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Madagascar
Small Enterprise Development Volunteer - Peace Corps Madagascar

Thursday, May 16, 2013

My buddy Jean Claude



From the very beginning it seemed fated that Jean Claude would become an important part of my time here, both as my closest friend and as the corner stone of all the work I’m trying to accomplish.  Before arriving I spoke briefly with Binh, the volunteer I was replacing. 

‘You can do whatever you want, of course,’ she began, ‘but of all you could do, I really think you should work with cooperative Taratra and Jean Claude.’    

The day of my installation in Arivonimamo arrived, just over a year ago, and waiting for me by the door to my new home was Jean Claude.  My Peace Corps guardians hadn’t a clue who he was, but after a quick introduction during which I stammered out my a few basic sentences and he explained in simple Malagasy that he had worked with Binh, he promptly took hold of my trunk and helped us schlep my remaining belongings up the stairs.  The next day, as I was considering for where to begin in my new town Jean Claude showed up, once again, and hung around my apartment, listening patiently as I strung together unintelligible non-sequiturs  in my rudimentary Malagasy while he thoughtfully assembled replies using the limited vocab he knew I would understand.  Months later, well along in our work together and firmly established in our friendship, I asked him how it happened that he should so fortuitously be at my door at the very beginning of it all, at the exact moment I arrived at my new home. 

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted as he stared out the window towards the patch of pavement where Peace Corps staff had parked the day of my arrival, ‘I was just biking around town when I saw this car and had a feeling that it must be you.’

Without question, he’s an incredibly bright guy with an inquisitive mind and a predilection towards day-dreaming of the brighter days ahead.  He’s ambitious but certain factors have coalesced to affect a number of external and internal obstacles I’ve watched him stress over and struggle with during the past year.

Born in the rural village of Tsimatahodaza within the town of Ambohitrambo, Jean Claude grew up in a relatively poor farming family, ten miles outside of Arivonimamo along a stretch of cratered dirt road.  With five sisters, he was the only son born to a strong-willed father, whose penchant for control and quick-witted congeniality elevated him to Mayor of Ambohitrambo when Jean Claude was roughly seventeen.  Jean Claude was brought up under the tutelage of a man who bought his very poor family a modest and relatively comfortable life through steely determination and a conviviality that could flip on a dime to an exacting sternness when there was business to attend to.  

As the lone son Jean Claude is in many ways assumed to carry on his father’s demeanor and proclivity for leading people.  It’s a quality that I believe many of his peers presumed to be hereditary when they elected him president of the fruit-drying cooperative.  Jean Claude, however, is not his father and is in many ways his foil.  He’s confided to me that growing up, though he looked up to and respected his father, he’d always felt closer to his mother, the listener.  So while he exudes ambition, is keenly perceptive and quick to assimilate new information in a way that few others are, I noticed when I first arrived how he was cowed into silence when confronted by authority figures, and often unsure of his words when leading meetings.                 

The second contradiction I’ve observed is how bright Jean Claude truly is yet how limited his education has been.  It’s one of the most troubling parts of his life and left him for many years feeling stifled.  It wasn’t for lack of educational opportunities or family poverty that he was deprived of an education, as is the case with many children in Madagascar.  Instead, as Jean Claude describes it, during his years in what would roughly be middle school, he began having trouble with intense headaches.  His vision would shift in and out of focus, he told me, and in a fit of desperation he would focus as hard as he could, trying to concentrate until a wave of pain would wash over him and he was rendered unable to think of anything. This was his condition for four to five years of his life as he tried to finish middle school until, at his parent’s behest, he stopped going all together.

What followed was a time of serious disconnection for Jean Claude.  Disheartened by his inability to continue studying, he drifted along, helping his family sell their pineapples in the capital from time to time and trying to find a means to move forward in life.  He once expressed to me that he’d considered working for one of the local taxi-brousse organizations that coordinate inter-city travel.  Without diverging too much I should mention that in general, taxi-brousse ilk are a crass bunch and most drunken brawls that I witness on market day in Arivonimamo happen between juiced up taxi-brousse workers. Not the ideal crowd for someone with Jean Claude’s disposition. 

Discouraged as he was by his truncated education, he and his family were determined to cure his headaches and alleviate his burden.  Part of the issue however is context.  Jean Claude revealed to me at one point that he travels the ten mile road between Arivonimamo and his home in Ambohitrambo so frequently because he often feels trapped and claustrophobic in his rural village.  In the ‘ambani-vohitra’ or rural countryside, poverty is much more rampant, fewer amenities exist and opportunities to stimulate your mind are scarce.  Things were easier and people were happier in the ambani-vohitra, Jean Claude tells me, before they were exposed to all of the glitz and glam of the Western world.  Now that certain upper echelons of Malagasy society have appropriated Western customs, acquired modern amenities, and broadcast their circumstance for the rest of the country to see, people have now begun to realize their poverty.  This new consciousness creates unfulfilled desires that erode people’s contentedness, especially for the generation of youth most directly exposed to the stark dichotomies in income and lifestyle that exist in the world. 

