The Westendorp Wandering the World

How to Get from Ranomafana to West Michigan

2011-12-11T21:53:00.002+03:00

Before leaving, condense all worldly possessions into two suitcases that have heretofore been serving as Sharbaraz’s favorite place to sulk and shed copious amounts of cat hair. Everything that doesn’t fit in the suitcases including most of the tattered rags I have been using as clothes get carried over to Rodrigue’s house and donated to the neighbor family. This is more challenging than one might imagine because my house is 2.5x the size of their house and there are already five people and associated clutter residing in it. Call the taxi-van guy in Ifanadiana and arrange to have a taxi stop and pick up four suitcases, two metal trunks, two gas tanks, and two bicycles from Alison and my house tomorrow morning. Inventory furniture, make Rodrigue sign some documents in English he doesn’t understand. Go to bed, sleep poorly.
Day 1- Wake up at 5:00. Give mattress to Rodrigue and family. Sit on front stoop and cry until the aqua-marine taxi van arrives with Alison. There is too much dried cassava on the roof and there is an issue stowing another bicycle up there. Stand around listlessly as things are re-arranged. Pack into the van for grand departure. Drive two minutes to Ranomafana and stop while the driver unloads the aforementioned cassava and frets about not having enough passengers. Depart for Fianarantsoa. Arrange to have driver shirk the local police and drop us off at the Peace Corps house rather than at the taxi station. Arriving at Peace Corps house, create a spectacular mess unpacking and re-packing everything in the common-room. Inventory and return all Peace Corps property (bicycle, metal trunk, water filter, med-kit etc.) to regional office. Grab the two Galana gas tanks I have been using to heat my food and fetch a taxi-cab. Drive to no less than three Galana gas stations before we find one that will take returned gas bottles. Unfortunately, you bought these bottles in Mananjary which according to the clerk is a different gas agency than Fianarantsoa so you need to take the bottles to Mananjary to collect your deposit. Manajary is 8 hours from Fianarantsoa. Walk the bottles down the street and sell them to a sleazy looking fat man selling “used” cell phones on the sidewalk for $25. Meet up with Alison and get Chinese food for lunch.
Day 2 (Thanksgiving)- Arrive at taxi-brousse station at 6:30. “Forget” plastic bag of old underwear in trunk of city taxi. Leave 30 minutes late because some abhorrently dressed diva has decided she no longer wants to come to Antananarivo and demands to have all of her baggage unloaded. Drive for 8 ½ hours through the central highlands listening to This American Life on my Ipod, reminding myself that I never have to be put through this cruel form of transportation torture ever again. In Tana, taxi to Peace Corps house, shower, change, and transform myself into a respectable human being before going with Alison to Jane’s house for a resplendent thanksgiving feast involving turkey and plenty of box wine.
Days 3-5- Since the office was closed Thursday for Thanksgiving, most staff took Friday off and indulged in a four day weekend. Thus post thanksgiving weekend is spent lying about the Peace Corps house working up the intestinal fortitude to provide two stool samples to the medical unit.
Day 6- Arrive at the Peace Corps office and demand the full attention of senior staff. There is a two page checklist of forms, meetings, and official bureaucratic malarkey that requires the direct assistance of no less than twelve different Peace Corps personnel. Sign pledge that you have paid the electric bill in full (ha), swear on your life that you closed the bank account even though the paperwork got lost in Fianarantsoa, and pay Peace Corps the $30 ‘emergency fund’ that remained secured in an envelope under my trunk for just two months before it was used for a non-emergency.
Day 7- Report to medical unit at 9:30 for de-briefs on post-Peace Corps insurance and C-127 forms. Give three vials of blood and a TB test. Leave post haste to make 10:30 dental appointment across town. The first three 194 busses are full so you are forced to resort to using a little elbow to ensure a place in front of the swarm of pushy commuters. Arrive at Adventist Clinic. Brace yourself for the worst dentistry experience of all time. Over the next 45 minutes, the painfully shy Malagasy assistant will need to adjust the x-ray bite wings no less than four times, fidgeting with the machine many more times than necessary. The dentist is a balding half Chinese half crazy man who seems to think this is your first time to the dentist office. He breaks out the plastic model teeth and oversized brush for an interactive lesson on how to brush your teeth. He goes on to lecture about the importance of flossing, making an analogy between marriage and dental hygiene and then stretching the analogy beyond all believable bounds, including references to scripture. The assistant then introduces a vacuum the size of a fire hose to your mouth while the dentist-person uses a shriekingly high pitched aqua drill to tear plaque off your teeth all the while asking apparently rhetorical questions since the two machines and three hands running amuck in your mouth preclude you from engaging in conversation. When the power goes out, find the battery powered headlamp and keep working. Leave the dentist office feeling somehow violated and make your way through traffic to the medical unit. Stool sample tests are back and they are positive for round worm. Take these pills you’ll be fine.
Day 8- Return to office for more running around. Exit interview with Country Director, invalidate Peace Corps ID, collect passport, and leave the Office an RPCV.
Day 9- Wake up early and go for nostalgic run through the rice paddies. Have TB test read by doctor when he arrives. Pack. Leave for airport with Alison and massive suitcase in tow. Because you’re Dutch, take mass transit instead of getting a taxi. Arrive at airport to discover the check-in line wrapped around the entire length of the airport. Bribe airport worker $4 to cut in line. Waste the remainder of my Malagasy currency on overpriced beer at the airport commissary. Cry leaving Alison and pass through passport control. Dry your tears quickly because customs has your cat-hair check-baggage out in the waiting area and calls you over to explain its contents. When they consider removing some of your purchases on less than legal merits, threaten the wrath of the U.S. Embassy and begin calling Jane. When they back off, collect your things and board the plane. Find seat next to sweet elderly French couple and chat them up. During take-off pop the three benadryl that you ferreted away from the medical unit on Tuesday and pass out.
Day 10- Wake up somewhere over the Mediterranean. It is still technically Day 9 in Paris but from here on out what day it is gets a little blurry because you dosed yourself on sleeping medication at noon and have been dead to the world for the past nine hours. Land at Orly airport south of Paris at 10:45pm. Proceed effortlessly through immigration and collect luggage. Your connecting flight is from Charles De Gaulle at 7:15am and you have arranged no ground transportation save looking up a bus schedule. Inquire at the information desk three times and receive three conflicting reports about available transportation and where it leaves from. The flight from Tana is the last scheduled for the day and the airport is closing. You have only 22.15 euros, all in small coins that you bought off of beggars squatting by the banks in Fianarantsoa, not enough for a taxi. While investigating the third lead on buses through the deserted airport, find a sign for a bus listed in the bus schedule you printed off the internet. Follow this sign out of the airport, through a parking lot, around a construction zone, past a hotel to a small metal bench with space for three people covered by a small three-sided glass shelter. It is 45 degrees and it is drizzling. It is now 11:40pm. The bus comes at 1:04am. Fortify yourself behind your luggage and listen to more This American Life while casting suspecting glances at the occasional pedestrian that happens by. The bus arrives as promised. Obnoxiously drag the cat bag up the stairs and hand the driver a heaping handful of coins that totals 6 euros 30. Driving through Paris, marvel at all the smooth roads and pretty lights of night in Paris. Pass a massive Christmas tree at Place d’Italie, Cross the Seine, catch a peek at Notre Dame, and circle Bastille before getting dumped at Gare de l’Est in central Paris at 1:49am. Stand around looking lost until someone asks you where you are going, reply that Charles De Gaulle is your destination and he will usher you to another bus and shove your luggage into the undercarriage. Pay the driver 7 euros all in coins no larger than .20 euro cents. Fall asleep for about ten minutes. The Airport is the last stop on this line and you arrive at 3:48am. Convince the security guard to allow you indoors. Locate a mildly comfortable chair and unpack all three pieces of luggage onto the terminal floor. Re-pack everything so that you meet the new airline’s arcane weight requirements. Try to use the bathroom but discover they are closed. Wait patiently while a KLM employee sets up an elaborate line maze in front of the check-in counter. At 5:45 walk through line maze and check in for flight. Unpack contents of carry-on luggage an additional time for Paris security. On the 70 min flight to Amsterdam, partake in a croissant and coffee as the first bit of food you have eaten since the stewardess revived you somewhere over Kenya and fed you some fishy pasta yesterday afternoon. Arrive in Amsterdam as the sun rises. Schippol airport is decorated in a tasteful holiday cheer. You are so distracted by the shiny lights and pretty things in the shops that you miss your concourse and are late arriving to your gate. There is a long line. Every passenger is being subjected to a 30 second interview before they are allowed to board. Your interview takes 15 minutes. The security agent needs to consult with his managing officer twice over your lack of complete travel documentation from Madagascar, the fact that you hold two valid American passports, and that you had been to Niger two years ago. He also is extremely inquisitive about the fictitious trip to Switzerland that I made up to explain your return ticket to Paris in April. Thankfully you are allowed to board. You do not sleep on this flight. Inform the stewardess about your roundworm condition as a ploy to get more pretzels, crackers, and tomato juice. The retired pastor seated next to you eyes you sympathetically and hands you his roll. Ask to be served both coffee and red wine before landing. Landing in Detroit, become one of those obnoxious passengers that speed walks though the concourse to customs. Get flagged for extra screening because you “were in close contact with livestock” and “visited agricultural areas” during my trip. Meet friendly neighbor Mr. Hedges in the waiting area. Drive directly to Grand Rapids. Meet brother and his significant other for the first time in two years and go to Chipotle for a burrito with all the fixings. Shower at brother’s girlfriend’s house and proceed to my cousin’s wedding. Drink serious amounts of coffee at wedding reception to say conscious for dinner. Meet new family member. Take family Christmas photo. Drive back to Holland. Arrive Home. Mission accomplished.

Peace Corps Madagascar

2011-11-27T14:06:00.005+03:00

Madagascar is like Hamlet: Beautiful, inspirational, and amazing but inexorably tragic. I have lived here for two years now and standing on the precipice of another significant life transition I am filled with so many seemingly incompatible feelings and emotions about this place. I love it. I hate it. I can't wait to leave but I don't want to go. I came here under the impression that I was going to give something to the people of this island, and I am leaving wondering what it was that I really gave and if what I gave did more harm than good.
It’s not a secret that Madagascar is a political, social, and economic disaster. Forbes magazine recently ranked Madagascar as the worst national economy on the planet. There hasn't been a peaceful transition of government in living memory. The country has been in a protracted state of political anarchy for going on three years now.
The sad part of this is that Madagascar has so much going for it, so much unrealized and underutilized potential that it breaks your heart to watch the forests burn, hillsides erode away and poor Malagasy farmers be paid a couple dollars to export their natural resources to China. There is also a sense of helpless complacency permeating the people of Madagascar. They know things are bad, but lack the will to do anything about it, knowing that anything they do is just as likely to make things worse as it is to improve them.
It is not my intent to conclude my experiences here on a depressing note. I have written extensively already about some of the unforgettable people, places, and things I have encountered on this spectacular island. Despite Madagascar's depressed outlook, I find hope Rodrigue and his family who live happy, spectacularly uncomplicated lives and in a small way are making Ranomafana a better place everyday and I am honored that I was allowed to be part of that for a time.

95% of the people who join Peace Corps have no idea what they are getting into. Not unlike others I stumbled uncomfortably through the questions from mildly concerned friends and relatives regarding my goals and motivations in making the decision to volunteer in the developing world. I was much more comfortable discussing concrete things like the application process or departure timeline than about serious questions like "What made you want to apply?" or "How did you become interested in the Peace Corps." Looking back I can see that I lacked eloquence on the topic because I hadn't convincingly explained the decision to myself yet and instead proffered statements to the effect of wanting to help people and see the world. At our final Peace Corps conference, our training director handed us the statements of purpose we had written during the application process, one of those superfluous application hurdles that asks you to explain your inspirations for joining and what you hope to accomplish as a volunteer. I glanced at the first sentence and quietly slipped the paper into the back of my folder and pretended to read from a blank sheet of graph paper for the remainder of the activity, fearing the uncomfortable string of fallacy that it inevitably contained. When I got back to Ranomafana I burned the document without reading it.
I joined Peace Corps because I didn't like where I was and I needed to be somewhere else. I had no direction in what I wanted out of life, no work experience, and nothing tying me down to anything. Somehow I hoped that Peace Corps would transform me into someone new. Turn me into one of those smiling white faces surrounded by a village of adoring African children. I would do as John the Baptist or Jesus and disappear into the desert and emerge completely changed. Unfortunately, Peace Corps does not do character transformations, it does character amplifications. Living alone as a foreigner in the middle of no where, I quickly learned that I was not going to be able to live with myself if I tried to force myself to change into something I wasn't. My house was not big enough for me and the person I thought I should be. Instead I made an unconscious decision to become comfortable with who I am, and let that person flourish. I learned lots of new things about myself. I am not good at cooking. I really like John Stienbeck. Most television is a waste of time. Cats are stupid. I'm an organizer. I like to please people, just to name a few.
Yet the number one misconception I had about Peace Corps is that I was doing this to help others. It has become clear to me that I gained so much more than I was able to give to the people in my community. As I discussed earlier, development is a messy business and the whole concept of 'helping' in the developing world is fought with complicated pros and cons. was my presence in Ranomafana over the past two years beneficial in the long term? Who knows? I certainly hope so, but in the context of observations I made about the culture, history, and direction of my village, I am not optimistic that my impact was significant.
Though there will come a time when most of the people in Ranomafana will have forgotten who I was and what I did. There will never come a time when I forget them. Ranomafana gave me a new family, gave me the freedom to be who I am, gave me direction and purpose to my life. Yes I put a bunch of trees in the ground and yes I painted maps and did projects. But I know my lasting impacts in Ranomafana are going to be on the relationships I forged with the people around me and how those relationships affected me and my neighbors. As I talked about previously, Madagascar is a broken place and no amount of aid money or Peace Corps projects is going to change that. What does make a difference is love and friendship between two people across the cultural and linguistic boundaries. And maybe I only made that connection with a few people here. But for me, that makes it all worth it.

(photo credit: Alison Thieme)

Health

2011-08-31T20:35:00.003+03:00

DISCLAIMER: I am not a heath sector volunteer much less a health expert in any position to comment authoritatively on any of Madagascar’s many medical issues. Actual responses to illnesses among Malagasy vary based on location, income level, and culture. The following post was compiled only on the observations made by myself, other volunteers, and Malagasy friends. No empirical studies were reviewed, no data was collected. What I’m trying to say is I am full of it per usual.

Knock on wood it has been 22 months now and I have managed to avoid becoming seriously ill in the Peace Corps. I have never been forced through a taxi brousse ride while vomiting or incontinent. The Peace Corps has not had to fly a helicopter down to my site to rescue me from the brink of death. I have not been evacuated to South Africa for observation and treatment. I do not have malaria. My most serious medical predicament to date involved accidentally smacking a wasp nest with a broom and the subsequent allergic swelling. Much of this bon sante is due to the wonderful and attentive medical staff that is on call 24/7 to patiently listen to volunteers as they describe their problems, real and imagined; usually something about the frequency, consistency, and appearance of their bowel movements.
In training, we are issued a black medical kit that is supposed to contain all the medicines and materials we could need to treat ourselves at site. It also came with two paper bags stuffed with materials that couldn’t fit in the black box as well as a hefty instruction manual. Most ailments can be dealt with from the contents of this kit or through the judicious application of Tylenol and/or patiently allowing symptoms to work themselves out. I have been put on antibiotics only once. I still take my malaria prophylaxis so thus far I have found Madagascar to be a medically uneventful place.
The responses to the medical challenges of Madagascar I have observed by groups of non-Peace Corps vahaza (tourists) have been far less reasoned. Many arrive on the island flouting their rejection of all three prophylaxis options claiming citing concerns over mefloquine’s psychoactive properties, malarone’s high price, and the impact of an antibiotic like doxycyline might have on their precious digestional bacteria. This attitude persists until someone in the group comes down with a case of runny stool or a cold. Then all the stops come off and ridiculousness ensues. Not only is someone sick, they are sick IN MADAGASCAR which obviously is 1000x worse than any normal ailment and thus justifies a proportional response that defies all common sense. I have, on more than one occasion, seen colds (usually mild and of the viral persuasion) treated, without medical consultation, with cyprophlaxicin, a powerful antibiotic that acts like Drano for the GI tract. Intestinal bacteria are written off as collateral damage Everyone attending to the stricken tourist raids their zip-locked medical bags to see what sorts of prescription-only pills their doctor sent them in case of extreme emergency. Tamaflu, Coratem, and last defense antibiotics, everything is on the table. When Alison was down with a case of dysentery, one tourist wisely prescribed her Ammodium and some other pill whose properties he was not familiar with, “but it cost $300 so it should work”. Fortunately she refused as Ammodium coupled with dysentery has been known to kill patients as pressure from backed up wastes can cause the gut to burst.
It may seem counterintuitive but the rainforest, I have found, tends to be healthier than other areas of Madagascar because the water running off the mountains is clear, fresh, and hasn’t been despoiled by animal/human urine/feces/wastes. Additionally, the healthy population of feral frogs, lizards, chameleons and bats keeps the mosquito population at a minimum. Everything downriver to the east is another matter altogether. Rural Malagasy seem to have a special penchant for reliving themselves directly into community water sources, a practice I have been forced to witness/deal with the consequences of at least three times this week. And when it comes to water and disease everything revolves around feces. Our doctors succinctly informed us in training that any intestinal ailment we contract is as a result of germs originating from the intestine of someone or something else. Against this volunteers are armed with filters and bleach drops, but the general populace is left to their own devices. Madagascar has a serious lack of toilets, a recent study concluded that lack of toilets/outhouses cost the country an estimated 17.6 million dollars a year in sick workers and lost time spent wandering around looking for someplace private behind the bushes. How one would collect data for such a study is somewhat suspect, but its conclusions are not shocking. Indeed the entire commune of Lopary contains only three outhouses, one notoriously flimsy one is reserved for the resident Peace Corps Volunteer.
The proceeding should not be misconstrued to conclude that there are not serious and dangerous illnesses in Madagascar. There are many including, but not limited to rabies, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, shistosamyasis, dysentery, and the plague. Syphilis is rumored to run as high as 30 or 40% in some areas. However, these diseases are transmitted in ways that most vahaza and volunteers can avoid by being safe with their water, food, prophylaxis, and choice of intimate partner. Many Malagasy people don’t have that luxury or don’t know what choices are available to protect themselves. Additionally many people live far from doctors and medical dispensaries. In Ranomafana, for example, there is one doctor who works out of a small facility in town that services the entire commune of 25,000 people. Most of these people live hours hike over steep mountains and dense foliage away and are not likely to make the trip if they are feeling under the weather. Often people wait until things get critical before attempting to move a sick person when it is often too late. In many villages there are ‘Ombiasa’ or medicine men called upon to attend to the sick. Here medical blends with spiritual as many Ombiasa require possession by a spirit to conduct their healings. One Ombiasa near Ranomafana can purportedly heal broken bones in as little as three days with the discerning application of zebu fat and his own saliva. Most prescribe some combination of native plants mixed into something approximating tea. Unfortunately the spirits possessing these earthly vessels keep poor patient records so their actual effectiveness is somewhat of a mystery.
Those living near the village and the road tend to report to report to doctors somewhat regularly. Without fail, doctors tend to prescribe the same solution for every symptom: bludgeoning the disease to death with low-grade antibiotics. Amoxicillin, tetracycline and lots of other things with the suffix “lin” seem to be indiscriminately prescribed for whatever ails you. Some, including my neighbors, swear by the big yellow and brown amoxicillin pills that they bring back biweekly whenever some family member has a cold or headache. If baby Kanto happens to be showing symptoms, antibiotics are applied intravenously. I can’t imagine there is a single bacterium left on the island that is not immune to amoxicillin. The same drugs are dolled out for livestock but without any instructions on dosage or how to get your sick chicken to ingest a human sized dose of tetracycline. Other drugs are around. I happen to know that the lady down the street in the obnoxiously green cement house sells a host of exciting generics that in any country with laws would be prescription only. These are either too expensive and/or unfamiliar to most villagers. Someone more entrepreneurial than myself could make a killing distributing sugar capsules under the label “Super Amoxycilin-cylcin.”
While we are on the topic of heath, I would like to add an appendix (pun) on Malagasy dentistry. The dentist of choice for the Peace Corps office is the lyrically agreeable ‘Adventist Dentist’ on the East end of Antananarivo. Volunteers are entitled to one cleaning annually which is usually conducted in less than ten minutes with varying degrees of professionalism by two attendants who have been known to place as many as four hands in the oral cavity at any one time, well above the carrying capacity of most mouths. More serious dental trauma, usually a result of sorting rocks out of rice with one’s molars, can bring about memorable experiences with root canals or fillings requiring multiple commutes to the capital.
Unfortunately for most Malagsy, rice and cassava farming does not come with dental and the consequences are immediately obvious in towns and villages. The absence of any corrective orthodontics leaves some villagers with shark-like arrangements of teeth protruding from gums at all positions and angles. When three or more teeth attempt to occupy the same space, the results are never pretty. The bane of Malagsy smiles, however, is not the lack of retainers of braces it is sugarcane a.k.a. fary. When it’s not being grown plantation style to make granulated sugar, fary us useful for exactly two things: munching on raw and brewing moonshine. While the latter is widely distributed in proofs north of 90 with easily foreseeable consequences for the liver, masticating on the tough fibers does for teeth what an industrial sander and saltwater can do for the exterior of a sports car. Despite this fary remains extremely popular because it is sweet, cheap, and is a wonderful way to get rambunctious children to shut up and mind themselves for a while. Gums are not exempt from the oral devastation either. Many Malagasy are addicted to 50 ariary bags of snuff that they cram under their front lip while they go about daily tasks. The gums proceed to rot like month old wonderbread, taking on a piebald pattern not dissimilar to spoiled meat. What few skeletal teeth might be left at this point stick out of the receded gums like the stained monoliths of some ruined Greek temple. Fortunately most Malagasy cooks adhere strongly to the boil-everything-until-it’s-a-mushy-paste school of culinary arts thus teeth are precluded as a necessary prerequisite to normal digestion.

