Working on A Life

Experience is what its all about. And the stories. Post college most people go on to find a job, or apply to grad school. I decided just to live. This is my story as related to my family and friends. (This journal represents ONLY my views and none of Peace Corps or the US government.)

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Location: New England

We are working parents looking to make the most of whatever adventures we can find close to home.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Hope and Oranges

Greetings Everyone!

As always, I hope this letter finds you well, healthy, happy and safe wherever you might be and whatever you might be doing. It has been a particularly fine ‘fall’ day here and as I sit to write the garden is at is fragrant best, a riot of color in the sharply slanted rays of the late afternoon sun. The neighborhood birds have discovered the birdbath I built and have been visiting the yard in noisy flocks for a chance to splash around in it. It is amusing to watch them at their bathing because it is perhaps the best time to observe them as individuals, some timid and tentative and others rollicking and playful. Our first batch of bananas has ripened on the tree in the back (and if anyone wants some we find we have perhaps a few too many all of a sudden) and our tiny vegetable garden has grown in size and density until it now more closely resembles a small jungle. It has already provided us with fresh lettuce, green beans and various herbs, with tomatoes beginning to ripen on the vine. Strange to think that technically speaking winter is rapidly approaching. The only evidence of the season is that is chilly nights and mornings before the sun completely asserts its dominance. We’ve been cheating a little and for the last few days have had fires in the wonderful fireplace in our living room, despite it being perhaps not quite cold enough in absolute (New England) terms.

It has been pointed out by several friends in recent conversation that I am perhaps a tad overdue in writing this letter for which I most humbly beg pardon. The good news is that I’ve been busy traveling for work and thus would presumably have much to discuss. If only I could figure out how. Confronted with the task, I’m having a bit of difficulty figuring out where to get started. Still, the best way to begin is to begin so here we go and I apologize in advance if what follows seems more s stream of consciousness than a proper, well organized note. Not that I ever manage to write those anyway:) .

Though I haven’t been on any longer trips with the family since the ones I recorded in my last update we did make good use of the remaining April weekends playing softball and visiting the ‘croc farm,’ a smallish but otherwise impressive zoo with a main attraction I’m sure you could guess if you put your mind to it. I’ll spare you the trouble and tell you that there were thousands of crocodiles at the park varying in size (and I assume age) from hatchling to goliath. It was also my first chance to see Madagascar’s only mammalian predators, the civet cat and its larger cousin the Fosa, several species of parrot and, of course, chameleons and lemurs. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the park was that the Malagasy visitors seemed much more fascinated by the ostriches and retired donkeys than they were in the native wildlife drawing the ooohs and ahhs from the foreign guests. There is probably a lesson there on perspective. I’ll get to more on perspective later I suspect. I’ve had many pointed illustrations recently.










Softball was a great time, except that I hadn’t played softball in probably close to 10 years (now that’s scary to think about too hard) and I haven’t done any sort of sport in a few months so jumping right into a two day tournament was probably not the smartest thing I could have done. At 26 I’m tied for the youngest player on the embassy team with a visiting Peace Corps volunteer and even we couldn’t really walk properly by the second day. The Malagasy teams we played against might have lacked some of the skills that come from watching and playing baseball as a youth sport and a firm understanding of the rules but they more than made up for it with speed and endurance gained from years of soccer and hard physical work and they were excellent sports. Better sports, I’m embarrassed to say, than many of the American players who also seem to believe, rightly or wrongly, that arguing balls and strikes and close plays with the umps is just part of the fun. I also got to meet, and get to know through fun and mutual suffering, a number of people who work at the embassy and found them to be, in general, a good humored and enjoyable crowd. I was also struck momentarily by the fact that they represent an interesting microcosm of America and American life. A cross section of the country and the lifestyles united by the fact that they choose to work abroad but diverse in many other ways. I wonder how often anyone stops to notice this.

