Gettin' Serious for a Sec

A few years ago I served on PC Madagascar's VAC. VAC is a group of about 8 volunteers who represent their region of PCVs. Their job is to attend meetings at PC office three times per year and then set up meetings in their region to report new policies or PC actions to their region of volunteers.

At one of the meetings I remember the topic of married LGBT volunteers being brought up. At the time, PC allowed married heterosexual couples to serve and live together. Now, the organization wanted to expand to married LGBT couples. At the time, I knew PC allowed couples to serve but I didn't realize there were guidelines for sexual orientation. Anyway, it was the beginning of a big change and it was exciting. The problem was PC Madagascar was being considered as a pilot country for LGBT couples and right away that raised a red flag with everyone in the room.

Unfortunately, in the three years I have been in Madagascar, I don't know of a single LGBT volunteer who was out to their community. Maybe someone told one or two trusted people but the bottom line is you would truly be putting yourself in danger to be open about your sexuality in Madagascar. 

I don't know the first thing about the struggles of the LGBT community. I mean, I know what I can see by being a contributing member to society, but I don't know what it would be like to walk in that person's shoes for a day. But, imagine coming out to your entire family and friends in the states and then joining the Peace Corps to do some good in the world only to realize that your desire to do good is going to cost you your newfound peace of mind. You have to take a step back and deny who you really are not only to be accepted in a strange world, but to make sure you can remain safe for two years. For this reason, I think LBGT PCVs in Madagascar and in similar places around the world are some of the strongest people I've ever met.

But this blog post isn't necessarily intended to bring attention that feat, despite how incredible it is. Instead, I wanted to give Americans a small look at how the LGBT community is viewed by Malagasy people. In western culture, I don't think we can deny that the LGBT community has always had it much harder than the heterosexual community has. There are a great many people in western culture who don't agree with the LGBT lifestyle. I do not understand these opinions, but after my recent English club I realize it could be sooooooo much worse.

Every Friday, I meet with a group of young Malagasy people. The group is mostly students, but there are some in their late 20s as well. We meet and usually discuss a topic decided on by one of the members for about an hour or so and then we discuss English vocabulary and I teach some things they may not have understood during the conversation.

Recently, a 26-year-old woman joined the English club and she has been a breath of fresh air! In her second meeting she asked if she could bring the topic for the discussion. We all said yes and she said she wanted to discuss homosexuality. 

The room went completely silent. 

Only I said, "That sounds like a great idea! We'd love for you to prepare a discussion about that," though it was clear I was in the significant minority. Of the 15 people in attendance, I would say only this girl, me and another American friend of mine who is a missionary in Manakara were excited about this. Homosexuality had come up once in a discussion I was part of about a year before. It was nothing short of despicable, but I wanted to see if a different group of people might have some different opinions.

In short, they didn't. All members except the three of us mentioned above said homosexuality was bad and Malagasy people need to work with "these people" to change their mentality.

I won't go into major detail about the discussion itself, but I just want to write some of the seriously uninformed and often incredibly offensive and cruel opinions that were given...

-One student said that people are not born gay, they become gay because they watch films featuring homosexual pornographic content. This, in turn, makes people curious and therefore they become gay.

-Similarly, another member said that technology has made people gay. Again, as I mentioned in my previous blog, sometimes things are just lost in translation but it sounded to me like he was saying computers, movies, phones and all the amenities they offer have led to an increase in people becoming gay.

-An opinion of a lot of members in the group was that it is a virus. It was the opinion of one person that people can be born gay because they lack enough testosterone which makes them feminine. We entertained this virus debacle for a moment and asked each person if their brother or sister or best friend were gay, how would you handle that news? It was the opinion of all the Malagasy members (except 1 and the girl who brought the topic) that they would no longer be able to live near this family member or befriend that person any longer. The reason, as one student put it, is that this person may bite you causing you to become gay. So, in the span of a few minutes, we went from the LGBT community being a group of diseased outcasts to a homosexual zombie apocalypse.

My American friend, Joel, and I just looked at each other. It was one of the most jaw-dropping things either of us had ever heard in our time here.

-Others had the opinion that if you go out with another LGBT person you may end up drinking. Drinking often leads to bad decisions and LGBT people will try to take advantage of you in your state of lowered inhibition.

I asked the group, which is mostly male on this day, why they would assume that any gay man would be interested in them? I asked if they ever considered that opinion to be conceited? I also asked if they think that the one Malagasy girl in the room, the one who decided on today's discussion, would want to have sex with any one of them just because they are both interested in the opposite sex.