Nosy Be

2011-08-17T21:45:00.002+03:00

Nosy Be is a play land for white people. Much like a prison or sewer plant is build far from an American metropolis to avoid making a spectacle out of something large and socially embarrassing, Nosy Be’s geographic isolation from the mainland seems designed to insulate the island from the typical life on the mainland. It, however, doesn’t house dangerous criminals or emit noxious fumes; it houses foreign people, their money, and the facilities to suit their extravagant tastes.
Getting to Nosy Be, however, is a less than glamorous affair. Unless you have booked yourself a direct flight from Milan or Paris, the only way to the island is through the port of Ankify. This noisy harbor is perched on a small rocky outcropping and is infested with seasoned transportation extortionists, slumping shacks, and fortified groups of white folk trying earnestly to appear calm. My theory holds that Ankify’s atmosphere is intentionally surly its tattered tarmac deliberately caked in sticky mud to entice stranded tourists to lay down unspeakable sums of money to be taken anywhere else by the fastest possible means. The only economical means of transport back to Ambanja consists of a small fleet of dilapidated station wagons with decimated facades that seem to be begging to be taken out on the ferry for aquatic euthanasia.
The seaborne transportation is hardly more encouraging. The larger ferries look like botched efforts to transform large objects not known for buoyancy into amphibious craft. One ferry almost certainly served some time as an industrial shipping container and another appeared to be floating balcony or patio off a demolished high rise apartment building. These car-bearing rust buckets don’t really ply the water as much as bulldoze it with their distinctly un-nautical flat bows and rectangular disposition and usually require three hours to make the voyage to Nosy Be. We opted to shell out an additional $2.50 for one of the faster passenger-only ‘speed’ boats that, already loaded with Malagasy passengers, maintained a not quite comfortable clearance above the waterline. As we smashed ourselves on the plastic bench, our skipper tossed us one life jacket to split between the four of us as we pushed off.
One arrives in Nosy Be via Hell-Ville, a town named for some obscure French naval officer and not for its likeness to the abode of the damned. It is the largest town on Nosy Be sporting breezy boulevards and colonial architecture akin to Diego Suarez. Hell-Ville doesn’t have any nearby beaches or resorts; instead it thrives providing the services for the resort towns scattered about the island’s coast. We did not dally here long and after disembarking at the port made for Ambatoloka by taxi.
Ambatoloka is Nosy Be’s largest beach resort complex. It is a two kilometer coral beach consumed entirely by hotels, guest houses, bars, etc. All of this excitement was, of course, well beyond our volunteer salaries so we booked windowless cement rooms sans hot water just inland from the beach. For the next three days we plied Nosy Be’s various beaches by taxi and spent entire days lounging about sipping beer and staring out on at Nosy Be’s beautiful blue waters while ladies with painted yellow faces walked by selling lambas, fruits, and massages. The most spectacular beach on Nosy Be is Andilana. Located on the Northern tip of the island on a large cove, it is only sparsely populated with resorts and contains few tourists. The white powdered sand slopes slowly out to sea so as the tide receded in the afternoon, we could lie in surf only a few inches deep and let the cool waves crash over sunburned shoulders.
Although Nosy Be exists in a world separate from the mainland, there are places on Nosy Be that are themselves bubbles of such unfathomable wealth and privilege. Venta Club, a swanky Italian resort on the north side of Andilana is one such place. The cost of just wandering onto the beach is a hefty 30 €. Walk-in reservations are not welcome. Clients, flown in directly from Europe, enjoy all-inclusive rights to all food, excursions, services and amenities. Occasionally a pack of Italians would wander off their reserve down the beach under escort from well-dressed Malagasy attendants whilst the PCVs lying in the surf made rough appraisals in the upper hundreds of dollars of their in-vogue swimwear and ocular UV protectors. On another occasion, slightly lost on the beach in Ambatoloka and searching for a short-cut, we wandered in some resplendent resort that made us dirty broke beach bums feel wholly out of place and we slunk out of the vaulted reception area without making eye-contact.
Just because Nosy Be is isolated and vahaza infested doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a vibrant Malagasy atmosphere or an exciting nightlife. Some of the nicest Malagasy I have met were on Nosy Be selling street food or just striking up a conversation at a local bar. However, good portions of the Malagasy frequenting the vahaza hangouts are prostitutes. Prostitution is huge on Nosy Be, especially in Ambatoloka to the point were many hotels now refuse services to single men. Thankfully, once you have established the fact that you are not interested in their services, most Malagasy women of the trade are surprisingly courteous and have the uncanny ability to dance the night away and have an apparent good time even when all potential clients have disappeared. The clubs of Nosy Be are also a great place to enjoy live Malagasy music as nationally renown singers often come to the area to vacation and put on shows. We were lucky enough to run into notorious Malagasy heartthrob Fandrama while visiting Hell-Ville. Katie even managed to come away with his phone number.
My time on Nosy Be was certainly thrilling, and I was not even able to see most of the island’s major draws. These include world famous snorkeling and diving as well as exploring some of the small outlying islands. Three days, however, is just enough for this PCV. There is such thing as too much of a good thing and with 29 hours of public Malagasy transportation awaiting me on the mainland, my reintroduction to real life was promising to be poignant.

Maromandia

2011-08-08T16:23:00.004+03:00

Given Ranomafana’s winter reputation for miserable weather, I collected a few of my vacation days and decided to ditch town and head up to Maromandia to visit my friend Katie. Much like Alison, Katie is a member of the Niger stage, an excellent travel companion and not my girlfriend. Her site is located in the far northwest corner of the island. The area near Katie’s site is hot and dry all year round, consisting mostly of arid shrub land leading out to the Mozambique Channel. She lives nearby Sahamalaza National Park, a newly protected area established in 2007. The park was created for a remote patch of forest that is home to the Blue-eyed Lemur (the only other primate besides humans with blue eyes) and continues to include massive swathes of thick mangrove forest, and a collection of coastal islands wallowing in some of the colorful coral reefs in Madagascar. The issue is there that all of this wonderful biodiversity and wildlife is about as accessible to tourists as Mars or other celestial bodies. Hiking out to desiccated reforestation site on top of a hill, Katie pointed out a mangrove island in the distance where rare Fish Eagles amass like dirty dishes after thanksgiving to nest. On the opposing side of the hill lay a deep swerving valley. The valley floor was blanketed in a concealing layer of trees and screwpalms trailing off into the distance where an escarpment jutted out of the hills and sealed the ravine’s tip. Katie reported that there was a waterfall at the edge of the cliff, but the valley’s steep sides prevented anyone from venturing into it.
Upon hearing this I immediately set about finding a way down, and lo, a skinny path appeared and ten minutes later both of us were picking off burs from our shorts and soothing our scratched legs in the bubbling stream that ran across the valley floor. Setting out East we sloshed through the muddy undergrowth until we emerged on a clearing. The spiny pandanus forest ended abruptly on a large pool of water surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. Over the east side of the cliffs a heavy stream of water split three ways and plunged about forty feet, crashing loudly on a pile of boulders and spilling into the pond. The damp shaded backside of the cliff was studded with mosses and small purple orchids pushing their delicate flowers out earnestly towards the sunlight. A more beautiful and swimming hole could not have been imagined. For twenty minutes we sat silently on a rock in the dappled sunlight with our feet in the water munching on melted trail mix wondering how on earth we get paid to live like this.
With my penchant for hiking and exploring satisfied, we spent the remaining few days in and around Maromandia, meeting with local counterparts and stuffing ourselves on the North’s delicious foods. On market day Katie bought crabs and her jolly counterpart came over and prepared them with tomatoes, onions and something else that made them taste magical. Another spectacular plate was Akoho voinyo or chicken cooked in coconut sauce and served with a spicy lemon salsa sauce. Although vegetables are almost non-existent and almost all food disappears from the markets during the hot hunger season, I would still take the northern diet over what passes for food in the hotely’s of my region.
Another thing about Maromandia, everyone likes to be naked. Whether you are down at the river for a bath, in the stream doing laundry or just out for a swim, why not disrobe entirely with all your neighbors and do it naked? Maromandia’s nudity complex is compounded by its one and only bridge and primary thoroughfare which provides an excellent vista over the town’s riverside bathing facilities. No one sees fit to make any attempt to cover themselves, and some even shout and greet their friends on the bridge. This behavior may be a result of the northwest’s sweltering temperatures; more relaxed unencumbered culture, or highly developed sense of community. But flaunting our over zealous modesty, Katie and I still did our utmost to avoid catching any bare buttocks in our pictures of the flaming orange sunsets over the river.
I have already published a scathing review of Madagascar’s public transportation system in a previous post, and our drive into Ambanja that morning did not depart from those norms, except that I really enjoyed it. Maromandia has a dumpy brown van that ferries Maromandia’s masses to the regional capital in the morning and faithfully returns before dinner. Affectionately referred to as the “chocolate brousse” by area PCVs, it is driven by an unkempt portly man in a striped shirt. Arriving late, the three PCVs were smashed into the front seat, an arrangement preferable to the muddled mountain of humanity which piled chaotically five and six to a bench in the rear compartment. Katie’s position sitting nearly on top of the driver obliged her to hold down the break pedal with her left foot when the driver stopped and concerned himself with forcing in additional passengers. The Chocolate Brousse has gained an unparralled reputation among the townspeople living along that stretch of the RN6 for his unorthodox way of of the announcing his presence. The van’s abused horn has been beaten so thoroughly that only a feeble electronic fart serves to alert to country folk to his impending arrival. Spotting any pedestrian he would pound the horn, take his hands off the wheel, lean out the window, and do an animated version of jazz-hands into the air bellowing “ARABEEE!” [this is a tribal greeting meaning congratulations] to his adoring public. Children run to the road to greet him, men and women put down their chores and return the quirky jazz-hands wave. Stopping to take on more bodies, our driver greets everyone more completely. “Arabe on your rice harvest!” “Arabe on your new t-shirt!” “Arabe on your house with a small door!” Self-confident women with their distinctive Sakalava quarter-bun hair styles and painted faces mill about and the arrival of the chocolate brousse becomes a community event. Everyone smiles, Everyone laughs, the drivers fat hands thump the horn a few more times and the overloaded chocolate brousse coughs and putters up the hill to the next hamlet.
As we approached Ambanja, we stopped briefly in Andampy. Andampy is the North’s newest sapphire boom town and is a remarkable testament to the destructive power of disorganized humanity. The discovery is only three months old, so recent in fact that the rice stalks surrounding the pits still contain streaks of living green. An entire slum has sprawled out from the main road towards the pits. Nearby towns have been emptied of people and produce as more energy and resources go to the mines and away from the rice fields. In typical form, a boom of any precious resource in the 3rd world has proved to be an environmental bust. For days valley floors are ripped apart by hand and the cut earth bleeds into the nearby streams and rivers. The chocolate brousse had stopped near a temporary used clothing stand to drop off another hopeful settler who unloaded a bunch of building materials and set off to make his fortune in the dirt.
Ambanja is an unremarkable Malagasy regional city save its towering triangular bridge and streets lined with towering shade trees. Unlike my regional capital of Fianarantsoa, Ambanja is not blessed with a Peace Corps transit house so PCVs are on their own to find accommodations. In Ambanja, however, a fat old woman with a saintly amount of patience and a spare foam mattress shaped like a comma allows transiting PCVs to overnight in her house. Local PCVs revere “Mama Peace Corps” with a peculiar blend of gratitude and trepidation as quick stops at her place to drop off luggage or catch a nap are liable to digress into long superfluous conversations about local news, family gossip, and the weather. Given that I can only understand pieces of her flowy Sakalava dialect, I snuck in late and left bright and early in a taxi to the port for Nosy Be.

And since this post has already surpassed normal length, I’ll save Nosy Be for another post.

Alison

2011-06-29T09:04:00.001+03:00

Earlier this month, Alison moved to town. Alison and I are both members of the now infamous “Niger Stage” of volunteers and is arguably my best friend on this oversized island. Her original site of Lopary could be euphemistically described as ‘poverty stricken’ and offered her no electricity, no latrines, few edible food products and even fewer work opportunities in the Environment sector. Together we made some fortuitous work contacts and well placed e-mails and earlier this month she moved up to replace Mark at the Friends of Madagascar house when he left in late May. Alison has already featured prominently in past bloggings, accompanying me for numerous vacations and commiserating with me on American holidays.
Our friendship over the past two years has been nurtured by thrifty text messaging deals on Malagasy cell phone carriers and a mutual penchant for sarcastic humor, practices only encouraged by our newfound proximity. Having a site partner in the Peace Corps can completely change the experience of being at site, and having Alison around has certainly done that for me. Suddenly I have someone to come with me on daily project activities, as well as assisting her on her initiatives. On a less professional level, I’m suddenly cooking a lot more meals for two and rediscovering my addiction to card games.
Having someone else around also results in rash and exciting group think. For instance, while I am not dumb enough to wander off into the rainforest by myself, I am certainly dumb enough to do it with someone else. In this spirit, Alison and I recently struck out from Ranomafana towards the forest with no particular objective, direction, or exit strategy in mind. We eventually discovered a mildly discernable path through the weeds and cassava fields which after and exhausting 45-minute climb led us up the mountains to the forest edge. We had entered the ring of semi-degraded forest that surrounds Ranomafana National Park. Completely open, unregulated, and unprotected, this area is open to anyone with enough stamina to drag themselves up the treacherous and unforgiving footpath Alison and I had just endured. It is also an excellent way to see the various methods of deforestation the Malagasy have developed to plunder the forest’s resources.
As far as I can tell, there are three main methods to this madness. The first is tavy, exhaustively described in a previous post, it consists of merrily chopping every living thing to pieces, baking it all in the tropical sun for a few weeks and setting the resulting pile of brush on fire. What remains is a good amount of ash, a clear place to plant and nothing resembling a forest. Deforestation type-2, or as I like to call it “banana tavy” is designed specifically for the cultivation of this yellow phallic fruit. All of the forest under story, including but not limited too tree ferns, screwpalms, hardwood saplings, orchids, palms, and other such plants of little interest, are laid waste and left to rot on the ground and hold in moisture for the precious banana plants that are scattered sporadically about. The largest trees are often left orphaned in a sea of pale-leafed bananas. Finally there is selective logging, where specific trees are removed for lumber rather than burned on site. The forest giants are felled by hand and slowly dismembered and carried people’s backs down the mountain trails to town. Evidence of this activity is revealed when the forest trail opens up on a gradually decaying pile coffee saucer-sized woodchips and a conspicuous hole in the forest canopy.
Alison and I witnessed all these fascinating variations as our trail wound deeper into the forest. However, after a few hundred meters, our trail began to dissipate and the phrase “I think it’s this way” became an acceptable term of navigation. The ground foliage oscillated between dense and oppressive. We scaled a sharp incline caked decaying leaf litter in order to escape a marshy valley only to literally fall into a patch sticky briars which attached themselves in the thousands to our hair, clothes, and skin by the thousands. Seeking relief we came upon a clearing of the ubiquitous selective-logging chips and took ten minutes to clean the curiously oily briars from our persons as well as evict the small colonies of leeches that had collected around our socks.
Tired, scratched, and discouraged we decided to cut our losses and head back having failed to see much more than a lot of green leaves. We quickly realized, however, that we were quite securely lost and even if we could retrace our steps, we weren’t sure we wanted to. I eventually acquiesced to Alison’s suggestion that we just keep moving downhill, a strategy which on more than one occasion had us both gracefully falling on our butts and scooting down the mountain. After nearly inflicting upon myself a serious life-changing injury by placing my weight on a thick log which turned out to have the approximate consistency of papier-mâché, we emerged on a rushing stream cascading down the mountain.
The scene that greeted us was, perhaps, the most beautiful forest scene I have even seen on this island. The stream came clamoring over the moss carpeted boulders into in an endless chain of small waterfalls broken up by deep cold pools of pristine water. The branches of surrounding trees leaned in over the river’s banks creating an emerald tunnel pierced everywhere by bright streaks of light. We panted standing on a deep green boulder with a commanding view while I fumbled with my camera. The picture was intensely underwhelming. Never before has my camera so resolutely failed to capture a desired scene. Undismayed we clamored down the slippery rocks and were confronted over and over again with scenes of stunning beauty. There were more subtle shades of green in a single scene than I heretofore thought existed and the limits of digital photography with a hand held camera were unceasingly evident. We followed the stream down exceedingly dangerous rocks, crisscrossing its path in search of the route least likely to kill us until we at last reached a deep deluge that forced us to seek other means or decent.
Striking off the river we soon emerged on a massive patch of fresh ‘banana tavy.’ My camera had no trouble with the abundant shades of brown, tan, black, and sickly yellow. We also got a chance to see a bunch of shade loving orchids left high in the remaining trees to bake in the unforgiving sun. One happy consequence of clear cutting natural underbrush is that the plants that emerge in the aftermath are usually covered in thorns and spines which enthusiastically tore at my exposed legs until they bled. We eventually discovered a descending trail and emerged in the rice paddies surrounding Ranomafana, both agreeing that our hike was both one of the most exciting, but also one of the least intelligent things we had ever done.

