Keep on Waiting on the World to Change

Sitting on the side of the road, waiting for a passing taxi-brousse* to grace me with a seat, or at least a fraction of one, I started to think about...waiting.  That morning alone I had already lost two unrecoverable hours of my youth baking in the hot sun waiting for a passing car, and it could be as many more until I even saw a brousse, let alone one heading in the right direction.  How many combined hours had I spent this way?  How many days of my life had slipped away in a taxi-brousse station, or on the side of the road, watching as cars passed me by, buses filled up with a seemingly impossible number of passengers, and chickens, mattresses, suitcases, and bikes were loaded onto the top?  As I started to do the math, I realized that this was not even counting the number of uncomfortable hours I had racked up actually sitting in a taxi-brousse, traveling to and from nearby villages and distant cities.  My thoughts drifted…

How much time had I spent waiting in general?  Waiting for students to show up to a class I was teaching, waiting for the restaurant to finally bring my food (“What, did they have to kill the cow tonight?”), waiting for a village official to get back to me about approval for a project, or waiting for the postman to tell me that a package I had been expecting for months had finally arrived.   

And then I looked around me, and for the first time saw what should have been obvious months earlier—Madagascar is a country in a near constant state of waiting.  Next to me on the side of the road were other people squinting, looking up and down the road in anticipation of the long-awaited arrival of a car, to pick them up, drop off relatives, bring the mail, or just provide a few brief moments of distraction in an otherwise fairly dull village.  Like these people, who almost seemed to enjoy sitting around doing nothing, I had become so used to waiting that I had stopped noticing it.  It no longer seemed like a burden to sit for three hours waiting for a brousse to drive by so I could hand them a letter, addressed “Vazaha, Maromandia” (“White person, Town south of me”…it got there, eventually).  Of course it would take months for a package to get to Ambanja  from America; why would it be any other way?  When will the taxi-brousse finally leave?  When it is full, duh. 

In some ways, I think Americans could learn a lot from the Malagasy outlook on waiting.  We tend to view idleness with an attitude that borders on compulsion towards business and productivity.  Time spent waiting is time wasted.  A ten minute wait for the bus is spent getting work done on a smart phone; a flight delayed by an hour is met with an angry outcry by passengers; food can be ordered and delivered in minutes, all without the onerous delay of parking and getting out of a car.

But, as I have learned in Madagascar, not all idleness is necessarily negative, and the ability to wait patiently can be a remarkably advantageous trait.  The time spent waiting for my food in a restaurant makes me enjoy my food more (I may not want them to actually need to kill the cow when I order my steak, but do I really want my food pre-made and churned out in seconds?).  Time spent waiting for brousses is spent getting to know the people at the brousse station, the vendors on the side of the road, or fellow travelers.  Time spent waiting at the pump for buckets to fill with water is time spent bonding with the women in town, fostering a sense of community. Time spent waiting for village officials to help with projects is time spent wrinkling out the flaws in what appeared to be a perfect plan.  The lack of the constant, stressful urgency to be accomplishing something or getting somewhere is profoundly refreshing and, ultimately, rewarding.  I am proud of my newfound ability to wait patiently like a Malagasy person, to find contentment passing the time doing absolutely nothing.  Scratch that: it is not time spent doing nothing. It is time spent waiting, which is an entirely different thing.

However, in other ways, this waiting that often seems to define life in Madagascar is perhaps less of a positive attribute than it is a manifestation of a certain passiveness that permeates the culture; a passiveness that is reflected, arguably,  in the country’s rampant underdevelopment.  This is not to say that Malagasy people are lazy, or unmotivated.  Certainly, there are many Malagasy people, some of whom I have the pleasure of working with in Peace Corps and in my village, who have taken their country’s development into their own hands, who are not passively waiting for development to happen but are working hard to realize it every day.  But, most Malagasy people, it often seems, have settled into an apparently indifferent limbo.  And they wait.

People don’t just spend hours waiting for a taxi-brousse, they spend years, even decades, waiting for someone else to come along and build a much-needed road.  They don’t just wait for food at a restaurant, they wait to get through the trying hungry season during which families must cut back drastically on caloric intake; they wait for government subsidies to kick into effect so that they can afford rice.  They don’t just wait a few weeks for village officials to get back to them about projects, they wait for years for the government to follow through on its promises to build schools, power plants, and wells.  And, like me on the side of the road waiting for a brousse, they have stopped noticing that perhaps they have been waiting too long.

While to an outsider, watching as Madagascar continues to fail to develop, this passiveness may seem inexcusable, after living here for over a year, it is certainly hard to blame people for this attitude.  Most Malagasy people, even decades after decolonization, continue to find themselves in a position of relative powerlessness, without an outlet through which to effect changes they want to see or even express an opinion about what path the country should be following.  Foreign run NGOs come into a community, assess what they think the problems are, apply their well-intentioned but often misguided solutions, ask people to thank them, and then abandon the community to fend for itself yet again. The government isn’t much better: it is either some abstract, distant entity that has little or nothing to do with a villager’s daily life (once, when I asked a group of my friends in my village who the president of Madagascar was, they readily admitted that they didn’t know), or a limited, powerless, and often corrupt group of local elites that can, in reality, accomplish very little.

And so Malagasy people keep waiting.  Where does this leave them?  Well, probably next to me, on the side of the road somewhere, patiently waiting for a brousse to pick them up and take them where they want to go.  I guess we’ll all get where we want to be sooner or later, and at least in the meanwhile, we’ll have a good time waiting.

*A taxi-brousse is the main means of transportation in Madagascar.  The “buses” are usually old vans that travel from town to town, or take longer, often overnight trips, from city to city.  On local brousses, people are sometimes squeezed five or even six to a row, with plenty of extra children, chickens, and random baskets thrown in for good measure.