Culture Shock

I woke up this morning in my comfortable twin bed in Tana, and I didn’t quite know what to think. I’m going through some serious culture shock in Madagascar’s metropolitan capital city—I video edited until 2am last night, enjoying the luxury of 24-hour electricity and high speed internet, but I found myself awake again with the early morning light at 5am per Vondrozo usual. The rest of the Tana population, however, seems to sleep a bit later than those Vondrozoans, and when Kuni, Christa, Henintsoa, and I left our hotel in search of morning sakafo, we found the city quiet and deserted…except, of course, for those few revelers still making their way home from an epic night at la boite (French for nightclub). And as for what we ate—pain au chocolat and café au lait—I might as well have been in Paris, not Madagascar. Kind of different from all those breakfasts of rice and peanuts sur terrain.

I’ve never been much of a city girl, and life in Tana stresses me out somewhat with its complexity. Not only can I now read your blog comments, but I am also painfully aware of the 1400 unread messages in my email inbox. Sigh. It is time to take myself off of some of those nostalgic Stanford email lists. Anyway, I have only 3 days left in Madagascar, and our team has seven videos to finish, one brochure to write, one website to design, and a host of final reports to put together. Sort of like finals week back home…You might say that life is busy.

There are a few things in Tana that have really thrown me for a loop after three months in the remote south. My first instinct this morning was to get up and run for the faucet with my water bottle—in Vondrozo, the water runs only consistently between the hours of 6am and 7am, and if you miss it in the morning, there’s a chance you’ll be going thirsty all day…or contributing to global plastic disposal problems by buying a bottle of Eau Vive, Madagascar’s equivalent to Arrowhead or Evian. In Tana, though, the faucet runs when you turn it on, and if you turn it towards the red side, the water is hot! Such a novelty—I haven’t had a hot shower since mid-September…

In addition—and this might be a bit too much information, but in the spirit of one who has become comfortable talking about all bodily functions, I am going to share anyway—the first time I sat down on the toilet yesterday (and a real toilet with a seat, at that!), I found myself searching in vain for the trash can in which to deposit the paper. But there was no trash can because—imagine that—in Tana, people flush their toilet paper down the drain…

And then there is the language. Henintsoa, who was born in Madagascar and still has family in Tana, couldn’t be happier. As members of the Merina ethnicity, the light-skinned residents of Antananarivo and the neighboring high plateau, both she and Ranto are at home with the crisp, clear accent of the region. People here greet each other with “Manahoana”—not “Akoraby” or even “Salama”—and they seem to enunciate their letters more cleanly than those in the Southeast. As an example, the Malagasy equivalent of “there is…” or “is there…” is the word “misy”, which Ranto and Henintsoa pronounce as you might expect: “meee-seee.” In Vondrozo, however, we’ve learned to eat the ends of our words, and we say, “meeesch.”

And so we return from the field a bit more boorish than we left, you might say. Our clothes are all disgusting, for clean means something different in Tana than it did in Vondrozo, and the WWF Tana staff all chuckle appreciatively at our Sudest accents. Perhaps our favorite phrase, so obviously uncultivated, is “da zaka be” (dah-zak-ah-bay), which means, basically, “How gigantic!” There really is no Malagasy officialy (the Merina dialect) equivalent, but to give you an idea of its usage, you might think of Sergio’s shoe size…

In general, our team is very small—I, at 5 feet, 4 inches, am the tallest of the girls, and we all wear an American shoe size of 5 or 6. Ranto is not a whole lot bigger than any of the girls, but Sergio, though skinny, towers over 6 feet. His shoes are comparatively enormous, especially his hulking hiking boots. When Sergio fell in a river during our second séjour sur terrain, he worried that his boots would take days to dry. However, with my unfortunately extensive experience trying to salvage water-logged iPhones, I had already introduced him to the drying properties of a bowl of rice. A night of sleep in a bowl of rice saved his Canon camera during our first field excursion, and impressed by the efficacy of the method, Sergio proposed filling his boots with rice during the second sejour to dry them out. In Madagascar, rice is measured by the kapoaky (kah-pook), or cup, and Ranto argued that we couldn’t waste rice on Sergio’s shoes because they’d take two kapoakys each to fill. To give you a sense for comparison, the six of us together eat about three kapoakys of rice in total in a given meal. Sergio’s feet are, you could say, “da zaka be.”

There may not be anything officially “da zaka be” in Tana, but we are proud of our southeastern heritage, as we come to view it now. I admit I appreciate some of the luxuries of life in the capital—my feet, for one, are no longer pussing and weeping with dirt and flies—but I miss the Madagascar I have come to know as home. Already, I feel as though the trip has ended in a lot of ways, even though I am still eleven hours of time difference and many thousand miles from California. Though sad for this incredible experience to come to an end, I am also eager to return to my real home and family—if only for a short while—before it is on again to the next crazy venture…

Time to go edit some more video…Don’t miss Henintsoa’s newest update to the blog (à la droite if you “mahay français” as they Malagasy say), and happy holidays until I write again!