I was
living in Milan, Italy at the time, second semester of my Junior year of
college and my family had just come to visit.
We took a day trip up to the Lake Como area, a short jaunt North of
Milan, and as we strolled along cobbled streets that traversed the hills
surrounding the lake I got to thinking how bizarre life was at that
moment. I was living in a beautiful
apartment, provided by my abroad program, in downtown Milan a few block from
the famed La Scalla opera house. It must have been incredibly expensive. Reflecting upon my circumstances a bit I
started musing aloud, ‘isn’t it odd that I may be living in the most expensive
apartment that I’ll ever live in and I’m probably the poorest I’ll ever be?’
To which
my brother replied, ‘No man…. I could see you being poorer.’
Turns
out he was right.
So here
I am, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar.
It certainly wasn’t the promise of reaping great financial reward that drew
me. I’ve had to justify my life here
over and over to perplexed Malagasy friends who grapple with the reality of a
young American man leaving the land of promise and opportunity, forsaking
family and friends, to come and subsist in Madagascar on the necessarily meager
Peace Corps stipend ($4 per day). I tell
them that what I forgo in wealth, I make up for ten-fold in experience. It could be that individuality and
independence are hallmarks of American culture and create a certain
restlessness in people, a proclivity to, or a need to strike out on one’s own and find life through
experience. But what gets left
behind?
I spoke
with a friend the other day who, after hearing that I taught about business
here said that Madagascar needs more technicians from countries that have ‘lasa
lafitra’ or essentially, ‘gone far.’ Ok,
fair enough I told him. The phrasing of
having ‘gone far’ implied for me some beginning point, which supposedly
Madagascar is closer to, and conjured up the image of a linear progression,
some road that the US is conceivably much further along. I explained to him that if it’s the case that
the US has ‘lasa lafitra’ then what I want to find out by living here is what
we in America may have lost along the way.
To come here and live life as a Peace Corps Volunteer I’ve had to
temporarily sacrifice family and my relationships at home, which turns out to
be the great irony of my life here. The
most significant thing that I’ve left behind in order to learn what may have
been lost on the road to prosperity ends up being dearest to the heart of
Malagasy culture: family.
Malagasy
families are undeniably large. If I were
to quote an average number of children in a Malagasy family I would just be
guessing, but judging by the number of little rascals I have running around my
block, I would guess five or six to be a fair estimate. It’s quite the jigsaw to try to puzzle all
these little buggers to their respective ‘ray-aman-dreny’ or ‘parents,’ but
I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on it over the past year. It’s true that many of the demographic trends
playing out all over the world are also creeping into Malagasy culture, so the
average number of children in a single family is decreasing, but from what I
can tell it’s still stubbornly high. I
asked a child earlier today how many brothers and sisters he had?
‘umm..betsaka,’ was all he said after a moment’s hesitation, deep in thought.
‘Lots.’ I also had an enlightening
conversation about the number of children running around town with an older
woman I often talk to when we pass on the road.
‘So what
do you think of Malagasy families?’ she asked.
‘They’re
great. You guys sure have a lot of children,’ I proposed in order to see what
she had to say about family size.
‘We sure
do, that’s what Malagasy people do.’
‘Doesn’t
that get expensive, feeding everyone and sending them to school?’ I thought
myself pretty clever, hoping I could slowly implant the notion in her that
there was some economic link between poverty and inordinately large family
sizes.
‘Yea,
that’s why we’re so poor,’ she exclaimed matter-of-factly.
‘Oh.’
So it’s
true that people are aware that a large amount of kids running around can
exacerbate economic hardship. Yet kids
in Madagascar don’t just eat up a family’s resources, they’re often an integral
part of keeping the house running. As
soon as they’re physically old enough to handle it kids often help the mother
take care of the house hold chores. The
young guys, not quite as much, but it’s incredibly common to see young girls
responsible for taking care of a baby sibling or called by an overworked mother
to tackle any number of chores. Every
day I see little girls, scarcely twelve years old, parading up and down the
streets with a little baby swaddled in a blanket and cradled on her back.
Malagasy
people also marry considerably younger than Americans. This isn’t an official number but I’ve been
told by friends that 17-20 is a pretty average marital age for Malagasy girls,
whereas men wait slightly longer, maybe 22-24.
As I edge towards 25 you can imagine how obsessed my adoptive families
here have become with finding me a wife.
Once
they are married gender roles are fairly prescribed, though things have begun
to shift in recent years with the exposure to Western norms of gender
equality. Traditionally men go out and
find money, however that might be, and the women stay home to take care of the
house and tend to the family. Farm work
seems to be something that both genders share in equally which plays a
substantial role in the life of most families in this predominantly agrarian
society. I’ve been told that in recent
years it isn’t unheard of for women to be the ones who work and for a man to
play the stay-at-home dad. Yet it’s not
quite common, and gender still plays a significant role in family
dynamics. One particularly interesting
aspect that stood out to me is that though the husband often brings home the
money, it is quickly relinquished to the wife, who then manages the family
finances. I was told a couple of times
that this is very much a distinctive characteristic of the Malagasy family
dynamic.
Something
else that differentiates the practices of an average Malagasy family from those
that have become commonplace in American society is the approach to old age. Nothing will appall a Malagasy person more
than hearing that in many cases, people in America are carted off to a nursing
home, as opposed to moving back in with a son or daughter’s family, once
they’ve grown older and lost the ability to take care of themselves. I asked a friend the other day if
grandparents often lived with their kids and got a very definite,
‘No, not
usually. They often live on their own.’
‘Really?’
I asked.
‘Well
yea, until they’re older and can’t take care of themselves. Then of course they
do. Where else would they live?’
It’s
been awkward before when I’ve watched a mixture of shock and befuddlement wash
over the face of a Malagasy friend as another friend tries to explain what he’d
heard we do to our elders in America.
For most Malagasy people the practice of spending your final years in a
nursing home is ignominious, and sending your loved ones there sins against the
backbone of Malagasy society, the family.
I want
to leave off with a short section of an email I sent to my parents nearly a
year ago, three or so months after getting to Arivonimamo. My dad recently thought to send it back to me
after finding out I was planning to write about family:
“I have a story I’ve been meaning
to tell you guys. So I had just gotten back from the In-Service Training
and was walking around Arivonimamo visiting some of the artisans and delivering
some money from scarves I had sold, when one of the ladies invited me into her
house. Malagasy people are incredibly hospitable so I get
‘mandrosoa’ all the time, which basically means, ‘come on in.’ So I was
delivering this lady her money and caught her just as she was slaughtering a
chicken for lunch. I sat with her for a while and watched her cook and
clean the chicken. We chatted some more
while she spun some silk thread and then when the food was ready they invited
me to eat with them. She told me during lunch that her son is studying in
Indonesia right now and he’ll be home in just under two years, which is crazy
because he has a remarkably similar time frame to me. Anyways, I think
all the talk about her son and my situation and living abroad, and the fact
that I was living a sort of analogous life to her son, got her thinking about
how this must be for you guys. So she asked me if I missed you
guys. I told her I did but that I was lucky because there were so many
people like her to take me in and make me feel at home. At that point I
turned back towards her and noticed that she was teary- eyed and had been
crying a bit. The whole situation just really struck me because no matter
how independent and individual I feel here, and no matter how strange my
situation seems, there’s something so common about it too, or at least it
speaks to how transcendent of culture the emotional ups and downs are for both
me and the people I left in the States.”- August 2012
Who
knows, maybe we’re not so different after all.
Until
next time,
Veloma
