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Mahajanga. Maahhhhajanga. Haven't been able to write much bc im stressed. 'stressed' being relative - i spent all day sunday on the beach and right now im sitting under a fan drinking a frappacino. BUT! There is actually lots of school-related things to be doing. And it is harder to do them when i am sweating out my eyeballs. 

Highlights:

-My fam here is insane. There is a mom a dad and approximately 800 children/newphews/nieces/kids of friends/ random ppl who swing by on the weekend/unknowns. Dinner is minimum 8 people. I love them they find me hilarious.

-My dad likes to not wear a shirt on talk nonsense in a booming voice.

-My mom likes to sit outside under the mango tree, yell at her kids to cook more rice, and refer to me as vazaha "efa voki vazaha?" already full vazaha? Vazaha knows lots of words. Vazaha will kill the chicken.

-Oh yeah i killed a chicken. With a knife. My 13 year old brother/newphew taught me. He told me I gave it a slow death, thats why it was twitching so much. Noted.

-My family likes to make me dance and then tell me im a good dancer while simultaneously dying of laughter. Confusing. 

-Doesn't help that my 800 siblings/cousins are all accomplished ballroom dancers. I went to class with them (they go 3x a week) and ended up getting almost molested in a corner by a rando during the Meringue. Afterwards the instructor aggressively held my shoulders and yelled french numbers in my ear bc my foxtrot was 'ratsy be' i.e. terrible. 

-I was on the 7 o clock news (not just me, all the vazahas of SIT) bc we visited the local tv station and because we are news. I had an interview where i talked gasy too fast and confused the word 'sad' with a random music group ive been learning about. example: "i am Rolling Stones to be leaving mahajanga in a week!"

-Consequently, i learned the gasy word for 'famous'

-I cooked fajitas for my fam with guacamole. My 10 yr old brother said it was the only vazaha food he has liked. Win. mahay mahandro ny vazaha - vazaha knows how to cook. But does not know how to foxtrot.

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Things that are different:

The oranges are green

you eat the avocado with sugar

tortillas have disappeared from the earth

On the way to school I see a man sitting in a dumpster, I see a cow leg hanging from a hook, there is a boy looking at me over his shoulder, smiling over his blood-streaked pousse-pousse “vazaha?!”

I come home and my dad picking guavas off the porch tree. Guava jus at dinner isan hariva

Taxi rides are max 5 dollars

I am telling the big-eyed dirty city ankizy tsy manana vola! but they are reaching into my pockets anyways

My race is instinctively yelled to me several times a day “vazaha!?” “vazaha?!” in case I didn’t know

I hear myself parting ways on a Friday night, saying bizarre things such as 5:30 tomorrow? Because we want to go running under a sunrise.

When I sleep until 7:30 it is “sleeping in”

When I stay up past 10 it is “late”

I am a celebrity to my neighbors

My neighbors are asking me for 500 ariary please he wants cigarettes

When I see a white person I notice

When I see a person washing a pig intestine on the street, I don’t

Things that are the same

The oranges are still orange on the inside

Sometimes I eat crackers

Coffee at breakfast

There are nephews who come to visit

There are tv commercials telling you which type of noodles to eat

There are silly soap operas

There are piano lessons

There are grandpas forgetting their glasses upstairs ah les lunettes encore!

There are grandchildren squirming at the dinner table je peux m’excuse s’il te plait

But no you must first finish your rice

I need to buy toothpaste

I need to buy sunscreen

I have written an essay in a coffee shop. The wifi code is Cheesecake

I have had iced coffee with whip cream

I have a mom who is worried about my bug bites, a dad who is telling me to set my alarm maraina be!

I am TAMANA BE

12

I really suggest that everyone once in their life take a journey through the Malagasy diksionera. This language is kind of hilarious. I literally read the dictionary for fun……………… wish I was lying.

SINCE most people haven’t heard of Malagasy and you probably don’t have a dictionary lying around I will help you out

Interesting thing #1: there is no word for “to be”

Interesting thing #2: the sentence structure is backwards yoda speak “eat corn I” “have book you”

Interesting thing #3: It is a simple language. For instance, bibi is animal. Bibikely = small animal = insect. Bibilava = long animal = snake. So cute.

