(I don’t want to type the entry from this morning up. I was content in the village stay for about 3 hours on this day and I wrote a happy entry about it.)
Fast forward 7 hours later…
I’ve taken living in a village for ISP off the table for two reasons.
1. There are too many flies on the table. Now, this may seem like a poor reason for ruling something out, but if I go crazy in Madagascar, it will be because of flies. They. Are. Everywhere. They touch everything. They fly into my eyelashes. They sit in the rice before meals. They hop around my legs. They drink my coffee. It’s the one thing I haven’t been able to get over here and I’m not sure I ever totally will.
2. The children watch me do everything. I sort of hit a breaking point today when I was hand washing my clothes outside. For starters, I don’t like being watched when I’m doing things I struggle with. Ie. Handwashing or as my mother can attest to, 3D puzzles. Sorry about that… Anyway, there’s also no sense of personal space.
So, I’ve got seven children, close enough that I can feel their breath, watching me poorly wash bras. Cue breaking point.
“Lalana! (play, go play)
*Hand motions*
La-la-NA!
Ne me regard pas!
LA-LA-NA!”
Finally, they dispersed, mostly because my Malagasy friend who lives in our cluster of houses told them to leave me alone. But I was pretty stressed out for the rest of the day.
Also, if I ever leave my little cluster of houses, every child in the area will drop what he or she is doing and follow me. Funny/cute at first, but my tolerance on day three is dwindling. I just want to blend in. Not something that’s possible in the village. Wah.
This isn’t a rant. I’m still loving the village stay (hahaha as I’m typing this in retrospect). It’s just that it’s raining here and I have nothing to do but write to myself in my flimsy notebook and scare chickens for my amusment. And that’s it.
You just sit…and talk…and work on the next meal. That’s what you do every single day.
We do however drink fresh zebu milk everyday which is a luxury (in the sense of getting calcium) that I am not afforded in Tana.
So that’s where I am right now. Sitting in a two room house, in a village, outside of the range of cell phones and internet and miles and miles away from the nearby town called Tsiromandidy. Population = 30,000
How did I get here?
Day three: The honeymoon phase has ended.
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