Cloud 9

2011-06-17T20:12:00.002+03:00

Who ever developed the adage that ‘living on cloud 9’ to describe a place of blissful joy and happiness was either being facetious or was criminally ignorant of the nature of clouds. When viewed from a distance, clouds can take many forms, almost always some variation on fluffy. However, when one comes and parks itself where you are trying to live, clouds reveal their true malignant permutations.
Clouds are basically just floating sponges of cold miserable wetness that lumber around harmlessly in the sky. When, however, one sinks to the ground it spreads around like a cold damp plague spreading gloom and despair throughout its environs. The clouds that move on Ranomafana every winter are nothing like the morning fogs that hamper American school systems with 2-hour-delays every odd month. Clouds here mimic a heavy, slow motion drizzle whose water droplets suspend themselves in the air, taking on a quality more like snow than rain. This lingering, air-like quality allows these wretched clouds to permeate into buildings, cars, and warm-weather clothing. Roofs and other such devices designed to insulate humanity from the forces of weather are rendered useless by the cloud’s moist terror. Everything gets damp. This is the kind of weather is what causes black rashes of mold to infest my t-shirts, dank bed sheets, and perpetually wet hair.
Yesterday inaugurated cloud season in Ranomafana with a particularly thick cloud that festered for a full 24-hours, putting a sour ending on what had been a wonderful couple of weeks. I had somehow managed to lasso Peace Corps, Centre Valbio, Madagascar National Parks, and 8 other volunteers into a painting project decorating the new visitor’s center for Ranomafana National Park. Further commentary on this particular event will have to wait until a time when I am no longer required to be diplomatic towards certain members of local government. After work was completed, I was obligated to leave for the capital and take an exam that holds particular importance for my intended career path. Standing by the roadside waiting for yet another semi-functional taxi van to come chugging up the hill to bear me away, I was overcome by a strange and unfamiliar sensation. I didn’t want to leave.
Ditching site for the big cities is the dream of every volunteer. Cities have stores that sell such fabulous luxuries like mayonnaise, boxed cereals, and even pizza. Peace Corps transit houses in Fianarantsoa, Tana, or Diego, can always be counted on to be sheltering at least one other sympathetic soul looking to go out and gossip over a beer or two. When searching for some alone time, these heavenly houses are wired with internet, hot water, ovens, and thick mattresses. Volunteers will usually make any excuse to get approval from the PC to get in for just one extra night. Why then was I, approved for almost a week of business and medical leave, bemoaning my golden ticket?
There are a number of possible explanations. Perhaps the nauseating 8.5 hour taxi brousse ride that one volunteer’s mother recently described at “worse than childbirth” was dissuading me. It could be the thought of the plateau’s notoriously frigid weather this time of year. However, I tend towards a much more dramatic, much more alarming conclusion. Ranomafana finally has become home for me.
Since I closed up shop in Holland at the impressionable age of 18, I have not been ‘at home’ in any place I have settled. It was a spell the sprawling city of Cincinnati was never able to cast on me during my semesters there. My stays in Paris and the enchanting country of Turkey proved to brief for me to even unpack everything from my suitcase much less establish myself emotionally. However, now after 21 months of living well below the poverty line in the jungle, Ranomafana has earned a special place in my heart.
Perhaps, these homely feelings are only being brought on now as the prospect of leaving looms ever closer and the dull pains of nostalgia set in. Maybe it’s my natural fear of radically changing my circumstances. I have grown comfortable in my corner of the forest. I know its cantankerous politics, its overpriced souvenirs, and strong coffee near the market. I love the way 3 year old Oni smiles at me when I rustle her hair at dinner. I’d rather be eating fried liver and leaves over rice with Rodrigue’s cozy little family than sit through three courses of American fair anywhere else on this island. As Ranomafana’s cloud infested winter months settle in, the weather will be miserable, but I’ll be on cloud 9.

Family Vacation Part 2

2011-05-16T15:25:00.003+03:00

The setting chosen for another week of gallivanting with just the parents, and some non-GFAs (Grandma Friendly Activities), was the northern costal city of Diego Suarez. In the Year of Our Lord 1543, Portuguese explorer Diogo Soares sailed into the harbor and murdered a number of the local inhabitants, earning the city and harbor their names, continuing the ever-fashionable trend of naming cities after historical figures with dubious human rights records. Area history would only grow more sanguinary as European merchant fleets took over the Indian Ocean. What attracted to Europeans to Diego was the massive, visually pleasing and incredibly defensible deep water harbor that juts into the island. Any naval planner worth his salt would be able to recognize the military advantages of controlling this impregnable marine-fortress. Thus, the French pried the harbor out of the hands of the Malagasy monarchy in the First Franco-Hova War in 1883. The Russians of all people used the harbor to re-supply the Imperial Navy in 1905 before getting themselves seriously spanked by the Japanese at Tsushima. Winston Churchill, worried that the Japanese would entrench themselves in Diego during WWII, authorized a major operation in 1942 to wrestle the harbor from the Vichy French. We hoped our visit would be slightly less bellicose, though it did turn out to be interesting.
The parent’s hotel was set on a vacant side street, the entrance looked like the backside of a bad Chinese buffet, and behind the heavy brown steel doors was a long dank hallway. Mother was concerned. I flashed her a pleasant smile and reminded her that ‘Peace Corps recommended’ hotels tend not to have bell boys or complimentary mints on the counter. I left them on the curb and went with the taxi to find my own accommodations at the PC transit house. When I returned an hour later I met the hotel proprietor in the reception area. Wearing nothing but a sarong, he was earnestly berating a fiendish haggler who was trying to extort money from my parents who were sitting nervously on a sofa. Once the other characters had cleared out, I was pleased to discover that the hotel was actually quite homely, pleasantly decorated, and featured the only functioning air conditioner I have ever seen in a room for less than $20.
Without any real direction as to where to go for lunch we found ourselves dining at an establishment that local Peace Corps volunteers have given the moniker “The Prostitute Bar.” Prostitution, as we soon discovered, is a booming industry in Diego. The whole of Northern Diego seemed heavily populated with elderly European gentlemen in optimistically youthful clothing chasing around brazen young Malagasy in tight outfits and painted faces. Curiously absent from the streets, however, were the throngs of Malagasy poor. There were no skinny men hauling sugarcane, no street vendors pushing sequined scrunchies and cheap flashlights. Only broad, shaded sidewalks, overpriced multi-ethnic restaurants pleasant vistas over Diego harbor.
On our first morning in Diego, I had arranged a trip out to the fabled Emerald Sea. We booked through the highly reputable “I have a friend who knows a guy who has a phone number for another dude” method so Friday morning found us wading through a slimy polluted harbor in drizzly weather to a wooden skiff with a musty sail and a little outboard motor accompanied by three Malagasy men we had only just met. Our fortunes improved significantly as the weather cleared crossing the harbor and we slowed to a stop above a vibrant coral reef. We paused for a bit to allow one of our guides to harpoon some of the local wildlife. Having collected four brightly colored, possibly endangered, reef fish, we skirted out of the harbor to the North, spread our sail and entered the Emerald Sea.
The Emerald Sea is what happens when white coral-sand accumulates on the ocean floor for some umpteen million years until the sandy bottom is just a few meters from the surface. The sea water sits gently on the sand, reflecting the sun’s rays turning the whole area a bright shade of unreal green. Our boat pulled up to a pristine beach on an island where the only structures are picnic shelters. Whilst we bobbed in the shallow sea, our crew was busy fixing us lunch. By noon there was a monstrous salad, four grilled fish, five crabs, three beers, and a heaping mound of coconut rice sitting on the table that our guides indicated was exclusively for us to ingest. We set to work and made a wonderful mess of things over the next hour before took to the sea to wash the bits of crab shell out of our hair.
Though stuffing ourselves with fresh seafood on the beach was a hard act to follow, we hoped that an overnight excursion to Ankarana, prepared for the next morning, would be to our taste. We set out by land rather than sea with a portly mustachioed driver in a Mitsubishi pick-up. The road (there is only one) out of Diego was rife with heavy artillery craters left over from the Malagasy Civil War. Although the historical record lacks any mention of this internecine conflict, there is no other way to explain the state of the RN 6 so I’m sticking to that story.
Our driver stopped us in some nameless rural hamlet and purchased for himself a leafy bush of lime colored leaves and placed them prominently in over the parking brake. Presently he began picking the branches and eyeing the plant, selecting the best leaves and popping them into his mouth. Chewing on the leaf for a moment, he stuffed the rind in his cheek before consuming another eventually causing him to take on the appearance of a fat faced hamster. “It keeps me awake!” he reported. Sure it does. Khat, as it is commonly called, is amphetamine-like stimulant classified as a ‘drug of abuse’ by the World Health Organization. Illegal in most countries, it prevents drowsiness, induces euphoria, suppresses appetite, and is addictive. Continued use has been shown to decrease self control and cause a whole host of maladies, but withdrawal symptoms can include manic behavior and hallucinations so I was glad to see the driver happily munching on his little leaves for the remainder of our time with him.
After an hour or so our mildly impaired driver turned off the road for a scheduled detour to the “Red Tsingy.” More significantly, my parents got a real experience of what an unpaved road in Madagascar really means. The car spent a good deal of time in four-wheel drive tearing up slippery muddy hills and sliding around unmarked cliffs. The driver welcomed a family of Malagasy featuring young infant to sit in the bed of the truck only to get himself stuck with two wheels off the ground a few kilometers later. We had to push. Mother about died. We arrived safely.
As it turns out, Red ‘Tsingy’ isn’t tsingy at all, rather it is a monument to the problems of environmental degradation besetting Madagascar that happens to look pretty when viewed out of context. The area surrounding ‘Red Tsingy’ was deforested and burned ages ago; inaugurating intense erosion that quickly washed any usable top soil out into the Indian Ocean. However, the erosion didn’t stop there, it eventually cut massive canyons into the red earth that grow larger and more menacing with each rainfall. In some of the canyons, the erosion cut all the way down to a layer of laterite that erodes in a strange way causing odd formations that appear similar to proper Tsingy. The Malagasy, turning lemons into lemonade, trumpet the formations as “a completely unique work of nature” to draw in tourists. Right. When we were there it was raining and we got to see erosion in action as sediments flowed though the canyon, burying the guardrails in mud and turning the formations into a sandy mush that fell apart in our hands.
Moving onto the more pleasing destination of Ankarana National Park, we passed the night in an hut made of local materials that earns mention as the most rustic of our accommodations thus to date, though it was roomier and better constructed than some volunteer’s houses I have visited. Although mildly scandalized by the lack of running water, squat toilet and flimsy exterior, Mother was highly amused, and I am not being facetious, by the bellowing of zebu that woke her up at 3AM, apparently causing her to forgive the establishment’s aforementioned shortfall in creature comforts.
The park itself was packed with lemurs, snakes, birds, and flora unique to the area and I finally figured out the proper camera setting for taking quality photos of wildlife on Mother’s newfangled Nikon. The park’s highlight is formations or REAL limestone Tsingy that stretch out endlessly across the landscape. Larger in area, but less dramatic as the Tsingy formations I had visited near Morondava in November, they are a fascinating example of Madagascar’s unique geography. Our final non-GFA was an afternoon decent into a colossal bat cave that opened into the earth near one of the Tsingys. Armed with little more that the flashlight on my cellphone, we ventured deep into the cavern surrounded by chirping bats that flew so close to our faces we could feel the wind off their wings as they passed and the slipperiness of their poo as we walked.
Emerging from the cave, I came to the conclusion that I had sufficiently exhausted my parent’s appetite for adventure, so we returned to Diego and spent that evening, and the following day (my birthday) lounging about town, eating and drinking at fine dining institutions and watching a strangely fascinating cargo ship unload containers into the port. We flew Air Madagascar back to Tana the next day. The airline, which had earlier met with my approval by serving a small breakfast on our way to Diego, served a disappointing lunch composed exclusively of hard candy. The next day the European Aviation Commission banned Air Mada’s planes from the skies over Europe sighting safety concerns. Thankfully, the parents had booked their flight out on Air France.

Family Vacation Part 1

2011-05-02T18:41:00.002+03:00

There is a point in every man’s life when he becomes the caretaker for his parents. As the inexorable tides of age begin to set in, the relationship begins to change. It may begin with an occasional drive to the grocery store to ease aging eyes, or a helping hand with household chores. Events generally climax with some medical misadventure and denouement occurs with a move to an assisted care facility. For me this journey began quite suddenly at the tender age of 22 when my parents passed through Malagasy customs and ostensibly lost their ability to function in society. Instead of coddling them into a comfortable facility to live out their days, I decided to take them 1,800 kilometers across a 3rd world country under the guise of looking for fuzzy primates and squatty trees.
I must admit our itinerary raised some eye brows, even amongst fellow Peace Corps volunteers.
“Oh that’s nice your parents are coming, how long are they staying?... Wow three weeks is a long time… and your sister is coming too?... and your aunt?... AND your grandma?!... both of them? And your taking them WHERE?”
Yes we certainly did not choose the most un-ambitious of plans, but no one was planning on returning to Madagascar and Lauren had an orchestra concert on Sunday, so there was no room for lollygagging.
I shied away from the prospect of stuffing my grandmothers in the back seat of the taxi brousses with the chickens, sick babies and non-existent posterior padding and instead opted for the ‘rent a van’ option. Our driver was Rahery. He had one front tooth, very few English skills, but proved himself to be very good at navigating the temperamental RN7 whilst his passengers gazed out at the endless valleys of green rice and rust hued houses. He also came in handy when the less than reputable Ilakaka Police Department attempted to shake us down for 40,000 Ariary.
I had not anticipated the extent to which my services as a translator/tour guide/banker/navigator/price-negotiator would be required until we reached the first lunch stop in Ambositra and no one could read the menu or ask where to find the toilet. At first I found the task of doing everything a bit overwhelming, but I quickly came to relish my position as master and commander of our little grey van. After 16 months alone I finally was getting to show nearly my whole family this life I had built for myself here.
The job also came with some nice perks, namely getting to spend a few weeks in the alternate universe known to Peace Corps volunteers as ‘Vahaza World.’ In this world silly things like air conditioning, complementary soaps, courses to meals, fudge dip granola bars, drivers on call, and flush toilets are commonplace. We could select hotels not in the ‘penny pincher’ section of the guide book. Chickens were on the table to eat and not running around under it. Once, we even had a friendly waitress at a restaurant.
We made four major stops on our road trip extravaganza. First and foremost was of course my humble little burg of Ranomafana. I made the family ‘rough it’ for a few days, putting them up in a spacious house with running hot water, toilets, solid walls, no rodents, and NO ELECTRICTY. Lauren, however, got the Peace Corps experience and got to sleep in my house which included none of the above amenities in addition to lacking power. She fortified herself inside my mosquito net with a flashlight and had the courtesy to wake me up in the other room whenever she spotted something crawling on the floor. (This from the girl who would later wake her entire hotel room at 2:30 AM because of a menacing looking towel) During daylight hours, we visited the waterfall and had a splendid day in the forest combining the forces of five digital cameras in mostly fruitless attempts to get good pictures of lemurs perched up in the forest canopy. Though the trails were muddy, steep, and coated with treacherous leeches, the grandmas endured valiantly, although we did end up with one very muddy sneaker.
Stop #2 was Isalo National Park. Already the subject of much praise in earlier an earlier blog, Isalo retains its status as my favorite place to visit in Madagascar. We stayed at “The Isalo Rock Lodge,” an expansive modern resort set back in some very attractive looking rocks. We thought it interesting that dinner at the resort was ‘obligatory’ until we discovered that we were the only guests at the whole place and the requirement was probably an attempt to give the bored staff something to do. Thus each night at precisely 7:15 we were paraded through the eerily quiet dining area where a sumptuous three course dinner awaited us. It was one of those deals where the food was sculpted into fancy little structures resembling fashionable ladies hats. Certainly a departure from the greasy pork fat and plain rice I had forced the family to ingest for lunch at a bustling Hotely near the bus station in Ambalavao.
Continuing on to Tulear, we disembarked for a short visit to the city’s artisan market where I acted as frantic intermediary for all purchases large and small.

“Grandma, How much would you pay for that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, $20?”
(In Malagasy)
“Excuse me miss, how much is this?”
“$10”
“Are you kidding? That’s too expensive”
“Fine you can have this shell necklace and a wooden pot as a gift”
“No, we don’t like shells”
“Alright how about this carved mask instead for your gift?”
“It’s still to expensive, I’ll give you $6 for all of it”
“Make it $8 and I’ll thrown in this candle stick”

This sort of banter continued until the smiling sellers relieved us of a mountain of worthless bills and we walked away wondering how we would ever fit everything into suitcases.
Our hotel that night lie some undetermined distance up the RN 9, a road which amounted to little more than a ribbon of cleared mud/sand punctuated by bits of asphalt. Mother’s unquestioning reliance on Google translate burned us when we came to realize that our hotel was not 12k north of Tulear but 12k north of Mangily, which itself was 26k north of Tulear. However, in typical Malagasy fashion, the destination was spectacular, the road was just atrocious. Our hotel was a splendid beach resort with bungalows opening up right on the Mozambique Channel. The hotel was run by an extremely amicable French couple who tried their very best to talk to make us feel welcome, without speaking a word of English. We found some fun activities to keep us occupied during our three days on the beach. Aunt Mary developed a hankering for chasing Radiated Tortoises through the bush whilst the rest of us hugged baobabs and snorkeled after brightly colored aquatic life.
Our last obstacle of the trip was driving 930k back up the RN7 to the capital, a two day drive in good conditions barring police interference. Thus I took the bus over to the Sahambavy Tea Estate, because grandmas love tea right? The tea plantation was a hit, I learned never to order head cheese, and our hotel gave the parents one of their luxury lake bungalows due to a minor booking snafu.
Returning to Tana the following morning, I couldn’t help but notice that each member of our trip had made a marked recovery in their ability to function in society. Grandma W had learned not to keep pens on the outside of her purse, Lauren went an entire week without waking her roommates up, and Dad had nearly learned how to correctly pronounce thank-you in Malagasy. Moral of the story: When your family members get old and dysfunctional, send them to Madagascar.

