email from Corie on 2/13/10

Hello!! Well it’s been a ridiculous, crazy, fun, bizarre week....here’s why:

Thing #1: Mini-vacation!!!
Dorothy, an education volunteer to the South of me was about to celebrate her 25th birthday…quite a milestone!!! So a few of us met at her site and then went from there to one of the most beautiful places I think I’ve ever been. We stayed one night at a little hotel and spent the day at the completely deserted beach. I’m not going to describe it because I’m sure you can all conjure up some image of tropical paradise…so there you go, that’s what it was. Oh snap, Ill try to post a picture with this too! Watched a gorgeous sunset and fell asleep to the sound of the waves right outside the door. Am I really in the Peace Corps right now?!

Thing #2 reminded me that yes, in fact, I am. The next day we went up north to Brittany’s site for the rice training. We got there a day earlier than the rest of the people so we spent the day hanging out with Brittany’s “family”. The mom took us to see a “Tromba” ceremony. And this is hard to describe, not because it’s as cliché as tropical paradise, but because it is in fact the complete opposite: one of the most bizarre few hours I may have ever experienced in my life. It was among my strangest dreams, but the kicker was that it was reality. It went like this: The 3 of us volunteers walked the 7k to the neighboring village with “Mama” and were led in the direction of the music. We went and sat in a tiny “Gasy” house (thatched roof, reed walls, all made of wood-ish stuff) and were hearded into a corner. We sat on the floor with our chins to our knees, crammed in like sardines with everyone else who was there to watch. Traditional Gasy music was going on in the other corner of the room, a guy playing cans of beans (for you marimba folks, its like a make-shift version of hosho) and the other guy playing the accordion. Yes, the accordion. It was this hypnotizing rhythm that didn’t really have any distinguishable words when people sang to it, and no beginning or end…totally entrancing. By this time our butts were already falling asleep and our legs were cramping up, but they were just beginning. There were a few people who started to apply this white clay paint to their forearms foreheads and jawbones, and changed into white clothes behind makeshift curtains. Then they put on sunglasses and hats (one of them was a safari hat that looked like it belonged in a prop closet of some high school’s drama department). They began to smoke cigarettes and drink moonshine. Then the woman began to cry…then sob, then sob violently. No one seemed too shocked and one woman jumped up and threw a sheet over her head, which made the woman sobbing start to have a serious fit and shake and dance and flail under the sheet. Then she just stopped…as quickly as she started and acted as if everything was totally normal. Then the dude next to her did it. Then of course, the people who seemed to be assisting the ceremony, brought out some cheap perfume and sprayed all the people who were dressed in white with it….not forgetting to put a dab of it under their noses. This went on for a good long while....more and more people started throwing fits and thrashing around on those next to them…then they too would get face-painted and changed into white clothes and perfumed. They seemed to infect their closest neighbors, until there were maybe around 10 people with the “Tromba”. Finally they seemed to break for lunch, and we followed Mama to her friend’s house, where we ate rice. Then…we went back and sat some more. One of the people had on a marriage veil and white gloves. Also, once the person throwing the fit was calmed, they would greet everyone in the “audience” with a handshake and 3 kisses. Here in Madagascar, we’re used to the 3 kiss thing…it’s one of the things the Malagasy seemed to have adopted from Europeans…kiss each cheek then back again, to say hello. Well apparently at Trombas, its one kiss on each cheek and then why not finish it off with the real thing, right on the lips. Awkward! More sitting and watching this ridiculous, surreal scene unfold, and when our bodies could no longer handle the sitting and the cigarette smoke, we asked Brittany what time it was…almost 3pm. It was being in another dimension where time and space and anything that made any sort of sense was non-existent. Finally we left and made the trek home, where we were able to bombard Mama with questions. We found out that:
- A “Tromba” is a spirit of a dead person who chooses someone alive to go live inside of. The Tromba will never leave and what we saw was not in any way, an exorcism, but more just a celebration of people’s Trombas…a way to bring them out to dance for a second.
- A person can have multiple Trombas…Mama’s mother in law has 8.
- The marriage outfit was because that person had a “Marriage Tromba”; The goodness or badness of the Tromba depends on the personality of the Tromba when it was a living person.
- The way a Tromba died can determine how it protects the person it lives in after death. For example, if a person dies of drowning, then when it turns into a Tromba, it will protect the person it lives in whenever they go into the water.
- All the white symbolizes cleanliness so that the Tromba will want to show itself.
- At the ceremony, if a person is downing moonshine and cigarettes, it’s like, totally no biggie because it’s just the Tromba that’s smoking and drinking, not the person. So a dude can drink as much as he wants and not get drunk and walk a straight line after because it was just the Tromba who got drunk. (no, we never saw them get up, so we don’t know!)
- After a Tromba ceremony, the people with the Trombas can do medicine. People in the village will start to come to them to have them heal their ailments. Apparently these people with Trombas actually make quite a lot of money by doing this.

Weirdest day EVER. Me and the other 2 volunteers just kept saying, thank god we were all there to witness that so we can know it really happened someday down the road.

Thing #3: RICE TRAINING! It went so well! We brought in a Malagasy man from Diego to do it. He was going to do a training at my site too, but the road is so washed out at this point and no vehicles are going in and out, so since he is older, we decided just to do it at Brittany’s site. I brought 2 men who could read and write and were really interested in learning up with me. It was 3 days of going into the rice field in the mornings, and lectures at the school in the afternoons. The guys was GOOD… it warmed my heart to see people from my village frantically taking notes and asking questions. Though me and Brittany have both been trained and have some experience doing this way of rice farming, it is complex and having a native Malagasy speaker there to explain in detail and answer questions was KEY. My 2 representatives were already excitedly plotting forming a group to teach and do this technique with back in the Ampotsehy. (Basically, this is just a very regimented way of transplanting rice so that the yields are 2 times, 4 times, even up to 10 times the amount of rice they would get from traditional methods). Stoked too because we might get this funded through an association that deals with spreading the technique around in 3rd world rice farming countries all over the world (Jim Carrey is involved somehow too…its like his thing…he was in 'Gascar awhile ago, since the technique started here!). So that was all totally warm and fuzzy.

Still safe, healthy and extremely happy and at peace here. I understand now when people talk about the 2nd year of Peace Corps as being “the good part”. I mean yeah, I have my moments, but this is where I need to be right now and I’m so glad to be here. I’ll try to post more pictures soon as I can. Take care everyone!