T.I.A.

Well, after spending the week in Tana attending meetings, going out to dinners, and enjoying a bit more of life like I’m used to back in the States...as well as being quite insulated from the cyclone that slammed into the southeast coast of Madagascar, I was ready to come back to the relative peace and quiet of Ambositra to spend the week and weekend finishing up my research papers and program planning for my online Disaster Management and Tobacco Interventions courses that are due this week. I had a solid plan in place to crank these masterpieces out, then I arrived in Ambositra only to find out from Ben and Gil that during the cyclone, our internet server, modem (I don’t really know, I’m not a techie person) was knocked out. Oh yippy skippy! No internet until the who knows when...apparently it will be whenever our tech guy is able to drive 5 hours up to Tana, find replacement parts, and drive 5 hours back and rebuild whatever blew up or over or something like that during the storm. And even then, the internet will still probably not work for the most part.

Fortunately, I have very understanding professors who have both spent a lot of time in the field and know how it is: half the time your tri-band cell phones don’t work, Skype cuts out constantly if it even works, and internet is slow, when it too decides to work. Needless to say, my profs have been very understanding about the fact that most of my assignments this quarter have been submitted late…

The more time I spend here in Madagascar, the more I’m able understand what Leonardo DiCaprio would always say in the movie “Blood Diamond”… "T.I.A” or “This Is Africa.” Life is extremely different over here. Rules you are used to in the United States or other developed nations most DEFINITELY do NOT apply here in Madagascar. The faster you figure this out and modify your behavior and expectations, the better off you’ll be. For instance, your internet gets knocked out...you're gonna have to wait many moons for it to be fixed. Roads blocked by landslides? Well, you're gonna have to hike. Any day you can get some weird bout of food poisoning even if you bleach the heck out of your fruits and veggies and avoid the mystery meat. You’re lucky if packages sent from the United States ever reach you without getting stolen by the postal service workers. Travel anywhere is unbelievably slow due to time spent dodging pot holes, mudslides, herds of cattle, zebu-drawn wagons, chickens and dealing with unnecessary stoppages by the police to pay them bribes to remove the spikes they put across the road so you can pass through (even if you are traveling on a national road in an official NGO vehicle). You wanna bring your chickens with you in a taxi, go right on ahead! BUT, make sure you don't travel at night...unless you're suicidal...as bandits increasingly roam the roads looking to hijack cars and steal anything they can, especially as the political climate following the coup here in Madagascar last year continues to devolve and more and more people are thrust into abject poverty and turn to desperate, more violent measures to find money or anything to help them survive. Basically, the way things normally operate...well, they don't operate that way over here...because This Is Africa.

I don’t know, it’s just been a bit of a boring weekend not having internet or being able to work on any research (I have however been able to write a lot of blogs...who knows when I'll be able to post them though!). I’ve had time to watch movies (watched “Ghandi” last night), read books, and reflect on the enormous differences in life between here and the United States. And I’m not just talking about life as in daily routines or the fact that I’m not able to enjoy most of the comforts of home, but the entire outlook on life and how different it is. It’s hard to explain, but I really wish more people from the States could experience the T.I.A. moments…I think in general, we’d appreciate a lot more how good we truly have it in the States and other developed nations.