Interesting thing #3: pretty much any word that exists in Malagasy can be doubled and this tweaks the meaning to weaken the word slightly. Example: kely = smallà  kelikely= kind of small. Mipetraka = to sit à mipetrapetraka = to sit around. Indray = again à indraindray = sometimes

For some reason I just find this really adorable. And fun to play with. 

There are also many hilarious words where you feel like the whole history and culture of Madagascar is sitting right in your mouth when you say it. Par exemple

Masay = the second wife in a polygynous family

Manjehy = to measure by spanning with the hand

Manakobaka = to slosh clothes around in water

Fotsy rora = technically means white person spit but also means “who speaks but is not listened to”

Mandry fotsy = to go to bed without eating, especially without eating rice

Fanantazana = the act of collecting in a basket

Dobodobohana= to be made to thump like a drum

Baiko = a foreign word ; a command

Bao = a pole for carrying burdens across the shoulder

Antsamotady = a sling for throwing stones

Antsanga = trash and mud deposited by flood water

Valim-babena = the duty of grown children to help their parents

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Other inspiring moments from the village stay:

-we are walking back from mamboly ovy (planting potatoes) and my stops and catches a grasshopper in her hands. ‘tsara be!’ she rips off the legs and wings and says she will bring it home for milalao ny ankizy (so the kids can play with it). I tell her that obviously I want to eat it if possible… this has been my goal since I ever conceived of coming to Madagascar. She nods. This is not at all strange. When we get back she clips it to her hat and it is staring at me all morning while I write field notes. Strangely this makes me lose my appetite while I eat lunch. but at dinner she grills it up for me and it tastes really soft and nice. I decide to go with tail first rather than head first. It is dei mafinaritra

- on the last day at breakfast I spot a giant spider outside the window. When I look closer I see that there are actually approximately 1037 of them all chillin in their webs right outside. I am leaning out the window to take a picture when my mom is pushing me to the side. Silly! why take a picture when you can nab one with a broom and bring it through the window! She is telling me they are nice, they are fanofody (medicine) for a word I don’t understand. I look it up and realize she is telling me they feed these to chronically crippled children. It is crawling all over her pink sweatshirt. It is GIANT. And then it is crawling up my arm too, sure, why yes this is so naturelle. My sisters think it is hilarious.

10

Got back to Tana today from a week long village stay. Hmm how to explain ? I was put purposefully with a fam that tsy mahay frantsay (did not speak French). Roland had perceived my level of nerdiness with the Malagasy and thought I could benefit from some straight up immersion. well

 So on Friday morning I was brought home by my dad Faly (literally means ‘happy’) in a janky blue automobile owned by the school. On the way we passed a sleeping volcano, casual. My dad was missing his four front teeth and had an excellent crazyman smile. F – A –L –Y tattooed the knuckles of his right hand, ADIOS between his finger and thumb.  “tia miteny malagasy” “dei mafiniratra!”

We live in the fokotony (town) KABAHABA. Our house is a room in a two story brick ‘traditional’ style casa with a cluttered porch. Chickens all around. There are 2 beds. One is my bed and the other bed is for the rest of the fam. There was a mom a dad and three daughters age 8 – 12. There are two tables, a dresser and a radio and a window. Also a rice bag full of all their clothes.  My dad shows me his guitar, it is broken but he has fixed it with a fork and a leather strap. ‘mahay?’ I play redemption song for them and they think I am a genius. Yet to be discovered that my dad is actually boss at guitar even though he only plays hira vavaka (church hymns). my mom is beautious and holds her hair up with a red clip in the shape of a dollar sign. She is strong looking and has good eye wrinkles. ‘dei mafinaritra fa afaka miteny gasy satria tsy mahay frantsay isika’ à how great that you know Malagasy because we do not speak French!

….about that. This was me starting my third week of language learning……………………….. dei mafinaritra!

My mom’s brother lives in the room downstairs with his wife and two chidlers. Grandma and grandpa and random cousin live in the house right next door. Older sister sells petrol in the shack across from that. Cousins live around the corner. My mom’s tanindrazana (ancestral land) is here in kabahaba so her fam is literally everywhere. They are stuck deep in 5+ generations of mpamboly ovy . of mpiompy omby (potato farmers. cow raisers). This is what they do. They tell me several times. They say it with such swagger I feel like a loser trying to explain my parents’ desk jobs. ‘insurance?’ Faly asks me about my dads commute and I am at a loss to explain a 4-lane highway.

