The Culture Shock Syndrome

“Life moves pretty fast sometimes. If you don’t slow down every once in a while, you’ll miss it.” Ferris Bueller speaks words of wisdom we all too often forget, or even worse, outright reject.

I’ve been in Madagascar for nearly a week now, and my concept of culture-shock has shifted, matured really, quite rapidly. When most people think of culture shock, I believe they are primarily considering a change in language, food, and maybe some cultural behaviors that we don’t really consider all that important. My time in Germany confirmed this concept in my mind. While there, not much really changed. I got on the Stadtbahn each morning, ate more German foods, and adjusted quickly to a longer lunch break and a shorter workday. But Madagascar, oh Madagasikararko, you are a totally different beast.

My week in Madagascar has done nothing short of shattering my understanding of culture shock. To give you a short recap of my week, I spent all day of Sunday, as you know, locked in my hotel room where it became very lonely and there was not much I could do other than continuously convince myself that I needed to stay awake so my internal sleeping clock could adjust more quickly. Time traveling over the Atlantic is very cumbersome and inconvenient. From Sunday to Monday morning, my only view of Madagascar was out my tiny hotel window. The window’s tininess is more metaphorical than it is literal. Indeed, it was actually a rather well sized window that provided quite a bit of light. Yet outside this metaphorically small window, I could only really see part of the narrow, cobblestone street below and a few chipped buildings in front of me. All day Sunday I could hear an occasional car drive by. But for the most part, the street was silent. Oh, how misleading Sunday is in Tana.

The traffic spontaneously appeared, much like I believe the sun did when the good Lord said, “let there be light!” around 7am. From that moment, all I could hear were the growling engines of questionably operating vehicles, the blasts of car horns, the shouts of vendors and pedestrians, and the deafening squeals of breaks who most certainly lost all of their brake pads maybe a decade ago. And it has held true this entire week, that Tana’s long, roaring yawn that rattles the buildings and fills the streets occurs just around 6:30am every morning, with the exception of Sunday and slightly less on Saturday.

Yet this Monday morning, I was released from my quarantine just in time to hop on the taxi headed to the US Embassy, about 45min away from Tana’s centre ville, and where I met my fellow Fulbrighters who had eagerly been anticipating my arrival to the country. The drive to the embassy was about what I expected, more or less. I have been on roads in poor countries before. It could be said that my time in Guyana, where the streets are narrow, sidewalks non-existent, streets shared by cars, trucks, donkeys, and people alike, and no traffic laws governing the chaos of the winding paths, prepared me for what I would encounter in Madagascar. The fact of the matter is that nothing in Guyana could compare to the sheer scale of Tana.

Everything I saw in Guyana is multiplied by a factor of 100. The photograph I selected for this blog post is neither mine nor does justice to the streets of Tana. For starters, the streets aren't crowded enough, there are not enough street vendors selling random assortments of "goods" on towels in the dust, nor are there any stray and starving dogs. Moreover, in this picture, there are intact roads, lanes for cars, cars that operate, and what appear to be what I would call "sound structures" on the side of the road. None of those things exist in Madagascar.

I wish I were joking. There are more people who live in Tana, just one city in Madagascar (2.5 million seems to be the most commonly estimated number, but I have heard 1.5-4 million as estimates before), than Guyana (750 thousand in a country the size of Idaho). There is an endless sea of traffic in Tana, and the winding maze of roads, alleyways, side markets, and rice fields goes on and on, far beyond the hills that outline the City of Thousands.

So what about culture shock? I have never seen so many people before in my life. They are everywhere. There is no quiet part of Tana, and I am now thinking that the title of my blog was horribly selected. Maybe I should have called it “Traffic jams with locals” or even “How to use your car horn a thousand ways”. But hindsight should not ruin good things. Moreover, after receiving my schedule and seeing how much time I will have off to explore the English-speaking community, I will certainly have a lot of time to myself and plenty of time to think while walking around the city. I can imagine that this is what New York City must be like, to an extent. But I doubt that they compare. Unlike United States cities, here the streets are too narrow, the sidewalks even more so, if they exist at, and the sheer volume of people in such a cramped space makes everything very overwhelming. And that, my reader, is only the snowflake balancing on the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.

All I can say is that the Malagasy people certainly know how to live in the moment, it’s all they have and all they want. There is no real care about tomorrow or yesterday. Why bother? Yesterday cannot change and tomorrow hasn’t even come yet. Everything in the city slows down. People, cars, bikes, scooters, businesses, restaurants, schools. They all operate on Malagasy time, and to an American who likes, indeed, thrives and longs for, routine, structure, order, and clarity, Tana has thrown a gauntlet before my feet saying, “come here vazaha. Live as the Malagasy do. Put aside your silly concept of schedules, timetables, order, and structure. Forget your routine. Live one day at a time. Live one moment at a time. Take life as it comes to you. Life moves pretty fast sometimes. If you don’t slow down every once and a while, you’ll miss it.”

It seems that God uses teaching methods and strategies, something which I have been working with all week in preparation for the classroom, that best suits His students. Apparently class is in session for me, and it seems like my curriculum is tailored exactly to my needs. Anyways, I will share my observations, for which there are too many to count, over the ensuing weeks. I feel that it is best to do it by topic, and there are more topics than I can appropriately mention here. Oh my, my reader, you are in for a wild ride. But know that I pray for you every morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.