Vacation: River, Tsingy, Baobabs

So as you may have guessed from the pictures in the last post, I've been exploring the island a bit more! After the Peace Corps training, I used up my accumulated vacation days by going on an awesome little excursion with some of the other volunteers.

Lava

The first stop was Ansirabe, the pousse-pousse capital of the country (the Malagasy version of rickshaws). A group of up chipped in for a taxi to take us out to Lake Tritriva, a pretty little turquoise volcanic lake situated above the barley fields. Yes, barley, not rice for once! Ansirabe is the HQ from Three Horses Beer, the national (basically only) beer in Madagascar. We hiked around the lake crater and watched a local man and his sons gather wild honey.

Water

A small group of us then took a too-early-morning trip to the town of Miandrivazo, where we joined up with some French and Dutch people for a 3-day ride down the Tsiribihina river in dugout canoes. The river was broad and shallow from the dry season and we had to get out to push it over sandbars a number of times. Out guide kept telling us that the Batman would guide us during the day. What? The Batman will take you! It took us a while to realize he meant the boatman. The sun was a bit harsh but the trip was peaceful, floating downriver and taking a turn with the oar now and then. We ate and camped on big sandbars and slept under the stars--though the first night I had to tuck my kisaly (wrap skirt) around my head to ward off mosquitoes.

Cows

After almost 150k of river, we hauled out at a small town where, as with everywhere else, the kids were too used to tourists. "Give me your watch." No. "Give me a pen." No. "Candy?" Sigh. There was also a constant demand for used water bottles, which I can support a bit more since it's legitimate recycling--I even saw a kid make a two-string guitar out of a discarded water bottle. After escaping the hoards of children, we loaded onto zebu (humped cow) carts for a 2 hour ride to our hotel, a hilarious little trip that involved running the cows and their rickety little wagons down dusty roads and fording the streams Oregon Trail-style.

4x4

After a very necessary shower and a good night's sleep, we squeezed into a 4x4 and drove to a campsite outside Tsingy National Park, a fairly long ride that involved nasty roads (4x4=absolutely necessary) and two river crossings by ferry. The ferries were interesting--bi- or tri-hull catamaran with a wooden plank platform. More river camping! As a side note, I continue to curse the French for introducing their concept of a breakfast to their colonies. 6 inches of dry bread with weak coffee or tea is NOT a meal, merci beaucoup.

Rocks

We spent a full day wandering around the Tsingy, which is a bit like Bryce Canyon in the States--erosion has caused slot canyons, stone pillars, and wavy fins of rock. We hiked around for 6 hours or so, squeezing between and climbing over the rocks to explore some of the caves and grottos that apparently used to be occupied by the mysterious Vazimba people, who according to Malagasy oral tradition were the first inhabitants of Madagascar. Many of the ascents and descents over the rocks were so steep that we wore harness and clipped onto cables anchored in the rock while we climbed over on ladders. There was also a great suspension bridge over one of the drops--think Indiana Jones with safety cables. The park was amazingly well kept up, despite (because of?) the fact that due to its remote location and the drop in tourism because of the political issues here, they only got 5000 visitors last year.

Lemurs

One thing Bryce definitely does not have! We saw a bunch of sifakas--lanky white little dudes who jump through the trees--a nocturnal hapalemur, and a family of brown lemurs.

Long Road South

We got back in the 4x4s to head south to Morondava--rough roads, two ferries, and LOTS of baobabs! There are a bunch of myths about the baobab, the most common being that the gods were angry at the trees' arrogance, so they yanked them up and stuck them back in the ground upside down, their roots in the air, which accounts for the baobabs' weird appearance. At sunset we were at the Avenue de Baobab, a line of massive trees, some of them 1000 years old. We left the rest of the group at Morondava, a dusty little city on the ocean, and after a brief swim in the Mozambique Channel, we headed back to Tana (Antananarivo, the capital) on 2 days of taxi brousses.

I'm flying back to site tomorrow and have some hopeful leads on working with fair trade vanilla. Peace (Corps) Out!

Pics: The Wild Wild West

Writeup in next post!

Random Area Pictures

Millipede in the forest

Not as cool as a chameleon.

If you were ever wondering what vanilla looks like on the plant.

Middle school students singing at the Independence Day celebration.

One of the towns down the road, Farafan- ganhely

Going by Marojejy Park

My banking town, Sambava, complete with cow

Sambava

Tree nursery at another volunteer's site

Finally, Uploading Cooperates!

Waiting for people to finish counting trees in the forest--L to R, gendarme, counterpart, guide.

