My boyfriend finally got a job at the national airline company and I had left my laboratory job a while ago and had an interview for a job as a quality insurance inspector almost a year and a half after our arrival. That meant INDEPENDENCE! So we started house hunting. We got really lucky because the first house we visited was close to the airport and also close to my future job. It was in a small forest, it kind of looked like a chalet. We immediately liked and wanted to move in at the beginning of the month. So we started shopping for all the necessities and two weeks later we were settled. Besides the fact that we were finally getting our feet on the ground, we were breathing fresh air. The city is very polluted by cars. First of all, there are a lot of them, second, most of them are really old, and third, a lot of them burn oil so is all that black smoke coming out of them. Not very healthy. We don’t live in the big city so we don’t have that much pollution and with all the trees around us, it just felt really good.
By the way, most forests of Madagascar have disappeared. People burn them to get fertile rice fields, but that lasts for only one year or two and they have to burn more trees and so on and so forth. My parents in law tell me that 30 years ago Madagascar was green but now, when you look at it from a plane, there are very few forests left. Some ministries have started a reforestation program which is good but it’s still on a small scale, but, they have to start somewhere.
I loved my new job, I was working very long hours and on Saturdays too but it was fun and I was learning a lot of new things that would help me in the future. But that did not last that long. It was a brand new company (making canned seafood for exportation) and we still didn’t have the government’s agreement and we had to wait for the European one as well. During that time, I would go to work to do nothing, my boss was cool at the time and would let me go home early sometimes. Those were the good times at work. When we were just days before getting our agreement, the owner of the company came to Madagascar and said that we had an order for a few thousands cans. I calculated the number of cans we can make during one day with a full team and with the delay that he gave us, it was just not possible. My boss started to stress out. He was blaming me for everything that went wrong in the factory, started saying he won’t pay me if we are not able to fulfill the order, bla bla bla. At one point I just couldn’t take the abuse anymore and just left.
A friend of the family was in town and she has a law cabinet in Tana so she helped me to write a letter explaining myself and saying that I would sue them if I needed to. In the end, everything went well, they did not blame me for the order that was not finished and I was able to leave with no problem. When I thought about it later I was happy that I left because my working conditions were kind of bad when we actually started working. For 10 hours a day and 6 days a week I was working at 10 degrees Celcius ( I was dressed accordingly but after a while you still get cold). I had a pretty bad salary and had no more life, so it was not a bad choice after all.
But life had reserved something better for me…