Oh forgot to mention THESE PPL ARE TINY. I am literally a gangly white giant amongst them. Also there are three kittens. I have never seen a kitten eat an ear of corn before last week. Or a bowl of rice. New things new things.

The girls come home from school and are literally silent to my attempts to make them talk to me. I am asking them stupid questions ‘Do you like food? Do you like school? Do you like pencil?’ They are staring at me in the face. I look up the word for ‘shy’ in the dictionary.

These are my days:

-we mitsangasangana (walk around). They take me on walks literally through fairy lands. I feel like we are tiny ants crawling through a crazy magical landscape. Sometimes my dad makes us stop and do photo shoots. Sometimes they play in the rice paddies but I cant go in because I might get a parasitic worm. Sometimes we mipetripetrika (sit around) and mijeryjery (look around). I am struggling with finding a word stronger than dei mafinaritra which they say for anything that is relatively nice at all, including eating a chicken neck for breakfast.

-I follow my mom to the fields and sometimes help if she lets me. She will not let me put the giant bag of soja on my head. She will let me mamboly ovy (plant potatoes). I have my hands in cow shit and pine needle fertilizer for much of the morning. Dei mafinaritra!

-people come up and watch me pull soja plants. They are confused. They are wondering what is the vazah doing here pulling up soja plants? They are wanting to know – ‘why is she here?’ ‘does she speak malagasy?’ they are especially wanting to know – ‘does she eat corn?’ ‘does she eat sweet potato?’ this question comes up without fail every time. ‘how much corn?’ eating corn is a hilarious joke in kabahaba, I think because everyone grows it, but no one grows it to sell it to anyone. They grill it and eat it for tsaki tsaki (snack). They cut the stalks with a machete and eat them while they mipetripetraka, while they are staring me in the face. It becomes my fallback for talking about how I like kabahaba: ‘mihinana katzaka betsaka (I eat a lot of corn).’ People literally think this is the most hilarious thing ever. I make friends.

- I juggle the baolina (soccer ball) with the ankizy (neighborhood chidlets). I play a lot with my 18 year old cousin who is crazy athletic. Sometimes she has to stop and breastfeed her 6 month old infant while I sit idly by and ponder the state of my unused ovaries.

-I try to ‘play’ with the kids in the neighborhood but this usually entails them staring at me, waiting for me to tell them what to do. I teach them hopscotch and how to say ‘wazzzapp??????!!’

-a lot of the time I sit around and observe people working. There is a lot more time here than I’ve ever experienced anywhere.

-sometimes I draw with my sisters. I learn the word for ‘to teach yourself’ mahay hoazy. Also an inexplicably hilarious word for the residents of kabahaba.

-I speak Malagasy ALL THE TIME. By the end I am a semi competent at making complex sentences and comprehending when old grandmas want to ask me if it hurt to get my nose pierced. Roland tells me im the most advanced they’ve had anyone at this stage. I literally read the dictionary for fun. Nerd win

-I walk the 7 mile round trip to the market/church. I am literally sore from this. Coincidentally, this is something my 8 year old sister does every single day. At church (Lutheran) we sit outside because we are tara­iki be (late)so there is no room inside. I sketch the mountain across from me and amass a crowd of literally 30 children. I feel awkward because they are paying attention to me instead of Jesus. I ask my mom ‘mety?’ ‘is this okay?’. She shrugs. Jesus can wait.

- we respectively eat 6 small mountains of rice for breakfast lunch and dinner. With the rice we eat  sometimes potatoes sometimes beans sometimes egg. Sometimes akoho (chicken). the whole chicken. They give the chicken head to the youngest. They encourage me to eat chunks of fat because this is the best part! You must eat it! I do not eat it. They are happy to eat it for me. They like the calories.

- I sit on the porch and mitendry gitara (play guitar). I write some songs but don’t think they will work anywhere besides this one guitar capoed with the fork the way it is. Faly tunes the strings on a whim to fit however he is feeling at the mo, whichever church hymn he is wanting to make us sing to. I ask him how long he has been playing and he flashes me his gum line - ’30 minutes!’

When it is time to leave my 8 year old sister suddenly and unexpectedly starts bawling her eyes out. This is really distressing for me because I was hoping to escape this veloma (goodbye) with dry eyeballs, but this was not in the cards. Ive never cared so much about a family I knew for less than a week. They tell me to come back, to bring my whole fianakaviana !! ..tempting.