Tag: Expat in Madagascar

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Africa In Photos Madagascar The Nomadic Life

5 Reasons Why Antsirabe is Madagascar’s Best Urban Destination

Antsirabe

Happy May, blogosphere. I’m sure for most of you it means a thawing out of the winter that lingered in the northern hemisphere, but for my part, I’ve been camping out in the same pair of sweatpants and light sweater-down-jacket combination for the past three days. Normally, I hate cold weather, but somebody imported maple trees to Antsirabe, which means at least in that small pocket of Madagascar, I can bike over crunchy, brown leaves, and indulge in the charm of autumn – my favorite season. It makes the chill worth it.

Fall in Antsirabe

But then again, Antsirabe in general just makes all the frustrations of life in Madagascar worth it. A small city just 160km south of Antananarivo on the RN7, I would argue that Antsirabe is Madagascar’s best urban gem (and this is even after visiting Mahajunga, Diego, Fort Dauphin, Tamatave, Fianaratsoa, and Antananarivo). In a country most visited for its national parks and wildlife, it’s easy to gloss over the cultural aspects of travel here. However, Antsirabe is a compact, and easy to reach city that has it all.

1. La Cabana

La Cabana

Next door to the hostel I usually stay at is a small, Malagasy bar called “La Cabana”. They are locally known for their freshly grilled chicken (actually marinated!) and cheap, cold beer. It’s one of the few places I regularly see foreigners and Malagasy happily mixed, I imagine because the prices are still ‘Malagasy’, but it doesn’t have the same dodgy, dingy appearance of most Malagasy bars. I also love it because it’s literally a place where everyone knows my name…

How to get there: Go to the ‘Score’ grocery store on the main avenue and follow the smell of grilled chicken.

2. Concerts at Alliance Française

Main Avenue

I have yet to figure out why the local music scene in Antsirabe is so vibrant – some bands from the area have even gone off to tour in La Reunion and France – but you don’t see me complaining. Almost every Friday night, folks in Antsirabe can find a live concert happening at Alliance Francaise, either for free or a small cover charge of about 5,000AR. The bands are almost always Malagasy, sometimes traditional but sometimes more of a rock/reggae kind of vibe.

How to get there: Alliance Francaise is on a small street near the supermarket, Score, and the train station.

3. A smaller, cleaner version of Antananarivo

nine

Antsirabe and Antananarivo hold a lot of similarities – both are highland cities and major economic enters – which makes Antsirabe, the country’s third largest city, feel like a less grimy and more manageable sister to Tana. Throughout the city are signs telling residents to keep streets clean and it seems like people actually listen. Sure, there’s a lot of room for improvement, but compared to most urban areas in Madagascar, Antsirabe is down right tidy. Most spots worth seeing are within walking distance of each other, and a lot of the slummy grittiness of Tana is practically non-existent in Antsirabe. For this reason, if I were to use any one word to describe Antsirabe, it would be ‘pleasant’.

4. Bikable streets and day trips

Madagascar's Highlands

Okay, I was in Antsirabe when that goat jumped on me and my bike, but for the most part wide, flat roads and slow traffic – half the vehicles are rickshaws, bikes, and cows – make it a really bikable city. Just a few kilometers south-west of the city on hilly but well-paved roads sits Lake Tritriva, a lake-filled crater. About 22 kilometers away is another small highland town, Betafo, which I personally love biking to since there’s less traffic on the road west of Antsirabe than the RN7.

5. Hamburgers

Pousse Pousse Cafe

The Pousse Pousse Café, a restaurant at the center of town near the small market (Antsenakely), has created a unique ambiance with table and chair sets made out of rickshaws locally known as pousse-pousses. I love everything on the menu, but for Peace Corps volunteers we naturally gravitate towards the place for their hamburgers. Chez Dom, another establishment further north of the town center, has a dining experience much like eating in someone’s living room. Dom, an amicable French gentleman, rocks the hamburgers by finishing them off with blue cheese.

How to get there: For Pousse-Pousse, it’s in the small market (Antsenakely) just near the Shoprite. Chez Dom is an unsuspecting house on a small road just off the RN7 by Zandina’s. Look for the giant sign to point you in the right direction

And a few more photos before I leave…

Cathedral Pousse Pousse in Autumn Street Kid

Photos: (1) A street kid shying away from my camera (2) A view of the maple trees from Ravaka hostel (3) Outdoor seats at La Cabana (4) The main avenue at sunset, just near the Alliance Francaise (5) A cobblestone street near Antsenakely (6) The RN7 about 15 kilometers south of Antsirabe (7) Taking photos while anxiously awaiting our hamburgers at Pousse-Pousse cafe (terrible lighting) (8) Rush hour traffic outside the Cathedral d’Antsirabe (9) Another shot of the maple trees (10) Another street kid

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Africa Madagascar Peace Corps Teaching Abroad The Nomadic Life

My Peace Corps House is a Middle School

neighbor

neighbor

In the late night cover of darkness, I wander out to the naked goal post in the school’s field. The gates are locked up, the lights turned off, and blissfully, all the schoolchildren have gone home. The grounds have become nothing more than a cluster of sealed off, dark and empty buildings. I jump up to hang from the goal post, emulating the teenage boys that monkey around on it between classes. I try to do a pull-up, and fail. Suddenly the thought occurs to me: I’m the odd, unmarried schoolteacher from out-of-town living in a little house on the school compound; the teacher I read about in historical fiction novels about small towns with one-room schoolhouses in pre-industrialized America. The thought depresses me as I retreat to the pink doll-house I call home, and read myself to sleep.