Such is the condition that Jean Claude found himself in.  Restless in his hometown and plagued by chronic headaches that clouded his vision and kept him from studying. He tried everything, he told me.  His family took him to doctors in town, he was taken to a traditional healer in the ambani-vohitra and nothing seemed to work.  Until he began to pray.  At that point, he tells me, he began to feel the head pain recede.  He prayed diligently and considered his way forward in life until, as he tells it, he stopped having his headaches and soon after received an invitation from my counterpart organization, PROSPERER, which set he and I on the road towards meeting each other.            

Back in 2010, PROSPERER added a new project to its development arsenal which entailed gathering a group of young kids from a rural village and training them in a new-value added production technique.  The town of Ambohitrambo was an easy choice because even though it’s tucked deep into the countryside of Arivonimamo, it’s widely known that Jean Claude’s hometown produces some of the best pineapple in the entire country.  So the call went out from PROSPERER to the town’s authority figures and group of eligible young kids was culled together which included Jean Claude.  They were all sent two hours West of Arivonimamo, at PROSPERER’s expense, to the sleepy lakeside town of Ampefy, home to an expansive training center for the express purpose of drying fruit. 

With training complete, this group of young kids had seen the road forward but it was a hard road from that point onward.  The volunteer prior to me worked tirelessly to help the cooperative shape its organizational structure, register with the government, hold elections and understand some basic principles of business management.  It was during her tenure in Arivonimamo that Jean Claude was elected President of the cooperative. 

More than two years have elapsed since Jean Claude first assumed the mantle and I’ve been fortunate enough to be present and watch his evolution as a leader throughout this past year.  Prior to my arrival things were at a standstill for quite some time with the fruit-dryers.  PROSPERER in many senses saw the cooperative as their shining star.  It was a youth driven development project they had catalyzed, and in keeping with that vision they agreed to build a production house and provide certain tools. Unfortunately, from the day promises were made to the day construction began and the tools arrived, roughly two years passed.  So the cooperative sat idle, aside from the trainings conducted by the previous Peace Corps volunteer, without which, certain cooperative members have said, things would have fallen apart.

I arrived at an exciting time for both the cooperative, but even more so, for Jean Claude.  This past year the production house was completed, the tools arrived just this past month and the cooperative began its first ever independent production trials. When I first arrived, I could see in Jean Claude someone who was eager make things happen for himself, who was dedicated, inquisitive, and contemplative, but who was also discouraged by his seeming immobile station in life.  What’s more, Malagasy culture has a very hierarchical authority structure in which young people invariably defer to adults and conflict is shunned at all costs.  These are fine cultural traits but in the context of these young people attempting to start their own business, they were unquestionably detrimental.  Jean Claude and many of the cooperative members were beginning to feel jaded and browbeaten after repeated exchanges to no avail, with the numerous authority figures that buzzed around their tiny cooperative while they remained suspended in limbo.

For the first six months I watched Jean Claude churn tirelessly beneath the surface to push things forward.  He tried to hold together the cooperative against an increasingly foreboding backdrop of futility, but I watched his confidence collapse under the weight of it all as would he try to lead meetings or approach important authority figures.  The first six months I spent much of my time trying to share his burden and bolster his confidence. I thought, maybe if he didn’t feel like the lone soldier fighting the good fight, his confidence would build and he’d become the leader that the cooperative needed.  Turns out it worked.  As things began to pick up pace Jean Claude’s demeanor was transformed.  I’ve been with him most days, since the very beginning and now that the work we’re doing is beginning to pick up steam I’ve seen a fire ignite within him. He has a new found energy, a directness when conducting meetings, a plan, a will to push forward. What’s more though is his will to push others forward.  No longer in meetings are his words mumbled, his eyes downcast, his opinions lost in the fray.   He stands up straight, speaks directly, makes swift decisions and approaches authority figures with a poise that didn’t belong to him a year ago.   

I want to end with this: As I mentioned before Jean Claude became pretty spiritual during the point in his life that he was dealing with his headaches and unable to study.  He confided in me how crushed he was that he had to quit school and told me that deep down his dream had been to study management or the economy. He prayed hard during those years he told me, and is convinced that his prayers were answered,

‘All of a sudden one day this Cooperative Taratra thing came along.  And even though I can’t study and learn about the economy anymore, it’s alright, because you came to teach me about it anyway.’    
  
It’s worth mentioning too that, even though he can’t possibly understand the meaning because he speaks no English, of all the American songs we’ve listened to together in my house the one he always comes back to as his favorite is a version of ‘I’ll Fly Away’ by Allison Krauss.  To me, it only seems fitting.

Until next time,

Veloma