the perils of creek-crossing

Funny how these memories come back at the most unexpected times, from a place so far away and, now, long ago.

From September to December 2007 I lived in Mahitsitady, a town you won't find on any map of Madagascar (off RN2, fokontany of Ambatolaona commune, Manjakandriana district, if you are into looking things up). It's the smallest town/village I've lived in, and it's a beautiful place. It's built around a rice paddy, of which you have a great view from just about anywhere in town, and I could tell stories all day of the gracious hospitality my host family showed in welcoming me into their home for ten weeks, teaching me a language and a culture in ways that a class could never cover. I went back to visit them a few times, in April 2008, in December 2008 with my biological family, and in February 2009 during consolidation, with a volunteer who lived with them in the training stage following ours, but I never got to say goodbye, not really.

But that's not what this is about. Tonight I was thinking about eyesight. The eyesight of seemingly every resident of Mahitsitady and the role it played in my ten-week life there.

In about the amount of time it took us to begin to understand the basics of the Malagasy language, we all picked up on the fact that our host families were watching everything we did. I had my own room, of course, with a door that locked, and I was in there alone for about 10 hours every night (7:30 pm-5:30 am, thereabouts), and the latrine and shower area were relatively private, but as soon as I left the house, I quickly realized I needed to keep in mind that my host family members would have their eyes on me at all times.

There are a few factors that contributed to this. One is Mahitsitady's construction. It's like a huge rice bowl, the central rice fields making up the bowl's foundation, and the houses and twisting dirt paths, most not wide enough for a car, comprising the sides of the bowl. My family lived directly across from the main road into and out of town, so it was a pretty good distance across this vast bowl. You could see their house as you entered town if you knew what to look for, but without perfect vision it would be hard to make out if someone were standing on the balcony (or lavarangana - what a great word) waving to you as you entered town.

They would be waving to you, though, it seems, because the second factor is the seemingly perfect eyesight of every resident of Vohitsara. When I arrived back to visit, someone would inevitably come to greet me as I approached my family's house on the road, because it seemed that they could make out every detail of who was arriving in town, especially by car/truck/Peace Corps vehicle (very rare!) and especially of that person's skin color. My host mom wore glasses, and by the time I went back to visit a second time, my 12-year-old host brother did too, but they seemed to be able to see what was happening a mile across the rice fields regardless, or perhaps as a result.

The final factor was the speed at which word of mouth managed to travel. This one in particular is the eighth wonder of the world, I think, and combined with the town's construction and the residents' impeccable eyesight, there were no secrets. A few of my fellow trainees dropped out of our program during training, and although my family had heard by the time I got home that day about the first one, I was eating dinner with them the day the second one left, and my host mother told my host brother that this person had left. She didn't know exactly who the trainee was, as she lived on the other side of the village from us, but my host mother had at least learned her name, who she lived with, and how sad her host mother was to see her go. She filled my host brother in on the details while we ate dinner, and I think he was the only person more shocked than I was that he hadn't heard all of this yet..."Marina ve???"

Our host families' ability to spy on us from anywhere, or at least hear everything they needed to know from others who had spied on us, made life in such a small town tough at times. There were one or two small shops in town where we could get cookies (Bolos!), stale loaves of bread, and other delicious treats. We would use our weekly allowances to buy afternoon snacks after class or during breaks a lot of days, until one day when one of our language trainers informed us that our host families were insulted to find out that we were buying cookies and other snacks when they thought they were feeding us enough. Rather than trying to explain that we had ENOUGH food, just not the right kind of food when we wanted it (we're Americans! we eat our feelings!), and that we were perfectly satisfied with their provision and content to eat both even if we weren't actually hungry, we reacted by trying to figure out how they could possibly know that we'd bought Bolos after class - were they standing on the balconies watching us? Talking about us as they walked to fetch water?

I never once saw anyone from my family standing on the balcony staring off across town waiting for something exciting to happen, but I do know that Sitraka, my host brother, showed up in my room one evening shortly thereafter asking me if I had any cookies. He knew!

Most weekends, when I would take my laundry down to the little creek that was designated by my family and others near us for doing laundry, my host mother would come with me and bring Sitraka, and she would finish the whole family's laundry long before I got half of mine done, so then she would take all the pairs of pants that I had, and begin scrubbing them herself, insisting that pants in particular are "difficult" so she needed to take care of them for me. Sitraka would jump in and help too, and it was a whole family affair. Glorious.

One week, though, she stayed behind for some reason, which was honestly a bit of a relief to me, a step toward independence as the end of training neared (although my first priority at my site was finding a mpanasalamba, or person to do my laundry for a fee - I was over it). Sitraka trailed along, though, and got probably half my laundry done for me.

He insisted on taking a different route than usual to the creek, though - rather than walking the longer way around, he took me on narrow paths in between the rice fields, which at one point involved crossing a narrow little creek on a bridge made out of two tree branches. The gap was probably at least ten or twelve feet wide, too far to jump, and the branches were probably each a diameter of less than six inches. They were perfectly shaped, sturdily placed next to each other, but still very narrow, as narrow as one of my feet, and as I watched Sitraka waltz across like he could have done it blindfolded, I realized this was going to be more of an ordeal than it should have been. I was carrying a basket full of a week's laundry, and as I started to walk across nonchalantly I quickly chickened out and stepped back onto land, also known as a narrow path next to a rice field. Sitraka was obviously trying to mask his amusement, maybe just respecting his vazaha zoky, and watched as I stood sideways, feet crossing both branches as my toes hung off the edge, and inched my way across very tentatively. I was probably halfway across when I realized that, no matter what she had been busy with that required her to stay behind, my host mother and most of the other neighbor families were all probably standing on their lavaranganas right now watching and laughing hysterically as I tried not to lose my balance and fall into the creek, which would be the only thing worse than inching my way so slowly across this "bridge."

I made it. I also made it on my way back, even though my basket of clothes was about seventeen times heavier since it was all soaking wet, but I'll never forget the dread that filled my heart as I realized just how rickety that little bridge was, and how I had to cross it with presumably the entire village watching.