Four months since I've written here. I apologize. Certainly it has to do with lack of internet access (heck, lack of electricity!), but also the difficulty of distilling my experiences down into a concise "blog post." Okay, so apologies over (this happens to be Malagasy culture for speeches: begin with apologies "sorry I'm not the oldest, sorry I'm not good at talking" etc etc), moving on to what's new, "inona vaovao."

We finished the alphabet! A to Z, minus C, Q, U, W, and X because Malagasy doesn't have those letters, and we've started building words with syllable blocks, two-syllable words like maka (fetch), rano (water), nono (boob), vavy (woman). I made a bingo game out of small and capital letters and called it Katsaka (Corn) because we use a corn kernel to mark the letters that are called, and the winner wins everyone's corn. I read about adult literacy techniques that involve using important words in the culture to inspire discussion and learning so we started with the words "miasa," to work, and "mianatra," to learn. One older woman in the group said that men's work is "heavier" but that women's work is harder because we work all the time but men just work in short spurts. Only two of the ten women went to school (one for a year, and the other for 3 years) when they were children. We talked about different ways of learning, and the things that they learned despite not having gone to school. Last week I handed out to each of them a paper with their name written in big letters. Their homework was to practice writing their name. This week, looking at all their names in their notebooks, I felt amazed at how far they have come. Even if they don't all learn to actually read, at the very least they can write their name, and they have had the opportunity to come together with other women every week and talk about their lives and experiences and learn something new.

The kids' club is going well also, though numbers have been dwindling all summer (winter here). We built a compost pile last May and finally dug new garden beds and started a new experiment to see if compost makes a difference. The little radish sprouts are poking up from the soil--so far we have 20 sprouted on the composted side of the bed and 11 on the non-composted side of the bed. The kids are excited and even I am surprised to see such a difference from the very first day of the experiment. Their exclamations of excitement over every worm in the compost and over finding eggs (lizard?) in the sandy soil makes the club worthwhile to me, even if only a few kids show up.

I've also had a bunch of vacations since I last posted here...since I didn't use many vacation days last year, and am not supposed to use vacation days during the last three months of service, I had to squeeze them in over the last four months. In June I traveled to Isalo, a national park in the east with big canyons and dry grassy landscape stretching far to the horizon, the kind of landscape that opens up my lungs and my heart and makes me feel alive again. I need that kind of openness after months in the tiny valley of my village. In August, I took a short but fun trip to Morondava on the east coast, watching the sunset on the ocean (channel really); visiting Kirindy park to see lemurs, birds, and fosa; and the Avenue of the Baobabs, which actually was as amazing as the pictures I've seen. A few weeks ago, I went the other direction and visited Manakara on the west coast, riding a train from the coast back up to the highlands was a highlight of the trip.

I will be able to post pictures when I get back to the States, which is coming up quickly...sometime between the end of December and the end of January, I'll know the date for sure in a few weeks. These last three months here already seem like they are going to go so fast. I have a lot of mixed feelings about leaving, no surprise. Read my journal, every day it's full of these mixed feelings! But after several attempts at ideas to extend (stay another year), none of which worked out, it seems like it's best for me to move on. There are moments, too, when I feel ready to leave NOW(!), but then I think about the kids, about the women and their eagerness to learn, and I'm pulled back to the moment, to the present, which is still me being here.

I want to write more, there are many stories to tell, but it's 10:00pm and I'm not used to electricity. In my village by now I would have long blown out my candle and tucked in my mosquito net. I need to sleep.

The women’s literacy group is up to H/h and I/i, and our carrots are several inches tall. They haven’t wanted to thin the carrots because they are so sad to kill all the little plants that are too crowded. So we did an experiment. We thinned one row and left the other row crowded. The following week we could already see that the thinned row of carrots had grown taller than the non-thinned row, so they dutifully thinned the rest of the rows, still looking dejected about the lost carrots. When I demonstrated that you could eat the nice green carrot tops, they just looked at me like I was crazy as I chewed. So the next batch of seeds they planted, they carefully spaced them far apart! We’ll see how the germination is…the carrot seeds here have had a terrible germination rate for me in my garden, which is currently looking pretty neglected.

I am in the capital picking up health posters and expired condoms for the week of health sensibilisations coming up soon. I have a health volunteer friend who is coming out to teach about everything from malaria to family planning, and the communities seem to be getting excited. Antanifotsy might even finish building their first latrine before she comes—a stipulation that I put on her visit, but with rice harvest coming in, they hadn’t started when I was there a few days ago. But they are talking about it! So there’s hope.

My weekly kids club continues. Their enthusiasm doesn’t seem to wane for counting sprouted radishes and carrots and watering our small experiment plot. We have 100 seeds of radish and of carrot planted on a dug garden bed and 100 seeds of each planted on an undug garden bed. I showed them how to make a graph to track the germination and growth, and—how cool—the results actually confirm that digging the garden bed is better! Now we’re trying to build a compost pile, but WOW it takes a lot of dry and green materials to build a meter pile, and for small kids to gather all those materials takes time, so it’s been a several-week process.

The best moment was when 11 year old Noely (one of my favorites—he’s going to be a heartbreaker when he gets older) was fording the river carrying a heavy sac of rice straw on his back and I just couldn’t stop wondering at his diligence and strength and laughing at the awkward balance of the sac and his pants rolled up high and his concentrated frown as he refused help! He wants to do everything—carry the manure bag, water the garden—I have to lecture him about letting other kids try too. He is on a constant show to prove his strength!

So I’m staying busy and feeling that although my “projects” are small and humble, the women and kids I am working with are worth it. I’m not changing slash-and-burn agriculture, not doing some great agroforestry project, no farmers flocking to me for my wisdom (ha!), but all these small things are feeling more real than anything I was imagining doing back a year ago.

I am learning more about teaching to, and more about motivation, and more about patience. Tuesday at the women’s literacy group I lectured a woman about not being ashamed to answer simple questions that I know she knows. Afterwards I kept thinking of how I could have approached that situation better, how I could have worked around and with their reticence. How I have to remind myself where they are coming from, and the culture that keeps women much more silent than men. There are better ways to get them to participate than by scolding them. I’m learning. I have to use my power as a teacher and as an American who can acceptably break some of these cultural norms carefully. Patience. Kindness. Creativity. It all goes together to make some change happen, I hope. Oh, yes, and hope. That too.

Months have gone by since I last "blogged"...I seem to have trouble writing for a public eye. I start a post and then backspace it and sit looking at the blank screen wondering what to tell you, the reader, about my life here. At the same time, I write in my own journal every day, a practice I've keep up for most of the last 20 years. Glancing over some pages between the end of January and now, there are so many pieces I could share with you.

Here's a few:

February 3rd, Thursday

I wrote the following after a meeting with my community that was supposed to start at 9 but started closer to 11 and didn't end until 3, and that was supposed to be for me to talk to the community about working with them, but ended up being a lot of ranting about the teachers not teaching because many parents hadn't paid the school fees, and a doctor from the city telling us that the plague was in a neighboring county. Eventually it was my turn. By then, over half the people had left and those who stayed, including me, were very hungry. I had prepared an activity to get them thinking about their top priorities for improving their lives based on the survey that I did months ago, and although it was well past lunch, about 30 of them agreed to stay and participate.

I think the meeting went well despite the hours and the negativity and the stress. I felt bad about keeping people longer, but they were so cooperative. Sometimes, in my frustration, I think that things will never get better here. I just want to roll my eyes at everything, pack up and go somewhere that feels like it has more hope to it. But who knows where that hopeful place is. We are all struggling with something all over the world.

And last week in Antanifotsy [one of the VOI communities near the forest] and this week in today's meeting, I did see a glimmer of hope. So that's what I have to hold onto. If I'm going to be easily discouraged, then this is not the work for me.

February 4th, Friday

Sometimes its as though I just forget that I'm not in the States. I'm cooking at my stove, sweeping my floor, feeling grouchy about the rain, in my house most of the day I create my own world. Then I hear the neighbors pounding rice, or see someone go by with a huge load on their head or balanced on a stick on their shoulder, and I suddenly remember where I am. It's startling. I want to turn to someone and say in English "Do you have this too?" but there's no one around. And because of the rain, I don't feel like climbing the hill to send a text message.

February 14th, Monday

The cyclone that Peace Corps has been texting us about for days finally arrived here and I've been in my house all day except for getting water. Strong winds and so much rain--I was disappointed to find my rain gauge had fallen over as I imagine it would have been overflowing. I'm reminded of the typhoon days we'd have off school in the Philippines. Here, the kids had no school today. This afternoon my house was full of kids drawing and reading. It was nice. I was working on literacy lessons for the women in Antanifotsy. I made a big alphabet poster and 18 copies of a worksheet for practicing writing the letters. I'm thinking that I won't be able to hike out there tomorrow though, with this weather.

February 17th, Thursday

My house is strung with laundry. 13 pairs of underwear tells me its been a while since I washed clothes! Unfortunately nothing will dry today, the drought seems to be over. I'm sitting in the doorway now. The kids are kicking around a ball in the road.

Today I held a follow-up community meeting to talk about solutions to their priority problem that they had identified before -- that of saving enough rice seeds from their harvest each year. They decided that they didn't want to work together as a group in an organized fashion, but would rather continue trying to save their rice seeds among their families or with a few friends.