Our parade on the way out of the forest (over the rice fields and through the woods, back to our town we go...)

Part of the path on the way up.

I hate this bridge.

First Three Months at Site

First off, sorry for the low number of pictures on the blog--I know people like them, but most of the time the internet doesn't cooperate enough to let me upload! At the moment, I’m in the capital for IST--in-service training, a volunteer conference after the first three months at site. This might be a good opportunity to answer the question I've gotten from a few people--"Uh, so what do you DO, anyway?!?" The first three months at Peace Corps site are supposed to be mainly for learning about your town and improving your language, but I haven’t been totally slacking! I:

Did a community survey and wrote a general report for future volunteers and organizations interested in putting resources in the community.

Hosted a live fencing demonstration for 60 or so middle school students (Live fencing is basically just planting trees or bushes really close together instead of cutting down trees to make a fence).

Helped a start-up vanilla exporting firm translate and edit customs documents in English--and got vanilla beans in return, yum.

Started a 30-student English club with one of the teachers and have had 4 meetings so far. About 5 or 6 of the students are really into it, the others just want me to magically get them to speak English, I suppose through osmosis. It’s amazing the gaps left by the system of rote memorization--the students usually don’t understand even basic words out of the context of memorized phrases. One of the smartest students, who has been taking English for 4 years, asked me what the word “what” meant.

Attended natural resource management conference and an environmental festival.

Did a World Map project--I mentioned this awhile ago. It’s a good project, but a bit of a pain and still not done. It’s a pain because another volunteer and I had to pay for the materials out of pocket, and also because 2/3 of the scheduled work days have been rained out, so the “map” right now consists of a large ocean-blue rectangle with pencil grid lines across it, just waiting for countries to be drawn and painted. Sigh--hate leaving projects unfinished, even if it’s just a few weeks. The kids seem excited, though.

Have been slowly promoting beneficial plants--moringa trees (nutrition and firewood), tomatoes (nutrition and anti-mosquito) and citronelle (anti-mosquito and soil stabilization). Since I only just got my closest neighbors to plant some, this might take awhile!

Malagasy Media--A Quick Post

There are, I've been told, no movie theatres in Madagascar. Peoples' exposure to movies comes from home-run theatres; in my town, there's a family that runs movies off a generator on a small TV. Unfortunately too late for me, but I get to see their advertisements for shows, which generally run along the lines of: "Fists of Steel Action 100%!!" There is one TV station here--MTV. I'm rarely exposed to it, but I did once spend an enjoyable half hour watching a French cartoon.

American pop music is known somewhat here (“(Your Love is) Wicked” and “If I Were a Boy” are big now), but less than I thought it would be. And NO ONE knows who the Beatles are. The truly loved American imports are reggae (OK, not so American I guess!) and country (“She's Gone Country” and “Kiss This” often play on the radio, and I've heard a number of Shania Twain ringtones). But the number one Western music import is Michael Jackson. I think I may have mentioned this already, but in case you didn't know, the world is obsessed with MJ. When I first got here, Malagasy radio news was reporting that Michael Jackson wasn't, in fact, dead, and I was asked for a month afterward to confirm this miraculous news.

The visual media culture in Madagascar is centered around Malagasy music videos. Restaurants, houses, even some of the nicer taxi brousses show music videos on a running loop. And as there are only one or two dozen really popular songs, they get familiar pretty quickly. If you want to look up some Gasy tunes, Wawa, Lola, and Viavy Chile are all pretty popular.



One of the most popular songs isn't Gasy at all—Shakira's “Waka Waka” World Cup song is sung daily here and, I suspect, all over Africa. Incomprehensible but way catchy.

Canine Cruelty

Not a happy post, sorry! An unintentional continuation of the last post's topic...

One of the other volunteer's dog was recently killed by a neighborhood teen. This lead to several disconcerting discussions with other Gasies about 'why the Americans didn't like this'. The Malagasy attitude toward dogs is, frankly, vile. Dogs are widely fady (taboo), and while Malagasies tend to live and let live with most other animals (and will even courteously swerve their cars to avoid hitting always-valued cows), dogs are pretty universally hated. Normally quiet Gasies will start screaming is a dog enters their yard, and kids learn pretty early that dogs are OK to hit. I suppose this stems in part from the high incidence of rabies in the country, but it's still inexcuseable.

