Age is Relative

Since I just celebrated my birthday last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about age lately…especially the implications of turning 25. I’m no longer going to be in my early 20s and I’ll soon be in my late 20s. And before I realize it, I’ll be in my 30s! I’m sure to my middle-aged readers, that still seems really young, but when I’ve spent a majority of my life thinking of myself as a teenager and then a young adult, it’s a significant milestone entering my mid-20s.

The other reason I’ve been thinking a lot about age is because of the recent adult English class I held in my new community. I had been trying for several weeks to set a date with the interested community members, but we had trouble finding a time when all of us could meet, and then things like unexpected meetings and funerals kept coming up and causing us to postpone our lesson. So finally this past week I held my first conversation class. I had about ten students. Many of them were really sharp and already knew quite a bit of English. A few had a hard time, but they all did really well in general. All the students were teens or young adults. A few were teachers, a few were middle school students a few were middle or high school dropouts who wanted to get back into learning. It was great to establish rapport with the young adults in the village. We started out with introductions and greetings. At the end of the lesson, one student wanted to practice asking, “How old are you?” and so consequently I found out everyone’s age in the class. Much to my surprise, I was the zoky be, or, oldest one amongst them! Their ages ranged mostly from 20 to 23. It really surprised me to find out that all of my students were so young, because looking at some of them I would have thought they were at least my age, if not a few years older.

In general, Malagasies always seem so much older and more mature than their actual age (with the exception of some of the annoying guys who think it’s their job to verbally harass women all day). In an impoverished setting like rural Madagascar with such a rough lifestyle, a lot is expected of kids at a very young age. As soon as they know how to walk, children are expected to fend for themselves, and as early as 6 or 7, they start contributing to the household. Whether it’s hauling water from half a kilometer away, washing the family clothes and dishes at the river, working in the fields, taking care of younger siblings, cooking lunch over the open cook-fire…they do it all. Many of those little kids are more competent than I am at such household tasks. I cheat and use a gas stove, so I don’t know the first thing about starting a charcoal or wood fire. The kids in my last village used to wash my clothes because they were used to doing everyone’s laundry and could do a much better job than I (I’m so lazy and unskilled at scrubbing laundry by hand that I just soak it in the powdered detergent, swish it around and rinse it a few times.) The mundane chores we give our kids in America, like setting the table, taking out trash, feeding the dog and putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher in no way compare to the physical labor and hardships that some of the Malagasy children are expected to bear at such young age.

Malagasies have to grow up fast, especially when you consider that the typical Malagasy family consists of five or six children, the parents are often away working in the fields and half of the kids don’t attend school because the family can’t afford the fees for all of them to study. If the kids do study, it’s usually for only half a day anyway. Hence the kids are unsupervised starting at an impossibly young age and have to figure out how to survive on their own with no amenities like electricity and running water to make their lives easier. So perhaps because of the fact that Malagasies have to grow up quickly, they often seem so much older than they appear.

I think back to my childhood and how I used to consider it a difficult time, especially compared to a lot of my peers—certainly not for economic but rather for emotional reasons. My mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when I as only in second grade and she was very sick for much of the time that I was growing up. I remember at her funeral when I was fourteen, my cousin said to me through teary eyes and a comforting hug that I’d have to grow up fast. Looking back on the trails and suffering of that period of my life now, I’m starting to think it still doesn’t compare to how quickly the Malagasy children have to grow up.

True, there was an immense amount of emotional pain and stress in our household when my mother was severely ill from the chemotherapy treatments, and a lot was expected of me, like helping to take care of her and to pitch in with the cooking and laundry. However I had loving support from my father, relatives and older siblings through it all and I never had to worry about basic needs like where my next meal would come from or where to find clean water for the house when all the wells dried up. I lived the entire first twenty years of my life with such luxuries of the developed world as indoor toilets, running water, 24/7 electricity, uninterrupted, quality education, ample quantities of healthy and tasty food, loving and caring family, quality healthcare, reliable means of public and private transportation and safety and security. Many Malagasy children simply do without a majority of these basic amenities which we Americans take for granted everyday.

The other aspect of Malagasy life that often makes especially the women seem older than they actually are is the early age at which they start bearing children. Since Malagasy culture values fertility highly, the average family even in this day and age still aims for four or five children. If the women actually space out their births by two years, having this many children requires them to start early. In addition, many women in the rural areas end up dropping out of school at the primary or secondary level because their family can’t afford the school fees or the secondary school is in a larger town that is too far away from their home village for them to continue on after finishing primary school. Since these women no longer have their education to focus on, they start thinking about starting a family, even though they may only be in their teens.

Birth control is available for free at government clinics thanks to the Malagasy ministry of health and outside aid from developed countries, but these clinics are still often too far for women to walk all the way there every month from their village to pick up the medication. For those who can access the clinic, their husbands or boyfriends still often reject the idea of using birth control, so their partners either have to use it secretly or not use it at all. And then many of the clinics face problems with frequent stock-outs, so the women periodically have to return home from the clinic without having received their shot or pills because the regional health centers weren’t able to replenish the supply of birth control in the rural areas.

With all of these barriers to birth control, Malagasy women start having children as young as 14 or 15 and continue having them into their 30s and 40s. The stress that pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and child rearing puts on these women’s bodies makes some of them appear as if they are 40 when they are in fact only 20, simply because they may have already had three kids.

On the reverse side, Malagasies often think that I look much younger than I am. I do have a young face, but I think it has more to do with it than that. When they hear that I am not married nor have any kids, they immediately respond that I’m still a child. Since I haven’t yet taken on the responsibilities of head of the household, I must seem somewhat young and immature compared to the average Malagasy mother taking care of 5 kids and a husband. I also tend to present myself in a way that makes me seem younger, because of language and culture barriers. Even though my Malagasy has steadily improved over the two and a half years that I have lived here, I still end up communicating at a more basic level or talking around vocabulary that I don’t know, which probably makes me sound like the way most kids or adolescents would talk. Since I’m still sometimes unfamiliar with cultural norms or expectations and because I’m generally shy anyway, I also tend to hesitate or act unsure in a lot of social situations, making me seem younger and less experienced.

So returning back to the situation at the english class in my village, I think it was as much a surprise to my English club pupils as it was to me that I was the oldest one in the classroom that day!