I've been thinking about how encouragement and discouragement come in waves, and how I have to get out of my own boat, stand somewhere on the solid earth. I'll always have my own waves of discouragement, but at least I don't need to take on those of my village. I was thinking that in some ways perhaps development work (at least in this context I'm in) is kind-of like counseling. You can help the process along, you can try to facilitate, but in the end it is the people who make choices to change or not change their behavior or thought processes or whatever it is. Like counselors, development workers have to A) not take things personally B) not get (too) emotionally involved, and C) work themselves out of a job.

My vetiver grass is really beautiful in the wind in the evening. All the little tips of grass bend over just the same way. Okay, now I'm really hungry, time to make some rice.

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So, there's a small glimpse into my daily thoughts. We are in full swing of the training for the new group of environment and small enterprise development volunteers and it has been going well. I had two of them out at my site last weekend and they enjoyed hiking out to the forest and waterfalls and we ate lots of good food, including french toast, corn tortillas from corn we picked in my field, and some vegetables from my garden with cheesy pasta. I figured they would be tired of rice! I spent a week with them in March at the training center teaching about soils, composting, and gardening.

When not working on the training, I've focused my attention out to the community Antanifotsy, about a 2.5 hour bike/hike from my village. There is a group of 8 women in the VOI there that had expressed interest in learning to read and write, as well as garden, so I've been going out there as often as possible. We dug garden beds and they each put in 250 Ariary for seeds. We've had 3 literacy lessons so far, and they are starting to warm up to me and participate in the goofy alphabet song I make them sing. We are starting with "how to hold a pencil" and exercises for their hand to get used to holding it. We've also planted some vetiver around one of their new fish ponds to keep the soil from eroding, and are starting a nursery for more vetiver so they will have enough for around all their ponds.

Last week after planting their carrot, onion, and green bean seeds, we were sitting in the field playing with the babies and the conversation turned to reproduction...I ended up attempting to explain to them how babies are formed in a woman's uterus, the whole thing of the egg, sperm, periods. It was a language challenge for me and caused all of us a lot of laughter, but really, it's so amazing that these women have never learned all these things.

In my own village, I had several meetings over the past months and the numbers of attendees dwindled, the enthusiasm was impossible to maintain. I get the feeling that they are too used to handouts from the past NGO that was here. They were ecstatic when I brought them soccer t-shirts for the kids from an NGO a fellow volunteer works with, but to get them to work on anything sustainable together seems to be going nowhere. So I am focusing my attention on the women in Antanifotsy, and on the kids, and will not be doing more community meetings in my own village for now.

That's the update from me. I'm heading on a short vacation with a good friend flying in from the DRC tomorrow! A much needed break before I go back to the training center again. Thank you to all my friends and family for your love and support! I miss you all!

Here's a post that I wrote on March 19th:

It is simply the children that keep me going here. If it wasn't for them, I probably would have left months ago. As I write this, 8 kids are playing the matching game with the Go Fish cards we made, one of them playing while holding a sleeping 3-year old. Three are drawing pictures, and one of my favorite little boys is just sitting on the chair with me watching everything.

They have star-shaped stickers on their foreheads from the Kids Club today. All of the kids who come on time get a sticker. Today we went on a Nature Walk. I had 11 cards hung along a path that winds near the river; like a treasure hunt, they ran from card to card, sniffing leaves, listening for animal sounds, and guessing what lived in a big hole (probably a rat, they said).

It was fun.

Then they played Farmer-Plants-Trees-Freeze-Tag while I went and got my kite. I made them line up smallest to tallest and they took turns running the kite around the field as I ran to fetch water up at the stream before the rain started.

It sounded from the thunder like it would be a big storm, but so far just light rain has fallen and kids are playing (kind of) nicely. Now and then I remind them to be nice to each other.

This morning I went to the fish pond that the nearest VOI is building and waded through a foot of mud carrying mud back and forth to build the pond walls. It's amazing what people build by hand and shovel that we Americans would need a bulldozer to accomplish. After less than an hour, I put my foot down on some kind of tree stump hidden under the mud and hurt my foot. It was almost time for me to go home anyway and prepare for the kids club.

On the way to my bike hidden in some bushes, I ate a bunch of little red guavas. They are ripe now--I've been looking forward to them since last year, and as I looked for the best ones, I thought how strange thatI've been here long enough to have 2 seasons of guavas, 2 seasons of corn...in another month or two it will be 2 seasons of rice.

Other than the children, maybe that's the other reason I'm still here. To experience being in a place for TWO WHOLE YEARS. It's not easy, but being able to eat guavas twice is definitely a perk.

Faux Cap, "almost" the most southern point of Madagascar. Definitely one of the most beautiful points though.

In Lokaro, also one of the most beautiful places...I just can't decide!

I have been back and forth to the capital every week this month, yet have not found time to prepare a blog post despite all of my internet access. I've finally become "busy" in our American sense of the word!

In the capital, I've been helping put together the training for the new environment volunteers who will be coming in March. In my village, I've been keeping up with my weekly kids' science/nature club, and meeting with one of the VOIs who are now showing some interest in working with me, and weeding, doing laundry at the river, all that daily life that needs doing!

Going back and forth between my village and the capital so frequently has been challenging, since the two places are so different--one could use the cliche about "two different worlds" (which I don't like because there is only ONE world, despite all the differences and divides between parts of it!). I have been thinking, though, that this a good thing for me to practice, this mental--and physical--movement between extremes. It might help me to understand myself and my own niche in both spots.

The poverty of my village, and even more so of the community that I have been spending some time in four hours hike south of me, is set in contrast to the Peace Corps hostel that I stay in, the office in the nice area of the capital, and the pictures of life in the US that I look at on facebook.

I have been thinking about Amartya Sen's definition of development as ability to live to one's capacity. Which gets me thinking of my neighbor kids, one in particular is so smart and yet will probably not be able to go past elementary school, for the simple fact that there isn't a secondary school for 10km and her family can't afford to send her, or any of their 5 kids, to live in another town. Doesn't that impact her capacity? I can't send all the children in my village to school either. I begin to wonder what will this village be like in 50 years. Will kids go all the way through high school? Will the road have deteriorated to a footpath by then? Will someone have fixed it? Will people still be surviving on less that a dollar a day and dealing with a hunger season? Will the soil still support farming?

Too many questions. I can't answer them and I can't be responsible for them either, but I'm learning how to think about them in a non-overwhelmed, and non-guilty-all-the-time way.

For instance, my friend Sara told me that I need to laugh more often. So I discovered video skyping and made faces at my family, seeing them (on the computer screen anyway!) for the first time in 15 months. Also, there is the joy of a phone call laughing with a friends buried in snow in Minnesota. Then the pleasure of a day feeling like I have done something helpful at the office, followed by ice cream and English conversation. In the community I have been visiting south of my village, there are women that want to learn to read and write, they are interested in gardening, and are actively talking about things we could do together, so there is hope there too.

As an old friend once said, Life is good.

(except for the rat that died under my floorboards and stunk up my house all week...yuck ; )

I wrote this little poem on the last day at Faux Cap, on my Christmas vacation.

December 30th, 2010

Last Day at the Cactus Hotel

What do I want to remember from this day?

The seven white birds flying across the water

landing on the shelf that is tide pools

where the waves break and spray,

where the agile fisherman hunts shellfish

with his long thin legs and arms,

where we swam through the blue-green

discovered anenomes, surprised barnicles.

The sun hits my leg, golden reflects silver

on the water and the waves.

My thoughts turn to so many different things

but always come back to the sound churning,

the touch of the breeze,

the shadows of small cactus on the sand,

the pattern of sand on my feet,

the reflection of the thin man on the tide pool

who squats now intently examining something.

What do I want to remember from this day?

The sounds of preparation in the kitchen,

the shuffle of a footstep bringing tea,

the silent movement of a lizard over sand.

Guess what? A fellow volunteer downloaded Skype onto my computer, and I've been in and out of Antananarivo lately, so if anyone out there wants to call me, send me an email and I'll let you know when I'm in internet-land! This world of technology is so exciting...

I'll try and write a real post here soon. Sorry it's been a while!

Tomorrow I return to my site after two weeks of vacation and a week of mid-service training. While some volunteers are anxious to get back to their villages, I am feeling apprehensive. In the month and a half between when I posted last and when I left for vacation, not much "happened." I finished planting my corn, beans, and rice field. I met with one of the VOIs in an effort to get them to want to work with me. I did two environmental education activities with some kids. Okay, so when I write it down it sounds like enough, like at least I was doing something.

And I was. It just felt like I was doing it on my own without people in the community being interested or willing to work with me, which is what is supposed to happen. And so I get discouraged. What do I expect to happen? I'm not sure. People coming to my house saying things like: "We want to learn about gardening!" or "We want to conserve our hillside soil!" Ha ha. While I know that is silly to expect, I find myself restless, wanting to be doing something already. Not doing something like spending days and days in my field planting alone, but doing something with people.

