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

Here's the link to the article on locusts:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21955740

Farming

Thus far in my writing I’ve completely neglected to discuss agriculture in Madagascar. This is has been an unfortunate oversight as agriculture is arguably the most essential sector of the nation’s economy.

First and foremost, though I am still technically a Community Economic Development (CED) Volunteer in name, word has come down from on high in Washington DC that Madagascar must cease to have four Peace Corps sectors, and henceforth the CED and Environment sectors will be tumbled together and bundled under the title, Agriculture, focused primarily upon food security issues.  As I took my oath as a CED volunteer, my mandate stands as is, unaltered.  Meaning my fellow CED volunteers and I, the last of our kind here in Mada, are free to work with artisan cooperatives as the primary focus of our service. However, from here on out Peace Corps is focusing on increased crop yields, crop diversification, and value added processing.  As luck would have it, work with value-added production through the fruit drying kids has become my big ticket project at site, so hopefully I’ll be able to leverage the newly disposed resources of Peace Corps to my advantage as things move forward.

Before coming to this country I knew very little about its agricultural production.  More specifically, I had no idea about one of the most striking facets of Malagasy culture, the diet.  It may be surprising but Madagascar actually consumes more rice per capita than any other nation on Earth. I’ve previously alluded to the magnitude of rice consumption in this country, but the Malagasy people are absolutely voracious when it comes to their rice.  This is largely a function of habit, of course, but a habit that has been perpetuated by centuries of poverty, solidifying rice as the only true viable crop capable of sustaining the 22 million inhabitants of Madagascar. 

In a country as poor as Madagascar it is not uncommon for subsistence agriculture to dominate the economic sphere.  Estimations from individuals around town here in Arivonimamo assume that roughly 70% of households own an individual rice field, or a small plot of land on which they grow their own food.  Surplus, when there is any, is sold in the market but there is very little price stability.  When the harvest  season of a specific crop approaches, the only time a family farmer is likely to see much of a surplus, the price of goods will plummet as the market is flooded with that specific product.  For example, during the month of February, the high season of pineapple here in Arivonimamo, I can find a good sized pineapple in the field for 200 Ar (roughly 8 cents), however in the low season prices can skyrocket to 1000 Ar (about 45 cents).  Given the relative purchasing power of Ar I would say it’s roughly equivalent to getting a pineapple for the price of a candy bar during the high season, versus the cost of going out to eat at a fast food place in the low season.  For a population that hangs by a thread in terms of their economic security, the distinction is glaring. 

Still, despite all of Madagascar’s rice production, the level of consumption still leaves Madagascar importing rice from other nations, notably Pakistan and China, to feed its insatiable appetite.  The government of Madagascar has introduced price stabilization schemes in the past aimed at decreasing the nation’s exposure to commodity price shocks.  Still, the people of Madagascar are acutely aware of fluctuations in the price and availability of rice.  In Madagascar, the few months prior to the rice harvest, which begins in the month of April, there is a period known as ‘maitso-ahitra.’ This essentially means the time of the ‘green grass,’ when the stalks of the rice are coming up but are yet to be ripe for harvest.  This is one of the direst times of the year, and amongst the Peace Corps community here it’s referred to as the hungry season.  During this time of year people are stretched thin, the rice from the previous year is running low, prices are climbing, and many farmers have no recourse but to wait for their lifeblood, the rice harvest, to deliver respite from months of scraping by.  I’ll always remember the words of wisdom delivered to my training group last April by Peace Corps’ visiting regional security advisor. We asked him to expound upon the intricacies of the political crisis and to give us his honest appraisal of whether or not we would be evacuated.  He looked off over the lake as he lit a cigarette and with a callous exasperation said, ‘if you want to know how the winds are blowing here in Madagascar, watch the price of rice.’

Now I can’t say honestly that I had any intention of getting into farming here in Madagascar.  I figured I’d give rice a shot, because, well, it seemed criminal to live here for two years and not learn a thing about farming rice. As is the habit of this place, an opportunity to become integrally involved in farming fell into my lap and I’ve been trying to take advantage of the situation. 

