01.28.2008     Happy New Year/Tratra ny Toana/Bonne Annae

For New Years, me, Steph, and some friends made balls to drop at midnight, using some christmas lights and locally available materials:

 

I was really happy to have Steph here for Christmas/New Years. Unfortunately, her wallet got lifted (sucks), she incited a mob on accident (really scary), and we thought she may have gotten gangrene (but thankfully not). I don't know that she'll be visiting a developing nation again anytime soon.

As for me and as for work:

I've been keeping busy lately grasping at straws in the form of 1) an English club, 2) helping out the doctor at the CSB while my sitemate, Anwar, is on vacation (which, by the way, has inspired me to persue a career in healthcare. I'm looking at the GSU accelerated nursing program), and 3) advising the farmer's association president on how to properly write grant proposals. Oh, and dealing with the moral dilemmas posed when god throws a little pink baby rat at me, with not enough force to kill it when it hits the floor. 

Anyway, not to be Negative Nelly, but here's an op-ed article I was e-mailed, for your reading pleasure: 

January 9, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Too Many Innocents Abroad By ROBERT L. STRAUSS

Antananarivo, Madagascar

THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps' country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger
volunteers.

However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.

This wasn't the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it's much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.

The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.

In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad's backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma's cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on
pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I'm pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.

For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.

Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying
themselves, it doesn't matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.

This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in
Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.

The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater
need for their good will.

Robert L. Strauss has been a Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director. He now heads a management consulting company.
 Copyright 2008<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>
The
New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>

Until next time. 

 

11.09.2007  And the night, the night is yours alone            

Hey Everyone!

Sorry for the lack of updates for the past couple of months. I've been really busy chain-smoking, listening to REM's "Everybody Hurts" on repeat, and wishing my life was more like an Aerosmith music video. BUT, Let me catch you up as to what I've been doing in-between!

Late September, Brannon came to visit! I was super excited to have him here, and we spent quite some time at my site, so he could see the amazing work that I do and the (quite literally sometimes) shit I have to deal with.

Back in the beginning of October, with Brannon along, I helped out with the 3rd annual Tamatave Bike and Pousse-Pousse race to raise AIDS awareness. A ton of volunteers were there, and our resident Tamatave PCV, Margot, did an amazing job putting it together. Something like 350 or so people got free HIV testing, and there was a huge turnout in general.

The pousse-pousse races were really fun, but it was like a zillion degrees and some of the racers were keeling over after running. I don't know how far it was, but it had to be at least a kilometer. My job was to wait at the finish line and give them juice so they didn't die.

All-in-all, it was a great time. I got to watch women do condom demonstrations on a wooden penis for amazing prizes like toothbrushes and hats.

After the bike race, Brannon and I went on vacation to Ille Aux Nattes, the tiny island south of Ille St Marie on the east coast, accessible only by little carved canoes, pushed with sticks by little boys.

It was a beautiful island, but pissed me off a lot. The island's culture seemed to be completely hidden under a cloak of pleasing French tourists. There were no little kids loving me and singing to me. Plus, it was ridiculously expensive and a mosquito (or several) bit my face five times while I slept.

Unfortunately, there aren't any pictures of Brannon and I together, or many pictures in general. But here's a couple:


I guess that's all.  Another update next month. I promise.

 

09.05.2007     JFK, the patron saint of Peace Corps vacations

So, vacation/business was awesome with the exception of almost dying at the hands of an attempted robber. In Tulear, my friend Dan and I were walking back to the hotel from the club, when 4 guys ran up after us, one breaking from the group and running in front of Dan, and over to me, with a knife up in stabbing position. I fell to the ground, and Dan tackled him and the wrestled over me for a minute and he pulled him to the street as the other 3 guys ran up. Dan got the knife, yelled a bunch, and the dudes ran off. Nothing was taken, no one was hurt, and this story may have been a lot better had this not been the zillioth time I've told it. Anyway, here's some pictures!

Leg one of business/vacation - hiking 30 K into the rainforest. Yes, those are Jellies.

