This is hecka long. Do you have enough time? Sorry.

Visual Aids
The first thing I want to talk about this month is the most awesome poster in my health education visual aids arsenal.
This poster is about family planning and it brings the house down. When I first saw it I thought it was a bit...extreme. "Aiza no tianao?" means "Which do you like?", Zaza maro misesy (lots of babies in a row) or fiterahana voarindra (well-planned births). The poster basically asks what do you prefer, everything in your life going wrong, or everything in your life going right. Great, I think we all know the answer to that one. But this poster gets people talking and thinking and all worked up in a way that I can never do in a kabary. All I do is open it up in a group of people and the ensuing heated discussion does all my work for me. I'll insert a question or comment here and there and discuss the logistics of contraception in Madagascar, but the pros and cons of big versus little families, the advantages of family planning for all members of the community and the country as a whole, different family planning methods, all get covered as people digest this poster. They take every detail completely seriously (I have had to explain on multiple occasions that it's a drawing and I don't know what the people's names are) and they think it's hilarious. First they count the children ("1, 2, 3,...SEVEN! and Eight is in her belly!"). Then they crack up because the woman is pregnant and she's still "mibaby"-ing (carrying on her back) her last child. Then they discuss her hair, the kids' clothes, how her husband is mean and angry, how fat the other family is, how they all have sandals, and on and on. It's incredible. I got another copy of the poster to put up at the clinic (that's what this picture is from) and I always see people leaving the road to come look at it. People who have already seen it love to explain it to first-time viewers too. They point out all the details they noticed the last time they looked at it. It's amazing.

Baby-weighing

I know what you’re thinking.: Baby-weighing sounds like a half step up from politician-baby-kissing – a photo-op, not reflecting any serious concern for the squirming baby’s actual wellbeing. And indeed, pictures of grinning volunteers placing babies on scales feature prominently in all Peace Corps recruitment literature and advertising. But as I recently explained to a surprised PCV in the education sector, we do! Actually weigh babies! Even when not accompanied by members of the press.

Once a month I head out with either of the two baby-weighers (I really think that might be their full-time job) from the Mananjary NGO I work with, to meet up with a local mpanentana (health educator) and a scale in villages all over the commune. In the past few months I’ve been adding venues to my tour, as I figure out which of the villages the NGO works in I can get to by 9 am on foot or bicycle. (I’m really trying to figure out how to get to all of them soon however, because the NGO’s USAID contract is up in September, and then it’ll just be me and the mpanentana from the village).

The reason that I want to write about baby-weighing this month is that I just started working with the other baby-weigher and it was a totally different experience. Despite all attempts at creativity, baby-weighing is essentially a nag-fest. The mothers that show up with their kids each month (already the diligent ones just for coming) have heard the information about healthy food and balanced diets before. The challenge is to come up with ideas (before the talk and in conversation with the mothers) of realistic changes they can make in their kids’ diets, and present them in a way that’s engaging, non-critical, and readily recalled when they go back to the kitchen. Humor is good, but the material is a bit dry – anyone know any good cassava jokes? One of the baby-weighers is often in a hurry, and after one of us does a short talk, feedback on each child’s growth is limited to a comment – “Your kid did/didn’t grow” – and sometimes a “why?” when the kid lost weight (the answer is always that s/he had malaria or diarrhea). As a PCV my job should be to talk with some of the mothers individually while we’re working, particularly with the mothers of kids who didn’t gain weight that month, but I totally suck at this. My Malagasy is finally good enough that I can understand most of what the women say to me instead of just blurting health slogans at them, but I always feel like I’m approaching them with demerits or something when I try to talk to them right after they’ve been told in front of everyone that their baby lost weight. The advantage and disadvantage of being a vazaha is that everyone turns to look at me if I start talking, so it’s like I’m calling them out in front of their friends. It’s hard to be encouraging in that context. So I was pleasantly surprised to weigh babies with the other guy from the NGO, who has a completely different style. The first time I weighed babies with Richard it took all day to weigh kids in 2 sites. We had to eat lunch twice (and turn down a third) and drink coffee in 3 different places because we did so many courtesy visits to village elders, etc. The main difference was that instead of weighing kids outside, we did it inside this tiny hut, so we pretty much had to take it one family at a time. Richard told each mother how much weight their kid had gained and usually had a conversation with her if her child had not grown. I was able to go back and forth between talking to moms inside with Richard, and sitting outside with the other mothers, talking about healthy food in general but not about any one child specifically. It was time-consuming, but a lot of fun and made me feel more like a health worker, and less like a census taker, hoarding the data for myself and my NGO to analyze later, without real people cluttering up the numbers.