My Life Part 3

2011-03-07T17:47:00.002+03:00

As my run continues up Route Nationale 25 past the center of Ranomafana I pass a few staples of Malagasy life. There is the ‘Banana Dump,’ a heaping mound of green bananas awaiting a semi to come haul Ranomafana’s surfeit supply to the plateau. Rickety tables proffer fruits, coffee and fried things unknown to passing villagers. Up the hill to the right is the health clinic. Approaching the entrance to the Centrest Hotel, the most expensive in the village with diligently maintained native landscaping and commanding views of the village, the grade of the road begins to increase. Quite unassumingly I have begun to climb a hill that continues up for the next 15 kilometers and from here on out my run becomes much more strenuous and less leisurely. The next few meters feature a few monuments to failed ideas. There is an abandon museum, a defunct hotel, a permanently closed t-shirt shop, and a cell phone store I have never seen a customer visit. It is mildly reminiscent of any American shopping mall open for more than fifteen years. Just a matter of time before Halloween USA rears its ugly head.
Next on our perspicacious little run is the Fiongonana Jesosy Mamonjy (The Church of Jesus Saves). At least one church from this wildly popular but loosely affiliated ‘denomination’ can be found in every Malagasy town. The Mamonjy will suffer no rivals in their well intended praise for Jesus. Seemingly endless Sunday services highlighted by laying on hands, speaking in tongues, alter calls, Southern Baptists don’t hold a candle on these guys. In Tana there is a Jesosy Manonjy by the white-people supermarket that could easily rank itself among the top ten super churches were it located stateside. Ranomafana is a primarily Catholic community so its modest Mamonjy congregation remains and unobtrusively located of the far side of town.
Normally, the Jesosy Manonjy is the landmark at which I turn around begin my decent back into town. The next seven kilometers consists of some serious inclines, exclusive hotels, and precariously positioned mud houses. At the crest of the mountains, surrounded by thick forest on all sides, rests the entrance to Ranomafana National Park next to the expansive Centre Valbio Research center. These areas are well beyond the reach of my running routine but they are the dual suns of the Ranomafana solar system around which the hotels, the forest, the town, the restaurants revolve. Past here, Fianarantsoa is 50k further on the Plateau.
Once back at my house, enveloped in a more then pleasant coating of my own sweat. A shower is in order. Being that no structure of the sort exists anywhere in my little corner of town, I collect my toiletries, put on a bathing suit, and make my way to the communal water source. Add public bathing to the list of things I have become used to in Peace Corps. There is a little stream that tumbles out of the rain forest and pools in a small area under the shade of some ancient litchi trees. Here the villagers of Masomanga come to bathe and wash laundry. This spring also becomes my source of water whenever the pump is broken, which is often enough that I no longer even stop by the pump house anymore. Occasionally, as I approach, I am greeted by a disrobed woman either bathing or squatting directly into the stream to relive herself. She giggles, I wait at a safe distance for her become appropriate again and take my place up stream.
I can say quite honestly that standing next to this cool stream pouring cold water over myself after a long run is one of my favorite parts of the day. The experience is even more pleasant when there are not four Malagasy women who have paused their washing to stare at you there in your orange swim trunks. But hey, nothing is ever perfect.

The My life series will be on vacation for the next few posts as I am taking a break from my life to be awesome

My Life Part 2

2011-02-10T08:26:00.004+03:00

The limiting factor on the quality of my breakfast is personal laziness. I could have coffee and tea with fresh fried bread accompanied by a smorgasbord of fruits every morning if I liked, but that would require me to bike all the way into Ranomafana town centre, way to much to ask just after I get up. Cat is also hungry having rejected the previous night’s meal and made a kitten deposit in someplace besides the litter tray. I check my food chest to see how many precious instant oatmeal packs I have left. There are 25. I take two minutes to calculate how much oatmeal I could eat everyday between now and December 30th to make it last the whole time. I can eat 7% of a packet. I need 3 packets to be full, that’s 43 days worth. Fail. I scrounge about the house for some change, its bolomboi again today.
Bolomboi is what happens when you take cassava root, peel it, send it through a cheese grater, mash it into pasty balls then fry it in oil. It tastes like an elastic French fry if you get them hot, like tire tread if cold. There is one lady who lives visual distance from my front door that makes them in the morning. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s fried. It’s like Malagasy McDonalds. I’m all over it. Striking out from the house I stroll over to the muddy hovel where my food is hopefully sizzling in a rusty can. Ignoring the cat calls from the scrawny two year old across the street, I collect an ample helping and hand over my fare. The cook asks if there is anything else I would like to buy. My options include heavily coagulated chicken blood, fried leaves, ‘fish biscuits,’ cow-foot soup, or three miserable bananas pregnant with fruit flies. I politely decline and return to culinary safety of my house.
There Sharbaraz is waiting for me demanding her portion of my breakfast before she ditches me for Rodrigue’s house. I toss a few in her direction and scarf the rest. I usually try to start things out with a run so once I allow things to digest I throw on a moldy t-shirt and my shoes and after some less-than-prodigious stretching I set out in the direction of town. My house sits exactly one kilometer east of Ranomafana and my run will take me directly past all of the village highlights.
As I enter town on the left I come upon the extensive Hotel Manja complex. It’s owned by a friendly Malagasy family that occasionally lets me use one of their hot showers so I do my best to direct the occasional lost tourist in their direction. The restaurant attached to the hotel is frequented heavily by passing tourists as well as the mayor, local guides, and the Queen of Ranomafana herself, Patricia Wright. Occasionally, when I bike by, I get invited to sit and have a drink with whosoever may be lounging out on the porch. Mostly though, I just get stared down by the painted French tour groups daintily eating their crayfish.
Just before I enter town I need to pass the police check-point. This consists of a small shack, wooden bench, and a spike strip stretched across half the road. The police are only interested in taxi-brousses and semi-trucks so they leave the sweaty white person on foot alone. There are always two policemen sitting on the bench looking bored and consuming serious number of cigarettes. The curious thing about police checkpoints in Madagascar is that the attending ‘national’ police wear faded uniforms that impeccably match each other, but do not match any other police anywhere else in Madagascar. The ones in Ranomafana are particularly fond of berets, sunglasses and trying to look intimidating.
Entering Ranomafana, I swing pass a series of mid-range riverside hotels diligently patrolled by some bad-tempered geese wandering about the middle of the road doing their utmost to be a public nuisance, honking at passing cars and intimidating schoolchildren. If tennis racquets existed in this country I would be sorely tempted to conduct an unsightly feathery massacre the likes of which would give the tourists something to write home about. Ranomafana’s central market consists of splotches of decaying asphalt surrounded by muddy ditches and potholes all seasoned with bits of garbage. The buildings surrounding this community space are almost entirely constructed out of molding uncured wood, perpetually filled with the smoke of interior cooking fires, and strung up so haphazardly with tangled electric lines that if the entire complex wasn’t doused in tropical rains every few hours it would probably burn down within a week.
Recently there has been a movement amongst those with connections to foreign money to construct buildings out of cement. The recently renovated covered market, mayor’s sprawling new general store and the ghastly post office (which recently received a new coat of Twinkie-colored paint) are included in this category. Cement is a huge sign of status in Madagascar, in particular in the regions off the plateau. Most villages and towns east of Ranomafana consist almost entirely of buildings constructed from the local indigenous palm tree, for example the entire coastal shack-city of Mananjary. Thus the little village of Ranomafana can adduce these buildings as signs of its recent ascendancy into the ‘modern.’
Opposite the market, just past the soccer field (also incidentally where the livestock is done in), sits the hulking ruin of the Station Thermale Hotel. Abandon since the mid 90’s, the Thermale dominates the town skyline with high pitched tile roofs sporting holes that look like they could have been made by a falling Ford Fiesta. The Thermale had its hay-day back in the French colonial period when it opened as a resort spa for ex-pat super wealthy looking to spend a weekend being pampered in the hot springs. Unfortunately, the departure of the French in 1960 also signaled a precipitous decline in demand for such epicurean activities such as soaking one’s bottom for hours in hot sulfur water. The Thermale limped along until the recent rainforest tourism boom when it received a thorough tongue lashing from the guide books for having a leaky roof, awful beds, foul service, and most ironically, no hot showers. Faced with competition from new hotels opening almost yearly and a plumbing system placed permanently on the mend, the Thermale folded. The abandon edifice was quickly re-occupied by a slew of Malagasy squatters, but not before the main entrance was transformed into the working space for a women’s weaving cooperative. The district government also acquired one of the powder rooms and began using it as the Clerk’s Office.

My Life Part 1

2011-01-29T15:09:00.002+03:00

It is amazing how much one’s conception of normal can change in a year. I like to think that as I become adapted to the Malagasy lifestyle, the less material I have to blog about since what would once be considered shocking and worthy of excessive gawking is now literally ‘nothing to write home about.’ A text message from a friend that she had just boarded a taxi-bus with an 8-foot hammerhead shark strapped to the top elicits little more than a smirk and a roll of eyes from me. What I find more fascinating these days is the westerners who are fresh of the plane and are frightened of taxi-stations, have never squatted to use the toilet, and wear white t-shirts. Thus in an effort to better acquaint you all with my normal I thought I would walk you though some typical scenes in my life.
It’s usually some activity over at Rodrigue’s that gets me up in the morning. His chicken flock has been steadily multiplying over the past months up to some 30 obnoxious birds peeping, squawking, fighting, and cock-a-doodle-doing all about my yard. The flock is culled only be the occasional taxi brousse that comes barreling by and graciously kills one or two a month. Then we have chicken for dinner. Rodrigue’s industrious wife is also awake. She has to start a fire and have rice ready for breakfast before she walks Riza and Oni 1.5k into town for school at seven. She is also eight months pregnant. Although all my windows and doors are securely shut, there is light streaming into my house from cracks in the wood and holes under the roof. Soon the sun will commence baking my tin roof making my bed intolerably hot and forcing me to start the day.
One of my first and favorite morning rituals is stumbling about the nursery trying to find the toilet. The story of my outhouse and its exceedingly inconvenient location dates back to my original installation in Ranomafana last January. It is a Peace Corps requirement that each volunteer have their own private shack-with-hole to use. Mine was located less than 10 feet from Rodrigue’s kitchen whilst Rodrigue and company had no outhouse at all and made creative use of the bushes across the road. Eventually Rodrigue began to construct his own facilities back behind the nursery. This, however, resulted in the ridiculous and counterintuitive scenario where Rodrigue’s family would have to pass by my house to use the toilet while I was making daily visits to their house to conduct similar business. I quickly rectified the situation by insisting upon trading, accepting a longer toilet commute so that Oni, two at the time, could potty train at a more convenient location. This actually worked to my benefit last April when the path to the new outhouse passed though the avocado grove and my daily morning ritual resulted in enough fruit to make lunch.
The trouble started when SAF/FJKM decided to mow down the avocado trees and turn my pleasant jungle path into an expansion on the tree nursery. The nursery and resulting bamboo fence forced me to take a prohibitively difficult route over a muddy cliff, though the thick coffee and banana stands, knee high grass, spider webs, mosquitoes, flesh eating moths… etc. A slightly better alternative was discovered when Alison was visiting. This path ironically passed right past my old outhouse and required (don’t ask me how this works) climbing over the same waist-high wall three times. Alison proved not very apt at this and actually has physical scars from her Ranomafana outhouse experience.
Clearly this was not a sustainable scenario and after a serious discussion with Rodrigue, some choice holes were made in the bamboo fence around the nursery. Now, when I emerge from my slumber I squeeze though a vine entangled hole in my fence, climb down though the nursery to the litchi in the back where the bamboo fence has been thinned out, I part the bamboo like a curtain and make my way down the embankment to my outhouse. As I sit inside I take comfort in the fact that although there is no way to measure how much progress I am making in the lives of the Malagasy people in Ranomafana, I am making measurable progress in filling this hole with poo.

The Holidays

2011-01-13T00:20:00.002+03:00

Christmas is not a tropical holiday. There are no silent snow blanketed nights. No sleigh bells, boughs of holly, or Fraiser Firs. Madagascar even lacks any form of large ruminid mammal that might resemble reindeer. Even looping my limited selection of festive Holiday tunes failed to inspire any Christmas spirit. One of the big aspects of Christmas in my childhood home was hauling the large box out of the basement and tastefully decorating our family living space with holiday heirlooms and color-coordinated Christmas tree ornamentation. Malagasy Christmas décor is comprised almost exclusively of oddly colored tinsel and other shiny plastic filth that could only be considered beautiful if viewed through a very fine kaleidoscope, by a raccoon. The taciturn store owner near my house had installed enough gaudy plastic cheer in her place of business obscure any potential customer’s view of her products, a frustrating state of affairs when pointing and gesturing are your preferred methods of buying daily essentials.
Closer to home, at Rodrigue’s, preparations were being made to be at church for as many as 12 hours over a period of three days. Something meaty, oily, and rice-y, was being proposed for Christmas dinner. With the walls closing in around me, I plundered as much as I considered modest of the finally-ripened litchis behind the nursery and made for the safety of the Fianarantsoa PC house with my trusty travel buddy Alison on the morning of Christmas Eve. After waiting 3 hours, cramming into a clown car, running out of gas, hitchhiking a ride in a semi-truck, and acting very grinch-like to the driver of a third vehicle, we arrived in Fianarantsoa. Soon we had forgotten all of that morning’s transportation miseries because we had electricity, internet, and an oven capable of baking pizza and Christmas cookies.
With Christmas proper behind us, we embarked on a two-day 950k journey across Madagascar to the Northwest of the island, near Mahajanga. Those with a history of heart problems, high blood pressure, or women who are pregnant or nursing should not attempt Mahajanga. Talk to your doctor or physician before taking Mahajanga. Side effects are likely to include poor circulation, peculiar rashes, headaches, temporary insanity, and foul disposition. My first destination was to be the site of a fellow Nigerian volunteer named Jenny. During training her site was talked up significantly as the mecca of dinosaur bone excavation and paleontology. This is true, for only two months every other year. Jenny’s house rests in a minuscule village comprising five huts 15k from anywhere. We spent two days there wandering about the dry, eroded, and treeless wasteland wondering why on earth people were still trying to grow rice here.
With an extra day to spare, Alison and I made haste to Ankarafantsika National Park where I had a South African friend doing research on Tenrecs, a nocturnal endemic hedgehog-like critter with penchant for injecting spines into human skin. Thankfully my friend’s specimens were safely caged and mildly sedated. The park itself was interesting not spectacular. The forest was featureless, dry, flat, and rife with wildlife. I fattened my list of birds, played with a chameleon, and got close enough to touch a lemur and took some spectacular photos (see photos). As far as landmarks, however, the only significant landmarks are a wide eroded canyon and a murky lake choked with water hyacinths.
Our New Years celebration was booked for the city of Mahajanga. We made our entrance at mid-day got a healthy dose of costal heat. Mahajunga is a truly special Malagasy city. Not only does the food and culture exhibit a mix of Indian, Arab, French, and Malagasy culture, but there are sidewalks and basic city services seem to function on a regular basis. Too many of us crammed into a single hotel near the ocean and hit the coastal boardwalk for beer and brochettes (fish and beef) purveyed by welcoming ladies at outdoor grills stalls. Joining Alison and I were 10 other volunteers from the Mahajanga region making New Years a happy convivial occasion for all involved.
Post-holiday plans included stops at the homes of my Thanksgiving-era friends in Tana and a 5 day “Advanced Service Conference” at the now nostalgic Lake Montasoa Training Center. The most significant development out of this event as far as the average blog reader is concerned is that I gained 5 pounds.

Taxi Broussing

2010-12-11T15:43:00.002+03:00

Believe it or not, the entire transportation system for the 20 million people living on this island consists of six paved roads and perhaps a thousand elderly Mazda and Toyota passenger vans. Given these conditions, there is no earthly way transportation can be a pleasant experience. These vans called “brousses” by the locals tear about Madagascar chock-a-block with cargo and people. Best evidence is that these cars were sold at a discount to taxi companies and imported from Europe when they became obsolete. Once in Madagascar they are stripped down and refurbished to accommodate the maximum number of legal midgets physically possible. There is no safety equipment to speak of. The vans are more or less metal cubes with engines and big gas tanks. Plastic containers on the roof can also be filled with gasoline to ensure that all passengers can enjoy an exciting fiery death should the driver misjudge the wrong corner.
Overstuffing a brousse is technically illegal in Madagascar and police check-points outside the major cities are there to ensure passenger’s safety and security. However, a few thousand ariary can make any potential traffic citations disappear so capacity rules are no longer heeded. Some brousses come equipped with mini-video screens so passengers can view some horrendous and often shockingly explicit music videos while they are being carted around like packed sardines. Heavy sub-woofers also come standard on every brousse, when turned up to full volume, the advancing sound serves to clear docile Malagasy villagers off the road as the brousse approaches.
To top it all of, many brousses are customized. Rather than install decent interior upholstery, seat belts, or repair the inevitably broken side mirrors, taxi vans spend their money buying custom car horns, glue-on imitation chrome side ventilators, flashy stickers of all kinds. I always know the brousse that operates out of Ranomafana because it has two massive Hannah Montana decals in the rear windows. Other vans opt for a more religious tone, sporting a crucified Christ, Madonna with infant Christ, or bible verses written out in cursive glitter type. By in large, however, most cosmetic additions attempt to intimidate or flaut the car’s illustrious but also fictitious racing prowess. Pink and orange flames cover the running board and meaningless logos such as “MAZDA SPEED RACING” are plastered on their dented bodies and broken windscreens. Who these stickers are meant to appeal to is up for debate.
Worst then puttering about this island in one of these tin cages of death is trying to get one of them to leave at the Taxi Gare. Always located in the most unbecoming sections of town, come within 400 meters of any Taxi Gare and you will immediately be set-upon by 10 or more persistent hagglers. These people make a career out of forcing innocent and unsuspecting travelers into their particular vans. They usually open by asking, in French, where I am going. When I ignore them they just start guessing. “Your going to Tulear? This car is going there right now! [lie] its already almost full! [lie]” I am not going to Tulear, as I continue to spurn their advances, more hagglers are attracted to the approaching white person heavy laden with bags. Soon everyone is screaming various destinations and pushing each other out of the way to get a better angle on me. The hagglers begin accusing each other of being drunk. Fights break out as I look on apathetically. One or two of the men will start grabbing at my bags pulling me one way or another. This is not ok. I yell at them in Malagasy though their garbled French bickering. On more than one occasion I was certain I was going to be shoved into a moving van professional-kidnapping style. The event ends anticlimactically when I fight my way into a particular taxi company office to buy a legitimate ticket.
Hapless white people are not the only targets of harassment. I once witnessed an elderly woman holding hands with a young girl enter the Gare. The pair was swarmed with 6 or 7 seven full grown men trying to herd them into their particular van. When the woman resisted, two men seized the screaming child and began to pry her away from her guardian. After a few seconds of valiant struggle the old woman lost her grip on the girl, tripped on a paving stone and fell hard onto the cement with a cry. The basket of personal effects she had been balancing on her head scattered across the lot. Collecting her things the woman ran off in tears after the girl, I never saw her again and a little bit of my faith in humanity died that day.
Having beaten off the unkempt, unfriendly, and unrelenting hagglers, the search for a van begins. Not so easy when everyone you speak with is lying to you and trying to scam you. Not only is every price quote you receive heavily inflated, but every departure time is completely misleading. Every bus is leaving “right now” or “in 5 minutes” or “as soon as you pay.” Once you have handed over your money, everyone, thankfully, losses interest in you and you are liable to wait as many as four hours for your car to leave. Unfortunately there is perhaps no worse place to be sitting for hours than a Malagasy Taxi Gare. Generally, these places are little more than a glorified parking lot encircled by tiny cement huts that serve as offices. While you bake on black tarmac under the tropical sun, you are constantly subjected to the most diverse assortment of Malagasy riffraff begging for money or selling rancid food and new shiny plastic garbage from China. I bring a book and try to hide, usually not very successfully, in the back of a car.
The only plus about the transportation terror that I have just described is that you are always thrilled to reach your destination and you always tell the best stories. On a brousse from Manakara, the entire bank of windows on the right side of the car fell off as we were doing 75 kph and shattered all over the highway, puncturing a tire. There are no restrictions on carry-on luggage. Mattresses, entire motorcycles, geese, goats, and even illegally poached herons are all kosher; the only universal no-no is dogs. I counted 30 people (myself included) in a van designed for 12, but refitted for 15. I have watched on in shock as 20 bags of cement were pulled out of the nooks and crannies of an already packed bus. We ran over a turkey. I have shared my personal space with drunk old men, vomiting teenagers, jolly nuns, xenophobic toddlers, and terrorized chickens to name a few. Thankfully when the rents come we are renting a private van.

