Back in the saddle again...

Chim-chimney-chim-chimney...

Sunday, February 25, 2007

I’m in Tuléar tonight by myself at the Eden Hotel, whose outer façade is the color of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. The cheap kind. I’ve landed another contract with CARE to do some more proposal writing. This will probably my last hurrah before KP’s contract ends in mid-June, so when this opportunity arose I felt like I should take it to get all the experience I can before leaving. (As a side note to those of you visiting the blog: we’re looking for jobs, so any leads—or offers!—would be welcome.) I’m not in Tuléar to work, just to catch a flight to Ft. Dauphin, on the east coast. I’m going to be on the east side three nights before catching a flight back to the west side, doing background research and talking with the team there. It seems a silly commute, but the Fianar—Tuléar drive is A LOT better than the Fianar—Tana one. Having just done the latter yo-yo trip a week ago, I know what I’m talking about. The last 7 weeks of steady rain have left large stretches of the road in bad shape that prevent you from getting any decent head of speed from building up. Last Sunday we took 10 hours to do Tana to Fianar, and today I made it to Tuléar in just under 7. (Okay, full disclosure: last Sunday we had about a one-hour delay because we were stopped by the gendarmes and forced to pay a fine for not having our papers in order—our green plates were of no use that day—and we stopped so Owen could nurse. Today, I didn’t have any of those same issues.)

This is the first time I’ve spent a night alone since Owen was born and it feels lonely not being part of the usual routine with he and KP. It’s small conciliation that I have a working TV. There are only two channels that come in, both in Malagasy and one channel is showing a Madagascar version of American Idol; the other is showing how Tropical Cyclone Gamede is on target to make landfall on Madagascar on the eastern city of Tamatave. The best thing I saw on TV was a commercial using Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman for its theme song. It was an ad for a beauty salon in Tana. Being a Sunday, there aren’t many restaurants open, so I happened to find myself at same Italian restaurant I ate at when I was last in Tuléar. About a year ago—last Easter Sunday to be exact—we were here with the FTC group and, like tonight, this place was about the only place open. KP and Claire ended up both getting sick and Hugo and I left with our respective wives so they could convalesce back at the hotel. This left AB and Patrick to chit-chat with Claire’s college semester-abroad host-family brothers and their girlfriends for the evening. The next morning we boarded our rental van (a.k.a. rolling Super Fund-mobile) and 10 hours—and one snapped accelerator cable—later, we got to Fianar. Thanks to a poorly (absent) exhaust system we arrived looking like a band of traveling chimney-sweeps. Oh, good times.

Monday, February 26, 2007

I made it to Ft. Dauphin this morning just as the sky opened up in a burst of rain. I suspect this was the leading edge of TC Gamede; it’s been raining off and on all day since I’ve been here. At present, according to the weather map the storm still looks poised to hit Tamatave head-on, but these things have a tendency to change direction at the last moment. Regardless, there are going to be many coastal communities dealing with the storm surge and a lot of flooding. When I arrived, the CARE driver took me to the office first. What struck me most along the way was how bad the roads were. Last May, when I was here last, the roads were in terrible shape, and since then have really deteriorated. I suppose the weather has something to do with it, but also I think the heavy trucks from the QMM mine and the port-building operation are not what the road engineers had in mind when the road was originally built.

Turns out I’m staying at the guest house of the regional coordinator. I didn’t realize this, but was excited by the prospect of not staying in town (less chance of random booty-calls from the local prostitutes). He lives on atop a picturesque promontory overlooking the Indian Ocean. Upon entering the “guest-house” I began to wonder if this was, in fact, a good thing. First impression was that I was living in a sty: clothes were strewn about the place, dirty dishes were piled high in the kitchen sink, the commode doesn’t have a seat, and there’s no shower curtain. The cook, who received me since the coordinator was still at the office, led me through two rooms before showing me my “room”—what is essentially a glorified closet with a double-bed wedged inside. There’s just enough room to maneuver around, but only just. There is a mosquito net, thankfully. But, what really had me worried was the corpse I passed en route to my room. In the second room I passed through lay a body on a bed with a sheet pulled up over its head. The cook didn’t even glance at it as she led me by. Not knowing what to do, I did nothing. As I was putting my suitcase down I heard the corpse emit a low moan, at which point I assumed the corpse wasn’t a corpse. I tip-toed back past the corpse to sit outside and wait for the coordinator to come home for lunch.

And eventually he did, and he explained the mystery of the corpse over lunch. The corpse is a friend of his who is working as a consultant on the project that I wrote up for CARE last summer. He’s one of these dyed-in-the-wool development jocks who has lived in Africa for the past two decades and has decided to eschew such western “luxuries” like mosquito nets and malaria prophylaxis. The corpse-like state was a product of two things: 1) an acute case of malaria and; 2) an acute case of alcohol poisoning from a weekend bender. It was unclear which of the acute cases came on first, but the end result was the corpse.

Now back home after working the afternoon at the office, the corpse was awake briefly and spoke, but has now turned off his light and is sleeping. I’m thankful that tomorrow I’m going out into the field; I don’t predict a good night’s sleep.

