Tamana Tsara

I've been at site now for three months, a critical period according to Peace Corps. During training, everyone told us the key to success is just getting through the first three months, integrating in your community and not quitting.

Integrating is a funny concept. Everything is so different from my existence in America that it is sometimes hard to judge how accepted I really am. The other day as I fetched water, always an amusing diversion for the neighborhood since I can't balance full buckets of water on my head and usually end up watering the road as I slowly make my way home, a child about six years old came running up, pointing and excitedly yelling, "Vahaza!" at me. This has been a constant occurrence and isn't necessarily an insult, just a happy greeting of, "Foreigner!", but I don't hear it as much at site anymore. (Being shouted at by little kids as their parents laugh used to annoy me, but now I just think about Katie's coping strategy which is to imagine yelling, "African!" at them if were were walking down the street in Denver, and that thought makes me smile.)

As I sometimes do, I patiently stopped and told him that I wasn't a vahaza since I live nearby and that my name is Melanie, to which he replied, "No, you are a vahaza!" I again said, "No, I live right over there. Where do you live? See, we're neighbors, we're almost the same." He became even more excited, yelling and pointing frantically, "No, you are a vahaza! Look, look at her, everyone! She is a vahaza!" I looked at the kid: filthy, torn clothing, florescent white snot oozing from his nose (why is Malagasy snot so very, very white?), and started to laugh. Who am I kidding? Of course I'm a vahaza. It's not just that I'm the palest thing around (as Frank told me I would be before I left), but it's everything about me: my short hair, my teeth (yes, I have them), my wardrobe, my shoes, my inability to eat six cups of rice in one sitting, my fatness, my aloneness, all my stuff. To tell this poor, snot-nosed kid that we were similar was insulting to him.

So perhaps I'm not fully integrated in my community, and maybe I never will be, but I am at least well-settled, or tamana tsara, a well-used phrase here and also a common greeting as in, "Are you well settled?" I can now respond truthfully, "Yes, I am very well settled, thank you," especially compared to my first month here when I was in despair over not knowing anything (a terrible feeling) and idealizing home. Now, sometimes it takes me a second to remember that people are staring at me because of my differentness, and not because I have a button missing or something stuck in my teeth.

In general, I'm happy here. It's hard, by far the hardest thing I've ever done, but it is also fun. It isn't the type of fun I had in Denver: there aren't any good bands to hear in a dark, crowded Blue Bird, no meeting up with the girls at Charlie Brown's for what will inevitably turn out to be a big night, and no perusing the morning paper over a big Americano, but it is fun in a completely incomparable way. It's fun to have a joking exchange with someone and to not even register that you're communicating in another language (until you try to explain it in English and it isn't even funny). It's entertaining being proposed to by drunk guys who completely ignore me when they're sober. (When they tell me I'm beautiful I want to say, "Have you even seen me?" I was low-maintenance before moving here, but am barely female now. I'm so greasy, dirty and bundled in layers of clothing...even on my rare, clean days I do not even come close to the beauty of the Malagasy girls with their clear, smooth complexions, perfect figures and erect posture, and their long hair coiled tightly in buns or woven into many shiny, black braids.) And it's fun to be so calm. Now that my first month of panic is behind me, I can enjoy simply being here. There are no real demands on me, I'm surrounded by people who are always happy to see me, I'm well rested and well fed, and since lateness is expected, there is never, ever a reason to rush. It is the lifestyle I was looking for when I applied to Peace Corps, and is everything that my life in Denver wasn't.

I'm on my way to a training, then going to see the beach at Ile Ste. Marie (where the pirate cemetary and beach bungalows were in the video Jackie sent, Mom & Dad), and though I am looking forward to seeing my PC friends and the Indian Ocean, I'm also looking forward to coming back to my town. There may be one or two kids who yell "Vahaza" at me when I get off the taxi brousse at the road leading to my house, but there is also sure to be a gathering of neighbors helping me carry my bag in and bringing me food to welcome me home.