In an unrelated aside I would again like to take the opportunity to harangue Madagascar’s Postal (dis)Service for their extemporary failure to perform above a third-grade aptitude.
A few months ago, my dearest Aunt Mary carefully filled a padded manila envelope with food, letters, and lots of love. Having read my past blogs featuring unforgiving tirades against the post, she bravely decided to take the risk and entrust the package to these purveyors of incompetence and my some miracle it only took a matter of weeks for them to get it though customs where Peace Corps, like a white knight in shining armor rescued it from the dungeons of the Postal depot in Tana. However, it was only after I had triumphantly returned with my prize did I realize that my celebration was premature. While lingering in the dark purgatory of the customs office, a rat had chewed though the envelope and violated its contents. The double-packaged dehydrated milk had been breeched but not seriously plundered. However, the homemade cherry-smoked chicken jerky was opened and entire precious strips were completely absent. I was irate. My mail has about as much chance of reaching me as a mentally challenged tuna fish has in a shark tank. This is the second package to be assaulted in such a manner, both tragedies befalling Alphenaar packages. Maybe just send e-mails and think non-hungry thoughts?

Antananarivo (Tana)

2010-12-03T10:48:00.001+03:00

I really don’t like Tana. Allow me to enumerate a few of my gripes with this city. First and foremost, Tana has perhaps the worst city planning I have ever had the privilege to witness in all my travels. The roads into the city disappear into a morass of crammed dirty backstreets. There are no highways in Tana, but enough traffic to make ten kilometer journey downtown a two hour project. The only mass transit is provided by antiquated Mercedes busses called ‘Taxi-be’ that charge 15 cents for the pleasure of being crammed into a child-sized seat next to an overweight Malagasy person as the engine chugs and sputters in gridlock traffic while you breath in enough exhaust fumes to induce a significant headache. Security is a big problem in Tana. Entire sections of town are no-fly zones for volunteers. Purses are slashed. Pockets picked. One volunteer a few years ago had his face beat in with a brick on his way back from a bar and had to be med-evaced for facial reconstructive surgery. Tana is also the city where the divide between rich and poor is most pronounced. Some residents live in shacks built in the swampy recesses of the rice paddies while the educated elite cruise through the garbage strewn streets in their European imports. Homes and businesses are secluded behind high walls decorated liberally with barbed wire. Rent-a-cop companies make a killing standing outside mansions housing the foreign and the wealthy. It is not for me to pass judgment on people for wanting to protect themselves and their possessions. It just makes for bad aesthetics.
Unfortunately this is the only city in Madagascar that you can’t avoid. As Madagascar’s capital, the terminus of four paved highways, and the home to the island’s only international airport, everything in Madagascar filters through this lackluster hub. Accordingly, finishing my wonderful vacation in Morandava found me staying at Peace Corps transit house in the wealthy suburb of Ivandy on the north side of Tana. The date was November 17, a normally inconspicuous date on the calendar but this year it happened to coincide with a controversial constitutional referendum being put to vote by the Malagasy government. As I was busy uploading my vacation photos onto Facebook, a group of ranking military officers decided to use the referendum as a pretext to over throw the current regime. From their base near the airport the officers announced to the world that a supreme military council was now in control of Madagascar, telling one French television station that the airport and presidential palace would be stormed the following morning preventing anyone from leaving the island and effectively paralyzing the current administration.
These men, however, failed to properly ensure the support of the rest of the island’s military apparatus and within 24 hours it became clear that the only thing the “Supreme Military Council” controlled was the building in which they sat and a pile of burning tires on the road out to the airport. Peace Corps and the Embassy, however, were not amused. A warden’s message was issued. Peace Corps extended a no-travel order to the entire country and I, as well as seven other unlucky volunteers, was more or less restricted to a one block radius containing one affordable restaurant and a gas station for a week. Even though the faux coup d’etat was quickly put down, my plans to go back home came to naught and a trip downtown was hastily called off when an improvised explosive device was detonated in a popular plaza.
As the walls of transit house closed in around me and the other volunteers, the embassy staff living in the area rescued us from excruciating boredom by inviting us to social events. Feeling a little awkward in a faded t-shirt and dirty sneakers we sipped expensive alcohols and got a little glimpse of the Foreign Service life. I became friends with one officer in particular, Jane and her nephew Aaron who had just arrived in Madagascar for a six month vacation. Jane invited myself and a slew of other volunteers to share Thanksgiving with their family and we feasted together on traditional American fare. For most of us it was a challenge to stop from eating the marvelous food even when our stomachs were well past capacity.
With the situation in the capital under control and our travel restrictions lifted, Jane’s nephew and I escaped on a weekend vacation to the sleepy costal town of Mahanoro for a real Peace Corps Thanksgiving. The volunteer living in Mahanoro had purchased herself a live turkey, which she had affectionately named Marvin, and had been stuffing it full of beans for the proceeding week. Mahanoro quickly gained the distinction of my new favorite coastal town. Quiet, friendly, unassuming, and with some 80 kilometers of sandy beach for running, the town would have been frequented by me on the weekends if it wasn’t some 800 kilometers from Ranomafana. Turkey-day-prep started early in the morning and after cooking furiously we managed to have a meal large enough to feed the 20 or so gathered holiday makers just before sunset. After ingesting Marvin, we hit the beach for beers and campfire under a spectacular canopy of stars, playing with the phosphorescent plankton glowing like glitter in the surf. I tried not to think about going back to Tana the next morning.

Canoe Trip to Morandava

2010-11-18T16:54:00.001+03:00

Mark and I decided we needed a vacation. I had yet to use any of my 49 vacation days from Peace Corps and Mark had just finished a major project. We heard about a trip in the West that visited some of the major sites for a reasonable price. A canoe was apparently involved. I got a phone number, made some calls, and here is what transpired.
The trip began less than gloriously. We spent 14 hours in three different taxi vans only to arrive in Miandravazo, a town notable only as the hottest place in Madagascar. After passing the first of many nights drenched in my own epidermal excrement, our tour group coalesced next to the Tsiribina River.
Mark and I, as it turns out, were not alone on our trip, joining us would be an unlikely motley of interesting people of European origin. Our group included four Italian-speaking middle aged Swiss tri-athletes, two friends from Spain, and a Polish man married to a Slovak living in Belfast. Four Malagasy men joined to row the boats. Serious linguistic Olympics ensued. The Pole and the Slovak spoke decent English, but talked to each other in an unorthodox Slavic mélange that was neither Polish nor Slovak. The Swiss were wonderfully chatty and their brazen Italian, but only one of the Swiss and the Spanish woman spoke English. Even my Malagasy was slightly handicapped as I speak Betsileo dialect and our rowers were Sakalava. In the end, although none of us hailed from the former colonial power, French became our main mode of communication.
The Tsiribina (means “Don’t Dive” in Malagasy) is much less a river in the conventional sense than an organized flow of dissolved red clay particulates. The water smelled mildly of cow manure. Bubbles on the surface would combine with one another to form foamy hunks of scum that floated by like a rancid sponge. Five or six naked women bathed next to our boats. The question on everyone’s mind was whether they would be cleaner before or after going into the water. Presently I dipped a foot in. The temperature was an un-refreshing 85 degrees, providing no relief from the unforgiving sun. Accordingly I would never go more than knee deep into this stale water for the next three days.
As we all clamored into our boats, we were each issued a cheap plastic parasol. Mine was pink with purple flowers and baby blue designs that suggested Asian calligraphy. Though I shunned this hideous present at first, I came to my senses fast after we pushed away from shore into the open river. My cheap parasol was the only thing between me and the African sun for the next 6-8 hours. Even the constant application of prodigious amounts of SPF 45 could prevent my pasty knees from turning the color of raw meat.
Once I got past the heat and the state of the river, the trip turned into a spectacular adventure. Far from any passable road, we were in the real wilderness of Western Madagascar. The scenery looked like what I imagined Africa would be like. Tall reeds hiding endless plains of grass and scattered trees dominated our world for all of day one. On the second day we paddled though a string of tall hills blanketed with pristine dry deciduous forest. White Sifaka lemurs leaped between trees and herons prowled the water for a meal. Large bats huddled under the high red cliffs as the loud songs of black Vaza Parrots reverberated off the rocks. Consistently, at about 4 pm the heat of the day would break and self destruct into incredible sunsets.
With daylight failing our entourage would disembark on an undisturbed sandbar, and busy ourselves setting up tents on the soft ground. With nothing but loose sand to stake the tents, wind was an issue. Food prep was handled by the Malagasy rowers, except for day two when they allowed Mark and I were each allowed to kill and denude the hens that had been heretofore keeping us company in the back of the Spanish canoe. One of our lunches took place at a waterfall oasis a few meters off the river in the forest, this stop was also notable because it provided a chance to wash off the layers of muck, sweat, sand, and oily sunscreen that had been festering on our skin for two days.
Our trip happened to coincide with the beginning of mango season in Western Madagascar. A few notes on these fruits before we move any further. This entire land is rife with these juicy fruits. Monumental and fecund trees are commonplace, but some abhorrent percentage of useful fruit is wasted because there are not enough people to eat them, equipment to harvest them, or infrastructure to transport them. Selling these fruits in Madagascar is like selling sand on the beach. Instead children toss them in the river to watch them splash. On the two occasions for which we sought the shade of a mango tree for a tent site, only to be startled awake by these large fruits crashing onto our thin nylon roof at unpleasant hours of the morning. Second, there is no polite way to eat a fresh mango. The flesh, unlike a peach for example, is bonded to the pit so after the fruit is peeled the edible portion has to cut or eaten away from the center creating a sticky mango mess. Also they are wildly stringy so one is liable to get half the fruit gracefully wedged between one’s incisors. Stabbing away at the offending orange stringys with a toothpick
After three days on the river, we were driven some distance north to Tsingy Bemahera National Park. If you have access to a November 2009 issue of National Geographic, locate it and observe closely the cover art. This is where I went. This place is completely beyond words to accurately describe, but I shall do my best. A “Tsingy” formation is a maze of thousands of tiny deep valleys cut sharply into hard limestone. The effect is other worldly. The tops of the rocks are a dark grey color, razor sharp, and tough as nails. Climbing up the valleys requires harnesses and cables as a safety precaution. One misstep climbing around here and you would be facing multiple broken limbs if you were lucky. Squeezing through tiny crevices no more than a foot wide to the valley bottoms, the rocks become a marble white sporting crystallized stylites and cool dark caves that connect the valleys in an endless web of confusing splendor. Somehow, life manages to thrive here and green trees canopies poke out of the tops of the valley providing a pleasant leafy contrast to the sea of black spires. Entire ecosystems of weird bats, spiders, snails, and caterpillars thrive on sandy valley floors. Tsingy truly deserves its status as a UNESCO world heritage site: there is no place like it anywhere else in the world.
After a full day of Tsingy exploration, we crammed into the 4x4s for a 180k drive to Morandava. A thorny task without considering the road had more craters than Ypres in 1918 and that our driver was trying earnestly to end our lives. Wearing tinted aviators and an outdated professional basketball jersey he very clearly considered himself and his elderly Toyota Landcruiser too cool for school and he wasn’t going to let his paying clients interrupt his flow. Horrified we watched on as he nearly turned a joyful family of lemurs into fuzzy white road kill and when one of the Italians shrieked at him to slow down as we approached a mother cow nursing her infant calf on the side of the road, he merely laid on the horn startling the poor beasts into the brush as he blazed past. Emerging finally on the sandy riverbed approaching the ferry, he revved the engine, accelerating to the edge of the water before skidding to a stop at the waters edge, slamming his passengers against whatever was immediately in front of them. Emerging dazed and sore, he had the gal to smile at me and say “Ca va?” Unfriendly glances and a mild tongue lashing we directed his way.
As the sun sank low we arrived at the famous Avenue de Baobabs. This cluster of trees near on the dusty highway north is, perhaps, the single most picturesque location in the whole of Madagascar. I dare say that a mature Baobab is the most beautiful, stately, and sublime tree anywhere in the world. Solid monoliths of grey and maroon soaring over the dusty flat earth cresting with a collection of craggy branches dusted with green spring leaves. The effect was stunning. The trees also happened to be in fruit and one of the Spaniards was gracious enough to buy us one of the brown fuzzy fruits. Ranging in size from a softball to as large as my head, Baobab fruit is dry, foamy, tasteless, but mildly sweet. It was the perfect little snack as we struggled to squeeze that last bits of life from Mark’s camera to capture the wonderful spectacle.
As night fell, we finally arrived in Morandava, a sweltering costal city with a heavy, dazed, relaxed, and overwhelmingly Rastafarian atmosphere. Mark and I tented in the front yard of a new volunteer and had a day to wander the sand-paved streets of the hot city. We ducked the noon heat in a ice cream shop in the center of town and dined on fresh seafood in a breezy beachside bistro before our car back to the capital, and an exciting political crisis and attempted coup d’etat awaited.

Thanks

2010-11-01T08:53:00.002+03:00

Hey I just wanted to give a quick thanks to Grandmas A and W, Randy and Sharon, and Aunt M who I got packages from today! Your the food, books, pictures, and letters were wonderful. Thanks so much! miss you guys!

Hotelys

2010-10-21T11:03:00.001+03:00

Contrasting my male coworkers who have wives attending to their three squares, I fend for myself. Cooking from scratch every day can be a monumental task. Rather than sacrifice all of my potential fecundity to become my own domestic slave, I have expounded several methods of satisfying my notoriously ravenous appetite.
I mentioned before that I pay my neighbors to eat with their family for dinner each evening. This experience continues to yield mixed results, especially as boiled intestines have established themselves as a family favorite. Irregardless, my late afternoon laziness continues to prevail over satisfying my increasingly numb pallet. So dinner is taken care of at least for the near future.
Breakfast has also been sub-contracted out to the local villagers. There is a lady down the road who pounds cassava root into balls and fries it into crunchy tasteless pellets. Although they acquire the consistency of rubber if allowed to cool, catch them fresh and douse with a generous amount of imported catsup and you can be full for just under 10 cents.
That leaves lunch, far and away the most challenging meal of the day. Often when out on orchard visits with Mano or working in the nursery with Rodrigue we do not finish before 11:30 of 12:00. The prep time for any meal that I would consider discussing publicly is at least an hour and a half, an unacceptable state of affairs when I have been working all morning. Sometimes I will take a few hours and prepare a mountain of food that I leave un-refrigerated in a pot for upwards of three days while I chip away at it. More likely, however, is that I will cave and bike into town to eat at a traditional Malagasy “hotely”. I can speak about these peculiar Malagasy dining institutions (restaurants is too euphemistic a word) in general terms because all Malagasy hotelys are exactly the same. Unlike American businesses which thrive on differentiating their products to gain a competitive edge and increase market share, these places seem to thrive on their ability to be exactly the same and defy basic business sense.
From the roadside, a Hotely does not look very endearing. If such structures existed stateside they would be used to store the lawnmowers or to manufacture methamphetamines. The walls are plastered with posters alternating between scantily clad late-90’s American pop-stars and digitally enhanced pictures of fruit. The menu is always uniform. Chicken, pork, or beef, stewed in beans, cassava leaves, or its own juices. Everything comes with the obligatory mountain of white rice. Chicken is always hit or miss. Hit being leg or breast and miss involving butt, neck, or other things considered inedible in America. ‘Pork’ is actually a misnomer; the menu should read ‘pork fat attached to skin and bits of meat.’ I stick with the beef generally. All the food is cooked and served in enough oil to power one of those modified car engines for a week. It also precludes the need for chap stick or laxatives.
The service at a hotely is uniformly horrid. The proprietress behind the counter is always taciturn and rotund (rare for Malagasy) and the underage girls who wait the tables appear to be hired based on their ability to be rude, unapproachable, and completely mute. I have on more than one occasion arrived at a hotely to find the waitress sprawled out asleep on a table. When not unconscious on the furniture, the staff is hypnotically glued to the 19 inch television behind the counter. Politely ask for salt and be prepared to receive dazed stares followed by lackadaisical shuffling and about the room before a container of damp congealed salt is apathetically placed in front of you. Heartfelt expressions of gratitude for this onus service are never met with so much as a ‘your welcome’ a phrase which has apparently been surgically removed from their vocabulary as a prerequisite to employment.
To use the facilities at a hotely is to bear witness to a voluminous quantity of flagrant health code violations. The pit toilet is never far from the cooking area and when passing through the kitchen, prepare to avert your gaze less you lay eyes on the unsanitary squalor from whence the meals emanate. Not only is the bright placard reminding employees to wash their hand before returning to work conspicuously absent, but also all the materials and facilities required therein. Also disconcerting is the pride of ratty housecats that often swarm unattended tables to plunder leftover bones and lick the grease off the plates so never leave a table unguarded.
Some hotelys do try and break from the nauseating homogeny that envelops these eateries by offering oily pasta, fried rice, and French fries to appeal to the occasional white person. Caution is however advised as these dishes are not pre-made in the kitchen like the others so you are liable to sit and wait for up to 35 minutes for your meal whilst you watch your friends satisfy their hunger on traditional Malagasy fare. Also catsup in this country is treated like a precious metal and is doled out only when requested and in the most minute of quantities. Eating with some friends, we ordered five servings of fries and “lots of catsup” but we were the recipients of only two platters graced with modest red dollops the size of York Peppermint Patties to divide between the five of us. The Great Catsup Shortage is however a myth because bottles of the stuff sell for less than a dollar.
With the unsanitary atmosphere, pathetic food, foul service, and downright criminal catsup stinginess, I sometimes wonder why I still frequent these establishments, but when I consider that I can get a full meal for less than a dollar and not have to dishes, my righteous indignation cracks, I get my bike, and I head into town for another meal at the hotelys.

