Mahajunga Nights

I guess sometimes I forget how much I’ve had to adjust to living here and how many things I’ve already gotten over. For example:

1.       Today at lunch we watched a rat run past our table in the restaurant. No one really cared and we laughed that it was better that the rat was running around the restaurant than prancing around in our food in the kitchen.

…But on the other hand, last night, while on the phone with my mom, sitting on the ground outside of my house, three rats charged at me, running out of the corn stalks in our backyard, and I completely flipped backwards on concrete ground to avoid them as my host family laughed at me from inside. Hey, whatever, those things are fast and carry the plague WHICH IS RAPANT IN NORTHERN MADAGASCAR, in case you thought, like I did, that the plague hasn’t been in existence since the Black Plague. No, no, my friend, it is still quite prevalent.

2.       This morning I opened up the sugar container, since all we eat for breakfast is white rice (I suppose this could be another thing I’ve gotten over…) and found a small colony of ants happily living in the sugar. I looked around the table and everyone else had taken the ant filled sugar and sprinkled it on their rice. I sighed to myself and then sprinkled sugar ants all over my rice and ate them. It’s a protein, right?

3.       Our group took a ferry boat to a peninsula called Katsepy. To board the ferry, of course you had to take off your shoes, walk through two feet of water and climb a slippery ramp. In moments like these, you look around and see these old Malagasy women passing you in the water and climbing the slippery slope like champs, and you think to yourself, ok, what’s the big deal? I can do this without whining too… And then the other part of you goes: “OH this is just a lawsuit waiting to happen!”

4.       A woman sat on me in the Taxi-Be yesterday. I guess it was her passive way of telling me to move over because we were sharing the seat? Or maybe she was just abusing the language barrier, so I was forced to scoot over.

So that brings me back to present time. I’m sitting in a pile of dirt in our backyard, watching cockroaches crawl past me and muttering “cadradraka” which means cockroach in Malagasy every time I see a new one. And every time this happens my family laughs hysterically and shouts “Miteny Malagasy ianao!” (You speak Malagasy), it has never stopped being funny. My dad handed me an ear of corn and I sat there eating it. This is when he told me I had become Malagasy and demanded that we take a picture, I'll post it later. 

My time in Mahajunga has been interesting. On the one hand, I’m impatiently waiting to get started with ISP which is our one month long project where all of the students are headed to different parts of the country to study a subject and then we return to Tana to present our findings. I’m so looking forward to having control over the little things in my life again, like sleeping schedule, the food I eat and bug control. I don’t think most families would be happy if I returned home with a can of insecticide and fumed their entire house… so at the moment I’m just coinciding with the little critters. On the other hand, Mahajunga has been a different experience that we haven’t gotten yet in Madagascar. Having a better grasp on French and Malagasy and entering “Module 3” (our calendar is broken into modules which basically represent our stages of freedom. For example, in Module 1 we were feed snacks regularly like small children and frequently received calls from our Academic Director who was ‘checking up’ on us.) has created a unique experience for our time in Mahajunga.

I realize I haven’t posted too much about Mahajunga, so here’s a quick summary of my thoughts since our time here is quickly wrapping up:

The people are less shocked by our presence (in comparison to the village) but still interested to talk to foreigners.

The crime rate is lower, so we’re allowed to be out after dark and don’t need to worry about being robbed at rust=y tetanus knife point.

There are pousse-pousse everywhere! I don’t understand how they get enough riders to support them/ their families, but it doesn’t stop them from asking us six times if we want a pousse-pousse ride. Speaking of pousse-pousses, I’m still weirded out/ confused by the pousse-pousse. So, you have this man who’s pulling a cart of people a relatively short distance. The man isn’t moving any faster than the people who are walking and is exerting much more physical energy than each person would exert to walk… so it seems very impractical right? But, then I realize that it provides jobs… sort of, since there’s such an abundance of pousse-pousses that there’s too much competition for it to actually be lucrative. And the people in the pousse-pousses are hardly doing any better since it’s so hot in this damn city and they’re moving at the same pace. Hmm. Someone told me it was just a means to express domination or imperialism, from one class to another, which I could understand, but just rubs me the wrong way.