No one spoke.

-The final part of the discussion was easily the most disturbing. This woman in the room (who apparently has two LGBT friends in Tana) asked the group if they think people in the LGBT community should be imprisoned. It seemed like an astronomical question, but at this point nothing was going to surprise me. Again, it was the opinion of all except four (two being myself and Joel) that people of the LGBT community should be in jail to prevent spread of the "disease."

I asked them if they really meant to jail these people and never let them out. They nodded. I suggested (this is obviously not my opinion, I just wanted to see how ridiculous their mindset was) why not kill all LGBT persons and have a genocide? They seemed to agree that that was too far but I think some of them were understanding what I was getting at and that I was genuinely annoyed by the whole conversation.

At the beginning of the conversation, some of the members said that homosexuality was wrong because of the bible (this is a very religious country) because LGBT couples cannot reproduce. I was happy to make it known to the group that my cousin and her wife are currently expecting their first child. I'm sure you can imagine that to they were completely shocked. I explained how that works and they said that's not natural. I offered a counter argument of a man who is unable to contribute to the reproductive process because of health issues saying that these couples still have children through artificial insemination or adoption. This was still not okay according to them. Unfortunately, I was talking to people who belong to a culture where in some places those who have twins will either give one (or both) up or have them trampled on by cows and the one that lives is kept.

I just want to say that this blog post is not intended to spark controversy or debate on this page or my facebook page though I realize that is a possibility. I think those who know me would attest to the fact that I am not one to involve myself in controversial topics, but maybe I should start every once in a while if there are people who think like this. The real intent of this post is just to give those who read it a look at how people in Madagascar see an issue that is still hotly debated in our world.

In closing, I hope the moral of this whole thing is that simple mindedness is a problem, not just in this country, but all over. Hopefully we can all remember to try and keep an open mind about all people, no matter what their background, sexual orientation or personal hobbies are.

Fame and Fort- No, just fame

A former PCV in Madagascar once said one of the things he would miss most when he returned to the United States was being famous. Going from messiah to pariah. Okay, maybe not a pariah, but I couldn't pass up that awesome rhyme.

Anyway, it seemed weird at the time for someone to consider him- or herself famous, but after three years here, I get it.

As a tall, white, American male who constantly rides around on a beautiful black Trek bike (which is like an American seeing a Maserati roll by in the States) I am one of the most identifiable people in my town.

A few weeks ago I was walking through the market in Manakara. As I passed a stall I heard one of the vendors talking to a co-worker...

Vendor: Mahay teny Gasy be izy! (He is really good at Malagasy)

Coworker: Kaiky! (Really?!)

Vendor: Tena marina! Nampianatra tany Ampasimanjeva taloha izy fa efa nifindra Manakara. Mampianatra ny mpampianatra izy izao (It's true! He taught in Ampasimanjeva before but he moved to Manakara. He teaches teachers now).

Co-worker: Mampianatra ino? (Teaching what?)

Vendor: Ny fomba fampianarana anglisy fa tena mahay teny gasy be izy. Mbola tsy hitanao ny vadiny? Nipetraka tany Analavory taloha izy fa efa aty koa izao. Any andranovato izy mipetraka. Tena mahay be avao koa izy fa fohy be. (The ways to teach English but he is really good at Malagasy. Have you seen his wife? She lived in Analavory but she's here now too. She lives in Andranovato. She's also really good at Malagasy but she's short).

Coworker: Kaiky!

(I'm feeling a bit weird about people talking about me while standing right there now so I decide to speak up...)

Me: Akory Aby! (hi)

Vendor: Zay!!! (See!)

(Everyone laughs)

Things like this happen all the time. People who I am positive I have never met will know my name, what I do, who my girlfriend is (the wife reference is normal. For the record I'm not married), where I live and everything else. Briana had lived in Manakara for maybe a week and a half at that point and they knew where she lived!

Knowing where you live can be problematic. Well, for the obvious reason that Bri and I had all our stuff stolen from her house, but for other reasons, too.

I swear one of my students right now has slipped a GPS tracking device into my backpack or my shoe or something. I can't shake him. And the problem is that he knows where I live. I am completely happy to speak English with students and teach but sometimes you just need your space and naturally you would think a house is a good place to do that. Well, not if you live in Madagascar and not of they know where you live.

Sometimes, when Malagasy people get into your house it's nearly impossible to get them out. Ya know, cause they only want to speak English and you are trying to encourage that but they don't necessarily understand what you're saying so you have to explain, "please, go home," about ten different ways and make sure they're all as polite as possible. But no matter how hard you try something always just gets lost in the translation.