Maybe it's just restlessness. I read my friend Emily's blog digestingafrica.blogspot.com, about her nomadic life, her life between worlds. It's nice to know I'm not the only one with this wandering syndrome. But heading into my second year here in my small house in the village, I'm thinking of the past and of the future, what I've been doing here and what I might be doing this year, and the next. Where will my feet land? At our Mid-service conference, other volunteers are planning their travels for next year, or talking about extending their Peace Corps service. I have some ideas, but I feel the same old crunch of time. What am I doing? What am I going to do?

I have some ideas for my second year of service here, and I want to get past my discouragement and find the energy in myself to get some momentum going. I'm thinking about seed-saving and grain banks for some of the small communities surrounding me. It's a need that came out in the food security survey that I did, and could be implemented with resources from the community itself. My other thought is putting together a small group of young farmers to learn some farm planning and experimenting skills. Plus, I have my group of kids that are the most eager to spend time with me, and the environmental education lessons that I've been putting together. So all I need is some interested people and some enthusiasm of my own!

We got invited to an amazing potluck at a returned peace corps volunteer's house. Delicious food, and people who had been in the Peace Corps all around the world and are now working here in Madagascar. It was interesting to talk to them, and to see how different my life is as a volunteer in a small village, compared to their lives working for places like Catholic Relief Services and USAID, "real" jobs with salaries, deadlines, big projects. In a way, it makes me glad that I get this life among the people. As real as their jobs may be for the USA, I am living closer to the real Malagasy life. I hope that no matter what I do after this, I find something that keeps me close to the people.

Now I need to leave behind the beaches, coral reefs, and spiney forest of southern Madagascar, and the internet and flushing toilets of Antananarivo, and head back to the village. My rice field, my garden, and all the kids are waiting for me...

November 7, 2010 - One Year in the Peace Corps - Food Security Survey and Trip to Mahajanga

Since I last wrote, I have passed the one year mark for being with the Peace Corps. I marked the occasion by climbing the hill behind the school, where I can get cell phone reception, and texting congratulations to several of my friends in my Peace Corps group. I also made banana chocolate chip pancakes, but that's more of a regular occurrence, not just for special anniversaries!

One year with the Peace Corps, 10 months at my site. It's something to wonder at, since I've been nomadic for so long, and also been struggling to figure out how to work with my village. But here I am, still working on it and haven't given up in frustration yet!

Also on the one-year anniversary of beginning this Peace Corps "experience," I presented the results of my food security and farming survey to my community. After visiting 38 households, I began compiling the answers to the survey, learning some interesting things along the way. For instance, while almost 70% of households make charcoal as their main source of income, only about 50% actually use charcoal for cooking, and half of that 50% purchase it. So making charcoal is often a "wage" activity--not something that everyone owns the rights to. I also learned that most people can only farm on one piece of land for a year before moving to a new spot and leaving the old land fallow, usually for 3-5 years.

Out of the 38 households that I interviewed, only 10 of them said that they have enough food for the year. I looked at those 10 households to see what the differences between them and the rest of the households were, and found that they farm more and different types of crops, most save their rice seed from year to year, and they have learned more about farming techniques (for instance, using manure on their field) than the rest of the population. The differences between their farming practices was striking, and I tried to convey that to those who attended the meeting, but I'm not sure if it got across.

The other interesting "finding" was that of all the "techniques" taught by the 10 (or more) non-profits who used to operate in the area only 20% are still in use. The reasons people gave for no longer using the skills taught by the non-profits were things like, "I'm too lazy," "It's too hard," "I learned about irrigated rice paddies but don't have one."

I spoke about how this was discouraging to me, and explained how the things that are important to me are children having enough to eat, and taking care of the land and soil. I read to them their responses to the questions about what they most like about their community and what they least like, and about what they have seen change over the years in the area. After I was done with my presentation, several people got up to speak and expressed agreement with everything that they saw in the presentation (not surprising, since it was their words simply written down by me!).

As I spoke, I tried to express that I am a resource for them, and am here to help explore ideas to address some of these problems related to food security and farming. About 35 people were at the meeting, and then more came the following Sunday, when I opened up the community room so that people coming home from church could see the big flip chart papers that I had written with all their responses. Later in the week, the doctor did his bi-annual trip to my village to vaccinate children, so we opened up the community room and some of the mothers read the papers as they waited for the doctor. So hopefully quite a few people got to see their ideas up on paper, and read the ideas of others, and hopefully someone is inspired to do something. I still haven't had anyone coming to my door interested in doing anything, but I'm trying not to be disappointed yet!

Right now I am in Mahajanga, a town on the north west coast. I just spent four days helping a fellow volunteer, Jennie, prepare a similar town meeting, and kind-of 'consulted' with her about her site, walking out to visit people in her area and see what things they are doing and what kind of potential exists at her site. Her town is in a dry area, beautiful red and pink rock formations and huge red sunsets and sunrises that reminded me of Niger. The area is severely deforested, yet beautiful, and the people friendly and already asking her to help with tree planting and other activities. Needless to say, I was envious from the moment I drove up to her house with the Peace Corps car. I walked around soaking it all up. Then we went and spent two days at another volunteer's site on the beach--she takes a boat to get to her site, runs on the beach every morning as the sun rises, and drinks coconuts!.

But in a few days I will be back home, and will have to make the best of my own place. No gorgeous vistas, no dramatic sunsets and sunrises, not much in the way of people interested in working with me, but hopefully I will find ways to stay positive and move forward.

What else have I done since I last wrote? Rice planting season has started, so I have been trying to learn all of the different steps to upland rice farming. I've gone out to the fields to help clear the fallow land, then watched as they burned it to get rid of all the branches, brambles, and field rats, and then returning to plant. The seeds that we planted have already sprouted, and the small rice leaves are poking up bright green from the charred ground, along with lots of weeds! I can imagine if I had three or four more seasons here, that I could find a few people to test out some improved planting methods for soil conservation especially, maybe ways to plant without burning (I'm still looking for ideas!) but unfortunately this is the only full season I will be here. Next year, our group completes our service (Dec.) before the harvest will be in (April). Still, perhaps someone can learn some ways to experiment with some ideas and carry on after I go.

So after this visit to Jennie, and seeing how quickly time goes by without still having identified a way to work at my site, I have been a bit discouraged. But I'm trying to remind myself that I'm doing the best I can, I hope, and I am learning a lot, and at the very least encouraging people to see the resources that they do have around them, whether they take that encouragement or not is up to them.

I have spent the last week here in Antananarivo translating for Operation Smile, a medical NGO that does operations on people with cleft palate. Mostly babies, some older children, and a few adults had the surgery--a total of 179 patients had the surgery in the past week.

I am currently pretty exhausted and hard to imagine I am about to go from the busy fast-paced not-much-sleep week back to the village where I spend the days trying to figure out what to do with myself. I hope that my cat remembers me and that my garden isn't dead, but really I just feel somewhat anxious about the culture shock that will hit me this afternoon, going from here to there...hopefully that feeling will fade once I get back "home."

I think all the weight of the week is just hitting me--the part that was hard like all the needles (yes, I watched and assisted as IVs were taken out of small babies)and constantly having crying babies all around, to the part that was profound, like all of the children that were just so changed through this operation. Each day's activities kept me busy, translating for the doctors and nurses, forcing kids to drink juice, handing out antibiotics and searching for a way to explain everything in Malagasy, so busy that I would almost forget the significance of all that was happening in their lives. Then it would hit me and I couldn't let myself feel it too much or I'd be overwhelmed and just probably cry!

One mom with about a four year old boy did make me cry. I think I was storing up all my reaction to the needles, to the witnessing of kids' pain and tears, to the exhaustion of working 12 hours a day and sleeping in the noisy Peace Corps hostel... Then there was this mom who came upstairs from the operating room with her son, who was around 4 years old. Much of the time, the family members come from the surgery looking anxious, wondering if their kid is alright, or still in shock that this has all just happened. Add to that people who have come from far away in a village and are dealing with their own shock of being in the city, around all these white people with their fancy medical instruments, gauze, medicines, white coats. But this mom had no anxiety. She arrived in post-op with her face just beaming with joy. I turned around from helping the bed next to her son's and saw her smiling, and asked her "Faly be ve ianao?" (You're really happy, aren't you?!) And she nodded. I went to give her a hug, and she just grabbed me into such a strong, wonderful hug, tears were coming to our eyes.

Yesterday was the last day of surgery. Each patient has a chart with their picture in it, taken during the pre-screening days. One beautiful 12 year old girl was sitting in her bed recovering with her family. I opened up the folder and showed them the picture of her from before the surgery. They looked at it and at her with a kind of awe.

Everyone was so thankful, so grateful. Of course, because we Peace Corps volunteers were the translators, the ones who could actually talk to them, we got to hear all of these thanks. It felt good to do something so useful, so basic. It was also so good to work with such amazing people. The nurses were wonderful, I especially enjoyed working with two from Namibia, one from Virginia, and one from South Africa. The Namibian woman was so calm, kind, and good with the children. We became friends and shared bits and pieces of stories from our lives as we went together from bed to bed, her checking vitals and me translating.

It's been one of those weeks that will stay with me, that made me stronger and taught me about the strength that people have, mothers and fathers and their children. There is much more that I could write, but I must begin getting ready to go home. I have a bus ride and a bike ride ahead of me today, lots of time to think about it all on the ride home.

Mila Mikarakara

When it comes to children, well, there are many.