Sundays

2010-10-16T11:02:00.003+03:00

With the recent re-population of the Route National 25 corridor with new volunteers, I am suddenly facing a new and strange phenomenon: American neighbors. Rebekah and Ally are now 21 and 47 kilometers away respectively opening up the possibility of a day trip to visit one another. Accordingly, we planned a weekly Sunday brunch.
An excellent opportunity to spend one day a week with university educated Americans and to avoid spending an entire day alone in my house with my recalcitrant cat, our little dinners have become the highlight of my week. We make the most of our time by having an impromptu American cultural hour before we start chopping the vegetables. Complete with poetry readings, scripture, favorite music, and book readings it is easy to forget that we don’t speak the mother tongue for the other six days of the week.
Food prep is coordinated by the culinary despot Rebekah which is ok by the rest of us because it always turns out scrumptious.
Emerging from our collective food coma in the early afternoon, we embark on a walk around whoever’s site we happen to be visiting that week. Last week, when promenading about the district capital of Ifanadiana, we wandered up the palm-lined avenue to the Maison du Chef de District de Vatovavy (French speak for Governor’s Mansion). As the center of administration for one of Madagascar’s 22 regions, the hilltop château gracing the top of the town certainly left something to be desired. The splendid wrap around verandah was collapsing in places, the moss infested gutters hung distended from the roof like thick vines, and weeds had re-conquered the careful efforts of the evicted French colonial gardeners. Presently a portly Malagasy man bedecked in athletic shorts and an old pocketed t-shirt advertising a local laundry detergent met us in the yard. In the course of our ensuing polite banter, this unassuming character revealed he was, in fact, the Governor himself. Still reeling from this somewhat surprising revelation, we were further taken aback when he invited the three of us inside to play a few rounds of Dominoes.
Entering the dilapidated mansion, we were led into a room decorated like the operation center of an Eastern European drug kingpin. Painted a deep shade of blue, the outsized room contained no windows or light fixtures. The only furnishings were a semi-circle of gargantuan leather chairs facing a rugged coffee table. In the far corner was a pile meter high stack of official looking papers positioned ominously next to a blackened fireplace. The worn leather recliners swallowed us with ease, although I quickly realized that playing a game with my posterior only inches above the floor and my knees pointing straight up in the air would be challenging indeed. An underling arrived with the dominoes and the Governor asked seriously if we would be bothered if he smoked, as if we were really going to tell him to abstain. Though the governor insisted on sitting out while the three volunteers played, he dictated strategy to Rebekah and eventually assumed praetorian control of her little white rectangles. Though I got off to a disappointing start, I managed to win both matches we played, shutting out the governor in round two. We lingered and chatted while he choked down his 9th cigarette before we excused ourselves. Though we had a great time, I realize we should probably desist from spending our weekends with the upper echelon of regional government. Next Sunday will undoubtedly be less eventful.
In a brief prologue I would like to submit the following incident as evidence of the monumental incompetence of what masquerades as postal service in this country. Last Wednesday, the unfortunate little postal worker who has borne the brunt of my ire with ‘Postera Malagasy’ and their failure to perform even the most rudimentary tasks, excitedly indicated through intense gesticulation that for the first time in four and a half months I had mail. Overcome with anticipation for the mountain of letters and well wishes from friends and family back in the developed world, I gripped the counter as he disappeared in the back room for a few minutes, no doubt he was trying to consolidate all my envelopes into a single box or at least wrap them up in a thick bundle of happiness secured with a strong rubber band. Beaming with pride, he emerged from the back room bearing a single envelope addressed to “Katie Browne PCV, Madagascar National Parks AMBAJA Madagascar.” It was all I could do not to throw the mishandled mail back into his beaming face and lend him a piece of my mind. Instead I politely informed him that my name is not Katie and that the person he is looking for lives some 800k away on the Northern coast of the island. Knowing full well that if I resubmitted this letter for delivery it may never see the light of day again, I resolved to hold onto it until I see Katie again in January. To illustrate my point a bit further, when the letter in question arrived in Antananarivo via airmail, the nincompoops at Malagasy Post only managed to get the letter 435k FURTHER AWAY from its desired recipient. Meanwhile I still have no mail.

Other Side of the Coin

2010-10-12T13:36:00.002+03:00

Picture is of the Nursery Expansion

Back in September, sixteen Malagasy farmers came into Ranomafana and slept three nights on the hard concrete floor of the local elementary school for the privilege of receiving fruit trees from the tree nursery. Hailing from scattered villages in the district of Ranomafana, these farmers have spent the past month collecting their saplings from the nursery and arranging them in orchards on previously barren hillsides. As the trees start to go in the ground, it is my job to go out to visit the farmers to ensure the trees are spaced properly, remain healthy, and are well cared for.
My partner in crime is Mani, a taller Malagasy man with one front tooth and an impeccable tendency to show up late for our meetings. Our job description does not sound terribly arduous: Meet the farmer, investigate the orchard, and get a stamp from the Chef d’Fokantany (town mayor). The challenge lies in the getting there. All of our transportation is done on foot on ‘roads’ that even the most liberal of American cartographers would designate as a “strenuous hiking trails.” My first excursion required three hours of trekking to a non-descript village only to find out that the farmer there had not yet planted his orchard. This morning we had to ford the Namarona River’s waist deep water twice. Mani imprudently wore pants; removing them he arrived in the village of Morafeno in his underwear. Although appointments with the farmers were scheduled in advance, we often arrive weary and sweaty to find that the person we are looking for is panning for gold, planting rice, or practicing some slash-and-burn.
Many of the orchards have already been expertly planted by their enthusiastic proprietors who are keen to show off their handiwork. Sometimes we are greeted by the entire extended family, welcoming us into their house offering gifts of coffee and bananas. Not all the orchards, unfortunately, have met with complete success. One farmer’s wife led us nearly a kilometer straight up a mountain only to discover that their infant orchard was already a victim of rapine. Two of the newly planted citrus saplings had been uprooted and stolen. We found a jabotikaba tree was found in the bushes nearby bushes, likely discarded due to the fruit-tree’s uncanny likeness to a native tree species notable only for its uselessness.
My new peripatetic profession has helped me to uncover a new favorite activity, namely running barefoot through the rainforest. With the leech population reduced by the dry weather and assured by the knowledge that there are no poisonous snakes or other potentially incapacitating wildlife living in the forest, I feel free to wander freely with my denuded feet. Feeling the rich earth beneath my feet and cool thick air rushing through my lungs as I lunge between vines and mossy rocks gives me a sensation of absolute bliss. The tourists with their heavy hiking boots and thick socks never get to feel the water rushing between their toes as they walk through a stream or know what a patch of bamboo grass feels like underfoot. When the rains return in December, I’ll undoubtedly need to break out my shoes again, but until then I intend to do all my forest hiking without footwear.
Though my previous blog post concluded rather ominously, I take comfort in the fact that in these sixteen little patches of earth near Ranomafana National Park, there won’t be any more burning. As I mentioned before, the objective of this project is to give farmers the tools and opportunities to stop the devastating agricultural methods of their ancestors. Many of the orchards are plated within view of vulnerable unprotected forest. One farmer in particular lives in a meticulously deforested patch of land surrounded entirely by pristine jungle. There is still no one who can stop the burning that continues to ravage this fragile island. But maybe next year there will be one less fire as the fruit trees grow and propagate, and 10 years from now far fewer as our little orchards expand and turn the burned moonscape into a prosperous green hillside.

Reality Check

2010-10-05T10:35:00.001+03:00

Picture is a fire burning above Ranomafana village

Though September and October are the high water marks for tourism in Ranomafana, it is also the season when all the Malagasy farmers take to the hills with their curved axes and burn the forest down. A few weeks of dry weather dries the underbrush and turns the entire male population of this formerly green island into frantic pyromaniacs. For the past six weeks, the valley of Ranomafana has languished in the smoggy haze resulting from all the burning, obscuring the forested mountaintops that remain in the East. While fetching water last week I was caught in a small flurry of ash descending from the sky. Ostensibly the purpose of all this environmental rape is to prepare the land for planting cassava, a crop with all the succulent flavor and nutritional value of a newspaper. Also, most of the land being subjected to slash and burn ‘agriculture’ isn’t forest; it’s already de-forested land that has been struggling to recover. However, there are still some parcels of the remaining forest included in the inferno every year as human progress marches forward.
Not to mention the extraordinary amount of erosion these fires are going to cause when the rains roll through in the coming months, or the astronomical cost of repairing infrastructure damaged by this erosion, the main loss to the people of Madagascar, and the world, is the permanent loss of biodiversity. Additionally, each fire set has the potential to grow out of control and burn through the Park, the economic lifeblood of Ranomafana. Just a few weeks ago, a fire set near Isalo National Park grew too large, got out of control, and proceeded to destroy most of the sites I hiked through and raved about last month. The leafy canyons, grassy landscapes, and even the picnic site with the friendly lemur families were all tragically reduced to ash. The Malagasy are trying to shoot themselves in the foot, but catching the bullet in the face on the ricochet.
For the past week I have sat on my back stoop watching the fires rage and light up the evening sky just across the river from my house and wondering how a supposed ‘environment volunteer’ can take all this so supinely. I want to form a bucket brigade and have the people responsible for the appalling destruction arrested. But blaming the local Malagasy farmers for this is like blaming the boiler-room workers on the Titanic for driving the ship into the iceberg. Compounding the poverty that inspires this madness are a truly Byzantine system of land distribution and ownership, a wild-west style of law enforcement, and a corrupt political system that ensures that the people on the bottom receive no benefit from the wealth of tourist dollars that Ranomafana is blessed with. As much as I want to end this post with an up-beat assessment of conservation or a clever quip about hope for the future, I feel that would be misleading. The forest is burning and there is nothing I, or anyone, can do to stop it.

Checklist of Chores to do Before Company Arrives

2010-09-28T11:52:00.002+03:00

1. Remove visible dirt from the surface of the bed
2. Attack baseball-sized spider festering in the corner of the room. Preferably killing it, but wounding it and forcing the unfortunate creature to beat a retreat into the ceiling is adequate also.
3. Remove rodent, feline, and other feces from the floor.
4. Locate/unpack deodorant stick. Use liberally. Display someplace easily perceptible.
5. Inform neighbors and villages that the visitor in question is not your significant other. This will alleviate rampant gossip on the subject, but will prevent neither children from giggling and pointing, nor neighborhood women from discussing you and your guest’s relationship audibly as you pass by.
6. Remove wet/dank laundry from the furniture where it has been failing to dry since you washed it two days ago. Prioritize undergarments.
7. Open all windows/doors to air out the faint smell of urine.
8. Buy toilet paper or dismember one of the old notebooks from pre-service training.
9. Clean* dishes
10. Hide precious objects from America you are not prepared to share. (Oreo cookies, JIF peanut butter, some candies)

*any of the following are acceptable definitions of ‘Clean’
-Cleaner than it was before
-Clean enough
-I would consider eating of that
-It looks clean
-“Off-white”

Also while I am writing this at the Internet Café there is an overweight American man yelling into his blackberry at some unfortunate customer service representative. He can’t understand why his baggage wasn’t delivered to his hotel some 300k away from the capital by yesterday. He making me laugh.
In other news my cat caught the huge rat that has been menacing me for months this morning. She ate the head and the tail off it (which I can not imagine are the best cuts of rat) and then regurgitated most of it on my mat. I was very happy.

Isalo

2010-09-17T13:56:00.002+03:00

Route National 7 is perhaps the most interesting road I have ever traveled. It runs over 950 kilometers from the capital to the coastal city of Tulear in the deep south of Madagascar. In that span, this thin ribbon of pavement passes through some of the most diverse and interesting landscapes in Madagascar. Starting in the Central Plateau, the road curves up into the Irish-looking Betsileo Highlands, skirts the Eastern Rainforests near Ranomafana before passing though the beautiful city of Fianarantsoa. The highway then passes within view of the granite peaks of the Andringitra Mountains and spills onto the grassy rock studded hills of the Bara tribe. Past the town of Ihosy the landscape flattens into a brown plain that could rival any plains state for its apparent endlessness. Suddenly, however, sandstone peaks emerge from the semi-arid plane at the base of which glitters the boom-town of Ranohira (meaning ‘water song’ in Malagasy). This town and the National Park which towers over it in the cliffs were the destination of my most recent adventure.
Mark, my partner in fruit tree crime here in Ranomafana, and the organization he works for had made contact with a woman named Monique who is interested in using the organization Mark works for to start a fruit and native tree nursery at her hotel near Ranohira and Isalo National Park. Mark invited me to go down in his car with him and fellow volunteers Alison and Haley came along for the ride as well. We got the trip off on the right foot by stopping at a local winery and buying mildly alcoholic grape juice in old glass bottles from a street vendor for 45 cents a liter. Lacking cups, we drank to the journey straight from the bottle like a bunch of pirates.
Passing the valleys north of the Andringitra Mountains we drove though a Malagasy edition of the 8th plague, namely locust. They covered the sky like a thick black snow and passed over us in a heavy cloud. After lunching in Ihosy we emerged on the vast Bara Plains where vast swathes of the brown grasses were being burned to encourage new growth in the spring for cattle. Arriving at our destination in Ranohira, we checked into our hotel and began sorting out dinner. In a truly Peace Corps attempt to save a few bucks we had packed the entire gas tank and stove apparatus into the back of the car with my pots, pans, dishes, and all the ingredients to make a Szechwan stir fry. Although we were staying at one of the lower class establishments in Ranohira, the sight of four Americans huddled around a single dome light chopping carrots and green beans in the parking lot of the hotel restaurant still garnered a few judgmental glances from other guests.
We took advantage of the Sunday work siesta to find a guide and journey into Isalo National Park. One of the largest parks in Madagascar, Isalo boasts some of the most spectacular landscapes, plant life, and unparalleled beauty I have yet encountered in Madagascar. The arid cliff faces that give the park its panoramic drama are peppered with a squatty relative of the baobab tree that can live up to 500 years old and present a truly impressive display of bright yellow flowers. Descending from the high cliffs into the valleys one finds themselves in a lush forest fed by natural springs emanating from the center of the park. These modest creeks cut canyons hundreds of feet deep creating deep clear pools of water that just begs to be cannon balled into by hot and sweaty hikers. These low valleys are the perfect home for all sorts of rare plants including palms and pandanis that grow into sizes and heights I had heretofore considered impossible. There are also large populations of lemur that inhabit these Eden-like microhabitats. Our peaceful picnic of packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was crashed by two troops of Ring Tailed and Brown lemurs. It was all we could do to keep these ostentatious primates out of our food. When shooing them like chickens produced few results my beleaguered comrades and I tried to box the invaders off the table. In the end the assailants got off with a cracker and a banana peel and we got some neat pictures out of the ordeal.
Meanwhile, our entreats to meet with Monique were coming to nothing. Ignoring the itinerary she had e-mailed us in days previous she had flow to Paris and would not be back until after our group was leaving. Facing the complete failure of the ‘business’ portion of our trip, the elderly proprietress of our hotel recommended we go and meet M. Bernie. She made a few phone calls and arranged for this ‘Bernie’ to swing by and take us to his orchards on the morrow. Once arrangements had been finalized, the old hotel owner began making strange foreboding comments about our pending visit. “Well you know how Bernie doesn’t like people on his property sometimes… He doesn’t speak any English… Well, whatever the case your visit will certainly be interesting!”
Bernie screeched to a stop in front of our hotel at 9 AM the following morning in an oddly shaped white pick-up crammed with some mysterious irrigation equipment. A shockingly old man in a trucker hat was behind the wheel listening to piano show tunes at a level clearly audible from a solid 20 meters away. He stuck his head out the window, yelled something in French to our driver, sounded off his clown-car horn, and we were off. Bernie’s estate is on the boarder of the park where he owns 100 hectares of arid grassland and rock. There is one small oasis some distance from the paved road where Bernie was presently leading us. Upon our arrival, Bernie leaped from the truck and greeted each of us in Malagasy with a firm handshake. He was wearing knee-length rubber waders and a pair of tiny white shorts that displayed a surprisingly generous amount of thigh. Born in Madagascar in 1926, Bernie was on his 5th wife (the most recent of 15 years) had learned French and some eight different Malagasy dialects but had never learned English thus we would spend the entire visit talking with this Frenchmen in Malagasy. Once we introduced ourselves he looked me straight in the face and asked me if I was Catholic. I fumbled through an explanation alluding to my Catholic university years, but he interrupted me to point out a statue of the virgin up on the rocks. If I was Catholic, Bernie declared, I could say a prayer to her, if I wasn’t I could say a prayer anyway but I would have to pay him for it. I gave him a perplexed look and he erupted in a peal of laughter.
After he learned that we were Peace Corps volunteers interested in fruit trees his deeply tanned face lit up and he took off into his orchard gesticulating heavily telling us to follow. For the next 45 minutes we struggled to keep up with this loquacious octogenarian as he hopped from tree to tree pointing out his seemingly unreal grafting abilities. He also demonstrated for us some of his truly innovative methods for making pots out of pounded earth and his expansive gardening facilities. He was continually cracking jokes in Malagasy and continued lecturing us on his projects until he suddenly got back into his car, told us he was off to Tulear (some 200k away), and left us in a dazed cloud of dust. Somewhere between the jokes, excited jabbering, and solid advice Bernie gave us permission to hike around his beautiful property which we did enthusiastically for about 40 minutes before our hungry stomachs forced us to retreat for lunch.
This week I am doing a big training at my house for 16 farmers with SAF/FJKM. I also would like to point out that I have not received any mail at my ranomafana address since July so I fear that my mail is no longer operating here. My Antananarivo address is still working.