Our only other family outing was a continuation of our plan to pick compass directions randomly and travel as far in the chosen direction as we can manage on a weekend. This time it was a short (3 hour) jaunt to the west, to visit a large lake, see a waterfall and some natural geysers. This trip was mostly a bust since we couldn’t manage to find our way to the lake (we saw it from a distance but the guide book instructions were very vague), the road to the waterfall was too rugged to get the car down and the geysers were not truly geysers. Still, the area was beautiful; the hotel was nice (many spiders! Yikes) and the mineral springs were impressive. Plus we hadn’t yet been west so it was all worthwhile in the proper spirit of the thing.




It is my more recent adventures that have captured my full attention however. For most of the month of May I have been traveling for work on a project to photograph and document project successes and best practices of a Malagasy NGO headquartered here in Tana. The organization works, with its partners, throughout much of the east and south of the country and I have covered a lot of ground and seen parts of Madagascar that I am sure very few foreigners get a chance to discover. For the most part this trip has been about people, not places. The rural people, often far from roads, forgotten and underprivileged, in some cases starving or dying of disease yet always doing the best they can with what they have. They are wonderful people with a ready smile and a quick laugh despite their circumstances, a song on their lips as they go about pounding the daily rice ration. Proud men wrapped in gaudy blankets against the chill of morning mists clutch razor sharp spears and guard herds of cattle as they graze and water. Happy children in crowded classrooms do long division to show their strange guests how much they know, play soccer in tattered clothing with a wad of plastic bags as a ball and race bicycle wheel rims through a drizzling rain amid the squawks of startled poultry. Girls as young as 13 and married proudly show off their infant children, or shyly hide, peeking out from behind the doorframes of their tiny houses. This is a different world, far from anything I knew or understood even after spending two years in rural Morocco (though there are definitely some points of correlation) and these are the faces that populate that world. The faces of people that for 23 days in May have shared, as best they can with me, their lives, their troubles, their triumphs, their hopes, dreams and accomplishments. They are the faces I have attempted to capture on film and will attempt to capture in words knowing full well that I am doomed to failure from the outset. No image I can create will ever adequately describe the lives they lead. Many are the faces of my dreams now also, a permanent mark on my soul.







My translator, guide, and friend on these journeys was a 23 year old Malagasy girl from the capitol city’s ruling class (though such a distinction is not technically supposed to exist any longer) named Arivony (pronounced Arvoon). She is the stereotypical definition of a city girl and like most royals, a tiny bit conceited from time to time, all of which means that in many of the places we visited she was almost more of a foreigner than I was. She was also amazing, conducting interviews with busy, well dressed professionals and people with nothing but the clothes on their backs and often not even that, arranging meals and hotels and generally being my fixer and confidant. I certainly couldn’t have done the trip without her.

Arivony

She and I had many interesting conversations during our many hours in the car or evening meals about life in Madagascar. She helped to shed light on traditions, like the giving of gifts, weddings, funerals, the ancestors, ‘spells’ of protection and others. One of the most interesting discussions concerned the social hierarchy of Antananarivo (and by extension much of the highland plateau). It turns out that to this day there are three major social classes in the capitol. Arivony translated them as ruling, servant, and slave. Historically the ruling class would be in charge overall, with the servant class working for them in the bureaucratic positions common to any government as well as in more standard servant roles, and the slaves, literally slaves in historic times, doing the hard manual labor and menial jobs. Now of course, there is no literal slavery and as Arivony puts it, “everyone works” but socially she still can’t marry anyone from either of the lower classes (she wears a golden identity bracelet to mark her status), each class has specific areas of the city in which they are generally found, distribution of wealth and position is generally still along the these class lines. They tell the classes apart by designators familiar to the racial conflict in the U.S. The slaves are for the most part of African decent brought up from where they had settled in the costal regions and have darker skin and different hair than the lighter skinned, straight haired ruling class of Polynesian decent. She also told me that it was getting more difficult to tell them apart and she had once accidentally dated someone from the servant class but had to break it off when she found out where he lived despite the fact that “he was a nice guy.”

In the end I think it was good for her to get out of the city and see some of the things that we saw. I know it was good for me. She started out believing that the people we visited were simply a bit backward, as if they had a choice in the matter. I found this view a bit amusing considering it was coming from a girl that wears her own baby teeth as jewelry in a spell to ward off evil. “Backward,” like most things, is a matter of perspective.

