Malaika Neri
Ambatondrazaka, Madagascar
OTIV Alaotra Mangoro
The stars are the most beautiful. Big, gleaming orbs of light that has travelled across the universe shine down, brightening a broad night in a small town amidst rice paddies and fields of green beans.
They are bright, those stars, but I can’t see them in New York City because we’re all plugged in, connected yet disconnected.
My fingers hover over the keyboard, unsure how to describe this experience. Unsure how to explain the amalgamation of frustration and contentment.
Because this is a slow island. Camions (Quebecois for big trucks) rumble slowly over mud roads strewn with pebbles. And everywhere, there is bevuvka, the endless poussière that rises up from the red African soil to coat cars, clothes, trees and nostrils with a layer of brown dust.
People walk slowly, ambling to work at five in the morning, and ambling home as the sun sets around five in the evening, exposing a blood-orange crease in the belly of this big, big sky. At my office, a bastion of bureaucracy in a town full of small and medium enterprises (SMEs – certainly one of my favourite acronyms), everyone sits down to work at seven-thirty or eight a.m., but jumps out of their seats once an hour for a pose.
Often, I’m irritated by the passivity. The total disregard for a need to work hard to gagner l’argent, or make a living. The Malagasy seem to amble through life, not perturbed in the least by a desire to improve their country, or province, or city, or even, fokontany, or neighbourhood.
I came to Madagascar to learn about economic development, to learn how life can be better for the family of eight who live in a wooden shack measuring seven feet by six, and pays for tomorrow with the income they earn today, as millions do on this island that has ballooned to a population of twenty million since independence from France in 1965, but remains “poor,” according to World Bank statistics, with per capita income hovering slightly about $250 per year. It is very much a tany an-dalam-pandrosoana – a country on the road to development – something that Kofi and Barack would surely earmark as an essential human right. I thought working at OTIV (a microfinance started with World Bank funds and technical help from the Canadian aid organization, Développement International Desjardins (DID) – a savings and loan association (SLA, in financial lingo) consisting primarily of agriculteurs (farmers) would teach me about development, and microfinance as a tool in its pursuit.
But I’m learning less about development as defined by Millenium Development Goals (MDGs – not a favourite acronym, for sure) and more about fitivanana – what Westerners/Greeks call agape, what philosophers call ‘The Golden Rule,’ what Christians call The First Commandment. Loving your brother as you love yourself, stemming from fiavanana: the harmony at the base of Malagasy culture, and the reason they, unlike most “poor” countries on this continent, have not had a war in over fifty years.
“So many people come here, and they ask, Why are they not developed?!” recounted Miguel, a French conservation biologist I met during my first week here. “And then you look around, and you think, They’ll never be developed. But after you’ve been here for a while, you realize, they don’t want development.”
They don’t say “developing country” in French. They call it a ‘pays en voie du developpement,’ a country in need of development. It irritates me no end that the Malagasy don’t feel that way.
And on the flip side of the irritation is amazement. I’m speechless, riding a creaky Chinese bicycle through the calm of the rizières (rice fields), gaping when the sun exits its expert hiding spot behind a group of nuages, clouds that bring rain in December and only cold winds in July. I’m astounded to see groups of young, healthy, able-bodied men hanging out on the sidewalk, petra-petraka-ing their day away. The shock continues every time I enter the home of one of Ambatondrazaka’s wealthy families, every time I sit down with my own very wealthy host family to eat a meal of two different kinds of meat, more than most could afford, replete with gourmet Chinese mushrooms, on tablecloths purchased in Tana, the capital.
The shock sometimes becomes apathy when, every morning at a breakfast of Nesquik and pain malgache, I open The Elusive Quest for Growth, a tome by NYU’s very own William Easterly and part of my colloquium reading, that decries past approaches to development.
Because there’s still no blanket solution.
“We just don’t have enough capital,” said my boss, on my second day in Madagascar. “Everyone wants loans, and we don’t have enough épargnes, (savings accounts) to approve them all.”
In New York, an island swimming in tidal waves of cash, I never worry about a dearth of capital. Indeed, our infamous financial crisis of two years ago was the very result of too much disbursed too quickly. But here in Madagascar, after I’ve wiped the dust from my eyes, I continue to see poverty, bad roads, and one too many children with orange hairs that belie protein deficiencies.
“People are poor because they lack access to capital,” Donald Trump once chirped. And one would assume that granting people access to capital starts them on the path out of poverty. But, I’m learning, it isn’t that simple.
“Look around you!” cried one of OTIV’s chefs, on a recent trip to visit a caisse, or local bank, in Andilamena, a small town north of us renowned for its pierres précieuses, or gemstones. “Take a picture!” he gesticulated, pointing to a group of children and their mothers, from whom we were purchasing illegally-harvested charcoal briquettes. “See the poverty of Madagascar! Nous sommes pauvres!”
“Absolutely!” I felt like yelling back. “But so are millions of people in India and China and Albania and Mongolia!”
OTIV works to enable people to pull themselves out of poverty – what we define as the inability to pay for a child’s school tuition, the impossibility of affording a car, and the limitations on disposable income – by providing them with bootstraps: quite simply, capital, in the form of prets (loans) and tahiry (savings).
My knee-jerk reaction to the multiple descriptions of poverty in this green and fertile country has always been, try harder! Perhaps it’s due to an inculcated “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” philosophy so venerated in America, but here, development has always been an idea brought in from the outside. And most Malagasy are habituated to outside help. This combines with a cultural passivity, bred in schools wherein students are taught to respond, “Oui Madame” instead of asking pointed questions, to produce a country that takes a very laid-back approach to the future, preferring to enjoy roasted misikita while swatting away the incessant flies, rather then worrying about national strategies de lutte contre la pauvreté.
But then, I find myself falling into the trap of blaming poor people for their own poverty. Multiple times a day, I want to grab the shoulders of the graphic dessinateur and marketing coordinatrice – colleagues with whom I’m trying to design a new marketing campaign for OTIV – and shake them up, ask them to be more creative, more innovative, to care more about their own organization.
“But you see, it’s like that,” sighed my host mother, one of the few I’ve met who has travelled à l’extérieur. “Here, when you find an office job, that’s it. You stay put. What else is there? And people just while away their time taking breaks, chatting and chatting. Then they complain that there’s too much work. It’s not like chez toi.”
No, it’s most certainly not what I’m used to, this lackadaisical lifestyle in which the music never stops, the laughter is frequent, babies are not an inconvenience, and Sundays are a day of rest. But I’m learning to suppress my desire to speed things up; I’m learning to appreciate that there’s always enough time for a second cup of tea, for another conversation, for another glass of freshly-pressed orange juice after lunch.
Because no one is in a hurry. No one is rushing toward development.
Great reading, thanks for taking me on the trip – see, learn, absorb and share a world of knowledge with your personal experience.
Emmy