Breakfast was great.
They serve rice with every meal; it is the staple food in Madagascar. Lunch and dinner is just boiled rice, but for
breakfast it is always a specialty cooked or seasoned rice. All of the
volunteer’s plates are divided into the different foods that they give us with
what I would call an average amount of rice, but if you looked at the workers
and staff plates they had a mountain of rice with all of the other foods just
stacked on top of it.
This being my
second training day, it was a lot easier than yesterday. We started with a two hour language lesson
class, which was far easier than yesterday thankfully. I found out today that it will be our last
real lesson before we go to our host home tomorrow. That I think will be a shock. I am really excited to go, but I can not lie,
I am a little
nervous about the language barrier. Everything else will be easy to over come and
most of it will be a fun experience, but that language barrier will definitely
be a dozy.
Most of the rest of the day was
spent in fairly boring security and training meetings, but we did get beignets
as a midday snack! They were so good!! After splurging on beignets we then meet up
with our language trainer and went out to visit a house in the surrounding
village. Our group lucked out and had
the closest house, so we did not have to walk very far at all. On our way there some kids that were playing
soccer came running to the ledge above us to watch us walk by.
As we walked down a dilapidated cement road,
we came to a house which had a small trail that lead down the hill to a house
on the lake. Chickens were
everywhere. Here they just let their
chickens run free and then they come back to the coop by themselves at
night. So at every turn there is a
chicken or a roster. Arriving at the
house we were greeted by the woman that lived there. As she was greeting us her young
daughter, I presume, came out to stair at us. Getting
stared at is going to be a way of life for me here for sure, but I am ok with
that. The house was surrounded by a
stick fence and the yard was all packed dirt.
The house itself was a cement building maybe 15’ X 10’ and two stories. Out front of the house attached to just half of
the front wall was an addition of a small room made out of sheet metal and wood
that worked as their kitchen, with a small chicken coop attached to that.
Getting invited into the house by the woman,
we were able to enter into her “living room.” This room was maybe 5’ X 10’ and
consisted of a small table and chairs, a bench, and a bed. I was surprised to see that she had a small
TV and a DVD player and that she had
electricity. The light in the room
consisted of just one bulb hanging by its wires from the ceiling. After asking her a few questions about her
animals and known taboos for the area, she then took us on a tour of the area
around her house.
Before getting into
that it would be good to make a statement about the taboos. Every region in Madagascar has their own
specific taboos. For instance, in this area it is taboo to canoe on the lake
drunk, because at one point a couple drowned themselves in the lake to save the
city (some parts of this story were lost in translation). Or, in my teachers
village, it is taboo to have a dog as a pet or to even pet a dog. One taboo that
seems to cross regions is not going to the kabone (toilet) at night for fear
of witches; these are not the broom flying, cauldron stirring witches of
western culture, but mischievous people that wonder at night. What these witches look like and what they
may do to you if caught differs, but most everyone believes in them and, if they
do not, the taboo itself is still ingrained in the culture.
So continuing the tour, we went to the back
right of her house to see about six or seven wooden stalls in which were kept
pigs of varying sizes. She then showed
us her ladosy (shower) which was about ten feet from her house and was only
a 3’ X 4’ wooden box. From there we
squeezed between the ladosy and a small storage building and walked down a
small trail flanked by mango and banana trees for about 30’ to a well in which
she retrieved all the water she uses. After that she showed us her kabone which was about 20’ in the other
direction from the house. This was a
simple 101 latrine in a 3’ X 3’ wooden box, that seemed to be on the verge of
falling down, with a floor that looked like it may give at the sign of any
weight.
Following this we returned to the
PCTC (Peace Corps
Training Center)
and learned where are host families were going to be and received a paper (mine
was two pages) stating facts about our family.
My paper stated that their were going to be eight other people in my
household; the mother (who’s occupation is pastries and seamstress), two sons,
aunt, cousin, grandfather, grandmother, and a maid…yes you read that right, a
maid. I was going to have electricity, a
pet cat, some other farm animals (pigs, geese, and chickens), along with some
other details. We all joke that I am
going to be in a mansion and will be living the life.
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