The small ones sing out my name

when I enter the village, coming home--

the same song my neighbors sing to announce

their grandmother arriving from the fields.

Everything is a plaything.

The rocks that tell stories,

the old plastic that forms a kite,

the mud we are using to build a house.

Each child has a container--just their size--

for fetching water.

They watch me (an old woman!)

with some hilarity.

They are the first to befriend you

and the last ones you must push

out your door in the evening.

“It's getting dark,” you can say.

“Time to go home.

I need to prepare.”

Sept. 5, 2010

The first annual Nature Day Camp in my village is now completed—my first project! It went really well—though there were many things to learn from and improve on for next year. We had 32 kids between 8-12 years old, and four of the teachers from the school in my village taught the lessons I had translated from a bunch of environmental education materials and books I got from the Peace Corps office. Several Peace Corps volunteers came out to be “camp counselors” and I must say that without Sara T., I couldn't have done it. Thank you Sara!

The kids dissected a bean seed, played “Stop Erosion Tag,” learned about food chains, built a human tree, and played “circle sit” (or “circle-fall-over-laughing”) to learn about working together. They had binoculars made from my toilet paper tubes, “nature notebooks” to draw and write in, and I even found two magnifying glasses at the fancy store in the capital that we used to look at leaves, water, and everything else. Many of them said that their favorite activity was learning about the water cycle, where they tied a plastic bag over leaves of a tree to learn about evapotranspiration.

It was challenging, wonderful, and exhausting, and I am still working on it, typing up all the activities to make a book for other volunteers and teachers to use (and still waiting on the evaluations from three of the teachers). The one teacher who has given me her evaluation wrote that she wants to do it again every year, and wants to do environmental education during the school year as well, so if that's not a sign that the camp was at least a bit inspirational, then I don't know what is.

The last day we walked an hour and a half to the forest and the president of the VOI was our “guide”, telling the children about orchids, vines, and all the kinds of trees. Walking back to the village, a lot of kids ran on ahead, but a group of us planted six trees around the school with the teachers. Last time I checked, they were still alive and probably happy to be out of their little plastic bags.

We split the kids into three groups, each with a name. "Riana" (waterfall) was my group. As I was biking out of my village last week, one of the little girls from my group called out “Riana! Riana!” as I went by. And as I've been going house to house doing my farming and food survey, I've seen the nature notebooks hanging in special places in the houses, parents proudly showing me the drawings of the water cycle and insect habitats that their child did. Hopefully, as our six trees grow, they will be a reminder to the kids of the things we learned about together.

September 1st 2010

When I first came to my village, I used to think about what would happen to me if I broke my leg, or was delirious with malaria or in some other situation when it would be difficult or impossible for me to walk or bike the 8 kilometers to the main road. A few weeks ago I was rinsing out my dish-washing basin and saw four men walking with a stretcher built of sticks hoisted on their shoulders, upon which lay a man who had cut his leg with an antsy be while chopping eucalyptus for charcoal. Ansty means knife and be means big. The antsy be is used for everything—making charcoal, clearing a field for planting, chopping firewood, peeling cassava root, cutting up vegetables.

The men were headed 10 kilometers down the road to the Centre de Sante de Base—the health clinic in my commune. I realized that if something ever happened to me, I would be carried out to the road like a wounded princess. Another method to transport the sick is on the rack on the back of a bike. One man who cut himself with an antsy be about two months ago was transported to the “good” road this way. When I went to visit his family later, he showed me his wound and how it was healing. He was lying in bed and still couldn't work.

Today I was biking home from a quick trip to the market, internet and post office. As I biked along, I began to notice bright red drops on the dirt road—lots of them. My first thought was that it looked like blood, but there were so many drops—too many. I was trying to think of other things it could be, when I saw some kids on the road and asked them about it. They told me that my friend Lala's husband had cut his arm with an antsy be while clearing his field.

As I kept going, following the fresh drops of blood the whole way back to the village, I felt sick thinking about whether he had made it to the clinic in time, thinking about the distance to the clinic and how people struggle to get there, thinking about his family and his field, still only partly cleared, and how this accident will affect their year—what they are able to plant, what work he is able to do. I thought about the antsy be and how important it is for everything in their daily lives, but how dangerous it is too. Sometimes it just strikes me how different things are difficult here. An infected wound, a few weeks delay on planting, the distance to the clinic, the tool you use every day slipping in your hand.

A guest post by Emily, the sister.

Sorry it took me so long to post these pictures! Even when Amanda has access to the internet, it's not usually fast enough to upload many pictures so these are all months old. I'll get some more recent pictures up soon!

First meal in the new home!

Table and map:

View out the back door:

The bathroom:

Kids visiting the first day - they look a little wary!

Making banana bread in leaves:

Fold them up:

Yum!

Kids sent to plant flowers the second day:

Walking with Redi and Ernest by the forest:

Reading is fun!

The most recent addition to Amanda's little home, kitty helps keep the rats and mice away.

So cute!

View from the bedroom window at training

Host family, Roland and Fanja

Laundry with the host family

Awesome tree

Stuck in the mud

Guest post by Emily, Amanda's sister

These photos are long overdue - I should have uploaded them weeks ago. My apologies!

Amanda sends photos via email when she can get a solid enough internet connection and also sent us a small USB flash drive of photos when a volunteer was heading back to the States.

Here are a few highlights from her time in training:

Mom and Baby Lemurs

Studying Malagasy

Training Town

Family Amanda lived with during training

Amanda's bedroom window - she would climb in and out of the window to keep from disturbing her training family.

Last night my phone shown a pool of light at my feet,

walking through rainforest,

stopping to watch sleeping chameleons,

stars upside-down above me.

Today I push my gas tank

strapped awkwardly to my bike

slowly down a sandy road,

startling lizards at every step here,

a yellow crowd of butterflies there,

a red fody coming from the rice field, overhead.

So it's been a long time since I've written. I have a lot in my journal, but I didn't bring it with me to the capital, thinking I was only going to be here for two days. However, my toes have an unknown inflammation so I have to stay here for the weekend to wait for blood test results to come back. I've been thinking about how nice it is to have health care for the first time in about six years, and sitting in the Peace Corps clinic, I was grateful for a good doctor and all the treatment that I might need.

There are many things to be grateful for. In the last month, I have come to a new point in my thought process about being here. While I still think of Niger often, I am coming to accept where I am, and I want to make the two years work here, and I find myself overcome with gratefulness for the things that I have.

My village had a volunteer seven years ago, but since the Peace Corps program was different then and that was quite long ago, I am like a new volunteer, coming into a village where there is little understanding of what I should be doing. So my first six months have been, at times, quite difficult when it comes to having a good concept of “work” and what I can do in my community. While I enjoy living in the village and learning about life here, it has been hard to identify good work, and I've had moments of wondering whether I will actually be able to do anything meaningful where I am at.

But in the last month, as I've become more and more comfortable with language and with my life here, and as I've been thinking a lot about development work, and my place as an outsider, I've begun to have ideas about how I can start working with my community. I spent eight days at trainings for VOIs (the forest management groups) on project planning and design, led by a volunteer who had been here before and returned for a Peace Corps Response position with Conservation International. The trainings not only taught me more language, but I also learned a lot about working with the VOIs and with project development in general, and also saw how a volunteer can act as a facilitator, which gave me some idea of how to help VOIs and other groups with their projects.

When I returned from the trainings, I spent the next three weeks in my cold and rainy village. Sitting in my house trying to keep warm, I thought about how in the States it's summer time, and that means Summer Camps, so the idea came to me to have a kids' nature camp in my village. In a relatively quick period of time, I talked to the teachers and several people in the community, and they are all enthusiastic and want to do it! So I'm putting together lots of ideas and I came to the capital to look into a funding program that the embassy has for small projects. Unfortunately it sounds like it's not running until September and the camp is next month, so I may just fund the camp myself. I think it won't be much more than $15 to buy paper and pencils and some art supplies. Several other nearby volunteers want to come and help, too. Hopefully it will lead to the teachers wanting to do a year-long nature club or other environmental education projects with the kids.

I have also kept busy during the cold, wet days by putting together a survey on farming and household food security. Although people say there is plenty of land and things grow well where I live, they still talk about a “hungry season” during December, January, and February (at least), when they don't have enough rice to eat before the harvest comes in. So I put together a questionnaire asking about what they plant, what other income-generating activities they do, and questions about whether they have enough food for the year, and ideas they have for how to improve their food security. I'm also asking about what things they most like in the community and what things they would change if they could.

Starting next week, I will be going to each house to do the survey, then presenting their ideas to the community. At the very least, I will learn a lot about the community and about the hunger and farming issues that they face. I am hoping that it will lead to some projects to help address some of these issues.

What I have been realizing is that it is up to me to make something work with my community. They are happy to have me living there, but they don't understand what it is that I can do there, and even I don't really know either. But if anything is going to happen, I will need to take the first steps rather than sitting around thinking about how lazy and drunk people are and how no one wants to plant anything or use any cool soil conservation techniques! Thus, the survey. I am excited about it. I gave a little speech to the community to let them know about it, and people seem eager to participate, so already, I feel better about the potential within my community for doing something good.

