Additional field notes.
Sorry about the gargantuan previous post. It’s also a little blurry… my diary and bible both got sogged by rain. Actually since that last entry, the health team packed up from A- and spent a few days in M-. As we climbed up the first hill away from A-, I was surprised to find that my throat was closing up, that my eyes stung a little. It’s one thing to know about poverty, to know about malnourishment and malaria and coughing up worms and bad road conditions, cyclones, child mortality, giardiasis. It’s another thing to run around with a cheeky, smiling kid and then find out that he had a positive blood test for malaria. We get to pull on our thick neoprene rainboots and spray up with DEET and return back to the lab base to scroll through Instagram. I may never visit this village again. But if I were to come back in ten years, how many of these playful kiddos will still be here? How many will have become part of the dread statistic, x out of y children die from z? Or will they grow up, little toddlers with distended bellies, into the glowering teens with distended bellies and hole-filled shirts that cover as much as Winnie the Pooh’s shirt did, which clearly have not been replaced since age 8? Or into the young mothers toting screaming children on their backs as they beat out the grain day after day? Why do I get to go upwards over the mountain to a world of potable water, electricity, medicine, heat, and internet? Why do I have so many clothes that I can wear a whole separate outfit just for sleeping?
I know this isn’t a totally valid thought, but there is painful incongruence when I realize that for this trip, I bought special shoes (on sale mind you, and child-size) worth more than what a family here makes in a week. Worth more than their house, probably. Why can’t this picture be fixed?
On the one hand, I really enjoyed being with the villagers despite only knowing a sparse few phrases in Malagasy. They always smile, they always say hi (salamo). I might be losing my New Yorker edge. They laugh when they watch me slowly (muramura) cross the log bridges to the bathing stream. And the kids visit me in the fecal sampling tent, sometimes watching me scan through microscope slides for thirty minutes. We can’t have a conversation, but my heart was warmed nonetheless.
On the other hand, my body was not used to living the village lifestyle. I counted maybe 40-something bites from some unseen bug. Four jigger fleas (Malagasy: parasy, if you look it up you see truly horrible things) took up residence in my foot; two actually successfully laid eggs in my toe. I didn’t recognize it for what it was, but I started having mild pain when walking. When the health worker with me spotted them, she immediately sat me down and dug out the egg sacs with a needle. Plus I got days of slight nausea/intestinal upset from the water or food. And my clothes and sleeping bag were always semi-damp/clammy; I woke up in the middle of the night from the cold. I found myself wishing for a hot shower and dry bedding and porcelain thrones and running water. My heartstrings were sore from leaving the first village, so in the second village I barely talked to any of the children. They were still shy and afraid of us, and I kept it that way. I didn’t want to get to know them better if I would have to leave them forever in a few short days, so I kept my head in the game and processed fecal samples at double the rate of the previous village. We finished all our work by Saturday evening, and were originally scheduled to leave Friday; we made the executive decision to leave early Lord’s day morning and get back to our lab.
Snippets of experiences:
I climbed someone’s pomelo tree and snatched three pomelos, one unripe. The owner saw and came over. Heart dropping, I tried to pay her, but it turns out she wanted to give me a huge, beautifully ripe pomelo, with ruby-red meat instead of white. And she wouldn’t accept my payment.
In M-, there was a pudgy baby girl constantly piggybacked by a young boy of 7–8. She took one look at me one day and burst out into gasping, screaming sobs. I might have been too different looking, I thought, and I turned away in sheepish embarrassment. The health worker with me, though, told me, “That girl’s mother died three months ago. She was visiting her sister in a neighboring village, but she heard one of her children was sick, so she insisted on coming back home, even though there was a cyclone. In a cyclone, you can’t see the rice paddies, and she fell off one of the log bridges. The water was too high. She drowned.”
I try not to take or publish pictures of the people living in the villages, because I’m afraid of all the implications that photography holds. When I capture a girl’s image, do I have the right to show a world of strangers what her face looks like, when she herself has never gotten to look in a mirror? Is it my art or their lives? Do people see my photo and objectify/exoticize the subject? But I took a photo once and a kid wandered into my frame, so I showed him, and I have never seen such breathless wonder. Soon a whole, slightly stinky cloud of kids surrounds me. The more pictures I take, the more they ooh and ahh and crane necks to get a chance at the image. I take care to make sure even the shy, teenage mothers who want to take a look but don’t want to push the kids get a chance to see.
Meal breaks here are too long for my workaholic self. Around mealtime, people congregate in the cooking house (usually the palace of the village, the most solid, well-built house, which the king lends to us whenever the health team comes to visit) and lollygag to the music of sizzle. Then after eating, which takes me ten minutes because I’m a Training-trained machine, everyone continues to kaputz and chat and laugh in Malagasy, tell stories, do impressions, anything but work. Then after about two hours of non-working, we slouch off to our various bedlams to continue our jobs.
When you visit a place nine hours’ hike away from asphalt, you pack just the essentials, says theory. But everybody I was with also brought a little splurge. Some brought fruit. A few brought packs of cards. One nurse brought his guitar. I brought my ukulele. When there’s nothing left to do, I hole up somewhere and play hymns to myself, sometimes for an hour at a time. Once I did this in A- and turned around only to jump at the sight of fifteen or so children and a young mom, probably 14–16, standing and watching. But when I offered my uke to the mom, she was too shy to try it. Every time I saw her after, I wondered like Prufrock, do I dare ask her name? I never did.
The last day in A-, we gave out gifts for the villages to thank them for helping us with our research, welcoming into our houses, and giving us their palace to stay in. We gave all the children lollipops, too, and the kids had absolutely no idea what they were. We mimed putting them in their mouths to suck on, and the kids popped the lollipop in, plastic and all, and sucked away happily. We had to demonstrate to them how to take the wrapper off, and soon the kids (zaza) were running around excitedly showing off their brightly colored tongues and teeth. But it was confusing for me. Clearly the kids at primary school age get lollipops. And middle school age. But then there were teens who were fathers and mothers. Many of them stared at the candy, but instead received the normal gift for households: salt, sugar, soap, cloth. I found my uke-shy friend, who was tying her baby to her back, and gave her one of my snacks: a bar of dark chocolate. I wonder if she liked the taste.