I snapped at a teen for throwing rocks at a dog while he was sitting on my porch: “Well I'm Antimoro,” he responded, naming a Southern tribe, “dogs are fady to me.” “Well I'm American,” I responded, “and this is my yard, and it's fady to throw rocks at dogs in my yard.” A slight shake of his head in response to this new wave of weirdness from the foreigner. I went off at another guy who was slashing at a tied dog with a stick while I was getting well water, and a neighbor told him to stop making me upset. So he took the dog behind the house and I had to follow him and explain in mangled and angry Malagasy that no, it's not that I just didn't want to see it, I didn't want him to do it, either. And last week one of the neighbor dogs turned up with a nasty gash in his shoulder and one of the kids told me someone had hit it with a machete. “Why!?!” A shrug in response.

This is definitely one of the harder cultural aspects to deal with, a callous indifference to canine suffering. Trying to explain Americans' attitudes towards dogs is difficult. “Dogs are our best friends”--Malagasy wrinkles nose in disgust as a response. “My dog sleeps in my bed at home!”--a shake of the head. “It's illegal to hurt dogs in the U.S. Some people go to jail”--raised eyebrows. “You know, you could even go to jail or have to pay money if you don't feed your dog enough”--widening eyes and a snort of disbelief. There's no way to deal with this besides educating and trying not to get too mad at people. And never bringing my dog to Madagascar, of course.

3 Dead Bodies and a New School

I thought last Thursday was going to be a lazy day, but it ended up being more like an anthropologists dream day--and I say that as someone with an Anthro degree, I am a culture nerd. :) I had laid my wet laundry out on the grass to dry in the sun and was just sitting down to study some French when one of the teens I know came by to tell me there was a no at the market. A what? A no. Eventually I figured out that she was talking about an aye-aye, known locally as eh-heh; the same as the word for no. (A lot of Malagasy words have multiple meanings.) The aye-aye is a strange animal, even for Madagascar: a lemur that looks like a cross between a raccoon and ET and has its own branch on the lemur family tree. It's famous for its extra-long middle finger, which allows it to dig for insects in trees and fill the same ecological niche that woodpeckers do in the US.

Before I got too excited, she added that it was a dead aye-aye. In part because they look so strange, the aye-aye is subject to superstition, and one of the forest towns had considered it a bad omen to see it near the village. Thay killed it and strung it up on a bamboo tripod at the crossroads to ward off bad luck. Apologies for the disturbing image, but here you go:

I had a (fairly civil) argument with the mayor about how no, they are not dangerous, and no, they do not attack people.

On a less gruesome note (since I didn't actually see this body), I got a very kind invitation to accompany a family to a ansaharana (sp?)--the local version of the famous Malagasy tradition of a bones-turning ceremony. It differs from the tradition in other parts of Madagascar (and as the explanations people were giving me were in Gasy, I'm not sure I have it all right), but basically, if a relative dies away from the ancestral village and the family cannot afford to ship the body back, they'll bury the person for 3-5 years, save up money, then dig up the bones, transport them back to the home village, and have a celebration. Most of it is family-only--days of sleepless singing and dancing--but on the last day the community visits for a big feast and speeches, which is what I was invited to. People were seated by town for the communal lunch, so through lunch women were yelling things like, "Tsaratanana! Karibo Sakafo!"--"People from NiceTown! Come eat!" After the speeches, I was invited to look in the family room, where all the furniture had been cleared out except for a small draped box/coffin on a table. It was surrounded by exhausted women sitting on floor mats.

Saturday was a different celebration altogether. A nearby town was celebrating the completion of 3 new school buildings, courtesy of the Japanese government and Aide et Action. After a lot of waiting, I got hustled up to a makeshift dais with a bunch of other VIPs (again, still don't think I belong in this category, but there you go). I was in the second row, but after the back of my chair fell through one of the plank gaps, they decided that was much too dangerous for me and made me change places with the vice-mayor and sit in the front row. The better to be stared at by over 500 people, joy. I did, however, get an amusing view of the kids, who spent the music breaks between speeches dancing like crazy in front of the loudspeakers. At least until it started raining--then the VIPs were talking to an empty field as the crowd retreated to the eaves of the newly completed school buildings. We watched the mayor cut the ribbon to one of the new buildings, then went in to admire the new facilities--basic concrete and wood, but sturdy. Two of the town leaders wrote a phrase on the blackboard in Gasy and French, and invited me to write the translation in English: School, the Gateway to Development. I should mention that these and other schools in the commune are all elementary or middle-school level; there isn't a high school in the commune (Am. equivalent of county).

On the way out, we passed the head and hooves of a bull that had been killed for the celebration. There you go, dead body number 3. I believe we ate him for lunch. (Locally-sourced food, anyone?)