Last week I saw this student on the road and he showed me a bunch of English audio files that he got off of YouTube on his phone. He was really excited so I was trying to be excited for him even though it had been a long day and I just wanted to go home. 

Then, he forever changed our relationship by showing me his photo album on his phone. He only had maybe 6 pictures hut amongst them was a picture of my older brother and I before we went skydiving like ten years ago, a picture of me with some volunteers on a trip in country, and two of my profile pictures from Facebook. Those alone would be plenty to creep me right out...and they did. For starters, my pictures are blocked so I have no idea how he got them. I asked but he just responded, "yes, it's good." Like I said, lost in translation. Then, he shows me another picture where he has cropped two separate pictures (one of me and one of him) and put our faces over a yellow background with our names under them. This was the scariest thing I have seen in Madagascar. He wouldn't answer my question about why he had those or maybe he just didn't understand. 

Didnt matter anymore. I wanted to...scratch that...had to get outta there.

About an hour later, I am sitting at my house and I looked at my phone. He had sent me a text 10 minutes before saying he was going to come to my house "to speaking the english."

Let's pause for a second. In some strange world maybe this could be confused for flattery but I never gave him my phone number nor told him where I live and still had no idea how he got the pictures or why he put them on his phone. So, instead of flattery I experienced something more like panic.

Afraid I would be too late if I sent him a message, I grabbed my bike, hurled it into my house and quickly locked the door behind me. I ran to the back door and the windows and shut those as well. I turned off my small speaker and sat in darkness for the next 15 minutes.

This was one of the sadder, but funnier moments of my last few years:

English teaching volunteer defenseless against the PI-like skills of his 18-year-old Malagasy student.

Anyway, I don't know if he ever came because I never heard anything. In some lesson soon we're going to have to review some new vocabulary. I think "stalking" may find its way into the list of new words. In the meantime, I'm being a little more careful about how often I leave my door open.

A Fool's Errand: The Search for Our Stolen Items Continues

The last time I posted to this blog I wasn't the happiest of campers for obvious reasons. Well, today I am going to continue the story. However, today I am in a much better mood the reason being that I am currently sitting on a padded chair in front of my parents' computer with a cold drink and a very low chance of getting burglarized in the next 5 days. A bunch of little things that have combined to put a very large smile on my face.

So...back to the story of the devastating weekend that continued into a devastating week and a half.

Bill's real name is Jean Freddy. I thought it was kind of cool to conceal the identity of an "undercover cop" because I wanted to have some fun while retelling a nightmare.

Well, Jean Freddy is the lowest of the low when it comes to possessing any degree of humanity. I'm sure you're all sitting there saying, "well, I coulda told you that" or "doesn't surprise me in the slightest," but I remind you that we were in an incredibly desperate situation and we were clinging to any possibility of finding our stuff. But, as the saying goes, "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." The police and Jean Freddy fooled us a couple times.

The last time I posted here Jean Freddy had left the police station hunting down a possible suspect. The next day I wrote the blog post, but still had not heard a word from him. The day after writing the blog post I returned to the police station to speak to the officer we had been working with the most. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and he was completely wasted. He could barely stand, he was spitting all over me as he spoke (there's say it don't spray it and then there's the maid of the mist, this dude was definitely the maid to my mist), and he could not make eye contact. Just that was enough to bum me right out, but he kept talking.

"Have you heard from Jean Freddy yet?" I asked.
"Yeah, we have him," he responded like it was common knowledge. "You can go talk to him yourself. He's in one of the cells in the station."
Oh boy...What now? I thought.
"He's here? In a cell? Why?"
"He got caught last night trying to break into another house on the south side of town," he said with a twisted grin on his face.
God dammit. You have got to be kidding me! So let me just get up to speed here...you're wasted, he's in jail, Ernest (hotshot investigator) doesn't respond to calls or texts and we still have nothing? Saawwweeeet.

After this, the police officer, whose name is Fleury, says that Jean Freddy duped us all. Ya don't say?He went on to say that Jean Freddy never had any leads at any point. I reminded Fleury that not two days ago he assured us Jean Freddy's criminal days were over and that he has been very helpful with police investigations. He couldn't even find the words to respond in his drunken stupor.

At that point I was scared to ask my next question, but I thought I'd just see what he had to say...

