Ramble, Process Time

I have a feeling that the next couple of entries are going to be messy rambles that don’t have points and are serving the purpose of allowing me to process. I believe in the idea that you have to leave a place to really understand how you feel about it and what it has done to you. Distance is good. So as I sit here in time zone limbo, sick as a dog, I being the processing.

I’m going to use one of my favorite journal strategies to get the ball rolling. I call it the two-minute blitz. I think of a topic and then I have two minutes to write about it. No filtering. No over-thinking. Here we goooo:

1.       Learning Malagasy – I feel very disappointed in myself and frustrated that I didn’t put more of an effort to learn the local language. I acquired some basic phrases, some expressions I thought were funny and then I stopped. I gave up. I spoke French or I didn’t speak at all. I think I feel most guilty about this in the village. I know I had rough circumstances, but the more time I put between myself and that experience, the more I realize how I mentally shut off around day 4 and just…quit. I’m not a quitter but I just quit. This is hard to accept. 2 minutes!

2.       The Food – It’s funny how quickly a lot of us adjusted to eating the typical foods here. Even after bitching about the amount of rice that people ate and the lack of nutritional diversity in their meals, I still found myself order plates that come with rice when I had an option. I currently feel weird about the thought of returning to an American diet. I am ready to never eat meat again. I have eaten my quota of zebu (a cow with a funny hump) for my entire life. Give me tofu. Give me raw vegetables. But maybe also give me some rice… Two!

3.       Doing Research – This one kind of connects to just what I want to do in life. Before coming here, I thought I probably wanted to teach at the college level. I thought I probably wanted to do research. And now I feel like I’ve gone through a tailspin. I didn’t really enjoy my month of Independent Study Project and after being with a group of unorthodox people who are most likely not going to take traditional life paths, I’m realizing that maybe it’s totally OK for me to do that too. Unfortunately, this opens up a mess of possibilities and I feel confused and overwhelmed about the future.

4.       Being Sick – Not to sound like an exaggerator, but I was actually sick for about 80% of the program. Sometimes it was just indigestion and other times it was food poisoning accompanied by other fun surprises like parasites or sun poisoning or hair loss and other things that I’m not even telling you about. I’ve lost faith in Malagasy hospitals and doctors. I just want to feel normal again. I want to not constantly feel worn down and ill. It sucks and severely impacted my perception of Madagascar. Oops 2:10.

5.       The group – I can’t begin to explain my feelings about this one in two minutes because this might have been the most impactful part of my experience, which is funny because it has nothing to directly do with Madagascar. But after spending 4 months with people who were turned out exactly like everyone expected, “Michelle, who goes to Madagascar? I kind of think you’re going to be with a bunch of people who are… who are just like you. That’s going to be really interesting and really weird.” And it was. It was the first time in my life I’ve ever fit into a group and as much as I found a niche at Villanova and other places, sometimes I felt out of place and it’s awesome to know that there’s people out there that I just didn’t know existed. I’m the most sad to leave them.

6.       Study Abroad – I recently had the thought that yes, I will be leaving Madagascar and it will be end of a chapter of my life, but then I realized that this is bigger than I realized. For two and a half years I’ve thought about study abroad. Everyone who goes abroad has their study abroad experiences and it’s something I’ve looked forward to doing. But now it’s over and I have no idea how the time passed so quickly. It’s weird to think… study abroad is over. Not just Madagascar, but something that I’ve been hyping in my mind for years is forever over. I can never do that again, under the same circumstances. And it was everything that I wanted it to be, I would never do anything differently. So that’s awesome.

7.       Madagascar – I’m really nervous to go back to the United States because of the question “How was it?” If you ask me this vague and meaningless question, I will probably give a dead face look until you feel uncomfortable and talk about something else. But really, I don’t even know where to begin with describing this experience. I don’t want to just remember the “crazy” things or being sick or eating rice because it was so much more than that. It’s hard for me to think about the fact that most of the people I’m going to meet in my life will have no foundation or base with Madagascar. It’s like always starting from zero with this place. I can’t just drop that into a conversation without always getting a weird look. And now it’s this huge part of my life that feels fady (taboo) to talk about.

8.       Lemurs – On a lighter note, lemurs. Lemurs are like, cool… but they’re also just kind of like monkeys that are native to Madagascar. I think it’s kind of silly when people only think of lemurs when they hear Madagascar, but I suppose that’s more a product of shitty publicity and poor international media about Madagascar, which I’m not saying is a shocking or surprising because this place is small, corrupt and in the middle of nowhere. It’s not even really Africa. It’s kind of like Asia… but not. I still love it. But yeah, lemurs, kind of cool, not at all descriptive of Madagascar.

9.       Hygiene – I kind of…….forget what “normal” hygiene standards are. I think I might have taken the prize for that in the group… which is “gross” but also, it just doesn’t matter here. As you might have noticed from what is currently my profile picture, my lack of hygiene climaxed in me traveling home from Sainte Marie looking like a mix between Ke$ha and a gypsy. But who really cares? Also, sometimes I think about this blog and people’s perception of me… I’m am like the opposite of datable. Soo, sooo un-datable and slightly repulsive. Mmmmmmmm, call me!

10.   The window seat on an airplane – WAH. The men sitting next to me are both asleep and have not gotten up to go to the bathroom on their own, once. This makes me the annoying American who’s muttering in French to them and carrying my bag of vomit past them as I classily walk to the bathroom. PUT ME ON AN AISLE. I will never make this seating choice mistake again. I hate sleeping plane men. I’m so unhappy on this flight.

11.   Norms – This one is kind of like the hygiene post, but external. I have gotten used to SO MANY THINGS because of this damn country. I ignore the cockroaches in the shower, only glance occasionally at the half dollar sized spider in the corner of my room, can sit on Taxi-Brousses without much complaint for 20 hours, don’t really think much of bedbugs, am confused when bathrooms have toilet paper, a seat and an actual toilet (where did these come from!?), automatically walk with one hand over my bag to avoid pick pockets, anticipate that hotel staff will go through my stuff (occasionally take pictures of their penises) and maybe steal stuff or maybe not, hand-washing my clothes is expected, I’ll eat bread that has been covered in flies, I scoop around the ants in the jelly jar, and why would you do anything but shower with cold bucket water? I went over 2 minutes. Gotta stop there.

I feel good about that processing sesh. Hope it wasn’t too jumbled. I’m sleepy and am going to try to sleep like my sleeping plane men who never move because they’re not throwing up every hour or don’t probably have little baby worms living in their intestines. In the Reunion airport CC and I decided my nickname could be: Hotely Biby Kely (translates to : Hotely – Malagasy hotel or eating establishment, Biby – insect, Kely – little, therefore Biby Kely – means little insect, and can be used to describe parasites and I am a hotel or eating establishment for them, hence, Hotely Biby Kely) Yeah that’s really gross. Me and my new puppy will have so much in common, as he was recently de-wormed as well. BEST FRIENDS.