So that's what I'm up to. That and taking care of my garden, learning Malagasy (always), and spending time with my friends in the village. One of my friends is planting a lot of Chinese cabbage to sell at her little store, and I went with her to clear out some of her fields and plant. It was really good to be “farming,” and to see how she goes about planting. We also dug up some mangahazo (cassava roots), and she gave me some cassava leaves to pound into a delicious loka (food you eat with rice).

June 26th was Independence Day here and my village was pretty much in party mode all week. The day before, in the evening, I heard people singing as they walked down the road. I looked out of my door and there was a group of people in a little procession. The kids were holding colorful paper lanterns with candles in them. I left my dinner behind and joined them on the road. Afterwords was a dance party at my friend's house, so I stayed up late (10:30!) dancing with my neighbor kids. In the afternoon the next day, the women did vakondrazana (folk dancing). I went to the commune-head village and watched more vakondrazana and a women's soccer match.

At one point last month, the poverty of my village suddenly struck me. Most of the time, I am just so used to my surroundings and although I know it's not the same as a “developed” country, I am so comfortable with living in a small village in Madagascar that it doesn't seem uncomfortably poor to me. However, one day last month when it was really cold, my neighbor kids came over, as they do pretty much everyday, and they didn't have long pants, shoes or socks, and weren't even wearing coats (which they have—old ones, discarded from the States, that lack zippers and have lots of holes). I felt so awful that they didn't have warm clothes to wear. On top of that, with the cold and wet weather none of them had bathed in a long time and their clothes were filthy and they smelled terrible. It is moments like that when I suddenly remember that I am in a poor country, in a small village, that has real needs.

It is also moments like that when what I want most is to focus on the children. I know partly that's my hormonal, motherly urge. But the kids here really work hard. They fetch the water, they pound rice (which tires ME out), they carry around the toddlers all day. Then I see them playing games made from all the trash and sticks and rocks around them, and having so much fun, and I remember that they are regular happy kids, too. They take care of each other, they share what they have with each other, they make something fun out of all the small things. I have a lot I can learn from them.

So that is my rather long update for the last few months. Hopefully I will be heading back to my village tomorrow with a pile of books on kids' activities and environmental education. If people have ideas, let me know! Thanks!

May 16th, 2010

I am at the training center right now, just arrived this evening and was served crème puffs for desert tonight. Crème puffs. Yes. I ate five. (they were small! [ish]). Where am I? The training center is so fancy, I am almost embarrassed. We have all brought our “counterparts” with us for the first 4 days of our training. Counterparts are people who work with us in our villages and towns, helping us with projects or “integration” and all that nice Peace Corps stuff... Some people have a very obvious person to call their counterpart. In my situation, it's not as clear. Maybe I'll end up working with one of the teachers a lot, with various farmers, and perhaps with some VOI in my area. There is not one particular person to call my counterpart, but I decided that the best person to bring is the President of the VOI who lives in my village. (A VOI is a protected area forest management group formed within communities living close to the forest.) He is the one who was most involved in getting a volunteer in the village, even if I don't end up working a lot with him. I think he's a bit overwhelmed by the fanciness of the training center. He said to me “this isn't like your house [in the village]!” I had to laugh. No, but I like my house more. I'm already a little homesick, and missing “my” kids...the neighbor children who are watering my garden while I'm gone.

Last month a Peace Corps Response volunteer came to my site and stayed with me for five days while she was meeting with various VOIs in my area. I went with her to a little community about five hours walk from my town—3 hours on the dirt road, and then off onto a trail for two hours, passing by some areas of Malagasy forest (not eucalyptus!), and lots of rice fields on the steep hillsides. The community consists of several families, the houses spread out along the hillsides where they grow rice, cassava, corn, and beans, and build their houses, raised from the ground a bit, from wood and reeds, right up the hillsides. There was a good-sized stream where the family we stayed with for the night gets their water. They cleared out a little hut for us to set our tent up in, and killed a chicken for us for dinner, serving us the biggest mounds of rice that I have ever seen. It was impossible to eat it all. People are so happy to have their rice harvest coming in, they are eating A LOT of rice.

We were staying with the President of another VOI, and in the morning about 20 men crowded into his house to meet with the volunteer and my “counterpart,” who was helping her with her presentation. The forest that this VOI is supposed to be protecting/managing is an hour walk from the community, and they don't actually have any projects going, and haven't finished their paperwork to get their actual VOI status, but they were very involved in the meeting and sharing their ideas, more so than other VOIs that she has met with.

The community had many children who didn't go to school (the closest primary school being 2 hours on that trail, and the secondary schools hours and hours away). They have no flat land in that area, so all their fields are on hillsides, where it's a slash-and-burn system and say they have to farm a new field almost every year—very labor-intensive and damaging. When I asked the VOI president whether he had ever seen farming on the contour (an erosion control technique for sloping land), he said that he had had no experience with it before, but had seen it in another part of the country. Honestly, I have no idea how interested he really is, but I detected more enthusiasm about things from that group of people than from others that we met with.

At the same time, like all the groups we met with, they had many issues and complaints, talking about how unfair the non-profit working with the VOIs is, giving money to other groups and not (yet) to them. From the other volunteer, I learned about what's going on with this situation, and it is really discouraging. Not just the isolation of the farmers who don't understand the non-profit's system, but also the non-profit itself, and how the goals and ideas don't always actually go in the intended direction.

I can't solve these huge issues, but sitting there listening to them talk about their poverty and their dissatisfaction with the non-profit, what I keep thinking is, why is it so much easier to see what we don't have than what we do have? So much easier to complain than to rejoice? And I can't judge anyone because I am exactly the same way, and I have much more resources than the people in this community have. My goal for my time here could be to develop my focus on the good things, the resources, the joy of using them well, and hope that some of that rubs off on others, too.

I feel like there is so much possibility here. I'm not in a desert where things struggle to grow—I'm in an area with rain, with sun, with streams and plants and trees. I don't know what is keeping the people from having nutritious food and enough for their children. I have a lot to learn, much still to come to understand.

I want to go there and start showing them a bunch of erosion-control things, all these books I have with ideas, and take my shovel and start digging...but I know I could just go in and mess things up! I have to sit with them and ask questions about why they plant the way they do, and understand what their reasons are, what their ideas are, and approach any sort of change slowly and carefully.

Honestly, I don't even know how to go there and start anything. Not only am I not an expert in development, in agroforestry, or in facilitating anything, I'm also not a non-profit with money to hand out, but, being a foreigner, that is what I will be seen as. Which is why what I need to keep in my mind as my first goal is to simply cultivate a thankfulness for the things I have, the things we have, the good things all around. Learning to value and care for well the resources here, and hoping that people see the goodness in all these things around them. I'm still very new to this place -- before I run in with project ideas, I have a lot to learn.

April 28th, 2010

So I was feeling like I needed a break from Madagascar, having one of those days when I'm struggling over what it is that I am here to do. So I decided that reading a novel might be good for me, to help me think about something else for a while.

I got out Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, which turns out to be short stories. That's good for me, since I've been reading so slowly. So before dinner I finished the first story, which brought me to tears! Not exactly the escape-into-a-novel that I was hoping for...

So I read the second story while dinner was cooking, and it wasn't as sad because it was less personal to me, and because the characters were more hopeful and quirky. The best part was Mr. Pirzada (an immigrant to the United States from Pakistan) saying, “What are these large orange vegetables on people's doorsteps? A type of squash?...And the purpose? It indicates what?”

I can just see the curiosity and confusion of someone unfamiliar with our rather strange tradition! Reading a story set in the USA while living in Madagascar in this small village brings all the many differences face to face for me. Things like refrigerators, microwaves, doorsteps with decorative pumpkins, couches, relationships involving divorce paperwork, television news, grocery stores, gyms and sweatpants and makeup, sidewalks, the four seasons, libraries where kids read books...

Here we have candlelight, water in plastic buckets, markets built from patched together wood and metal scraps, people crowding into small rooms to watch videos powered by a generator, mosquito nets, handwoven baskets holding rice, handwoven mats to dry the rice, drunken men talking loudly in the dirt road late at night (i.e. 9pm), kids playing games with rocks and balls made from discarded plastic bags and banana-tree bark...

April 24th, Saturday

This afternoon, I threshed rice in a big group in Madame Haingo's fields. Her fields are flat, lowland rice that is flood-irrigated. Harvesting it is different from what I've been doing on the hillside, dry (rain irrigated) rice, where you harvest each strand individually, cutting the stalk with a small knife just a few inches below where the grain is attached, just enough stalk to be able to grasp it with your hand. With lowland rice, the men have a scythe and harvest in armfuls, which they lay on the ground, and the women gather it and carry big bundles of the stalks, forming a pile on a big tarp in the field.

To separate the grains of rice (still in the hull) from the stalk of grass (ie straw), we thresh it. For upland dry rice, people often spread the rice stalks on a mat or tarp and walk on it, smashing it around with their feet. This separates the rice grains from the straw. And tends to hurt the soft feet of people like me... With lowland rice, which is cut lower on the stalk and therefore has a much longer straw to deal with than upland rice, we used long wooden sticks to remove the grain.

