How to listen to someone

How do you show that you’re really listening in England and Madagascar?
England

Make eye contact
Make listening noises (aha, yup, indeed)
Ask questions

Madagascar

Look at the ground
Remain silent

Thus an English person listening to a Malagasy could be perceived as:

Wanting to speak themselves
Trying to dominate
Being disrespectful
Intrusive by asking questions

And a Malagasy listening to an English person could be perceived as:

Bored
Trying [...]

Minor annoyances of Madagascar

Cloth eating bugs
Sorted through a bag of clothes I’d left here yesterday, to discover that they too had been decimated by some clothes eating bugs.
I’ve no idea what they are so I attach a photo so that someone can tell me. Whatever they are I watched with smug satisfaction as the ants cleared away [...]

Begging and other ways to get money

Madagascar is one of the poorest counties in the world, positioned 164 out of 177 countries for GDP per capita and 143 out of 177 for its Human Development Index (Madagascar’s Human Development Index 2004). So you would expect to see people begging (we do in London after all).
But, in Diego, begging only happens [...]

Our new car

We are the proud owners of a new car, a Diego classic Renault 4.
Currently it is Diego taxi yellow, with lots of ‘Bad Boy’ attachments such as headlight covers that look like seductive eyelids, shiny silver windscreen wiper attachments, blacked out windows etc.
We will be removing most of these and repainting it, to a more [...]

Grown men crying

For some people of the Dordogne district (Jean’s district), life has been on hold for two days as they have watched the three ‘Anne of Green Gables’ films. Grown fishermen have been wiping tears away and taking Jean aside to say how great the films are.
Ha – and they like to laugh at us [...]

You are so fat

A big topic of conversation has been how FAT I am… Some people have said it to my face and others have said it to Jean.
“Oh she’s been eating cake” “Oh she’s been eating too much sawaba (sweet dish with coconut milk)”.
It doesn’t really work to say “Well I’ve had a baby” as local women [...]

Sorting things out

A treat for ants
My precious commodity from home of breakfast cereal was this morning attacked by ants. I’d looked at my box of cereal last night and thought ‘Hmm – the ants will find that. Must put it in something’.
Well, I paid for my fingers-crossed approach as I spent an hour sorting through [...]