Year One

A year ago, I got on a plane headed for the great unknown, almost threw-up somewhere over Timbuktu, and, if I was shoving my fellow trainees out of the way, it was that, not my desire to save the world, that had me rushing off. Well, we ended up in a different great unknown and –if you would like the honest truth- what I have been doing for most of the past year has been getting to know it.

I am well-aware that this blog trends toward the lighter-side of life; frankly, a sense of humor is often the only way to survive endless bush-taxi rides, weeks of brain-melting boredom, ceaseless scrutiny. Laughter is the best and only defense. But being a Peace Corps volunteer can be serious business: we are ambassadors of the United States and foot soldiers of international aid, we are profile and most of the time we are alone out there.

It is a unique experience and it offers a unique perspective. PCVs don’t flit over the surface. We are community members, we live like our neighbors- hot, dusty day to hot, muddy day- albeit with a much sturdier safety net to catch us when we struggle to find that middle ground between flitting and sinking like a stone. We don’t just shift worlds, we shift paradigms. We struggle with and eventually take on new thought structures: of time, of progress, of efficiency and productivity, of LIFE.

After a year, I can tell you what I am doing in my small town- I am trying to change people’s minds- though I can’t tell you if I am doing it with any success. Mentality is groundswell and Malagasy people are very traditional, a euphemism we all use for “resistant to change.”

I think many Peace Corps Volunteers have a vaguely preconceived notion of a village somewhere just waiting for an American, to throw rose petals upon their arrival and say: show us the way out of poverty! (Erm, guilty as charged!). But, often itd the case that upon arrival, a PCV discovers that the people of said village have always lived this way, are pretty durn content, and don’t necessarily aspire to much more. Which then begs the question: who wants things to change here?

Which is why international aid is a much trickier business than the commercials would have you believe. It does no good to tell a community what they want, what they need; to come, to build, to leave. The result- and believe me, it is all over Madagascar- is a graveyard of failed projects: broken water pumps and solar panels (no one trained to repair them), unused latrines (people are frightened, or they are taboo), empty schools without teachers (no salaries, no supplies).

To force people to charge, to force-fit Western notions on progress, can be not only ineffective but destructive; it can create backlash; it can close open cultures. When a PCV faces resistance, or more accurately resistant indifference, a certain crisis arises: how convinced am I if this gospel of change?

The people of Madagascar do not necessarily need what the Western world has to offer: big screens and Big Macs, wide highways and air conditioning. They are pretty happy with their stick fences and small houses, dirt yards and skinny chickens. But after living here for some time, one begins to realize that certain standards of humanity are going quietly and sweepingly unmet: 15% of children dying before their first birthday, widespread malnutrition, less than a third of the population finishing primary school, environmental degradation on a mindboggling scale.

Which brings it all back around to changing minds. There is an element fatalism wrapped up in these statistics and before they can be improved, one has to convince people that they are a problem in the first place. As long as communal memory this has been the way of things and when a foreigner shows up saying “hey, this is preventable” or “think about population growth,” there is an understandable undercurrent of suspicion.

So change must first manifest in small, simple messages: “wash your hands,” “grow a garden,” “stay in school,” “plant trees.” Most people will nod politely and go back to what they have always done, but a few will listen. Those few may start a garden and feed their children vegetables; they may build a cookstove or plant a tree where they cut one down. Through a receptive few, the groundswell may grow, change may begin slowly but in earnest, and the unknown may yet become known.