This place is bumpin’ at night. In a not-horrible way, the people in this city remind me of the cockroaches that live in our WC. They are no where to be found during the day… when I walk in there in the morning, it’s almost a pleasant experience (pleasant is an ENTIRELY relative word in this country)  but then the sun goes down and there are dozens. WHERE WERE YOU DURING THE DAY? WHERE DO YOU HIDE? I DON’T UNDERSTAND! So yeah… those are my thoughts on the people hiding during the day.

I feel guilty for not taking an interest in the Malagasy language. Over the past couple days, I’ve had to do some assignments for Malagasy class that have actually required me to exert some effort to learn a little of the language. That’s when I realized that It’s not that hard… I could have done this… I’m OK with languages, which means I’m in remedial Malagasy entirely because of my refusal to deem Malagasy worthy of studying. I kind of suck in that regard. Too bad we only have too more classes left. Oops!

I have never encountered this kind of heat before. Ahh!

There are a lot of religions in this city. I wrote an entry about our visit to a mosque, but it was after drinking whiskey with Bruno and I wasn’t as p.c. as I’d like to be in a blog, so I held that one back, however, in a few words, the visit was really interesting. I didn’t know very much about the Muslim religion before going and I’m glad that I’ve had that experience. All of the girls were required to wear lambas (a long rectangle of cloth that people tie and wear as skirts or dresses here) around their waists, which went down to our calves/ankles. We also had to wear lambas over our heads, with the intention of covering our hair. Then, in French of course, a man told us if anyone was on their period they were forbidden from entering the mosque. That was a little awkward. The boys who were wearing shorts also had to wear lambas, but nothing on their heads. It was also around 100 Fahrenheit that day, so some of the girls in the group were a little discontent, to say the least. I also learned that it is both a challenge to remain open and accepting to other ideas and world views, but sometimes, that’s necessary to do and can be helpful for learning. And there, that’s my politically correct description of my experience. Next topic.

Seafood is big here. Fortunately I’ve gone into each of the homestays with “allergic to seafood” on my papers, so it hasn’t been too much of an issue. Except for last night when my family had crab and decided to feed me rice with an inch wide piece of zebu from the day before’s meal. Oh… ok. (*Cultural note, after learning in Greece that Tuna is not really considered seafood and having the awkward situation where I was served a heaping pile of tuna on lettuce after saying I was allergic to fish, I have learned here that crabs and shrimp are seen in a similar light. Be specific and use hand gestures if necessary. Yes, this means that I have acted out the motions of crabs, lobsters and shrimp to get my point across. And props to you if you can act out a shrimp because that’s a challenge.)

On average, we drink about 2.5 – 3 liters of water a day, sometimes 4-5 liters. I really can’t stress how sweaty it is in this city.

There are tiny lizards that live on our walls. Initially I was confused about why there were 7 lizards on the wall of the family room and six in my bedroom, but soon learned that they eat the mosquitos. And god, are there a lot of mosquitos in this house. The lizards must feast. They also make a weird bird chirping noise when they’re bored, fyi.

The word for mouse in French is “souris.” It took me a little while to figure out what we were chasing in my room, but I kept hearing “Regard! Le souris!” (Look! The mouse!) and my response was “Souris…. Qu’est que c’est?” (Mouse… what is this?) and they would stare at me and try to act out the motions of a mouse. These are also difficult to mime.

It was my turn to pray at dinner last night. Oh look, I’m Catholic again! At least I can fake it better than some of the other students on the trip who weren’t even raised a religion and struggle to figure out which direction the sign of the cross goes when they fake bless themselves.

Speaking of the other students, I really like them. It’s such a different group than I’ve ever encountered. Maybe the group that chooses to come to Madagascar is a bit self-selecting, but pretty much everyone is a bit… different. Not in a crazy way, but just that they don’t fit the mold of “normal person.” Most of them are really interesting, and smart and great to hang out with. I’m kind of bummed to split up with the group for ISP.

Sleeping on a bed that’s 5 inches too short is miserable. Especially when you’re feet can’t hang off the edges. I now empathize with all of the really really tall people who live in the US. It sucks to not fit in a country. I shouldn’t complain too much though because there’s some people who are 6 foot or taller on this trip and they really struggle. This is a place for tiny people.

OK I’m tired of writing up things for Mahajunga. It’s not that eventful in terms of stories or interesting facts. I like it mostly because I like my host-family and I want to savor the time I have left with the group, but it’s not my favorite city we’ve visited. A lot of that is because of the heat and ghost town effect, but in general, I just don’t vibe with this city. ( sorry for the weird slang, I don’t know how to better put it)