This isn't a picture from the school opening, but from an environmental celebration I attended near Andapa awhile ago--I just though you might like a more cheerful image to end on than the dead bodies...:D

Malagasy Hollywood

First: Mail! I got packages at my Sambava address! Awesome. Will email if I got one from you. One took less than 3 weeks to get here! And--people gave me the wrong postal code for Sambava, the 208 code that is now in my contact info is the correct one. But don't worry if you put 205, things have been getting to me fine; I'm not even sure if they look at the codes.

Have to run, but for your amusement, one of the most popular music videos right now--Azafady by Lola. I have titled this post Malagasy Hollywood because I have yet to see people or beaches who look like this. But it's a catchy song!

The Last Two Days

So I was walking down the street Sunday and was stopped by the middle school chemistry and French teacher (the same person)--"There you are! Why haven't you visited me yet?" "I don't know where you live..." "Well, come on!" So we walked about 15 minutes up the dirt road to his place, where I awkwardly smiled at his wife and daughters and drank some Bonbon Anglais (Bubblegum soda, about as good as it sounds). At one point, he leaned forward and patted my hand. "You come here any time and visit your Malagasy mother and father." He and his wife, concerned that I was too skinny, sent me home with bananas and cassava (healthy and wealthy people should be fat, of course, this is Africa). If you don't know what cassava is, don't worry, you're not missing much: it looks like a potato, tastes like nothing, has virtually no nutritional value, and is one of the most popular foods in Africa. Happily, I have a recipe for cream of cassava soup, thank you Peace Corps cookbook!

Later Sunday evening, my counterpart picked me up to escort me to the World Cup final, which the (female!) doctor at the hospital had invited us to. So I watched Spain beat the flourescent-orange Netherlands with the vice mayor, (3 person) hospital staff, and commune school director--nice to be around people who find white people mildly amusing rather than endlessly fascinating!

Yesterday morning I found my favorite local dessert at the weekly market (the Gasy version of peanut brittle) and did some yard work (with a machete). Had to watch my step with the chores because some of the neighbors have been posting their cows in my yard. They're not supposed to, but I guess I'm not using the grass, and I get readily accessible manure from them, good for soil improvement projects. More importantly, nothing keeps the kids away from my windows like a feisty bull.

The mayor stopped by in the afternoon with a funding request to the American Embassy that he wanted me to sign and send. They referred to me in the letter by title, or rather by what they think my title should be: Mademoiselle Corpeace. The letter detailed 10 projects, with an estimate of how much they would cost. Good, right? Except the projects included a sports center, a tourist information center, and an agricultural research center. And the total amount requested was about 80 US million dollars. I didn't know whether I felt like laughing or crying...between the economic and political crisis, most governmental development aid to Madagascar has been pulled, and (without being too pessimistic) I think I'll be lucky to fund a few wells. I smiled vaguely and told him I'd look it over.

Last night there was a disco--a big twice monthly event that takes place about 100 feet from my house and goes until 5 in the morning, without exaggeration. It actually isn't too bad. While I cooked, I listened to the Voice of America request hour and wondered again why so many PCVs from Zambia call in. One of the other volunteers in my region keeps track of how many days in a row he gets rain (I think the current record is 12?), while I keep track of the number of times there's a VOA request hour in which someone DOESN'T request a Michael Jackson song. So far, 2 in 2 months. Not that I mind MJ, but my god, the world is obsessed.

This morning I had to wait a bizarrely long time for a taxi brousse. One of the men from town decided I needed help hailing one once one did come along, though let me tell you, a 5-10 blond has NO problem getting a bush taxi to stop in this region. Once one did stop--a station wagon--the driver fit 18 people in. Allow me to clarify. When I say station wagon, I AM referring to the Western idea of a station wagon, which in the U.S. seats 5. How did the driver fit 18? Well, I sat in the passenger bucket seat with a mother and her baby, the driver had a teen seated next to him in HIS bucket seat whom he had to reach over to shift, there were 4 people in the "trunk" space, and 4 people sitting in the 3 person backseat. And 4 people sitting in the laps of those people. And one guy sitting on top of those 4, with his chin jammed into the driver's headrest. So if you were ever wondering how clown cars worked.

Workwise, nothing too exciting to report. I got tentative permission to do a world map mural, but will have to wait for school exams to finish. I planted some avocado trees. I wrote 15 pages of a community report and analysis, for which I've been doing a good amount of research and interviews. And I started a (very small) moringa tree nursery. If you haven't heard of moringas, they're pretty cool--nutritious leaves and fast growing, so good forfood, fencing, and firewood. More info here. And also, there's some info about my community partner's work in Madland here.