Tsaky Tsaky Wooooooooow

Hi everyone!! I’m gonna tell you about my week of craziness! I was in Faux Cap, a really really isolated part of Madagascar right on the southern tip where the Indian Ocean and Mozambique Channel meet. It was village stay week so we were placed in groups of two and taken off to distant even more isolated villages to live with the people there. I didn’t see anyone from my program but my partner, Sophie, for an entire week. Our village consisted of five tiny huts. There were about 15 people in our village, including our parents Nene and Baba (Mom and Dad). Uhhh they were so great and took really good care of us and treated us like their actual kids. They have two daughters, one tiiiiiny baby and then another impossibly cute six year old girl. Our cousins lived next door. They are 19 and 20 year old girls and it was sooo cool interacting with them – their lives are totally different than ours but we’re all still 19/20 year old girls so there are definite similarities. They cried when we said bye to them it was sososo sad.

            Literally 23 hours out of every day was spent practicing their traditional dances and those specific to their villages, the majority of which consisted of INTENSE booty shaking and pelvic thrusting.  O mannn was my village in it to win it. Our professors told them at the beginning of the week that if we didn’t come back as really skillfull Malagasy dancers the family wouldn’t get the sheep that had been previously promised to them, which we had NO idea about until after the week was over. SO CRUEL. The result was that the village became intensely competitive and we literally never stopped dancing, and everytime we didn’t shake our booties at top speed our family would get really distressed and wouldn’t know what to do with us so we were forced to shake it sun up to sun down. My booty moved in ways it has never moved before this week. At points were forced to pretend be didn’t understand the word for dance to get a break. And the worst part was that by the end of the week we were sooooo incredibly exhausted that we gave an incredibly lackluster performance in front of the 11 other villages, despite our cultural garb and the way in which we poured our souls into the performance. I could see the concern in our village’s eyes as they awaited the results, but OBVIOUSLY it turned out to be a massive 12 village wide tie and everyone got a plump, fluffy, succulent sheep. Ridiculous. OH and I forgot to mention that the dance “party” at the end of the week was 5km away and we were forced to dance the entire way there, chicken/goodbye present from Nene and Baba raised Simba style over head. At one point my lamba (traditional/ super conservative lady clothes) got danced off, revealing my sultry running shorts underneath. SO embarrassing.  Got so many giggles from my village and brought shame to a large, large number of elders. Sorry village. Haha and the best part was the ridiculous of our special village song called “Tsaky Tsaky Wow.” It haunts me in my sleep. It goes like this: “Tsaky tsaky wowwwwwwww” and everytime you say wow you take a step forward, swing and arm back and over head and give a bigggg thumbs up. Oh yeah.

            There were many awesome highlights to the week, including when I got stuck (literally stuck) in my parents house. I was trying to exit through the doorway and my torso made it but then my butt got stuck and I was pretty sure I was gonna rip the front wall of with my butt but skillfully manuevared and avoided an incredibly awkward situation. It was a close call, but luckily my butt had literally been shaken off by this point so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. We also had a really great impromptu dance circle with a ton of random little kids in this other village not involved in the village stay and before we knew it about 50 people were involved. It was incredible. Other highlights of my week included harvesting bagedas (sweet potatoes) and eating them, skinny dipping in the Indian Ocean, and pooping in cactus patches, and returning home to my Ft. Dauphin family and getting lots of hugs!!

Love love love,

Mairi