Market Day Presentations

A few days at the market

Life has certainly been nothing short of hectic since my last blog post.  The market day presentation that I mentioned briefly before subsequently caught some momentum and spiraled into three separate presentations with the help of my other Itasy region CED volunteers in each of our respective towns.  I originally envisioned a simple speech followed by meet and greet activities, simple enough.  Yet, like most things in Peace Corps I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.  In retrospect I cannot imagine how difficult it would have been to tackle this project without the help of Sarah and Emma.  After mentioning the idea to the two of them, we decided it would be beneficial to put together a few flip charts, present together, and do the circuit of our three towns.  This ended up making a lot of sense because the three of us are all CED volunteers partnered with Prosperer in the region of Itasy.  So while we are each the primary responsible in our respective towns, we will undoubtedly collaborate often and our work will inevitably overlap.  So in short, while we intended to give a concise standardized spiel in each town, one, two, three and done, each successive exposition had a distinctive character and involved a good deal of ‘rolling with the punches.’

To begin, we tackled my town, Arivonimamo.  The night before we gathered in my apartment to make a few flip charts which we intended to place on a poster board stand borrowed from my counterpart.  Kudos to Sarah for her illustrations and handwriting, and kudos to my Malagasy-English dictionary for making it possible to articulate the role of a CED PCV.  The morning of the presentation arrives, we wake up in my apartment and Emma says, ‘I could really go for some vary ananas right now.’ (which means watery rice with greens. A Malagasy staple that believe it or not I’ve come to crave from time to time).  So I was on board and we made our downstairs to the small ‘hotely’ below my apartment (a cheap Malagasy restaurant that serves rice immediately with whatever side dish they happen to have in stock at that time).  For the ‘loka’ (side dish), we saw a man eating what appeared to be eggs so we pointed and requested to have three of the same.  Halfway through the meal the owner, who has by now become a good friend of mine, stopped by to see how we were enjoying our breakfast.  At this point he was already wise to the fact that we may not have known what we actually ordered. 

‘Tianareo atidoha ny omby?,’ he says

Pause. ‘avereno azafady, tsy hazko’ (please repeat, I didn’t understand)

I know at this point that ‘tia’ is used for ‘to like,’ ‘tianareo’ = ‘do you all like.’ And ‘omby’ is cow.  So I’m thoroughly confused.  We’d already remarked to each other that something wasn’t right about the texture of these eggs.

He points to his head and repeats, ‘atidoha ny omby.’  All three of our eyes bulge and stomachs church simultaneously because we were each about halfway through a breakfast of wet rice and cow brains.  I finished mine off.

So after starting the day that way we figured things could only go up, and luckily they did.  We situated ourselves in the center of Arivonimamo’s sprawling market, right in front of the commune, and while the girls positioned the flip charts, I ran inside to get the table for a community map activity.  Within minutes we were swarmed by a curious crowd of Malagasy which continued to grow once word spread that these three ‘vazah’ were speaking in Malagasy.  We functioned as a well-oiled machine, considering how ad hoc the whole presentation was, with me giving a continuous speech introducing the three of us, explaining our work and Peace Corps in general, Sarah directing the community mapping activity and Emma fielding questions.  We kept this up for roughly two and a half hours and in all I would guess we spoke to a few hundred people.  Hopefully as a result the word has spread that I’m not French, I’m here to stay, and that I’m not rich, the importance of this last point cannot be overstated. 

We were all feeling pretty good about how things went and following that high we proceeded to Ampefy the following week to try our luck there.  The town of Ampefy, Emma’s site, is a sleepy little village in comparison to Arivonimamo, and considered a popular vacation spot since natural beauty abounds.  The primary draw is lake Ampefy, used both recreationally and as a spot for the numerous fish farmers that Emma will likely be working with.  The town also sports a stunning waterfall and geysers so it’s no mystery why it’s become such a notable tourist destination.  Much the same as Arivonimamo, we made camp in front of Ampefy’s commune building and proceeded to introduce ourselves to anyone who passed by and disseminate as much information as possible about the Peace Corps Community Economic Development program.  What I particularly enjoyed from that day was what actually followed the conclusion of our presentation.  That afternoon we were invited to the local library, a one room community facility which serves as an extra-curricular center, a benefit that Ampefy enjoys, which many communities do not, and a testament to the iniative of its community leaders.  With a group of roughly 30 young Malagasy children we sang American songs, played American kids games (thanks in large part to Sarah’s extensive arsenal of games accumulated during summers as a camp counselor).  We also learned a few Malagasy kids games, danced a bit, sang a bit, and in all had a pretty great time together.

To complete the rotation we ended up in Miarinarivo the following Wednesday for that town’s large market day.  Since Miarinarivo is the region’s capital and thus the regional headquarters of Prosperer, when Sarah was negotiating market space with her Mayor, the ‘lehibes’ (important people) of Prosperer got a hold of the idea and decided to run with it.  So I show up early in morning after a 40 km taxi brousse ride, which in true Malagasy fashion took just shy of three hours, to find that, per usual, we were to be stationed in front of the commune, but this time Prosperer had rolled out a large tent, speakers, music, tables, banners, and a microphone.  To complicate matters, Emma had a graduation ceremony for a Prosperer youth training program in her town which she was obligated to attend, which let Sarah and I to complete the final leg of our venture without her.  Thankfully Sarah’s Prosperer counterpart, Mr. Nary, was an active participant and filled the gap.  Beginning around 11 am, Sarah, Nary and I gave speeches, answered questions and did our standard ‘vazah’ song and dance for nearly three hours.  At one point I was explaining to a crowd of Miarinarivo market goers the three goals of Peace Corps, for about the fourth or fifth time, when I came to the part about cultural exchange.  This was roughly two hours into the presentation and the normal fatigue of speaking straight Malagasy was starting to take hold.  When Mr. Nary noticed the cultural exchange portion this time around he felt it would be a perfect opportunity to engage the crowd.  So we proceeded to hold a question/answer session about all things culturally American.  They opened with whether or not we eat rice in the States, and if so, how often? Following with whether or not I was married, a question that I inexplicably get asked a disconcerting amount of times by both men and women.  Still haven’t figured out why that’s such a popular area of intrigue.  While the whole experience in Miarinarivo was much more of a production than we initially bargained for it felt good to go out with a bang. 

I’ve should mention that I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about all the modern amenities that I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy as a result of working with Prosperer so I turned off my lights and wrote this blog by candle light. On my computer. Which is plugged into my outlet which keeps my laptop alive by virtue of 24 hour electricity. 

‘tsara vintana aho’ – I’m lucky.

Until next time, Veloma.