Imaginary Photo Collection

There are a few things I wish I could take photos of, but the circumstances haven’t allowed for it. These include:

Imaginary Photo #1

My host dad chases a baby zebu (sort of like a cow, but it has a giant camel hump and produced weird tasting milk. How do I know? Because we drank it every single day. Scalding hot zebu milk.) around a tree. The baby zebu is trying to stay near its mom and my dad is trying to not get speared by the mama zebu’s giant horns.

This goes on for five minutes and has occurred three different times because the baby zebu kept escaping. It ended when my dad grabbed the baby zebu’s back leg and dragged it across the yard.

Side Note – This whole thing is funnier because I think my dad has Alzheimer’s because my mom likes to point to him and say “mal a la tete” (sick in the head) and then tell me that he forgot it rained earlier today, followed by laughter. So now, whenever he laughs at the dinner table, I laugh too. Why? Because we both have no idea what’s going on.

Imaginary Photo #2

The faces of the village kids after I showed them a picture I took of them. It fell somewhere among the laughter, shock, excitement, astonishment, disbelief and insanity emotions. It was priceless.

Imaginary Photo #3

Considering this moment happened in pitch blackness, it would have been difficult to capture.

I wake up in the middle of the night. I think it’s about 3 AM, but since I have no clock, it could have honestly been 10 PM for all I know. And I have to pee horribly. After 30 minutes of internal deliberation, I decide to creep out of my house, which involves wandering around in the dark, unlocking the door, in the dark, going into the rain, in the dark, and peeing next to the angry zebu, in the dark. (I later learned that all of the other students were given “middle of the night pee buckets” and I was bitter that I did not receive this.) So I stumble around in the dark and eventually get outside. It’s raining and I can hear the zebu. It’s awake and making weird noises. Popping a squat in the middle of their yard, listening to the sounds of creeping critters and a discontented zebu and hoping that they wouldn’t wake up and go looking for me, made for a really unpleasant experience.

I also managed to sufficiently pee on myself in the process. Win!

Imaginary Photo #4

This image is me trying to subtly and politely dry off my dishes and utensils with my shirt before dinner. After being told that the smallest drop of contaminated water could make us sick and being instructed to thoroughly dry anything before using it, I find myself in a pickle when I see a small pool of water sitting in the bottom of my dishes and cups. This is too complicated to explain in Malagasy, so I pretty much just suck it up and hope for the best.

Real Photo #5

Now, some things really cannot be explained without a picture. So here is my lovely shower situation. I’ve decided that it is possible to go the rest of the village stay without showering, but I will be pretty grody on day 6. So we’ll see.

Imaginary Photo #6

My face every time my host mom says “Mihinana vary betsaka! Et tu vas etre gros comme moi!” This combination of Malagasy/French translates to “Eat lots of rice (Malagasy) and you will be fat like me! (French)”

This really reached its climax this morning when, after telling her yesterday that I could not eat all of the morning rice (because breakfast is just rice and nothing else), she gave me my breakfast bowl with another bowl covering the contents and pushed it towards me with a creepy smile on her face. I lift the top bowl up and what is there? Double the amount of rice she gave me yesterday. She actually cackled and shouted “Mihinana vary betsaka! Ahahahah” I can’t even describe my reaction to this.