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The idea is “do something to make the world more beautiful.”

My childhood manifesto still beats in my heart. I tend to take myself way too seriously, but sometimes life really is this incredible.

We painted a world map on the outside wall of the 6eme classroom. It’s the wall that is most visible from the dirt road connecting the school compound with the next community. When we began, we had a blank wall with some graffiti on it. The first step was to draw a giant rectangle and paint it blue. That raised a few eyebrows.

Next, we drew a grid: 30 rows tall, 50 rows wide. 1,500 squares, five centimeters by five centimeters. From the road, our pencil lines were not visible, so the confusing stares continued as people passed us doing seemingly invisible work. This went on for two days. We fed ourselves from a giant pot of coconut beans and rice. Then we continued to work. We started to stencil in the countries, using a piece of paper as a reference point. Each square represented a tiny portion of the map: disputed borders between countries, groups of islands, land masses, oceans. We actually drew it all.

On the third day, magic happened; color appeared on the map. From what was once a blob of light blue paint emerged distinct, unique lines and squiggles, each a different shade of blue, orange, green and red, signifying ownership: this large, upside down orange triangle represents Brazil. These tiny red dots in the Pacific Ocean are the Polynesian islands of Vanuatu. This long yellow blob, right smack dab in the middle of the map, is Madagascar.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

As nations began to emerge, so did people. We had an audience by day three, sitting under a shaded roof and watching us paint, laughing at our silly dance moves and sometimes coming closer to ask questions or lend a hand. By day four, the paint was dry and we were ready to label. Writing the full names of each nation across its land mass was…frustrating. Try writing Boznia and Herzegovina next to Montenegro, all within a two centimeter surface area. It’s tough. But we prevailed, and we insisted, because without names, the map is just a picture. But with names, it became a portal.

“Oh, so that’s where Brazil is.”

“Where’s Russia? I want to go there for the next world cup.”

“Where are you from, Melanie? Where is Memphis?”

I smile, I point, and then I step back. I watch as my friends and neighbors and former strangers talk and point and share stories, their eyes glued to the blobs of blue and orange and red and purple that signify culture and success and struggle. I hope they will continue to stare and ask questions and share stories long after I’m gone. I hope the paint won’t fade, or if it does, I hope someone will pick up a brush and make Australia bright purple again and Philippines that shiny yellow. I don’t know if this map can change anybody’s life, other than my own. The map has changed me because, in that moment when I walked in the mud and the rain to the office of my School Director to say, “It is finished,” and in that moment when he came over to look and made a speech to say thank-you and applauded, I knew he was energized about what I had given him, and I knew that in that moment he respected me, and I finally felt understood.

I don’t know if that will continue. But whenever I walk to class from now on, I can look up and see the world. And so can all my 450 CEG students. And so can my colleagues. And so can the rice farmers. And that, I think, makes the world a little more beautiful.

 

 

The days are getting longer, and hotter, here in the Avaratra. By 7 am, I am already sweating if I’m out in the sun. Fortunately, there is a brilliant, man-made structure that combats heat, invites company, and calms my soul: the porch.

I am blessed with a cement floor that extends about three feet past my front door, and a ravinala roof to cover, providing sweet shade, a necessarily relief from the beating sun. It’s often cooler outside, under my porch at midday, than it is inside.

Suffice to say, I do a lot of sitting on my porch. I was dishes and clothes, I grade papers, I eat lunch, I journal, all on my front porch. My view is the houses across from me, the mountains in the background and, if I’m lucky, the wispy pink strokes of a sunset. My entertainment is the cast of characters whose home I am visiting: the neighborhood boys and girls chasing each other around; my students on their way to and from school; women selling fish, selling beauty products, selling bananas and angana in big baskets balanced effortlessly on the tops of their heads; men riding bicycles; whole families riding in ox-pulled carts.

At first, I felt very self-conscious being in such conspicuous view of the whole neighborhood. Every time I brush my teeth or wash my hands or even just open my door, someone is there, watching me. At first, I got a lot of stares (and a few jaws dropped…and lots of laughter). But now, thankfully, most of that has died down. Instead, I get a familiar greeting, a morning song that I like to sing with everyone:

–Mbolatsara!

     -Salatsareeee. Ino vaovao?

-Tsy tsy. Maresaka?

      -Mangina foeeeee!

And so it goes.

People in town know me now. But when visitors come, they are still gaga (surprised) to see a white girl, sometimes with braids in her hair, washing her clothes out of a plastic basin on the front porch of a Malagasy home. I still smile and nod and greet them, and they laugh, mostly in good humor, and move on with their lives.

I remember when I first got to site, I was overcome with anxiety about how much sitting everyone seemed to do. “People just sit, all day, on their front porches. They don’t go anywhere and they don’t do anything.” Well, of course that’s not true. People work all day, and they go to the rice fields and they go to other towns and they go to visit people and they go to church and mosque and the market. But it is true that people do a lot of sitting on porches. And now, I’m one of those people.

 

Yeah, I’m a little gaga, too.