? Non!” After this we decided to leave the market
because it was so overwhelming and just walked down the main street outside. While out there, we ran into Rivo and were able to ask what the Kibu actually is. Apparently it is a combination of rice flour, sugar, peanuts, and some various fruits. It smelled pretty weird and I didn’t think it tasted that good, although other people in the group did.
After a few minutes we went back in to try to find a snack. We ended up buying a packet of chocolate cookies, which ended up being delicious! On our way out, we stopped to look at the goods of local vendors. We kept getting started at and called vahazas. One adorable little boy looked right at us and said “Bonjour, vahaza” and it was one of the cutest things ever. We also ran into a few little boys (3 of them, all of whom appeared to be 7 or 8) who were walking with linked elbows and, in a sing-song voice, said to us “Bonjour, bonjour, bonjour.”
While in the market we also saw a few really weird things, one of which really stood out: a zebu head. The head was literally just sitting on a counter, but everything had been taken out of it. So it was the nose and mouth and the fur/skin, but nothing else. Super disgusting and I have no idea what people actually use them for, but in the Malagasy culture, almost nothing is wasted.
Tonight will be the last night that all 21 of us will be together for a while, as tomorrow we move in with our host families. We will finally get to see the SIT classroom as well as a tour of the area surrounding it before meeting our families and then heading home with them for dinner. On Thursday, we will actually start classes and orientation will be officially over.