"What exactly is being done now to try to find our things now?"
"We have friends all over."
"Right, as in police?"
"No, no, not Police," he laughed. "Just friends. And you should really call your friends around Manakara to see if they have seen your computer."
"Yeah, they know, but that's only four people and two of them are not here. Where are these friends of yours and how are they qualified to look for this stuff?"
"I just have a lot of friends around Manakara. Everyone is looking for your things."

He then went into this 15-minute drunken diatribe about how this isn't the United States and how we (Briana and I) were being unreasonable thinking our things could be found so quickly. I'll be honest, he has a good point. In the States, some forensic investigator would probably take a finger print on the broken window or in the house and the thief would be identified in a few days. People, and particularly Americans, want results.

My apologies, Fleury. On the other hand, the forensic investigators probably wouldn't be able to do their job very well if they were hammered.

.....................

Fast forward a couple days when three new volunteers have arrived in Manakara before they went to the town they will be living in for the next two years. It's sort of tradition to take them out for dinner and a few drinks when they get into town.

After we left dinner, we were walking down the street to go to a karaoke bar. I walked in last and noticed a rather sketchy-looking Malagasy man walking behind us wearing a purse (or as Zach Galifiniakis would call it, a satchel). I turned to go into the karaoke bar and then did a double take to satchel guy and noticed he was wearing one of Briana's souvenir purses!

My mouth dropped. I grabbed him by the shoulders and walked him into the karaoke bar and had Briana confirm that it was, in fact, her bag. We explained the situation to the bar owner and all of us took the short walk over to the police station together.

The guy, whose name is Setra (which means violent or dangerous in English), claimed that he found the purse on the ground the morning after the house was broken into. He maintained that he didn't break in and never saw anyone. He also confessed that he picked up two other purses of Briana's and gave one to his girlfriend and sold the other one. He also said that he knew us and where Briana lives (which isn't that crazy considering there are not too many white people in Manakara). He also said his uncle lives across the street from Briana. Nevertheless, we had no idea who he was.

He was told he would sleep in the Police station that night and we would be back in the morning to discuss this all with Fleury. I felt incredibly guilty being the reason this guy found himself incarcerated for a night, but I didn't know what else to do.

The next morning we went to his house with Fleury to look around to see if anything was there. It felt highly unethical and weird to be on the front lines of the investigation, yet there we were, the accusers, standing in his bedroom with the police, his parents, and other members of his family all looking on. Before we started looking around his bed to see if he had stashed anything there, his parents begged and pleaded with Briana and I which made things even more weird. We asked them about Setra and when the point of his girlfriend and the other bags came up, they said he had no girlfriend. Then we asked where exactly their family lives in Manakara. They said they have no family anywhere near Manakara. It was getting fishier by the minute.

A quick look around his bed and we found an eye mask of Briana's. Not a big find, but the kicker was that at the time of the break-in, the eye mask wasn't in any of the bags that Setra claimed to have found on the road. It was in another bag. We made all of the inconsistencies known to everyone in the room and the father proceeded to scold Setra in front of the family, saying that he is destroying himself and destroying the family. It was another awful moment to have caused, let alone witness.

We walked a few blocks to another bar where Setra said he sold a small souvenir women's wallet that Briana bought to bring home. At this point, Setra's mom claimed that he found those things only a few days ago and not the morning after we were burglarized. However, when we arrived at this other bar and identified the stolen and resold item, the owner of the bar claimed Setra had, in fact, sold it to them on the morning after the break-in.

The day before I left Manakara to come back to the States, Briana, Setra and myself all made separate statements to a prosecutor. I actually had to pay for Setra's transportation to the courthouse because the Police refused. It felt like the government was laughing at me.

The case is supposedly going to trial now, but in the end it is our word against his. There is no other evidence to go on. Some moments I think for sure he did it and other moments I think maybe he really did just see the stuff on the road and has no idea. Either way, you cannot convict a guy based on a few bags and no hard evidence. Setra is not scared by this whole thing because even if he did steal it, the stuff is long gone by now. The trial is supposed to continue upon my return to Madagascar next week.

Unfortunately, all these events have had an even bigger impact than just our stuff being lost. As I mentioned in the last post, both Briana and I lost our piece of mind. Unfortunately, Briana wasn't feeling any more comfortable as the days went on. This past week she made the decision to revoke her 6-month extension and close her service with the rest of her group.

You can't be effective when you don't trust anyone around you and whoever stole our things permanently ruined that for her. You couldn't begin to imagine how difficult of a decision that was for her, but she is undoubtedly making the best and healthiest decision for herself. It is a tough end to two great years.