Domestic Life

2010-09-02T15:00:00.001+03:00

Haley’s presence in my house over her ‘grande vacance’ has provided a welcome respite from the solitude that typically awaits me in my humble abode. Haley’s normal Peace Corps work, force-feeding English to pot-smoking Malagasy middle schoolers, does not provide her with much free time so she has been enjoying her time off in Ranomafana writing letters, reading books, and helping me with the occasional project. Most significantly, she has been assisting me in bringing out my inner homemaker.
Haley’s arrival coincided with a visit at the neighbor’s by Rodrigue’s mother-in-law, making room at the dinner table scarce and compelling Haley and I to scrounge for our own supper. Normally, this would have propelled me into a serious food crisis, returning to my staples of pasta & hot sauce or fried-egg-on-bread-slice. Thankfully, Haley came to the rescue. Having studied for months at her site under the careful tutelage of another volunteer who modeled herself as the Martha Stewart of Madagascar, she had quite the repertoire or recipes up her sleeve. My personal favorite being Szechwan green beans served over rice. After three weeks of cooking at home, the mother-in-law packed up and left so we invited Rodrigue and the family over for a dinner party.
Serving complex foreign foods to Malagasy is a risky business for Peace Corps volunteers. Horror stories abound of unsuccessful attempts to accommodate the extremely picky Malagasy palate. One volunteer who laboriously prepared pasta and marinara sauce had a child literally spit it out at her feet as the mother excused herself to cook some rice. I personally witnessed two Malagasy scoop out the insides of a single rice-stuffed tomato and not finding the rice to their satisfaction left most of the contents on their plate. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past, Haley and I prepared the rice separately from our Szechwan green bean & carrot topping and took precautions not to make the food to spicy.
When the big day came and everyone had gathered around the table in my living room Haley lifted the lids from the food and Rodrigue’s wife informed us flatly that she was not eating that. She then explained that she only eats traditional Malagasy foods and asked for some cold water to pour over her plain rice. The other more adventurous members of the family seemed to enjoy the food and everyone was pleased when I asked them if they would like to watch an American film on my computer once the meal was concluded.
Sharbaraz the cat is slowly coming of age and has been doing excellent work being lazy around the house. When my accommodations are no longer to her liking, she ditches me for the neighbor’s house and passes the afternoon shooting me contemptuous glances from their bedroom window. Yet, she makes a quick return whenever Haley or I return with food of any sort, bananas in particular. Given the opportunity, my cat would sell her soul for a banana. So much as touch one of these delectable yellow fruits and the cat will tear around the room, climbing on furniture, and creating a general ruckus. She will even go so far as to climb onto one’s shoulder and attempt to take a bite out it as I try to put it my mouth. I wouldn’t be very inclined to fuel her addiction, but this week she finally started pulling her weight around the house by catching her first mouse. Haley and I were both thrilled with this development and toasted her success by treating ourselves to pasta whilst Sharbaraz consumed the entirety of her prize under the table.
Though one mouse has firmly bitten the dust, there is another, much larger rodent still lurking in my house. This very large rat emerges from the wall each night, crawls up next to Haley’s bed in the living room and leaves fecal evidence of its presence for us to find each new morning. The cat is much more interested in trying to force her way into my bed in the middle of the night to waste time prowling in the dark for this serious offender. Haley has gone so far as to put up an entire bunch of bananas as a reward for its capture dead or alive, but Sharbaraz remains uninterested.
The cat has also proved worthless in defending the house against invading chickens. Rodrigue’s flock of poultry has multiplied to nearly 18 birds and they have discovered a way to wriggle under my gate and invade my deteriorating garden. There is one particular brown hen that cannot comprehend that she is not welcome around my house. One sunny afternoon when Haley and I were focused on an intense hand of Gin Rummy, the chicken in question came fluttering and squawking through the window landing in the center of our neatly arranged runs and sets of three. Having evicted her back through the window she snuck in through the back door and commenced in a serious attack on Haley’s mosquito net. On a third attempt she managed to trap herself in the living room for a solid minute as Haley tried vainly to forcibly direct her out with a broom. We later discovered this particular bird has a thing for laying her eggs on beds and being that the neighbor’s house was closed up at the time; the confused hen was attempting to deposit her goods on one of our foam mattresses. Next time this happens we decided to let her in and pocket the egg.

Tourist Season

2010-08-23T11:25:00.000+03:00

I should have anticipated this one a little better. Ranomafana and its environs occupy 3-4 pages of any decent guide book on Madagascar and a few kind words in Lonely Planet will send busloads of people with pasty skin in your direction. Late January, when I arrived in Ranomafana, is low tide as far as visitors are concerned. The months of September and October are the reported peak.
It isn’t hard to see why they come. Ranomafana is a place unlike any other in Madagascar. Set in a green valley surrounded by dense cloud forests, it is one of the biodiversity hotspots of the island. It is one of the last strongholds of the Greater Bamboo Lemur, perhaps one of the most endangered primates in the world. In total, Ranomafana National Park encompasses nearly 40,000 hectares of picturesque forest, concealing numerous springs, waterfalls, and granite cliffs. Since the Park’s creation in 1991, the village of Ranomafana has adapted to accommodate the tastes and preferences of the “adventurers” who visit. The town of less than 5,000 people has 8 major hotel complexes with a 9th under construction. Cell phone coverage is ubiquitous. Internet is always available. One can even buy boxes of cereal in the market place. Fancy restaurants serve steaks and flaming deserts. The old adage “you build it they will come” is certainly true here. Before the 2009 political crisis, all the hotels in town were booked solid between the months of June and November. After that boom-year, this little jungle town raked in some 3.4 billion in local currency ($1.7million).
All of these dainty luxuries are well out of reach of the underpaid Peace Corps volunteer living on the outskirts of town with his tree nursery. My trips into town to buy vegetables and plug in my cell phone have become stark reminders of the world of wealth that I am no longer a part of. There is no denying that compared to the Malagasy who live around me, I am very wealthy. But when you compare me to the French ladies with painted faces dining on prawns on the deck of the Manja Hotel I’m a pauper indeed. I have found it fascinating to watch their seemingly odd behavior. They take pictures with long-lensed cameras of inconsequential elements of village life; like Bananas on a stand or kids loitering in a gutter. They are desperate to appear comfortable in the muddy marketplace as they finger through woven mats and baskets, careful not to appear too interested and attract the attention of the seller. My presence is generally not appreciated. Most appear to be disappointed to have traveled so far to a place as remote as Ranomafana and still run into other white people, especially one who hasn’t shaved in a week and has a ripped t-shirt. At least I’m not walking around in a matching designer hiking outfit, sun hat, and fanny pack. Who looks silly now?
Despite my mixed feeling about tourists, I have been complicit in attracting them to the area. A second bed as became a new addition to my living room and I have been hosting other volunteers and friends of volunteers since I returned from the bike tour. The volunteers teaching English are on their well deserved vacation from school and are taking their first vacations since January and I opened my house to anyone interested in stopping by. Haley, a volunteer from an isolated town called Breville took me up on the offer and has been living with me for three weeks now. Meanwhile, Peace Corps continues to stuff this country full of new volunteers and I had the opportunity to meet my new site-mate when she was down for a visit this past week. Rebekah is an education volunteer who is living in Ifanandiana, only 20k from me. She is incredibly intelligent, witty, and really likes books. I took her and Haley out to some of Ranomafana’s more notable attractions and we cooked up different sir-fries on my modest stove for dinner each night.
In the coming weeks I will be, of course, busy. SAF/FJKM wants to do a major training on fruit trees in mid September and I am hoping to do a trip down South with Mark to meet some of his contacts and scout out some Mango production possibilities.

Bike Trip

2010-08-03T22:26:00.003+03:00

None of us really knew what we were signing up for. All we knew is that we were going to be allowed to travel to another part of the country with other volunteers without having to take vacation. Sign me up. I understood biking was involved and that we were doing events involving HIV/AIDS. In 11 days we biked to 9 different towns with long names surrounding Lake Aloatra.

Amparafaravola
The trip to Amparafaravola, at approximately 70k in length, was the longest leg of our bike trip and trip planners thought it would be a good idea to get it out of the way first. Our biking brigade, consisting of 22 eager PVC’s, hit the road like a bunch of eager lemmings and raced to our first destination. The road was paved and the terrain only slightly challenging, plus we had the wind at our backs. The Lake Aloatra region is known as the “bread basket of Madagascar” and like most “breadbaskets” world round, it is topographically uninspiring and there aren’t any tourists. We easily tackled the low rolling hills and long stretches of pavement through lowland rice paddies, but by the time we arrived in town we were exhausted and ready for bed. We set up camp in front of a city office. There was one toilet. As we set up our tents we began to collect a group of curious onlookers. Since there is zero tourism in the region, the sight of 20 white people erecting nylon habitations in the center of town garnered more than just passive interest. When we emerged dreary eyed and disheveled the next morning, there were already 6-7 Malagasy watching us intently like a bunch of kindergarteners watching eggs hatch.
The first run of our festival was a little rocky. We tried to build homemade-budget collapsible tables for each of our five learning booths. Alas, the finished product would implode into a pile of wood and string if there was so much as a gentle breeze. We attracted a crowd of eight or nine hundred people and stumbled through our respective speeches on condom use, nutrition, health, HIV/AIDS and budgeting. Unfortunately the majority of our participants were young children for whom a lesson on family planning was about as useful as a lesson in microbiology.

Vohitsara
The morning after our event in Amparafaravola we began on our ‘typical schedule’ namely biking and doing a festival in the same day. We packed up our tents (under the close scrutiny of our Malagasy observers who were up to see us off at 6AM) and hit the road for a 40 kilometer bruiser before Vohitsara where we arrived at lunchtime giving us just 90 minutes to set up before our festival starts. Vohitsara is a small sandy town located on a bit of high ground surrounded by an endless expanse of rice paddies. The entire town turned out to our festival. The ‘stage’ the village had constructed out of woven plastic sheeting for us to use for our speeches was torn asunder by the wind and had to be abandon in favor of a dirt clearing. The villages were so enthralled by the singing/dancing white people (we had written some HIV/AIDS jingles) that we soon found ourselves completely surrounded by a eager mob of 900-1000 Malagasy people. As program progressed the children sitting in front gradually encroached so that there was hardly room for us to stand.

Tanambe
Located a short 7k from Vohitsara, Tanambe is the market town and administrative head of the west side of the lake. It is also one of the dirtiest and least appealing cities I have ever visited in Madagascar. The streets were crammed and congested. It smelled like burnt garbage and latrine everywhere. The one hotel in town hosted some of our ‘daintier bikers’ and everyone was excited to take showers there. When I turned on the water a weak cold trickle came out and by the time I had my hair damp the water stopped completely and my shower was abandon. The festival in this town was a little lackluster, the wind was unbearable and it tore our paper information posters apart, nearly destroying our information booths. I participated in a new game we invented called “The-first-kid-to-catch-the-white-person-gets-a-free-pencil” To add some time to our already 4-hour program we began filling our dead-space with all-volunteer dancing to American pop-music on stage. The Malagasy would just stare at us not sure whether to be entertained or confused. It was after our event in Tanambe, we began to feel like a traveling white person circus.

Ambohitrampirana
The bike to this town was the 2nd longest but also most beautiful ride of our trip. We left early but I got a flat front tire about ten kilometers in. There was a little repair hut on the side of the road and I lost about 10 minutes on the pack so I had to bike quickly to catch up. This bike ride was also notable because half way in we ran out of pavement and the rest of the trip was conducted on dirt roads. We stopped for food in the market town where we wolfed down some bread as almost 60 curious Malagasy watched us from the street. Ambohitrampirana was the tiniest town we visited. Located on top of a hill composed almost entirely of crystallized quarts, the area was dry and was the closest approximation of Niger I have yet seen in Madagascar. The water in Ambohitrampirana is thirty meters down and looks like iced tea. Because the number of people in the town was small, four of us wandered into the countryside on a “rabble-raising” mission. As we wandered into the adjoining villages, children fled at the sight of four uniformed (we had made T-shirts) white people walking into town. They probably though the French colonizers were back.

Antanandava
This town is near the entrance of a National Park. It has received five tourists in the past 6 months, and for good reason, there was nothing particularly interesting about it. Once again our festival suffered due to high winds. It was a Sunday so many of the men showed up at our festival drunk. Stephanie lip-syncing to Eminem’s and Rihanna’s new duet became a permanent part of our program (with required backup dancers).We were served beans for dinner for the 5th day in a row.

Imerimandroso
Although the it’s the capital of the North-Western part of the lake Imerimandroso is a ghost town. Suffering from years of depopulation and decay, most of the buildings in town are falling apart and the stores are all closed. We are given a beautiful spot on top of a hill overlooking the lake to do our festival. The lake, as it turns out, is more of a bog. Most of the marshy areas have already been converted into rice paddies and long reeds grow in the shallow bottoms almost out to the center of the lake.

Ambatosoratra
Ambatosoratra is a pleasant town down near the lake shore. It required a considerable amount of effort to bike the 20k into the wind on a dirt road. The villages were very interested in our festival and we were served chick-peas and meat rather than beans. This stop on the trip was also significant because it was my first shower. It is also next to the only place in the region where one can see the Aloatra Reed Lemur, a rare and endangered species. Unfortunately the lemurs are nocturnal so a group of intrepid volunteers, myself included, woke up at 4, biked blindly into the middle of a field and paid a guy with a dugout canoe $2 to go find some with us. The mist was heavy and the full moon was out. In the east we could see a moonbow. Skimming smoothly across the lake between the reeds and bailing water out of the boat with a metal bowl, we heard something in the distance. It wasn’t a lemur, it was another canoe with a radio playing Justin Bieber’s new hit “Baby” on full volume. Proving once and for all that American culture can follow you no matter how far away you go. We found the lemurs; they looked like a mix between a miniature monkey and a muskrat, although they were really cute.

Ambohitsilaozana
After we docked the canoes we set off for Ambohitsilaozana. During our ride in, a beautiful rainbow emerged from the clouds in front of us and it sat magnificently in the sky for over two hours. Ambohitsilaozana was built around the now defunct train station in the center of town. A Peace Corps volunteer now calls the old ticket booth home. The village is also home to the best mofo akondro (battered and fried bananas) I have tasted anywhere in Madagascar. I worked the condom demonstration booth and did a very good session which included a woman who looked no younger than 90.

Ambatondrazaka
This town was both our starting and ending point for our trip. We all camped in front of one volunteer’s house near the high school and took showers. Our final HIV/AIDS festival was poorly attended (only a few hundred) but we were able to bring some doctors to do testing and 34 people were tested (all negative!). To celebrate the completion of the trip we went out the only dance club in town and stayed out late. The next morning we caught the early van back to the capital. The trip was 9 hours and we were all exhausted. Our driver was determined to play loud Malagasy music the whole time so Alison unwired the speakers in the back seat and we all passed out.

The Visitors

2010-07-14T20:43:00.003+03:00

Last March when Tropical Storm Hubert rolled through a little red scar of exposed earth appeared on a distant hillside above Ranomafana. Although it appeared harmless enough when viewed from the town square, the landslide posed a serious threat to a priceless internet and cell phone tower perched on the hill’s summit. After the storm cleared, a helicopter bearing concerned big-wigs from the French telecom giant Orange flew out to investigate. The initial report was not good. All the earth supporting the east end of the pylon was gone and each new rain shower was washing soil out from under the concrete foundations of the substructure. Orange purchased a colossal green tarp as a stop-gap measure to cover the damaged hillside. Then they called Yoann.
Yoann Coppin is a French entrepreneur who I met last May during my IST conference. He is the owner of a small company that uses an amazing grass called veditver to stabilize hillsides and prevent further erosion. Yoann and I have been communicating since May about his upcoming project in Ranomafana. I offered to help him get the materials and labor together to jumpstart the project before he was due to arrive. He made me responsible for locating and purchasing 200 Eucalyptus logs and hiring 25 men to work on the hill starting on the Monday following Vingt-six. Preparing for Yoann has been one of my major tasks over the past few months. Eucalyptus does not grow in Ranomafana, so the logs had to be ordered and transported from Kelialina, a little village 10k away. I also collected all of the labor necessary, agreed on wages, and organized a meeting place. Then about 12 hours before Yoann’s arrival he called me and told me he was going to be a day late. Not wanting to disappoint 25 Malagasy men expecting work and a paycheck, I made the decision to start the job without Yoann. The first big task was to get the 200 logs up the hill to the tower.
The cell phone tower in question is a prominent feature on the Ranomafana skyline. Reaching it from the town square is a very strenuous half hour hike. Although only about a mile and a half away, the slope of the hill is steep enough throughout that my ears pop at least once during each ascent and decent. I expected that carrying these logs up would be a monumental task, but on the Monday we began work, it started to rain. The trail up quickly assumed the consistency of burnt rice pudding. By the time I made it up with my logs, I was covered in mud up to my knees.
Yoann arrived the following morn, but the rain did not dissipate, rather it continued to rain without interruption for the next 12 days. Unlike the tropical storms of January and February which clobber the island with torrential rains, put on fantastic lighting shows, and blow over in a few hours, June and July rains spray Madagascar with a chilly mist for weeks at a time. The rains made Ranomafana about as cold and miserable as Michigan in early November. Conditions on Yoann’s project continued to deteriorate. The Malagasy workers, without any serious cold weather gear, continued working in the mud, re-leveling the hillside and hauling cement bags full of manure up the increasingly slick trail. Pay for a days work was 4000 Ar., or just under $2.
Yoann’s presence provided an excellent excuse to bring some other volunteers up to my site to learn about erosion and vetiver grass. Originally I planned on hosting two volunteers at my house for a few days. By the time it was over, 8 different volunteers had made the trip to Ranomafana. My modest home was transformed into a sleeping-room-only hostel. My kitten, overwhelmed by events, had to go live with the neighbors. The packaged candies and meats I had been saving up from my precious mail pouches were almost entirely consumed in the course of less than a week.
On some days, the prevailing Nordic weather canceled work on the project so we were forced to seek other means of entertainment. We took one morning to take a hike into the Ranomafana National Park where we saw one of the most endangered species of lemur and plenty of other neat critters. Cold and dirty from the hiking and working, we made good use out of Ranomafana’s community pool (pictured). Fed entirely by a geothermal hot spring, the pool is always pleasantly warm, making for excellent soaking. On July 4th we were invited to a ‘small’ (turned out to be a crowd of 35) get together at the Director of Valbio’s place. Patricia Wright made an appearance and was a huge hit with the other volunteers, especially after she took us all to one of the nicer restaurants in town and bought us all dinner. Drinks were on the house.
Although my friends were learning a great deal and enjoying everything Ranomafana has to offer, Yoann’s project took a serious turn for the worse. Saturated by the unceasing rains, the top level of terracing collapsed, wasting well over a week of work. Planting of the grass was postponed until well after the volunteers were to leave so much of the training had to be done without doing any physical planting.