2007 Fianarantsoa Province Reboisement (Reforestation)

Two weeks ago I received a call on a Tuesday from the Regional Coordinator of the main USAID-funded Environment project here in Fianarantsoa province. He tells me, “Kristen, I’m so glad that you are going to the reboisement tomorrow morning. Everyone else is completely swamped or not even around. You will be representing ERI (the environment project), SanteNet (a USAID health project and my host agency), the Alliance (the coordinating body of all USAID-funded projects in our province), and the Wealthy North in general.” Meanwhile, I’ve just finished a conversation with our secretary asking her if she can go instead of me as I don’t really have time (our Regional Coordinator was in the capital). I respond, “Yup, I’ll be there.” The irony that someone from the health project was representing all of the environment projects wasn’t lost on either of us. Our secretary was willing to go (though she doesn’t usually represent our office at such official functions), but had encouraged my attendance instead, as apparently the head of the province himself (equivalent to a state Governor in the USA) had brought the invitation by the week before (it seems that no one from our office went last year, so the pressure was on). After committing to go, I start to look forward to wearing sneakers and a t-shirt (a SanteNet one, of course, to advertise our presence) to work, getting out into a rural site for the morning, and getting dirt on my hands, and planting some trees (which I hadn’t done since finishing up my Peace Corps service in Niger in 1998). It turns out that ERI was able to dig up a staff member to go along after all (Vony, who is great fun), and our water/sanitation guy (Jonathan, a former PCV in the area) decided to join us as well. As we were leaving, Jonathan asked one of the office gardeners for an angady (local hoe used primarily for rice cultivation), to dig the holes to plant the trees. At this point I realized how distant my tree planting, Peace Corp days are, for Vony tells us that we don’t need an andady; all of holes for the trees will already be dug by the time we (‘official’ people) arrive. She was right – when we (along with about 1,000 other office types) finally got to the rural site, all the holes were ready (dug by soldiers earlier that morning). School children carried the trees from the nursery to the reforestation site and laid them next to the holes, and all we had to do was stand and listen to big whig speeches (granted, not easy on a 30+ degree slope) and then plop our tree into its hole, fill in the soil around it, and pat it down. After seeing the hundreds of other people who left their desks to “plant” a tree, I wondered if the Governor would really have noticed if we hadn’t showed up. Turns out, at the ‘cocktail’ (soda, fried cakes, cookies) after the ceremony, just as Vony, Jonathan, and I were making our exit, I was accosted by the mayor of the commune (county) where the reboisement was taking place. As he and I chatted, who should appear but the Governor himself. He sees the camera around my neck and requests a photo of the four of us, and expressed his pleasure at seeing USAID’s presence. Whew, it’s official: we were there. I hope some of the 1200 trees planted make it, and that the other reforestation events in 2007 throughout the province are as successful.

Sam's 30th Birthday

The other night Owen attended his second 30^th birthday party (not his own, though he did achieve the 4-month mark last week). His first was his Aunt Marian’s in DC in November, which I believe he slept through as he was only 6 weeks old at that point. His second was this week, when Kristen’s colleague and our friend Sam (a Brit who’s transplanted herself to Madagascar) turned 30. We had Sam over for a drink (or two) to welcome in her third decade. Left to right: Abel (Sam’s boyfriend), Dan & Owen, Kazaku (Japanese volunteer for the NGO Sam heads up), and the birthday girl herself. The highlight of the evening was Sam’s story of the massage she received in town as a birthday present. Specifically, how the masseuse commenced with her feet (living as we all do in Fianar, which is a bit of a dump, and seeing as it’s summer here so we’re all in sandals…let’s just say it’s hard to have squeaky clean feet by 5 pm on any given day), and then spent an inordinate amount of time rubbing the front side of her upper torso instead of her back, and finished up with her face. Abel said he wanted to watch next time. I hope no one gives me a present to that masseuse for my next birthday.

ORP for Prez

Even as far away as Fianarantsoa, Madagascar we are feeling the ripples of US current events here. To gauge from the barrage of news reporting on the radio, print and blogosphere—and all the attendant punditry—there seems to be a lot of excitement about the 2008 presidential election. Not a day goes by when someone or other either announces they are going to run for office, or are forming an exploratory committee in order to consider running for office. Well, this explosion of candidatures has left us little choice but to show our hand a bit earlier than planned.

Here it is: Owen Redlund Patterson is forming an exploratory committee for the office of President of the United States of America.

There will be a bigger rollout later, as Owen tightens up his talking points (once he learns to talk, that is). But until then, here’s what we can say about the candidate and his platform. Owen is a baby of the people and doesn’t have strong ideological leanings to the right or left. With the proliferation of other presidential hopefuls on both sides of the aisle, Owen will be running as an independent. He wants to reach out to all people (as well as he is able given his limited gross and fine motor skills…) regardless of class, creed or color. At sometime between 9 and 12 months, we are hoping that he’ll take a stand for universal breast milk for all, unrestricted mobile viewing, and the unalienable right to decide on nap frequency and duration.

Knowing the political landscape inside the beltway, and the ruthlessness of the special interest groups, we want to avoid any kind of scandal involving our candidate, so we’re pulling out the skeletons right from the beginning. In his younger days, Owen was a bit wild and was known to imbibe a bit more than he could handle—sometimes to excess. He’s been to treatment and has a handle on his problem. And, there could be some incriminating nude photos of Owen leaked to the press. He takes full ownership and responsibility for the pictures and admits to agreeing to pose for these shots in return for a reduction in his room and board in Fianarantsoa. He’s not proud of the photos (well, maybe just a little proud), but he was in a tight spot. (And he naively believed it when the photographer told him “What happens in Fianar stays in Fianar.”) But now he’s a new baby, having turned his back(side) on these darker days.

Look for Owen in Iowa sometime in July, after he’s back in the US. He’s looking forward to meeting his constituents and taking the fight to Washington.