As we traveled further from the city I had to keep revising my definition of true poverty to be in line with what I was seeing. On the first leg of our journey to the east people lived deep in the lush rainforest, at least in places where it had not been logged for charcoal, as their ancestors had lived for generations before them. They farmed small plots wrestled manfully from the dense surrounding vegetation and scattered over many acres. It is an extremely difficult life, always at war with the surrounding jungle but much more sustainable than the slash and burn agriculture that is rapidly coming to replace it. It’s hard to tell right and wrong in situations where any option condemns either the people or the earth on which they depend to painful life and slow death. There is not enough food during the months at the height of the rainy season when the rice crop doesn’t grow to keep the children in school. I saw many with the red hair and distended bellies of kwashiorkor disease due to a lack of protein in their diets. The people live in bamboo and grass huts built on stilts to discourage rats and minimize flooding. The huts do almost nothing to keep the elements out or provide privacy but do keep the choking smoke from cooking fires in. (Yet, if you teach them how to make a chimney for their fireplace the number of malaria deaths increases exponentially. It turns out that the smoke from the fires also cuts down on the number of mosquitoes in the house.) Local organizations were struggling to provide centrally located sources of clean water, increasing agricultural diversity in an attempt to provide year round food sources and using puppet shows to provide information on family planning, health, sanitation and nutrition (to great effect). Its not often you can say a puppet show restored a bit of your faith in humanity.













Not everything was working however. One of the villages we visited was a completely deserted ghost town. The people who lived there, I later discovered, were deep in the forest where they stayed for most of the year, only returning to the village for festivals and funerals. Yet two wells had been dug in the village to provide clean water, only this hadn’t been discussed with the people of the village first and instead just seemed to appear out of nowhere when they returned from one of their long absences. Village elders declared the wells black magic and had them boarded up without ever using them, posting sun bleached cow skulls around the village on the end of long poles as warnings.

To the south conditions were no better and often worse. Bamboo huts were replaced by structures built with mud and sticks directly on the ground that I first mistook for chicken sheds. Often these houses had dimensions smaller than 6x8 feet and I could easily see over the peak of the roof without having to stand on anything. You had to crawl to get in the door and there were no windows. The grass roofs were black from years of cooking smoke seeping in as it attempted to find an escape from the crowded interior. In such a dwelling might live a family of 11 people or more. TB and Malaria are rampant despite a pitched battle being waged against them by the government, USAID, the UN and a variety of local organizations, including my own. We gave a ride to a family whose young daughter had gone into a malarial coma (the first I had ever seen), muscles clenched and sweating. They couldn’t afford to bring her themselves and it was too far to carry her. I can only hope she made it, but there were other children at the clinic that did not and statistics were against her. That particular clinic saw an average of 36 malaria cases a month, which may not seem like many until you realize that many people can’t get there at all and the disease is often in its terminal stages before the child is deemed sick enough to be worth the expense. Of the average 36 cases more than half die even after aggressive treatment.







Family planning was also high on the agenda of the aid organizations, since a woman in a rural village would, on average have around 12 children, 4-6 of which would survive to adulthood, the rest falling to malnutrition, gastrointestinal maladies, malaria or TB (though exact cause of death is often impossible to determine because they lack the resources to get to the nearest hospital for testing). This was expected as a matter of course. Men might have up to 10 wives and therefore father greater than 100 children, so even though he was relatively well off (men ‘buy’ their wives as a traditional check to insure that he is rich enough to then provide for them) that’s a lot of mouths to feed. I have no source for these numbers except my own observations and the interviews I conducted but it is a sad state of affairs even if only those few families are affected. Most families are willing to give up everything they owned to afford school fees and this is often what it takes. Teachers were often paid for by parents organizations and sometimes went hungry themselves in lean times, or walked miles a day to get too and from remote schools.







Some things are working. These are truly intelligent people and programs to increase their knowledge of disease, literacy, nutrition, health and sanitation and the benefits of clean water seem to be taking hold. School children raced to demonstrate that they wash their hands before meals and after using the latrine and treat their water to render it safe. They carry these lessons home to their parents from the classroom. Adult literacy classes often lead to the creation of village development associations that take on new agricultural challenges, like raising green beans and honey bees, building toilets and creating income generating arts and crafts co-operatives. Certainly, heartening progress.