The rice sat in a high pile on the tarp. We stood 8-10 people facing each other in two rows, and the two people closest to the pile began by using their sticks to pass a bunch of rice down through the row, one side beating on it in unison, followed by the next side, with a beat-fluff-beat-flick down to next person-movement. Being part of the rhythm of 10 people beating and moving the rice in unison was amazing. The momentum and energy would keep going and going until my mind stopped even thinking about anything but the stick moving and the rice moving and my body moving in coordination with all the other sticks and rice and bodies. Now and then people would shout out things with the rhythm, and whenever we would finally pause, the young people would jump and do back flips on the piles of accumulated straw, laughing, and the old people would lean against their sticks watching and smiling. We would rest for a minute and start again, until we had threshed two huge piles. It was good, concentrative work. (I knew that wasn't a real word, now the computer with its red line confirms it...!)

I stayed until we were done threshing and all the rice had been put in big sacs and carried back to town on the men's shoulders, who walked fast because of the weight of the sacs. Seeing the whole process and what was accomplished with a big group of people working together, being there in the midst of it all made me happy. It was like making hay, but more fun, everyone close together putting in their energy. I know they are all there because they are paid to be there, it's probably not the same feeling one would get if it was a community working together because they wanted to help each other, they are farm laborers for the “wealthy” woman in town. There is a certain tiredness towards the work that they may not have if they were threshing their own rice. But they still formed this amazing human threshing machine, all of the strength going into making daily food.

The past few weeks I've been enjoying all the "cultural exchange" goals of

the Peace Corps... I've been out to my friend Joslyne's rice fields

harvesting rice, then learning to pound it with a wooden stick and basin (is

there a word for this in English that I'm forgetting?). It feels good to be

farming, standing on a steep hillside with a group of women chatting away,

me trying to catch a word or two and make sense of the

conversation... someone died, someone had a baby, something funny that they

all laugh about but I'm not sure what... it started to rain and we all

huddled together under a shelter they had built there earlier, when the rice

was still not ready to harvest and kids stay in the fields all day under the

shelter, throwing rocks and balls of clay at these red birds who eat the

rice.

The harvest is fun and easy, done with a small knife in one hand, and

putting the individual stalk of rice in the other hand. The other women

harvest about three times faster than me, but they've also been doing it for

years, and constantly tell me how "mahay" (really good) I am. My slowness

in everything is a good lesson in humility, which I can never have enough

lessons in. When the eleven-year-old girl is stronger at carrying huge

bundles of rice on her head down the steep hill than I am, I am really

humbled. And inspired to get stronger! But carrying heavy things on my

head for a long time hurts my back, so I have to lower my pride and let the

kid help. Pounding rice also is hard work - using a wooden basin

and long wooden stick, every now and then I fling some onto the

ground! But I'm getting better at it, and have even done it with two

other people--once you get a rhythm going and focus on the middle of

the basin, it's not hard.

The most interesting rice-related activity happened a few weeks ago,

when the first rice is harvested they have a tradition of offering

some to their ancestors. I was invited, so went and sat in a hut full

of people, right next to the mat where they placed six piles of lango

(pounded not-yet-dry rice that's really delicious, you eat it

uncooked), an ear of corn, some honeycomb, some tobacco and sugar-cane

alcohol, and the small knife that you use to harvest the rice. The

eldest man, my friend's father, called out to the ancestors, and said

the names of everyone who had died that people in the room listed.

Then chaos erupted as everyone in the room jumped up to grab lango,

and everything else from the mat--it was like a pinata had dropped and

everyone was laughing over who got the toka gasy (alcohol), and kids

were stuffing their mouths with the lango. So I guess we helped the

ancestors out, eating the food for them. It was fun to watch.

Then they put out two huge banana leaves, and poured a basket of rice

out, placed small bowls of beans and squash around it, and we all ate.

I was sitting next to the eldest man, and he kept heaping rice in my

bowl. I kept trying to eat it all, until my friend Solo told me I

could stop if I was full!

So that's the rice activity lately. It's fall here, so harvest time.

I'm also planting my garden bit by bit, digging up my yard to make

beds. The neighbor kids come over when they see me out there and

help. They are really sweet. Last night I heard someone pounding

rice next door and looked over and it was the tiny neighbor boy, just

throwing his body into each pound! I wanted to go over and help, but

he was already done. They are so hard-working! They have one more

week of vacation, then the kids go back to school. I'm hoping to meet

with the teachers when they come back and see how I can get involved

with the school, doing environmental education or something. My

language skills are still limited, so the thought of standing in front

of a bunch of kids talking is scary, but maybe we can get a few small

groups going...

One last little story before I get out of this internet cafe and go

eat lunch. On April 1st, I went out to the latrine to empty my po in

the morning. (Did I already tell you about the po, aka chamberpot?)

I keep a bar of soap and an old sponge in the latrine so it's easy to

clean out each morning. I unlocked my latrine, and went to get the

soap, and it was gone! I thought, did someone steal it? But the

latrine is locked and there's no way for someone to have gotten in.

Then I thought, maybe it was a rat--but would it have eaten the WHOLE

soap, plus the plastic bag it sat on? Then I thought, maybe I kicked

it in the hole, but I couldn't see the plastic bag floating down

there, and I would have had to be really unobservant not to have

noticed it fall in. So for days, every time I went to the bathroom,

I'd think about that soap...maybe it was an April Fool's joke! A few

days later, I put a new soap in there, and the next morning, it was

dragged from one side of the latrine to the other, with little teeth

marks in it! So I guess it was a rat after all... At least it's not

in my house!!!

I have been at my site for a month now. Probably a good time to write something and let my friends know I'm still alive! Time is playing one of those tricks on me where I can't believe that I've been here for a month and at the same time, feel like I've been here much longer.

I've spent this past month beginning to get to know my village. There are some great people here, including a bunch of fun kids. I've been out to people's fields, been to a few meetings, entertained kids (and adults I'm sure), and even went to the village fundraiser dance party that went on until 5:30am (I went home at 10:30...way past my normal bedtime here)! Despite all of the good people and keeping busy with things, the first three weeks I was thinking a lot about why I am here, and missing Niger (and even the US!), and really questioning whether this was where I wanted to be for two years. A big part of me feels ready and wanting to settle into a place and into meaningful work for a long time, but Madagascar doesn't feel like that place and Peace Corps isn't quite the long-term/meaningful work kind of committment that I want. I'm tired of putting energy into things without being able to grow roots... Well, I was thinking a lot about things like this, and I came to the point where I decided that I can't go each day analyzing everything, and this is where I am right now, so at least I need to refocus and be positive about what I can do here and now. I can re-evaluate later, but for now, not everyday! So, the day after making that decision, I left my house with my shovel/hoe thing (called an angady) and a bag, and went collecting manure from the road to start my compost pile. As I write this, my compost is decomposing away and makes me happy whenever I see it. I finished reading the chapter on the humid tropics in my Permaculture Design Manual and got lots of ideas for my garden, too. I'm really not ready language or culture-wise to start any big projects yet, but my garden is a great way to begin and a good way to start talking to people about farming and food. I have 23 by 9 meters to work with - a pretty big space! Plus, possibly some land that a young woman in my town may let me use on a hillside for rice/cassava/corn/bean farming. Much of that planting starts in October-ish, so lots of time to plan. Lots of ideas for things are coming to me, but we'll see what the community is interested in. I'd like to do something with these teenage girls who no longer go to school - maybe linking them to leadership and mentoring of some of the younger kids. They are so smart, strong, and amazing, but have little outlet for creativity or thinking independently. There is also a lot of potential for agroforestry, on the steep slopes where people grow their rice. I know that one woman might be interested, so eventually we may be able to start working on things like that. For now, I'm still learning and just trying to get to know people. Each day is a little different, but the daily routines involve getting water from a stream about 5 minutes away in the morning and evening. I've been doing a lot of good cooking, mostly beans and rice, but my mom sent me chocolate chips, which have been a wonderful addition to pancakes now and then! : ) I eat rice every day but don't get tired of it. There are lots of fresh fruits and vegetables - no market in my town but I can find a lot of things at the little stores that we have, and going to the big market (in the town where I do my banking/internet/post office) I can find lots of color and variety. To get cell phone reception, I walk up a hill past the stream to the top of some rocks. From up there, I have a view of all the surrounding green hills, the rice fields, small mud and wooden houses with thatch roofs, and the schoolyard where kids are playing soccer with a ball made from a stuffed plastic bag tied into a round shape. If I listen closely I can imagine that I hear the waterfall 20 min walk south of town. The hills are mostly covered in eucalyptus, all the original rainforest is gone. People make charcoal from the eucalyptus and sell it to big trucks that come through and take it to the capitol. There is a small area of protected forest south of town--one of my jobs is to work with the community group that is in charge of managing it, but I have yet to see the forest or to meet with them as a group. In the evening, I close up my house when it gets dark and light my candle, eat dinner and wash up the dishes and write. With no electricity here, most people go to bed early and wake up early. It's a pattern that feels good to fall into. I've been also reading some - currently Wendell Berry's The Art of the Commonplace, a gift from my sister. It's good and makes me thing a lot about agriculture in the states. My days are good and full, despite all my thoughts about everything. Funny how now that I'm "settled" somewhere for 2 years, I start wanting to be somewhere for 10, 20, or 30... : ) Right now rain is falling and my yard is a mud puddle, but I can imagine how nice it will be when my garden is planted and growing with pineapple, papaya, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes... I'm glad to be going slow with learning the community and building some friendships before I start working, though two years feels like an awfully short time to actually do anything, other than enjoy all these small things I like about life. So I guess that's what I'll focus on for now. Kids, food, making compost, and watch the rain.

