January 2012
1 post
Some Ohabolagna Fo’ Yah!
Here in Befandriana-Nord, Madagascar I live amongst the Tsimihety people and speak the Tsimihety language. Tsimihety is one of many dialects spoken in Madagascar and while some of its vocabulary resemble the Official Language of the country, the pronunciation, tone, and delivery of words differ such that to an outsider the dialect is all but incomprehensible. Tsimihety is rarely merely spoken. To...
August 2011
1 post
May 2011
2 posts
A Night in Befandriana-Nord
8:42 PM
Befandriana-Nord is structured around a main, albeit still in wretched condition, road that comes from the big almost-coastal city of Antsohihy (where I bank) and goes to the strangely large inland town of Mandritsara. As the road crosses through the heart of Befandriana-Nord, it forms with a lesser-sister dirt road a crossroad and round-point, which round-point is the heart of the town....
Fat Foot, Sweaty Back, Shrimp Bag and Broken...
What’s your worst travel story? Long layover? Flat tire? Or the classic, a baby that won’t stop crying? I assure you none of these holds even a candle to what you will most likely experience on any given taxi-brousse ride. Taxi-Brousse rides are not for the faint of heart. They involve too many passengers in too small of cars. They involve reckless drivers on dilapidated roads. They...
March 2011
1 post
"Beware the Ides of March"
There’s been an interlude between my last post and this most recent, the reason for the delay being that my computer has a software problem unresolvable in my current location. Islands, it would appear, despite their seemingly boundless advantages that encompass everything from delicious coconuts to breathtaking booty-shaking, are not without their detriments. Doubly so for developing islands. But...
January 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Green or Yellow? Long or Round?
Do you like Mangos? Do you like Diego Mangos? Or Long Mangos? Or do you like the sweet tartness characteristic of Round Mangos? Did you even know there were more than five species of Mango, all of which have their own devotees and inimitable tastes?
How about bananas, do you like bananas? The green ones or the yellow ones? The fat, short ones or the long, slim ones? The tiny ones or the big...
1 tag
Sixteen to Twenty
SIXTEEN HOURS A WEEK
Pens; notebooks; a blackboard; chalk; tables to seat eighty students; four hours a week with each section—these are the resources my students and I have to work with. Half of the time my blackboard is a metal slate painted black. The other half it’s a piece of wood painted black. On the first day of school I walked into my classroom and tried to write an exercise on...
December 2010
2 posts
BRIDAL SHOWER
Perhaps, in a distant café, four or five people are talking with the four or five people who are chatting on their cell phones this morning in my favorite café. And perhaps someone there, someone like me, is watching them as they frown, or smile, or shrug at their invisible friends or lovers, jabbing the air for emphasis. And, like me, he misses the old days, when talking to yourself meant you...
1 tag
GETTING IT WRONG
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open...
November 2010
1 post
1 tag
Not Cutting My Hair In the Land Where Hair Was Not...
“To be or not to be, that is the question”—at least in English it is. In Malagasy, however, not so much since, while there is a verb for ‘to be’ it’s almost never said, but simply implied. When I questioned Robert, the Malagasy training manager, about this I was met with a mischievous grin and an enigmatic statement: “What is ‘to be,’ anyway?”...
October 2010
1 post
1 tag
Getting Away From it All
I have lived in Madagascar now for close to three months. In that time, I have witnessed dusk change to dark at seven in the evening. I have read, studied, and done dishes by candlelight. I have gone from not being able to say my name in Malagasy to being capable of discussing the historical significance of Martin Luther King, Jr.. I have made family of people who I once considered strangers. I...
August 2010
2 posts
A Note on Blog Posts
I am committed to maintaining this blog as a way of sharing my Peace Corps experience with friends, family, and all those who are interested. At present, I have a list of topics I will be addressing in the future. I’d like to do a series discussing various aspects of the Peace Corps; a series talking about Malagasy culture; a few blog topics on my home stay experience and the dynamics of...
July 2010
1 post
2 tags
“‘I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read...”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Bay Back Books: New York, 1996), 12.
January 2010
3 posts
2 tags
“The insights gained and garnered by the mind in its wanderings among basic...”
– Carl Von Clausewitz, On War
2 tags
“War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.”
– Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pg. 87.
3 tags
“The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who...”
– 毛泽东: Mao Zedong
December 2009
3 posts
4 tags
"You're Not Unique"
“Now then, my lad, you’re still young, and as time goes on you’ll come to adopt opinions diametrically opposed to those you hold now. Why not wait till later on to make up your mind about these important matters? The most important of all, however lightly you take it at the moment, is to get the right ideas about the gods and so live a good life:—otherwise you’ll...
3 tags
“Pleasure is indeed a proper criterion in the arts, but not the pleasure...”
– Trevor J. Saunders, trans., “Laws,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), pg. 1350, 658e-659b.
2 tags
“The exclusion of the public from the parliamentary deliberations could no longer...”
– Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 61-62.
October 2009
1 post
3 tags