A few months back I’d been discussing voter registration with some of my neighbors and found out that one of them, Hanitra, worked for the Malagasy census and voter registration organization, CEN-IT.  She mentioned that the following day she was going to visit the rural village of Ankeniheny, a few miles outside of town, and asked if I would like to tag along.  Naturally I jumped at the opportunity, and when the morning came, we hiked together along the main road until we arrived at the first outcropping of houses. 

So as to be observant of the Malagasy hierarchy, the first house we passed by was that of the president of the small village.  We were warmly greeted by the family, but the hospitality quickly succumbed to quizzical gazes and puzzled expressions.  Who exactly is this vazah (foreigner) that you’ve brought to our town Hanitra? She began to explain that I was a neighbor who worked with artisan groups, but I stepped in to expand on the explanation.  Upon hearing my Malagasy a smile broke across the woman’s face. 

‘You work with artisans?’ she asked, ‘because we have silk weavers here in town.  Could you work with them?’

‘Of course, I’d love to meet them.  Let’s set a time and I can come back.  We can talk about forming an association or a cooperative,’ I told her.

‘Or wait….,’ she said, as her eyes lit up, ‘what about farmers, can you work with farmers? What about a farming association?’

Her enthusiasm was infectious so I agreed to return. It’s important in Madagascar to capitalize on those moments that you find genuine diligence, so we set a time and as the day of the meeting approached I studied all things pertaining to the formation of a cooperative or association, the relative benefits of each, the requisite paperwork, any fees associated, until I felt I could properly teach the subject.

The day of our meeting arrived and as I pulled up to the house on my bike I was greeted by more than fifteen women and one man, all of whom introduced themselves as future members of our group.  In interest of time I’ll skip the mundane details of our meeting but in the end the farmers decided to form an association, as opposed to a cooperative, and set a date for the big meeting during which they would decide the association’s leadership and certify a constitution formally establishing the group.  When the time of that meeting arrived I was with them as well as we talked through elections and the necessary documents for the association’s registration with the government.  I was slightly disheartened that in a group of 15 women and 1 man, the man was chosen as president of the association.  Later, out in the yard, I asked one of my confidants in the group why on earth they chose the only man to be their leader. ‘Isn’t that how it has to be?’ she asked.  In hindsight I should have made that clear during previous trainings, but to be quite honest, the existence of that misconception wasn’t anywhere close to on my radar.

Since that meeting things have been progressing at a breakneck speed and it’s all that I can do to try to keep up with the development of their association.  I feel a responsibility to the group, having helped plant the seed for the association, but the work ethic of these farmers and the enthusiasm they have for moving forward with the project leaves me playing catch up much of the time.  It’s inspiring that every time I go out to visit I have to get the news on what new initiative they’ve decided to tackle.  Productive competence is something that’s lacking in many of the artisans I encounter, in part as a result of failings in the education system, in part due to a cultural predisposition to shirk risk and fear change. However, I’m absolutely floored by the diligence of this little farming association.  They are currently farming a communal plot of land in order to sell the products to a larger commercial client and told me recently that they plan to take a small vacation together as a bonding experience for the community.

The only speed bump that we’ve hit thus far was during the association’s registration at city hall.  There are two deputy mayors who can formalize a cooperative.  One of them told me that there was no cost associated with legally registering a group, and then at a later date, when I was with some members of the association, we were told it would cost roughly 50,000 Ar….. Guess who we decided to go with.

My intention in writing this entry was to convey the importance of agriculture, particularly rice, in the lives of people here in Madagascar.  With that in mind I want to conclude by making reference to a fairly alarming piece of news that I was recently made aware of.  It may already be known by many individuals reading this outside of Madagascar that in the previous week both CNN and BBC broke a story about a plague of locusts bearing down on Madagascar. According to sources I’ve come across, one half to two-thirds of the nation could be affected by this swarm of crop-devouring insects and Madagascar will soon require a massive influx of funds for eradication efforts along with food aid to keep the population from starving.  Not to mention we’re heading into election season soon so…we’ll just have to watch the price of rice.

