Life Normalized

10 months is long enough to make the moon home, let alone Madagascar, however different it may be from the life I’ve known mostly in Kentucky. Events transpire all the time that initially shocked or at the very least caught my attention. Now I would be appalled to live otherwise.

At the market for instance, bargaining is a sport and when vendors new to me see a vazaha (foreigner/white person) coming, watch out, it is game on! It’s gotten to the point that I do indeed feel ripped off when charged a dime higher that the going rate for an item. But then again, a pineapple costs 50cents and a mango a nickel. To be fair, fruit is much cheaper on the coast and veggies are cheaper in the highlands. So right now when a kilo of potatoes costs 200 AR (5cents) near Tana, it’s about 2400 AR ($1.20) here.

Sticking with food for a minute, I’ve come to expect sand in street food and occasionally hotely (restaurant) food. Then again, I expect sand everywhere. Everyday I can sweep out a small pile of sand from my house. Good thing there’s no carpet here!

This one has taken much longer to adapt to and will probably be difficult to reverse (Future-returned-to-the-States-Maria apologizes), the notion of time. I personally moved pretty slowly to begin with, but when it comes to meetings, taxi-brousses, or schedules of any sort, they will never begin or leave on time. When a meeting starts at 2 PM, I show up around 2:15 to gather the participants, shoot the shit for about a half an hour, then finally get around to business. Brousses leave only once they’re full, though make the same trips everyday so there is some routine. But when the guy at the station says the brousse is leaving at 2PM that really means show up by 2:30 or 3:00 so you stuff gets packed on top and you should actually leave between 3-4. And that could be for a 45 min OR 12 hr drive.

Children under the age of 4 are either utterly enthralled, but more likely terrified of me, the white girl. I’ve lost count of the number of children I’ve made cry based solely on my looks. And the best way to tell with a 3-5 year old frozen on the fence because they haven’t decided how to react to me is to smile as big as possible, say the local greeting and wave emphatically. 2 and only 2 reactions will occur. Either the child runs away, preferably to the hidden comfort behind their mother, OR instantly returns an equally emphatic wave and a smile big enough to lift them right off the ground.

To some degree or another, we’re all creatures of habit and it only takes time to adjust to most regular, however odd at first, occurrences.