Among Madagascar’s education PCVs, living on the school compound, often in an old classroom, isn’t all that unusual. I feel lucky to have a house separate from the building itself, but for whatever other problems it saves me, I still wake up to the sound of hundreds of screaming, laughing children, boys banging coins on the metal goal post, and the obnoxious drumming out of beats on wooden desks. I forever remain both impressed and horrified that these kids can make their voices sound so ugly, with a guttural shout I lack sufficient words to describe. In these moments, at precisely 7:00am, 9:00am, and 3:30pm each day, the nightmares of being trapped in a room with my overly-energetic little brother, age 11, come rushing back. Sitting though these breaks make me feel as though I’m living with 200 duplicates of his 11-year-old self, only this time I can’t shout “seriously, would you STOP that?!?”

To add to the terror, every once in awhile a stampede of children storm through my front gate on the pretext of cleaning the school compound. My first warning arrives in a deadly silence broken by a roar of shouts as assembly disperses. It is quickly followed by the pattering of kids running to fetch brooms, flip-flops slapping against their feet. I know what’s coming and rush to close up my doors and windows before I hear the ubiquitous slap-slap of my wooden gate. “My god, I’m under attack! Quick, get out of here!” I think. I know cleaning my backyard area is a part of cleaning the school – and we all know I’m not going to sweep up a yard full of dirt – but I hate being the subject of my students’ curiosity, hate that if I leave a door or window open they seize the opportunity to peer in (once while I was changing), and hate that they steal the unripe peaches off my tree in peach season. In this arrangement, the idea of keeping professional and personal lives separate falls apart. Or maybe, it never existed?

Living on a school compound is stressful at breaks, eerily quiet on Sundays and at night (although the architecture of Malagasy schools thankfully lack the quintessentially creepy high-school hallway popular in 80s slasher films), yet convenient on the odd morning I oversleep before class. I don’t think I’ll ever quite be used to the constant chatter of children, the bats that live in our rafters, or half a dozen students saying “hello teacher!” while I make my way across the yard from front door to “toilet” (it hardly deserves the title), but such are the challenges Peace Corps throws at us.

Photo: My neighbor’s son; the school is his playground.

Categories
Africa Madagascar Peace Corps The Nomadic Life

I Have a Lemur for a Neighbor

Lemur in Ankarana by Sally Bull

Lemur in Ankarana by Sally Bull

As soon as I received the mislabeled FedEx envelope telling me I was about to spend two years in Madagascar, I braced myself for the onslaught of comments about lemurs.

“Who are you going to teach English to? Lemurs? Hahaha,”
“Ooo, that’s great! You’re going to see so many cute little lemurs!”
“Lucky you! You get to live near lemurs!”

“Um, you know people live there too…” was the best response I could conjure to counter friends’ envy of the iconic creatures I’d undoubtedly be living amongst. Thanks to pop culture and some admittedly well done wildlife documentaries, Madagascar inevitably evokes romantic images of lush, tropical rainforest, massive baobabs, and otherworldly animals. This is a fantastical daydream compared to the Madagascar I’ve become familiar with and at my fourth month here I admitted to a Malagasy friend that I still had never seen a lemur.

“What?” she said, “but there’s one right by my house!”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. Our town, Antanifotsy, is a major highland town near a heavily trafficked highway (by Gasy standards), and the surrounding hillsides have been largely stripped of animal or plant life by traditional slash and burn practices. Fewer trees have also had the consequence of lose topsoil, a dusty town, and a lot of people complaining about living in a dusty town. Unfortunately this is a common circumstance, especially where farming is a main source of income, long held tradition, and even white collar workers own fields. From my untrained perspective, it appeared there was no environment left for any creature to live in.

“You’re lying!” I teased.

“Oh yeah?” she said leading me through a tall, wooden gate into a neighbor’s yard. Linking her arm with mine, she tilted her head and pointed to the second-story balcony of the house. “Look up there,” she said, “you see him?” Squinting at the shadowy, brick, terrace I saw a bushy tail dart out from behind a pillar. Its owner stopped in full view and stared back at us through wide, dark eyes while munching on a banana.

 “There he is!” she exclaimed.

His face looked eerily human and while locked in a staring contest with him, I thought of one of many Malagasy fady, or taboos. In some areas it is considered fady to eat or kill lemurs because they closely resemble humans in appearance. Some towns even have myths about the spirits of dead ancestors manifesting as lemurs or lost children long ago changing into them. While a recent National Geographic article on rosewood harvesting cited that some of the harvesters hunt lemurs for food, Malagasy generally believe this to be a last resort and not a common practice at all. Humans are more of a threat to Madagascar wildlife through their destruction of habitat for farmland.

“Damn, that lemur has a nicer house than me,” I thought to myself.

“Now you’ve seen a lemur,” she said proudly, before I thanked her and headed home.

Finally, after months of building up my own cache of “really Malagasy things” – taxi-brousses, rice, chickens, spaghetti sandwiches, windy roads, the pale blue smocks worn by students, tall spindly trees – I caught a brief, domesticated glimpse of what foreigners most frequently associate with the island. All too often, that first thing we associate with a place isn’t as omnipresent as the more mundane, commonplace (and therefore less marketable) scenes that build the particular ambiance and memories we associate with travel.

/ Photo of lemur in Ankarana most likely taken by miss Sally Bull. She has more wonderful photos of Madagascar here. /