We are a few days away from “swearing in.” We've had our last training sessions, our language placement interviews (a.k.a. language test) are over, and we left our host families yesterday to come back to the training center for all of our last minute logistical nightmares before we head to the capital for the ceremony. Hopefully I'll get internet while we're there and I can post this. I think I would have gone crazy with all this training if it wasn't for the host family that I lived with for the last three weeks. They lived in a small two-room house, in which I had one of the rooms and they slept, prepared food, and we ate meals in the other. I felt bad for taking up so much of their space, but they were so flexible and welcoming. It was a young couple and their two boys, ages 6 and 3, and a little cat who was always hungry and liked to curl up on the rock by my window/doorway. The entrance to my room was through the window, which was big and had a big sill, so there was plenty of room for me to sit there and look out at the world. What I would see from my window seat would be a nicely made fence, a small corn field, a decomposing house across the way, chickens in the yard, and off in the distance down the hill, bright green rice fields in the valley. We spent our days in language classes at another trainee's house, and doing some technical sessions on things like gardening, composting, making mud-brick stoves, and planting rice. In the evenings, I would help with dinner, dishes, sometimes drawing with the kids, and studying. On the weekends, we did things like laundry in the river, and going on walks with the family. I made some meals for them, including tortillas with re-fried beans and salsa. It was a trick to learn to cook with the charcoal stove on the ground, and the first time I was left alone to fix lunch while the mom was still at the market, I had to find the young neighbor boy to help me light it in the rain with no kindling! We ended up breaking off little branches from one of their fences in order to start the fire. At least they were impressed by how well the rice ended up turning out! Everyone in the small town where we were staying was friendly and kind, and very encouraging with the language, always telling me I was “mahay” which means good, smart, intelligent, etc. “Efa mahay Malagasy,” they would say, which means, you're already good at Malagasy! They would say this even after I had only said three words, like my name is Amanda, or something really silly like that. In reality, I'm at just the level expected of me by peace corps, no higher! Yesterday we had a big thank you party for all the families. It was estimated that 300 people were invited when you counted all the kids, officials, and staff members. I was voted to give the thank you speech, which didn't worry me until I found out that I had to use a microphone. Fortunately, several other volunteers also did speeches, so I wasn't alone, and it went very well. I managed to talk slowly and clearly and pause at all the right moments. One of the language teachers helped me prepare it, and I actually made the families laugh several times, so apparently they understood what I was saying! My host family whispered to me that I was the best, they are so encouraging! The staff had prepared so much food; the families were stuffing their pockets and purses full. On Wednesday I will be moving to my site. It will probably take me several days to move in, get what furniture I need for the house, and meet all the appropriate officials. Two language teachers will be coming with me and two other volunteers to move us in and introduce us to the communities (they call this “installation”). Right now it feels surreal to me that I will be in my site in less than a week. I can barely imagine it. Especially after years of moving around, it's unreal to think I will be in one place for two years, and I can't quite grasp that idea. I will have email access once a month when I go to my banking town, so I will try and give an update about how it all goes!

My first week here was a wonder of green, a wonder of water. Our training center sits on the edge of a lake (man-made but still watery), and down the hill in the villages, rice fields form a network of running water in every valley. With a bright sun, the world turns upside down, small green rice shoots growing out of sky and clouds.

Yesterday we went out to the rice fields and stepped into the mud. I stepped carefully between the rows of small rice plants and used a really awesome kind of rotary hoe to cultivate (weed) the rice, calf-deep in mud. We are learning a technique of planting rice that gives a much higher yield than the traditional method, in the hopes that people in the villages we are assigned to will want to learn. I was skeptical until I saw that it didn't involve any fancy chemical fertilizers or “improved” seeds, just some basic applied plant biology...spacing out the plants to give their roots room to develop, and managing the water so that you give the roots some air now and then rather than constant flooding. Simple, cost-free things that make a difference. It's a step closer to One-Straw Revolution's “natural farming” without being so drastic as to be impossible to convince anyone to try.

Our “site announcements” were made a few days ago. The village that will become my home for the next two years is a 9-kilometer bike ride from the main road where I can get a taxi-brousse (bush taxi) to a bigger market town (the Peace Corps will be giving me a bike to use!). It's a tiny village of only 180 people in a “hilly wooded area” that is “hot and humid” according to the info sheet. There is a women's group and a group formed to work with the national forest beside the village. In an effort to manage the national parks and forests more sustainably, the previous government began giving more control over the park management to local communities. I will be working with this forest management group and with farmers in the village and the surrounding area on projects relating to forestry, agro-forestry, gardens, improving rice harvests, environmental education, or whatever other agriculture/environment things that they are interested in. My first months in the village will be spent improving my language skills and learning about the people's needs, desires, and expectations. I will not start any projects right away (except maybe my own garden!), until I have learned what sort of things would actually be useful. I've been reading Two Ears of Corn, a book about small-scale agricultural projects, and starting slowly and small seems to be the best approach. At the same time, I am eager to finish training and go jump in more rice fields. We've been in training for over two months now, and I think it is starting to wear on everyone. If we hadn't have left Niger, we would be finishing training this week and going to our assigned sites now. Instead, we have another month left, but the last three weeks will be spent living with host families in the surrounding villages, so that is something to look forward to. Plus, I can use as much training in the language as possible—our teachers here are excellent and I feel like I'm learning quickly. I've just got to be patient and hang in there for a few more weeks! Almost daily, I go on a walk for about an hour and a half after classes in the afternoon, when it's not raining too much. I pass oxen carts painted in bright colors and patterns, little stores selling cookies and Malagasy bread (mofo), cassava growing on hillsides, unknown trees that have been coppiced many times, children calling out “Manahoana” (hello!) and then hiding behind their siblings, boys playing some sort of game involving rolling small balls in the road, a rushing stream that feeds the rice fields, egrets standing gracefully in those rice fields, wooden houses with shutters, mud brick houses with thatch roofs, young men that say things I can't understand and probably don't want to understand anyway, puppies looking bewildered at the world, chickens burrowing into the dirt at the side of the road...I could go on, but you get the idea! Anyway, we are heading to a National Park to see some lemurs for the Christmas weekend. If I get internet access, I'll post this up. I hope all of you had a good Christmas! Our dining room is decorated with paper snowflakes and some of the trainees made little paper stockings with each of our names on them. Some of the stores in town have lights and decorations up. Everyone is excited about Secret Santas. When I get to my village, I will be setting up a new mailing address, but for now, feel free to write to me at the address I emailed earlier. I have a new phone number too, which I can try and get to anyone who wants it. I'm not sure how frequent my internet access will be, but I'm guessing perhaps once a month. Hopefully I'll have more insight about the village next time I post! Overall, I am just trying to learn Malagasy and adjust to being here rather than in Niger. I definitely miss a lot of things about Niger, but now that I know my site assignment, it makes it easier to begin to focus on spending the next two years here. Keep in touch! I'll try to post pictures next time!

You can email Emily (my sister) at lilbikergirl (at) gmail (dot) com for my current address and phone number if you want it!

Here is a sampling of pictures from my time in Niger:

My trees in the nursery (moringa growing)

Camels eating by the lake

Me and Nikki under the tree - our hut is behind us, behind the low wall.

Kids in our concession by the cookfires

Tabaski feast food being prepared (no goat yet!)

The teenage boy got the kids to pose while we were drawing together - very cute kids!

The two greatest girls in our family drawing

Sunrise over our training town

My stick bed on the end of the row

Women pounding millet in the millet pounding area

The grandmother of our family pounding peppers - the teenage boy in our family took this picture!

Me by a very large milkweed type plant

Freshly made bricks drying by the lake

Watching the sun set on the last day in Niger

We spent this weekend with our host families for the feast of Tabaski, a very important Muslim feast where they slaughter a sheep in remembrance of Abraham. I did end up eating a lot of rather interesting goat parts. I spent the afternoon making a Go Fish set for the kids and showing them to play. It was so fun, I made pictures of things in their daily lives and put the words on the cards. They loved it. It was so hard to say goodbye to the family. They walked out to the end of the road with me, telling me Sai Hankuri, and Sannu da Kokari, which means kind of like Have patience, and Blessings on your effort. I stopped at the nursery and watered the trees. A group of little girls watched me, and we all greeted each other and told each other our names and they were so sweet. I am saying so many goodbyes, to the trees, the sunrises and sunsets that are so distinct here, the silly kids, the ox carts filled with millet, my own expectations of two years here, all the wonderful teachers and staff and families that have welcomed me and taught me more than I thought I could learn in six weeks.

