Rock Hill volunteer home from Madagascar, but not for good

After two years spent living in a small village in Madagascar, Rasheika Robinson missed several things about life in America. But when she finally returned home to Rock Hill earlier this month, the first thing that surprised her about home was the foliage.

“On the way home from the airport, I was like, ‘South Carolina is so beautiful! Everything is so green! Look at all the trees!’ ” Robinson says, laughing in her family’s kitchen during a short respite from her Peace Corps duties in the poor African nation.

“Where I live in the central highlands, there’s some rain forest, but it’s all been cut down. There are almost no trees,” she said. “You would think during the rainy season it would be sad, but that’s when all the leaves and flowers come out. It’s during the fall that I get depressed.”

This month’s return home is just a quick layover for the 27-year-old volunteer, who has been doing health outreach and public education among the Merina people of central Madagascar, even raising funds online to get basic materials to a deprived rural population lacking running water and other amenities that Americans take for granted.

She’s become so committed to the people she serves and works with in Madagascar – literally on the other side of the world, in the Southern Hemisphere, where Robinson left behind a Malagasy winter for the South Carolina heat – that Robinson plans to fly out Friday for an extended year of Peace Corps work in her adopted home.

Even back in Rock Hill, Robinson’s stayed on “Malagasy time,” either getting up early or staying up late so she can communicate online with other volunteers several time zones ahead of her on the projects she plans to take on when she gets back.

“When I first got back, I was on a high,” she said. “But now I’m ready to go back so I can start working. I’m not used to having so much free time.”

Discovering a new country

Robinson wasn’t even sure where Madagascar was when she received her assignment from the Peace Corps. She had become the first member of her family to graduate from college at the University of South Carolina, and was torn between her volunteer effort and plans to go to law school. Her flight out of the country in March 2013 was only the second time she had ever been on a plane.

But since then, she’s found a home among the people in the highland village of Vinaninkarena, despite the seemingly more difficult standard of living in the still developing country. She found the people there needed more help than many may have thought.

“We’re telling people about the importance of washing your hands, but they have no clean water, no wells,” she said. “They said ‘OK,’ but they just don’t have the resources.”

In a country where many villagers still relieve themselves in open fields, Robinson and community volunteers helped raise money to dig 22 sanitary latrines, 16 wells and nine clean water sources, helping 1,000 people across the highland region she serves.

At the same time she was getting to know the Malagasy people, she adopted much of their lifestyle. In the last two years, she’s traded America’s cheeseburgers and pizza for the local staples of rice, fresh produce and strong Malagasy coffee. Her family noticed the difference when she came back.

“I remember you looking through the fridge going, ‘Oh my God, all this food is processed,’ ” Roche Robinson told her sister. “Then I came in the kitchen two days later and you were eating it.”

In addition to the local food, Robinson has gotten used to the more leisurely rural lifestyle in Madagascar – especially during the long, inactive rainy months, which she uses to catch up on her American TV shows.

“Here, life is always go, go, go, go,” Rakeisha Robinson said. “You don’t have time to sit and drink a cup of coffee and have a conversation. Now I think that’s what’s important.”

But life in the country isn’t so leisurely that when she gets back to Madagascar Robinson won’t jump right back into work. Robinson has become active with the Tovovavy Mendrika (Malagasy for “Model Young Lady”), an organization for girls ages 12 to 20 that focuses on education and youth empowerment.

The week she returns, Robinson is supposed to lead a weeklong camp on girls’ leadership and the environment, a Peace Corps initiative to help young people feel a sense of responsibility for the island’s threatened environmental resources. It’s one of several projects focusing on education she wants to see finished in her final year in Madagascar.

“A 12-year-old there doesn’t have goals like we would,” Robinson said. “They might only be told to finish middle school. ... We want to push them to go into college, and look at what kind of jobs they want to do after college.”

Robinson has set up a Peace Corps donation page to help raise money for the camp. Time is of the essence; if the project hasn’t met its funding goal by the time she gets back, the camp may have to be postponed.

‘Ammunition to make things better’

Rhonda Robinson admits her children didn’t have the easiest upbringing. She says she developed a drug problem after Rasheika, the youngest of her four children, was born, and she spent time in jail after smoking crack cocaine and marijuana. But through it all, she tried to keep her family close, and give her children a sense that something better is possible. Her youngest daughter especially seemed to take it to heart.

“Even when she was younger, she had that vision,” Rhonda Robinson said. “I’ve always tried to instill those things in them, that they can do what they want to do.”

Rhonda remembers a time when a middle-school-age Rasheika came home and proudly told her mother she was going to be the class vice president, with her friend as president.

“I told her you should be president and he should be vice president,” Rhonda said. “I said you can do anything you want to do. Through Christ all things are possible.”

The Robinsons have remained so close, Roche said she didn’t believe her sister was really going to leave for so long and travel so far until she saw her little sister get onto the plane to fly out of the United States.

“I could never leave my family and my home,” Roche Robinson said. “So she amazed me. I thought if she can do it, then I could do it, or my son can do it ... my sister’s kids or other kids in the community could do something like this.”

Even as a young girl, Robinson could perceive the trouble spots around her. But she vowed not to let it make her a victim.

“I used that as ammunition to make things better,” said Rakeisha Robinson, who studied psychology and sociology at the University of South Carolina. “So often in sociology they say, ‘If you’re from a low-income background or have a single mother, you’re going to be this way.’... That’s why I want to work with youth, to show them it’s not true. And I can say that not as an outsider but as someone who went through it and is still going through it.”

‘What they give me’

By next spring, Robinson will be headed out on something of a farewell tour. She will have to head around the region she serves to say goodbye to everyone she’s met and tried to help for three short years, from young children to community activists, mayors and village presidents.

Once she completes her extended tour, she hopes to provide more resources and opportunities to the community she’s made her home, or at least lay the groundwork for her Peace Corps successors to finish some of the more ambitious projects.

She could still go to law school, but Robinson says she wants to spend the next couple years polishing her grant-writing skills so she can focus her energies on community development here and back in Africa. Eventually, she’d like to run her own development non-governmental organization. In the meantime, she plans to stay in touch with her colleagues in Madagascar, just like during her late nights on Malagasy time this month.

Still, it will be difficult for her to leave Madagascar behind, where she’s made so many connections. Robinson has heard from mothers of some Tovovavy Mendrika that the girls break down in tears when reminded that Rasheika will soon be leaving them.

“I’m not going back for what I can give them but because of what they give me,” she said. “I feel like I’ve found a purpose there.”

Robinson will keep one momento from her time there: her fiance Jacques, a history student who hopes to come study in the United States along with his future wife.

“I need him here because, of course, I love him, but also because the longer I’m here, the more I’m losing my Malagasy language skills, and I can’t speak to the people I need to over there if I can’t remember the language.”

Next year, with Madagascar in Rakeisha’s past, the rest of the Robinson household will be waiting to see what challenge she decides to take on next.

“All my family think I’m going to take over the world,” she jokes. “But I just want to enlighten the world.”

This story was originally published July 29, 2015 at 6:45 PM with the headline "Rock Hill volunteer home from Madagascar, but not for good."