Dance Parties

My days tend to alternate between days of massive exercise where I’m hiking up and down cliffs all day, and days where I don’t leave my house. To keep my muscles from atrophying as a result of the latter, I’ve started having dance parties on these lazy evenings. Lacking both speakers and electricity, these are by necessity headphones dance parties. Here is the problem: the “dancing” that I do involves a lot of wild arm-flailing because I’m going for maximum calorie utilization, THUS I am constantly yanking the headphones out of my ears. There is very little that provokes me to instant, way-out-of-proportion-to-the-stimulus anger (think Incredible Hulk) like the feeling of earbuds being unexpectedly yanked out of my ears. My eye is twitching just thinking about it. So in case anyone else has this problem, and also to give you a really goofy mental image of me, I’m going to share the headphone-management system I’ve devised to protect myself and the breakable objects in my house. It’s complicated, so suggestions for any improvements would be very welcome.

1) First put the earbuds in your ears so the cord is behind your head. Now start the music. Louder…

2) Twist the cord around your ponytail 3 or 4 times. Don’t forget to leave enough slack so the headphones don’t get yanked out when you twist your head (shudder…).

3) Tuck the mp3 player under your hairband (Walkman/Discman/Giant-old-iPOD users are going to have to invent another headphone-management plan).

4) Next, put on a beanie over your whole head/hair/music player/ears.

5) Finally, put your headlamp on over the hat so that it secures everything in place. You can turn the headlamp on to really put the “party” in “lone dance party,” but your neighbors might come over to investigate if there’s both strange clomping and a light show coming from your house. Remember, only you can hear the music.

Mazotoa! (Enjoy)

The Gospel

I went to a gospel music concert by a group from the Mananjary Evangelical Church. It was nuts. I could have been in Alabama. Robes and everything. And they were good. The two main guys should have recording contracts. They both wore angled fedoras with their robes and one of them didn’t take his sunglasses off the whole show. All four hours of it. Apparently “Which songs should we sing?” was not the question that got asked at rehearsals, but rather “What order should we sing every song we’ve ever learned?” I made the same observation after leaving a four-hour Christmas Eve service at midnight, but I assumed that that church was just caught in the totalitarian grip of an egomaniacal choir director. It was really a shame for this gospel show however, because they were amazing, but by the end of the show the only people left in the once-packed town hall were (I think) friends and relatives of the performers. This included me both because they were too good to walk out on and also because the sunglasses guy was one of the animateurs for my friend’s agriculture NGO. I was having a great time imagining him singing Malagasy gospel songs about intensified rice production.

My Cat

…died. He ate rat poison (or a poisoned rat) from the mayor’s office on Friday the thirteenth. It took him 3 days to die. The first day he puked 5 times all over my house. The second day he crawled under my house and was completely unreachable. When I finally coaxed him close enough to me to pick him up and move him into the house he just laid on the ground not moving for another day. I was spoonfeeding him oral rehydration solution. It was awful. I’ve never had a pet die before and I’d only had Pichou for about a month. I felt so horrible because I had adopted him from my friend who was moving back to France and then I had to tell her that he died.

I wanted to write about Malagasy Independence Day, visiting my friend’s family in her village 60 km away, coffee, whale food, and knocking over my pô (bucket that I pee in at night and when it’s raining and when I don’t feel like walking to the kabone) at night while having a dizzy spell, but this is getting way too long and I don’t want you to stop reading. Or get tired of me. Til next time, veloma.