 Leg two, attempted pyramid

 Uptown girl

 Boston and I disussing War and Peace

 This little girl kept braiding my hair and it looked horrible

Thanks again for my life, Dan

This is what JFK envisioned in 1961


08.16.2007     Where's OSHA when you need them?

So, take a look at this picture:

The main focus of the shot is obviously my beautifully large and dirty feet, however, check out my left foot. See that wound of some sort in the arch? 

Here's the shory story background: I saw this thing on my foot about a month before this picture was taken, but it didn't really bother me, and I'd figured it was just a cut or something with a small infection. The New Jeanette tries not to pick at everything that's pick-at-able, so I left it alone, thinking it'd just go away after a while. When I took this picture, I realized it had been a pretty long time, so it was time for surgery. 

After bathing, I set out the equipment: 1 safety pin, 1 pair of scissors in case stuff got serious, and finally, some toilet paper for the mess. I took a good look, and immediately got worried. 

I hate myself for not taking pictures of the thing, but I was a little shooken (sp?) up at the time. Here's a depiction I made recently, hopefully you can get the idea:

It was a 5 mm diameter, about 2 mm tall perfect dome. It did not look like an infected cut. It looked like a pus-pocket, that I could only assume was the result of some insects of somesort, but I hoped for the best, and made a prick with my pin. I put the TP to the little bit that oozed out. I looked at the TP. It was green.

Anything green coming out of my body constitutes a red flag and a call for back up, or, in this case, at least moral support. And besides this, the angle at which the pus-pocket seemed to go into my foot (which I estimated to be about 30 degrees) made me think that I’d be digging into the honest-to-god meat of my foot. There could be a lot of blood involved. I was worried.

I wrapped my foot up in a bandana and headed down the road to my site-mate Anwar’s house.

As I’m limping down the road, the gendarme (community police) see my bandaged foot and call me over. They ask what’s wrong with my foot. I say I don’t know. They as to look at it. I show them, and they all say a collective “PARASY!” and laugh at me. “HA HA the vazha (foreigner) has parasy! HA HA!” I said that it was NOT, in fact, funny, and that I was scared I was going to die. But I say that about everything, so they knew I was just being playful.

They referred me to Mama Jinese who, they said, was very skilled at picking out parasy. I went over to her stand at the bazaar, where I can always find her, and she took a look. “Ooooh, masaka!” she said, which means well done or ripe. Jesus.

So, she leaves and comes back with this thin long thorn off some plant, that she assured me was tsy maloto (not dirty). To reassure me, she borrowed my lighter and held the thing in the flame for a few seconds. Then she set to work.

Smoking a cigarette, with my foot propped up on a stool, in the middle of the bazary, she picked at my wound with this not dirty thorn. I thought that white stuff she was picking out was pus. It wasn’t. It was a zillion tiny EGGS.

I had a pea-sized sac of eggs in my foot that I let grow there for a month.

In my defense, we learned about parasy (which are actually female sand fleas that burrow under your skin and lay eggs) in training, but we were told that they’d itch uncontrollably and were usually found under the nails or between the toes. As it turns out, they can also appear on the arch of your foot and not itch.

Anyway, after Mama Jinese was done, I had a wad of toilet paper covered in eggs (which I was told to burn), a crater in my foot, and a crowd of Malagasy people laughing at me for allowing these parasy to grow in my foot for a month. 

Here's a couple of pictures of the healing, a month after the "surgery:"

 

 In the end, I guess I have a good war story. If I could only remember what it was I was fighting for...

Love you, miss you.


07.05.2007     I'm really bad at this

And by "this" I mean both blogging and being a PCV. But I can't dwell on the later anymore. Or the former, really. I'm sorry. I have, like 5 minutes to write this. I'm doing fine, kind of.

I had to go to Tana last month because I was thinking too much and not doing much of anything, including getting out of bed. More recently, I was looking through my mess of papers and found the "Aspiration Statement" I wrote before coming here. My favorite part: "...my professional and educational background got me here, but it's my strength of character that will get me through it." ha ha ehh.

There's a lot of problems here, as you would imagine a developing country has. I started thinking horrible things about the people here - things that would make me immediately hate a person had I heard it coming from someone else. I'm realizing all this, and I'm trying to be positive. Things will get better, though. I know it.

Just as a final random note, the things you enjoy most in life really are the things you're good at. 

 I'll be back around a computer the 25th of this month. I miss everyone.