Chef CISCO Vaovao

Thursday, November 4, 2010

The Giants won the World Series! It took me going to the opposite side of the world, but hey, it works for me.

It’s been an interesting week. Monday and Tuesday there was no school, I believe because of All Saints’ Day, although no one actually told me. Mama Peace Corps just told me it was a holiday, and I called up the proviseur, and sure enough he told me there was no class (I would have shown up at school if I hadn’t called him).

So my pacing was already thrown off because of this holiday situation, and then I showed up at school on Wednesday and discovered that all classes except my English classes were cancelled because there was a new Chef CISCO with whom all the Malagasy teachers needed to meet (CISCO stands for Circumscription Scolaire, and it’s just the school district; the Chef CISCO is the head of the school district, like a superintendent; and it’s French, so Chef=Chief—he doesn’t prepare food). So my students had to watch all their friends go home while they stayed for a lesson on the “present perfect” tense. Lots of fun. They were already ahead of the sections that didn’t have class on Monday or Tuesday, so I let them out early.

So, there’s a new Chef in town. I don’t know why I forgot this in my last post, but there was a protest in my front lawn a week ago. I was getting ready to go to class and a car pulled up in front of the CISCO office (where I live), blasting Malagasy music. It was followed by dozens of protestors carrying signs, apparently calling for the Chef CISCO’s resignation. I guess their protesting worked.

Today when I showed up to teach my evening class, I put my bike in the teacher’s lounge as usual, but found all the other Malagasy teachers sitting in rows of chairs ready for a meeting. The proviseur saw me and told me the new Chef CISCO was coming for an important discussion. I taught from 4:30 – 5:30, after which I found all the teachers still in the lounge, drinking beer and soda and talking to the new Chef CISCO and his wife. I left after introductions.

I don’t know what this new Chef CISCO business will mean for me and my life, except that I think the old Chef will eventually be moving out of his house, which is in the building next to mine. He’s always been pretty standoffish, so I don’t think I’ll miss him much. However, his two little children are pretty adorable and dance whenever I play guitar, so I’ll miss them.

I also don’t know why I forgot this in my last post, Mama Peace Corps’ son, Tsiky, is no longer living in Ambanja. He has left for university in Antsirabe, which is awesome, because from what I’ve observed, not many people here even pass the Baccalaureate (the test to graduate from Lycee). However, he had become a very good friend, so I’ll miss him quite a bit. His friend Momyne, also just a few years younger than me, is now living with Mama Peace Corps while he studies to take the Bacc himself. I’ve been tutoring him with English, but it’s made me sad because he’s supposed to be at the Terminale level, and he’s grossly underprepared for the test.

In other news, I made an ice-blended café latte today. Let me backtrack: Mama Peace Corps is an entrepreneur. She has electricity, so she invested in freezers. In the evenings after work she makes delicious, sugary, whole-milk yogurt and puts it in little re-usable plastic cups with lids. She puts those cups in the freezer, and, presto: frozen yogurt. Men come by with coolers and sell the frozen yogurt cups on the street and at the market. I decided it would be cool to mix coffee and the frozen yogurt in the cups. I thought it tasted pretty good on a hot day.

Food is very important to me, as anyone reading this blog may have guessed. One of the first things Peace Corps has done for my personal development is given me a new appreciation for food, especially for the variety of food available back home. In the U.S., I was faced with choosing from among over a dozen varieties of peanut butter. Here, if I want peanut butter, I need to roast the peanuts and spend about half an hour smashing them with a giant mortar and pestle. Another huge difference is the lack of cheese here. For those reading in the States, try to go through every meal and subtract the cheese. It makes things a lot less delicious. Needless to say, I get a lot more joy out of little things, like iced coffee with real milk.