Still, when you come from a life of relative privilege it is difficult to remain unaffected by such a total lack. By the time we reached the far southern port city of Fort Dauphin on our last set of visits both Arivony and I were feeling it. Her attitude had changed over the course of the trips from one of self superiority to one full of empathy and a kind of fierce national pride. If my visit and our trip had accomplished nothing else but to be able to be a catalyst for that single change - the creation of an outgoing and charismatic advocate with powerful friends and a better understanding of her own country - it was completely worthwhile. She broke down completely into tears during and interview with a 73 year old man whose wife had left him with a 4 and 5 year old child when he had contracted TB and had to stop working. We conducted the interview sitting on the floor of a house barely standing after a storm had pushed to a rakish slant. The organization we were visiting with donated rice to the small family, cooked by neighbors. It was the only house I visited not permeated completely by smoke and it felt less alive because of it.







Supposedly the man was cured of TB but still had a deep racking cough, as did his children and many of the neighbors. In the end we decided to use some of our own resources to transport as many children from the village as possible to the clinic 20 kilometers away for testing if for no other reason than to feel like we were doing something. Eventually we managed to get organized and took 40 kids in two trips in the back of our pickup truck amid a bit of a festival atmosphere.







The clinic itself was overwhelmed with patients already, with one doctor seeing between 30 and 300 patients a day (and on market days sometimes as many as 1000). Bloody surgical instruments sat soaking in bright colored plastic buckets on the floor of his office waiting to be decontaminated according to instructions someone had hand painted onto the wall above the sink. The room reeked of blood and worse. Charts taped to the crumbling cement walls tracked disease trends and progress in family planning programs, the graphs fluctuating wildly up and down the damp and yellowing sheets of paper. Yet these people were lucky. They had a skilled doctor and a clinic for him to practice in. White skin and a camera occasionally come in handy and the clinic managed to test every child we brought. The TB technician of the local aid group volunteered to be responsible for overseeing the results were properly distributed and any prescribed treatment followed. (the treatment for TB requires a 7-9 month course of daily antibiotics and is notoriously difficult to follow under such conditions except under direct observation) I also bought a literal truckload (200+ pounds) of oranges for the equivalent of $6 at a local market and passed them out to everyone I could find in every village along the way. So for the price of a little gas and $6 worth of oranges we helped in a small way and our own smiles returned. Tax dollars well spent I think. Later over lunch Arivony said, “I will never again say that I am poor, in fact today I think I am richer than I have ever been, though I have no money.” I can’t help but to agree. The people we visit are also rich in many ways and would never call themselves poor. “We have family” they would say, “we have our pride, we have our homes, we have our fields, we have our cattle and chickens, we can read, we can write, we have our ancestors and the stories of our ancestors, we have traditions and magic. Yes, we have no money, but we can still dream.”







Now, home again, I’m left with 2000 photos, mostly portraits, and the challenge of trying to figure out what it all means. The surreal nature of my double life sometimes strikes me as I write in the garden or go out for drinks with Peace Corps volunteers (some trying to escape their own ghosts I think). At an expat bar where a decent cover band does Steve Miller Band and the Beetles I have to stop and close my eyes and for a moment the music disappears I’m back walking among the proud people of rural Madagascar. In the end it is the question WHY? that most often recurs. The ways of fixing these problems are out there already. What’s stopping us from finding the resolve that would be required for bringing the combined force of will of the human race to bear on them? And my determination to go and complete my education and spend my life helping these people and others like them is redoubled. I would not have traded this trip for anything. It was a truly amazing and wonderful experience and I’m sad I have to return to the office this week. But I won’t be alone there. I will still have the faces.









I apologize that this letter is longer than usual, but I hope you found it worthwhile. Please write me! I would love to hear from you.
Until next time my friends,
Stay well
Love and Luck in Everything and next time you’re down have an orange and think of your wandering friend,
-Andy

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