Until next time,

Veloma

Law and Order

The tragic reality of Madagascar’s reputation abroad is that the strongest cognitive association the country has, at least as far as the Western world is concerned,  is to a children’s cartoon about a group of eccentric animal castaways, creating a positive hue in the mind of the average Westerner. It is phenomenal that the country receives greater international recognition as a result of the films, as opposed to being an enigmatic landmass adrift off the Southeastern coast of Africa.  However, this fuzzy association that much of the Western world has to the country of Madagascar papers over the dire reality of a country teetering on the verge of anarchy as a semi-failed state.  I have no intention of deliberately disparaging Disney, yet my experience here begs the question whether they might have the gall to make the same film and name it Somalia.

The reason I bring up this point, and more particularly my approximation of Madagascar as a semi-failed state, is that there have recently been a number of striking incidents in my life here that shine a glaring light on the lack of state capacity.  The political theorist Max Weber famously defined a state as a political entity having legitimate claim to exercise of force over a defined territory. So in one sense Madagascar is a semi-failed state in that the current governing body is only recognized as legitimate by a handful of nations. Another factor is a dearth of state capacity, which leads to the degeneration of law and order here.

To provide some context for this story I’ll mention that I was selected by Peace Corps, along with a few other volunteers to participate in a Training and Design and Evaluation workshop to help structure training for new groups of volunteers in my sector.  My good buddy James was also selected and seeing as I’d been in this country for nearly a year and had yet to see the rainforest, I figured I would visit him at his site out East, close to Moramanga, and take the time to visit his forest before we both made our way to the Mantasoa training site.  I was enthusiastically greeted by James in Moramanga and ushered into his favorite bar in town to have a beer while we waited for a taxi-brousse (local van transportation between cities), to take us to his village. 

‘I should tell you, right now is a pretty exciting time in my town, and I’m going to have a lot of people I need to talk to as soon as we get back,’ James said as we watched the rain coming down in sheets outside the door.

‘Of course man, no problem, but what’s new in town?’ I asked.

‘Well, we had five guys in town just get out of jail today and it’s looking like there’s going to be a pretty big homecoming for them,’ he replied.

As the story goes, there were five fairly well liked and important young men in town, some of whom were guides in the forest.  One day, for reasons still unclear, a lady up the road leveled an accusation against these five young men claiming that they were guilty of clearing and burning the forest, allegedly a crime in Madagascar.  Given the prevalence of the practice however, I would guess that often there’s an ulterior motive on the part of the accuser that would lead to the accusation and eventual incarceration on such a charge. 

An ulterior motive may well have been the case in this particular instance, according to James, who informed me that the accuser was a moderately wealthy, ‘land-grabbing’ woman who lived slightly outside of town and was universally despised.  I then asked his honest opinion about whether these men were cutting and burning the forest….

‘No man, I mean, I’m not sure but…. pssshh, na not at all.’

I was then told that in many Malagasy prisons, and supposedly this particular one, individuals are crammed into a small room with the rest of the inmates, regardless of duration.  In a country where many families cohabitate with rats in their family homes one can only imagine the condition of the prisons.  In addition, the onus is on the incarcerated individual’s family to pass by the jail, often located in another town, to provide food or money to feed the inmate for the duration of his prison term. Beyond blighting one’s reputation, incarceration is often an insufferable hardship for families who in the end are often forced to pay a bribe to extricate a loved one from prison.