November 13 FridayThe goats are really noisy tonight, tied up under the shelter on the other side of my wall. Maybe they know what's coming to them... I went to the language teachers' house tonight to study and it was really nice to sit at an actual table and spread out all of my Hausa papers. I feel like I am beginning to grasp things, but I still feel so limited in my vocabulary that communicating is really awkward and stumbling. My mind works slowly, especially with my tiredness (anti-malaria medicine is giving me sleeping problems), and I need time to let it all sink in. November 18 WednesdaySo, kidnapping attempts at American embassy workers in one of the regional capitals and four nights of insomnia have made this an interesting week so far... All of us trainees have been moved up to the training center for now, this is called “consolidation.” The other volunteers have been moved into their regional centers and we are all waiting to find out what will happen next. People are certainly anxious. There's not much we can do but keep going with our training and hope that the program here stays open. Maybe I've been too tired to be upset, I just feel patient. The medical staff gave me some medicine for my insomnia, so hopefully I will sleep now.

November 20, FridayI went on a walk with three other trainees this evening. It felt so nice to get out of the training center. A breath of fresh air. An open sky, brown earth stretching so far. The enormous ball of sun sinking into the horizon. It was so beautiful. I really do want to make my life here for two years. We were all talking about Peace Corps on our walk and whether or not it was useful or did any good, and I really came down to “It is what it is.” Is there a better “helping” organization out there? A worse one? Probably. It comes down to such an individual experience. What am I hoping for? A chance to learn about and practice agroforestry, trees, grafting, animals, water catchment strategies, food security in a difficult arid landscape. That is what I hope for.

November 25 WednesdayWhat a day. The country director came to tell us that we will not be continuing training here and most of us will be sent to Madagascar. She felt that with the security situation not improving, while she could keep the program open with the volunteers that are already here, she didn't feel comfortable sending out new volunteers without experience in Niger right now. So we will all be leaving within the next 2 weeks. It was such a sudden and unexpected announcement. I immediately felt so sad to be leaving Niger. Somehow, I ended up loving it here, the landscape, the people, the potential for all these dryland agroforestry projects...my 40 trees planted... On my walk this evening, Julie (another volunteer) and I sat and listened to the call to prayer. I thought about how the call to prayer is a moment to be grateful and remember how good life is. Watching dusk come over an orange-brick village with the sound of pounding millet, goats bleating, the sun falling into the next day, I will miss this piece of Africa. I am trying to keep an open mind and heart to what will come next, trying to be grateful for what I have been given here, taking this time to say goodbye to Niger. I don't want to think too much about beginning a new training in Madagascar, that is too much to absorb right now. I just want to sit and look at the patterns the gardeners raked into the dirt around my mosquito net. I want to sleep with the stars above my head and the sound of the crickets. One good thing is that I did get so excited about being here. That gives me hope that I a bit closer to “finding”(?), “figuring out”(?) what I want to do, that I'm moving in the right direction. If Madagascar is that direction too, that's good. Patience. I do need patience. Sai hankuri...

We are visiting a volunteer in her village for “demystification” - a Peace Corps process in which we all go out to stay with “real” volunteers in their villages for several days to get a taste of what their lives are like, for all of our mystification to be solved. While the terminology is rather silly, the concept is nice, and I'm enjoying a break from our training town. We are staying with Nichole - her village is really nice, the people we have met have been so welcoming, just the whole practice of greeting in this country is a welcoming process. It definitely feels very different here from the training town...much more remote and quiet, no electricity and LOTS of stars. We went to the fields with this ancient woman named Hankuri (which means patience) who is one of the most expressive people I have ever seen. When she greets you, she holds onto your hand for so long. We walked with her to a place where some non-profit once came and planted eucalyptus trees, which use so much water that they dried up all of the surrounding wells. There was a plant there that looked just like milkweed, except that it was taller than me! In the heat of the day we sit in the shade. Then we go out visiting. We walked to the area where people go to pound millet. They don't pound it in their homes because of the chaff that it stirs up, and because of a belief that evil spirits stay in the place where the millet is pounded at night (something like that...). Where they pound is out on the edge of the village, on the top of a plateau, with a view going on for miles into the distance. All of the women out there working seemed so relaxed and beautiful and happy. I guess what I love most about this time of day in the evening is when it's finally cooling down, the air becomes light again, and energy comes back. In the middle of the afternoon the thermometer read 120 degrees. I had a hard time believing it. We walked to the school and I was so impressed by the teachers. They seemed so engaged in their work, and one especially was so enthusiastically talking to the kids sitting in a building made from woven millet stalks, with little seats and books. Only five girls in the whole group of younger students, and Nichole said that she thought perhaps only a third of the children in her village went to school at all. Being a teacher is so important. Being here inspires me to focus hard on the Hausa learning so I can be as ready as possible for my village and working on projects. Partly I'm excited at the possibilities and partly I'm thinking to myself “how in the world would I even know where to start?”

November 5, ThursdayWe started making our tree nursery today! Each NRM (Natural Resource Management) volunteer gets to plant 40 trees. It's amazing to me that a seed will grow in this sand. Humbling. How adapted things become, how little we really need, and also how much. In places of abundance we become accustomed to abundance, but in a desert, each tree, each millet stalk has grown from this sand and a bit of water. Yes, the climate is harsh, the poverty more extreme than what I have ever seen before. It's hard to live here, whether you are a person or an acacia tree. I am glad to have two years to live here, to dig into it and find all the light places in the harshness, like finding all the color blooming in the desert during my bike trip.

I am an observer mainly. Learning the language is my task at hand, with a goal of communication. For now I am watching, listening t the sounds, following what movements and patterns I can find. Each day is new, I am humbled by many, many things.

Today I sat with women in the house where I do my language class; during our break I pulled the petals off the hibiscus (ware) plants, and the leaves, which were spread out behind their hut to dry. They make a sauce with the leaves, and juice with the petals, just like the rosa de jamaica in Guatemala. I was thinking about Rabinal and the women I cleaned hibiscus with there last fall. Having something to do with my hands for a little while as nice.

I went walking around the lake with another volunteer, and we found women gardening, digging small holes and planting some kind of squash-looking plants. Their gardens are surrounded by dead branches forming a fence - it impresses me that it can keep the goats out. They speak Zarma in the village, so our attempts at conversing were humorous and very limited, but the women so kind and welcoming.

Ignore the date that it says above---I'm updating this from the hotel in Paris and just putting in little bits from my journal over the past 6 weeks. I'll put the date above the entry when I wrote it, and try to figure out a better system later!

October 24th, Saturday

There are so many noises, new ones. It's like passing through an unknown village in Mexico on my bike trip. All this activity happening that you can only imagine. Soon enough I will be part of it all. Starting from zero with the language (Hausa) is difficult; it's like when I was in Guatemala and my family would be speaking Kakci'kil and I'd just be sitting there smiling, playing with a kitten or a child. There is a comfort to the voice of an old woman.

October 25th, Sunday

Our first day spent with our host family. I am roommates with Nikki, aka Hadiza. The grandmother in our family gave us Nigerien names, mine is Aisha, or Aishatu, though there was quite some confusion on that matter for a while, during which time we thought that Aishatu meant "Hey you!" or "Look here!"

We walked to the seasonal lake on the edge of the village. There were green and blue birds with long tails, and white birds in a flock. It was a moment at which I suddenly had this wave of feeling that I am in Africa. It is a place different from anywhere else that I have been.

Our house is a round mud hut with a thatch roof right in the middle of the family's house, a concession made of a mud brick wall and several small houses for each part of the family. The family is big, lots of kids, adults, I don't know who belongs to who yet, and it doesn't seem to matter. We have our own latrine and bathing area, a bucket for our bath water, a stool to sit on while bathing, cups to pour water over ourselves. Mostly I feel very comfortable and easy here. We are so much taken care of, no thinking about our food, our schedule, even our laundry...I feel too priveledged. I keep thinking that so much will hit me when I finally get to my post. Training is a good, but strange, lifestyle.

Our little host brother told me today about learning Hausa "if you can catch it in your head, it's not difficult!" I'm trying to keep my mind open like a net, ready to catch it all, but it seems to take me a bit more work than that!!

October 22nd, Thursday

I have arrived. It is more amazing than I have been able to imagine. Soaking in all the donkeys pulling carts on the way to the training center, the animals all over the place, the beautiful orange sand and scrubby trees, the wide wide sky and clouds. Women watched our vans go by, smiling, the colors of their clothes shine. Brown stalks of dry, harvested millet stood in the fields. The clouds are the only thing against the flat horizon, they are the mountains of this desert.

I have a bed outside on the edge of a row, each with it's own yellow mosquito net. From here I can hear music and radios from down the hill in the town, voices and crickets, children. I look out from my mosquito net and see 14 lights in the town below. Many many stars above.

I almost feel so blessed by all of this that I could cry. Here I am! Okay, I need to sleep, let all of these new things sink in, and be ready for tomorrow.

I have decided to share bits of my journal with you, my friends. Right now I am on the edge of a new transition, just as I was six weeks ago, when I left for Niger as an Agroforesty Extension Agent with the Peace Corps.

After six weeks there, our training class is being transferred to Madagascar due to security concerns in the region. This journal will tell about my time in Niger, and hopefully I will be able to update it periodically in Madagascar, though I don't know how often that will be. I will be working in the Environment program there, hopefully also with Agro-forestry or another agriculture-related project.

Some of you have followed my bicycle trip journals. This may be a bit different, as there are no daily milestones (or kilometer-stones) to measure myself by, no map to trace my progress, and an end-point that is 24 months from now, and definitely less frequent internet access, but we'll see how this goes.