Later that night James and I met up with his most trusted friend and closest ally at site, a middle-aged man named Tahiry.  We parked on a bench inside a candle lit wooden shack that served as the town’s general store. The wood plank counter was cluttered with plastic tubs of corn, rice and an assortment of beans.  Behind the counter, stacked against the wall, were bottles of warm beer, sodas and small bottles of rum.  As the town was in a festive mood and I had just arrived, James ordered three small glasses of rum for the three of us.  As the rain pelted down outside I began to make small talk with Tahriy about his family and life with James.  Tahiry, an exuberant man in general, quickly turned somber and began to explain how his family was all very distraught over the recent disappearance of his sister’s daughter.  She’s only eleven years old he tells and was last seen by her younger sister at their house, getting into a car full of people in it. It’s unclear who took the young girl or where she may have been taken to.  Tahiry explained that his family has informed the police and are doing all they can but also noted that these things happen in Madagascar all of the time and the children are rarely found.  What’s more, many individuals in town suspect that it could be the work of black market organ thieves, a business that allegedly thrives in some parts of Madagascar. 

Apart from the organ thieves, another insidious force infecting Madagascar is the Dahalo.  Ostensibly roving bands of cattle-thieves in their nascent stages, dahalo have in certain regions evolved into qausi-Mafioso, para-military organizations that rape and pillage towns throughout Madagascar, most significantly in the South of the island.  It’s unclear how centralized control has become over dahalo in the South.  I’ve heard on numerous occasions of military being deployed to combat dahalo forces as they ravage towns.  As far as I’ve gathered, in the central highlands dahalo do exist but are mostly unaffiliated gangs of bandits.  Imagine a gang in the United States but semi-militarized.

As the night wore on with Tahiry, conversation meandered to the subject of the dahalo, at which point James leans to me and says, ‘Eric, you’ve got to hear his dahalo story, it’s crazy.’

One late night in 2011, Tahiry explained, there was a band of dahalo that passed through the town on a large flatbed truck making its way between two larger cities.  The dahalo disembarked and entered a small wooden hut housing one of the village shops on the edge of town.  That night the shop was being watched over by one of the village elders, a very well respected man in town.  Brandishing semi-automatic weapons, the dahalo demanded all of the money the old man had hidden in the store.  After cleaning out the shop’s coffers a member of the gang cracked the old man on the head, splitting his skull, and leaving him to die. 

When the town’s people heard the commotion, knowing it must be dahalo, the men of the village rushed out brandishing machetes and planks of wood.  Details of the events that transpired are foggy but the men in town were able to overwhelm and capture a few of the dahalo members, while the remainder scampered into the bushes with large gashes on their arms. Having captured the dahalo, the men in town proceeded to bind the bandits before cutting off their hands and feet.  From Tahiry’s retelling it is unclear whether the dahalo died from loss of blood or were then killed after having their hands and feet removed, yet either way Tahiry assured me that those dahalo were maty (dead).  A few days later, Tahiry says, a man came out of the forest looking sickly and asking for water at a store on the outskirts of town. Noticing a gash on his arm the store owner hastily alerted the men of the town who apprehended the remaining bandits.  Tahiry assured me that they suffered the same fate as those who had been caught a few days earlier. 

‘So why,’ I asked him, ‘aren’t these individuals taken to the police?’ To which he explain that in the beginning, dahalo were taken to the prisons when they were captured.  Yet as soon as one was incarcerated, someone would pay a bribe to the police, and the townspeople would see the bandit ride out of town in the back of a flatbed truck a few weeks later.  I’ve even heard tell of murders in this country where the murder weapon was found to be registered to a policeman yet had been mysteriously appropriated by the dahalo.  I do not level these accusations lightly but corruption is one of the most intractable and devastating diseases in this country, and I’ve been told unequivocally that in certain cases, not all mind you, the line between protector and perpetrator becomes hazy. Tahiry continued to explain to me that he doesn’t wish things to be this way. He implored me to understand that village justice becomes a cruel and necessary pre-condition of existence when the government has failed you.  When your town is fighting off the dahalo and you can’t rely on the government to protect your family, honor due process or respect the rule of law, instinctually a community devolves into a brutish Hobbesian condition in order to defend itself. It’s either a nasty brand of vigilantism inspired by self-preservation or the risk of losing one’s family.   

I am not going to say I agree with him or sanction the town’s response to the dahalo. All I will say is, I’m glad it’s not me making the decision.

Until next time, Veloma.