Vignt-six

2010-06-28T10:40:00.002+03:00

Picture is of me sitting on a gastank to so it will work down in Lopary last month

June 26th is Madagascar’s big national holiday. Although the holiday commemorates Madagascar’s independence from the French colonial oppressor, fifty years later the Malagasy continue to refer to their national holiday using French numeration. In spite of the confusing its designation, Vingt-six is quite the party.
On the evening before the holiday, the festivities got started with a sumptuous meal with Rodrigue’s family. There was fried tuna tails, select chicken organs (intestines, gizzard, etc), cubed pork fat, and some cooked leaves. All this was served with a side of heavily coagulated chicken blood over a bed of rice. I helped myself to a heaping portion of the leaves and took my helping of chicken blood home and fed it to my cat.
After dinner everyone descends on Ranomafana for the Children’s Lantern procession. Little kids dressed up in their finest meander all through town with paper lanterns for about a half hour before everyone consolidates on the market square. Then there is a monster dance party. This dance party was like nothing I had ever experienced. The entire village turned out and the entire mass of people was breaking-it-down. Old malagasy grandmas, moms with infants strapped to their backs, the odd French tourist, swarms of five to ten year olds. It was truly impressive. Have you ever seen an elderly Malagasy man try to break-dance? Because I have. After four hours of seriously intense partying, with the marketplace still packed with people, I biked back home and put myself to bed. I woke up at 4:30 to the sound of music still blaring in town 1500 meters away. At 8 when I finally woke up, there was still a party going on in town.
The music stopped around 9 so that the speeches could get started. The entire village had by now reassembled into a droopy eyed mass. For the next 4 hours various Malagasy dignitaries talked themselves hoarse into the microphone about how wonderful everything was while the indifferent populace napped, played marbles, or carried on their own conversations. The speeches were followed by one of the strangest parades I have yet witnessed. Essentially the entire town participated in the parade leaving very few spectators. All the schoolchildren went first followed by the local hotel employees, soccer teams, Park Guides, power company maintenance people, karate club, the list goes on. My friend told me if I wrote PEACE CORPS on a large piece of cardboard that I too could be in the parade. I passed.
The procession soon turned into a disorganized hoard when things got a little backed up near the mayor’s box and the operation was abandon. Then we broke for lunch. Rodrigue had killed another chicken that morning so we ate it over rice (no blood this time) and I brought a bunch of bones home for my cat to munch on. Exausted by all the day’s festivities I retired to my bed for a short power nap. I was awoken a few moments later to one of my cat’s chicken legs disappearing into a rat hole in my wall. After an ill-fated attempt at tug of war with the offending rodent the bone was lost forever into the labyrinth of the rat fortress.
Determined no to let the setback in the Great Rat War ruin my holiday I returned to Ranomafana at 2 to find another dance party already in full swing. This party continued on all afternoon as the kids got increasingly rowdy and the adults got increasingly drunk. Besides the chicken blood, getting pass-out-in-the-dirt drunk was the other Malagasy tradition that I did not partake in. Almost everyone was drinking more than their fair share of moonshine, even the sweet old lady who I buy eggs from was wandering about screaming incoherently in the street. When night fell there was second rendition of the Children’s lantern parade thing and the dance party was shifted to the community center. Replacing the dance party in the market was the large screen projector which piped in the Ghana-USA match much to the amusement of all assembled. So passed a big happy Vingt-six.

Yes I Really Do Work

2010-06-24T16:50:00.002+03:00

Anyone reading my past few blog posts should be forgiven for thinking that all I have been doing here is gallivanting about Madagascar on the government’s dime. This, I can assure you is not the case. Peace Corps, as it turns out is about volunteering and helping the people of impoverished nations and in-between my forays to Fianarantsoa and Farafangana, I have actually been quite busy.
If you recall, last March Dan Turk came to Ranomafana and gave me a bundle of great ideas to work with. However, the item he really emphasized was a fruit tree reforestation initiative in the areas around Ranomafana National Park. The idea of the “The Project” is to put high quality fruit trees and the means to propagate them into the hands of Malagasy families. While the first few months of my service involved producing many of the fruit tree, I am now deeply embroiled in the politics of development. As it turns out, two other organizations are also interested in doing a fruit tree project in Ranomafana, these organizations (which I talked about in previous blogs) are Friends of Madagascar and Centre Valbio.
This week Friends of Madagascar sent Mark to work on their project. Mark is a Duke University forestry student from Petoskey Michigan. He also came with all the materials to build a monster greenhouse near the Friends of Madagascar house. Mark is about 6’5” therefore he hits his forehead on more doorframes than I do which makes me feel much better about myself.
The situation with the project is very complicated. We all want the same thing, namely a successful fruit tree project, and each organization has a different piece of the puzzle, but they all have slightly different ideas about how to get there. Compounding this problem is the fact that while I work with SAF/FJKM, I am in no position to represent their concerns, and no administrative people from SAF live in Ranomafana. It pretty much just means that I end up running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to invent answers that I don’t have and spending more time parked in front of a computer screen than in the nursery.
One of SAF’s people, Rolland, came down to Ranomafana as well this week. I got about 4 days notice of his arrival. I had planned a meeting in Fianarantsoa that day so I missed seeing him but when I returned I was in for a shock. Rolland had doubled the physical size of the nursery by flattening a hillside behind my house and clearing out a grove of trees. To my dismay that included most of my avocadoes. I seriously don’t know what I am going to eat next March and April.
In other non-work related news the World Cup is going on. The Winter Olympics were over before I even knew they were going on, but the World Cup has captured the attention of practically the whole country. The Ranomafana Community Center was taken over by a large projector television, entrance is 10 cents for ‘important people’ (that’s me) and 5 cents for your average Gasy. The bats get in free through holes in the roof. Rodrigue, who spends his evenings in town watching the action on television, has been replaced at the dinner table by a Malagasy radio commentator who screams incoherently every 1-2 minutes. The new song about Africa by Shakeria is all the rage. Playing it three or four times in a row at full volume is not considered excessive noise pollution here. I have noticed that the lower a nation’s Gross National Product, the more support it seems to get from the Malagasy people. People in the community center are practically jumping up and down whenever Ghana gets anywhere close to the goal box and seemed downright smug about France’s early exit. One exception to this rule is the United States who people are proud to tell me that they support. I for one am backing the Dutch.
Next week is shaping up to be as exciting as the last, Madagascar is celebrating its 50th anniversary of independence on Saturday. Should make for some good blogging.

Farafangana

2010-06-15T02:31:00.003+03:00

It just so happened that a Peace Corps vehicle was heading south on the same weekend as Alison’s (one of my good PC friends) birthday. Additionally I had some fruit trees and soccer uniforms that I needed to give to the other volunteers on the southern coast so it was a great occasion to take a trip.
The car arrived in Ranomafana about an hour early and Joanessa, Peace Corps head of security, jumped out to meet me. Peace Corps was sending Joanessa south to do security assessments on volunteer sites and develop new sites for other volunteers. Joanessa, with his gold-rimmed glasses and friendly smile, is about as intimidating as a vanilla wafer. This is in sharp contrast to our safety officer in Niger who
had arm muscles the size of bowling balls and is a former Niger national champion in Judo. He took one look at my house, asked me if my window hinges were ok and told me to get my things.
This was my first time south since the big tropical storm last March and the road south of me was still in a dismal state of disrepair. Near where my friend Ashley lives large chunks of pavement are sitting in rice paddies 100 feet below where it had been a few months earlier. Three months of work by road crews and earthmovers have made the way passable, but barely. Once we had made it out of the mountains on to the coastal plain road conditions improved, but the landscape was
rather depressing. To say deforestation is a problem on the coastal hills of southern Madagascar is like saying that the lost island of Atlantis has a water management problem. There are no trees save some scraggly ravenala palms as far as the eye can see in some places. It looks like African Savannah except no wildlife lives there.
The journey down was not all doom and gloom. We paid a visit to a volunteer named Tadashi because his outhouse had collapsed and the villagers were slow in building him a new one. While Joanessa gave the builder responsible some gentle encouragement, I noticed a peculiar tree growing next to the ruined latrine. The tree had big green fruits that were filled with brown flesh. The Malagasy call it “Voankazo Tainakoho” or ‘the chicken shit fruit’ because the insides resemble
the excrement of certain poultry. However, Dan Turk and SAF/FJKM have been encouraging people to call it “Kaki Chocolat” or ‘Chocolate Persimmon’ so that it sounds more like something you would want to put in your mouth. Dan and I have been trying to track down some seeds of this peculiar plant for months without success and I found one literally growing in a volunteer’s yard. I quickly gathered up about
50 seeds and a few fruits for my nursery and told Tadashi to collect every seed he can get his hands on.
The rest of the way down to Farafangana Joanessa and I did site development for the new volunteers coming in August. This involved a whole lot of hiking up hills looking for phone service and talking to local big men about the security situation in the area. We spent the night in Manakara at the ironically named Sidi Hotel (pronounced ‘seedy’). It was actually a nice place; the room even came with a color television, although it only had one station and the decibel level of the air-conditioner was enough to inflict serious ear damage. The next afternoon Joanessa dropped me off at Alison and Melissa’s sites.
Alison and Melissa live about two kilometers from each other in Lopary and Mahabo respectively. These two tiny villages of a few hundred people are located on opposite sides of the Mananivo River and the two towns do not get along. The only reason Lopary requested a Peace Corps Volunteers was because Mahabo had one and they didn’t want to be left out. The area around Alison and Melissa is about as poor as
it gets in Madagascar. There is a hunger season that stretches four to eight months and even when there is enough food, many families eat only breadfruit, a food with the nutritional value of construction paper. Alison and Melissa face problems at their sites that you can’t even imagine would be issues. For example: one would imagine that getting used to using a kabone (outhouse) everyday would be difficult.
During the rains in March Melissa’s kabone flooded to within an inch of overflowing and the gound around Alison’s kabone became so soft that it collapsed into the pit taking a horrified Alison down with it.
Both of the girls have houses made of sticks, leaves, and bark. This becomes a problem when the legs of the bed begin breaking through the floor. (Something which happened to Alison when I was there) Have you ever tried sleeping on a bed that is not level by about 10-15 degrees? Well I did when I spent the night at Alison’s and let me tell you it is almost impossible. Tired and sleepless Alison tried cutting at her mattress with a kitchen knife as if it were a big coffee cake at 1:00 in the morning in a desperate attempt to correct the problem, but we ended up having to tear apart the entire bedding apparatus anyway.
The next morning, on about four-five hours of sleep, we hiked five kilometers to Melissa’s CSB (local health clinic) because a population control NGO was in town doing vasectomies and tubal ligations. The health hut was about five rooms and there was a long line of women outside waiting for the doctor. The cost of an operation was 500 ariary or about 25 cents. One woman there was 28 years old and was already the mother of 8 children. Unfortunately here in Madagascar, birthing eight kids at a young age does not get you a multi-million dollar reality TV contract, cover-shoots with People Magazine or guest appearances on Dancing with the Stars. It lands you in a big mess of poverty. After a morning at the CSB, we went out and investigated
Alison’s sweet potato field and paid a visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden’s tree nursery in Mahabo.
On Friday Joanessa returned from his work to give us all a ride in Farafangana. Farafangana is a coastal town and is the district capital for Alison, Melissa, and two other Volunteers who met us at the hotel when we came in. The five of us booked a single hotel room, changed into swimsuits and hit the beach. Unlike Mananjary, Farafangana has special beaches where people can go and swim without worrying about
deadly undercurrents or the occasional Lincoln Log floating by. Although we did have to share the palm trees and spectacular ocean views with a herd of cattle. That night we grabbed some beer and street food and watched the first game of the World Cup on a hotel TV the size of a toaster oven. Then, to celebrate Alison’s birthday, we went out dancing at Farafangana’s only night club. We were the only whities in the place but that didn’t bother us at all. So we danced the night away to Malgasy tunes and did not retire to our hotel room before 1:30. It was an excellent way to end the trip.
I have another busy week this week. Going to Fianarantsoa on Thursday and have some people from SAF/FJKM coming to expand the tree nursery.

The Whirlwind Return

2010-06-07T13:58:00.002+03:00

Still stuffed from the previous night’s barbeque, the three other volunteers in the South East and I set of to return to our sites at 6:00 in the morning. Although we had reserved seats in a taxi-brousse ahead of time, I still ended up sitting in front of the lady barfing into a plastic bag, on top of the engine, next to the driver in the seat least accommodating to posterior comfort. The only way for someone of my size to fit into this most unfortunate of locations was to have my left leg on the gear-stick interfering with the driver’s attempts to shift and have my right leg pinned firmly against the hyper-sensitive volume knob on the radio. Thankfully, the car made it to Fianarantsoa in a blazing eight hours.
Rather than subject ourselves to more taxi-broussing the next morning, we decided to take two nights at the Peace Corps house in Fianarantsoa. Peace Corps just installed a new group of volunteers at the beginning of May, nine of them are near Fianarantsoa and two of them were sharing the house with us when we arrived. We spent the day getting to know one another and preparing a truly unholy amount of Mexican food and banana bread. We did have one close call when a malfunction in the gas oven resulted in a fireball that shook the house to its very foundations and singed a good amount of Melissa’s hair, but otherwise the evening was uneventful.
Returning to Ranomafana the following afternoon I received a warm welcome from my neighbors who enthusiastically informed me that I had gotten fat over the past three weeks. When I got back into my house, the first thing that I noticed was that my war on the rats was back on. In my absence Sharbaraz had caught her first rat while staying at Rodrigue’s house. Terrified, the remaining rats fled back to my empty house and proceeded to trash the place, defecating all over the furniture, floor, kitchenware, and books. The place was a virtual rat latrine.
No sooner had a put my bags down than my phone rang. It was a professor from the University of Michigan who I had been occasionally corresponding. She told me she was coming with some students to Ranomafana in less than 24 hours and wondered if I might be available to show them around for the afternoon. I gave her directions to my house and spent the entire next day scrubbing my house as not to give off the impression that it is inhabited by some seriously negligent rodent enthusiast.
Back when I lived in America, the English “Some students” translated to 5-6 people. Therefore you can imagine my surprise when a medium sized tour bus parked itself in my lawn the following afternoon. Apparently “some” now means 17 students 2 professors, 3 National Park guides, 1 driver, 2 young folks with Latin American accents, and a dude from Tulear. (That’s 26 in case anyone was counting) My neighbors stopped what they were doing and looked on in amazement. Sharbaraz fled the house and took shelter under Rodrigue’s bed. I approached cautiously and introduced myself as a Peace Corps Volunteer from Holland Michigan. A girl in the back row shouted “NO WAY I’m from Holland too!” Her name was Caroline, she lives on 38th street. A later round of Dutch Bingo would reveal that we had been on the same trip to Costa Rica when we were 13, although we didn’t remember each other.
Over the next two hours I talked myself hoarse about Peace Corps, Ranomafana, fruit trees, and what on earth I am doing here. I toured the entire mass through my house, the nursery, and the Arboretum before we broke for dinner. Over brochettes and beer one of the professors invited me along to the Centre Valbio the next day where they were hearing a lecture by one Patricia Wright.
I am going to pause here to say a few words about Patricia and Valbio. Patricia Wright is an American biologist who first came to Ranomafana in 1986. Back then Ranomafana was a dumpy backwater with one decaying hotel and an impoverished population. In the course of her expeditions into the forest around the town, Patricia discovered a species of bamboo lemur that had previously been unknown to science. Not satisfied with just one noteworthy accomplishment, Patricia took her new lemur to Madagascar National Parks and USAID and founded Ranomafana National Park. The Park is now the #2 park in the country for tourism and the little town of Ranomafana rakes in $1,700,000 annually from pasty Europeans with big cameras. Patricia, however, didn’t stop there and in 2003, with the support of a laundry list of NGO’s and American Universities, she opened Centre Valbio. Valbio is a modern research center about 7k from town in the rainforest. The Centre is a hub for researchers and students who have the place so busy that it is currently undergoing a massive expansion. So when I got an invitation to come up and meet Patricia (who because of her work is only around for a few days at a time) I was on it like butter on bread.
After she completed her lecture for the Michigan students, she and I got some time to talk about the fruit tree project that I am working on with Dan. While Patricia knows Dan, neither she nor any of the Valbio staff was aware of what Dan has been doing down in the tree nursery. She was very supportive of my ideas and offered Valbio’s resources to put me in contact with good people to work with around the park. This is invaluably helpful and has the potential to save me months of work finding motivated farmers to do projects with around the park. The people working at Valbio have also offered to take me to some of the outlying villages on their expeditions, put their computers and extensive library at my disposal, and offered me free rides up the mountain from Ranomafana any day I need them. How awesome is that?

This week I’ll be in Farafangana visiting some other volunteers. More fun stories I’m sure.

In-Service Training

2010-05-29T12:37:00.002+03:00

In 2001, President Bush committed a huge sum of money to the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. This money was funneled into a fund know most commonly by the acronym PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) that is managed by USAID. Most of the money was rushed into the most seriously affected nations in Southern Africa like Lesotho, Botswana, and South Africa. Additionally some money was earmarked for the island of Madagascar. On paper, Madagascar has one of the lowest instances of HIV/AIDS of any nation in Africa with an infection rate holding at around .13%. Although the actual infection rate is undoubtedly higher than official figures suggest, the fact remains that Madagascar got a lot of PEPFAR money for not a lot of HIV/AIDS.
For this fiscal year, Madagascar got an unfathomable mountain of dollars to use for PEPFAR. All of it needs to be spent by October or it disappears back into the bureaucratic maze of Washington DC. Peace Corps volunteers are welcome to use this fund for their HIV/AIDS related projects, but with the political problems and last year’s evacuation, the money was not being used. Instead of letting the money go to waste, Peace Corps Madagascar decided to use some of it to pay for each volunteer to bring one co-worker or counterpart up to our In-Service Training on Lake Montasoa.
After coordinating the transportation for four volunteers and two Malagasy counterparts and sitting through an ABBA hits marathon between Fianarantsoa and Ambostra, Rodrigue and I arrived at the PC training site. Because Rodrigue’s trip was paid for by PEPFAR money, the Peace Corps training staff was obligated to spend half of the training doing HIV/AIDS activities. While I am all in favor of HIV/AIDS awareness and education, the sessions that we put through were truly nauseating. Peace Corps attempted to do group activities with approximately 75 participants including a disappointing round of “AIDS Jeopardy.” However, not all of our required programming was a total loss. On Tuesday we threw an “AIDS Festival” down in the city of Montasoa. When I spent time in Montasoa during training, my Sunday strolls into the town center would usually draw a few onlookers interested in watching the white person. Now imagine the crowd created by 34 Americans marching into the city center singing songs, throwing candy to children and carrying banners with smiley condoms on them.(see photo) By the time we arrived at the commune office, the meeting room was crammed beyond capacity and many people found themselves standing out in the rain peeking in through the windows. Volunteers and community members did condom demonstrations, made speeches, sang songs, and did plays. Additionally Peace Corps bussed in a vanload of commercial sex workers from Antananarivo to talk about how they try to protect themselves, their clients, and their co-workers from contracting the disease.
Though most of the HIV/AIDS workshops were not terribly relevant to fruit trees in Ranomafana, but there was some programming that it was very useful for Rodrigue to participate in. It was great for him to learn about what this crazy American living next door to him is supposed to be doing in Madagascar, and what his role is in my Peace Corps Service. The week was also a kind of reward for working with me. Going to Tana is a big status thing for Malagasy who live far from the capital due to the high cost of transportation, and he got to learn quite a bit about American food. The cooking staff completely spoiled us and mealtimes served as excellent showcase of good old American overeating. Meat was on the menu three times a day (a major luxury) and the variety of food served was epic. One lunch featured hamburgers, pork chops, refried beans, and rice flavored with shrimp. Another meal included duck.
Rodrigue and the rest of the counterparts left after the first week of our training and we were alone on the training site for the weekend. Left to our own devices, we actually had a relatively productive weekend and bonded as Peace Corps volunteers. Activities included building forts out of the furniture, throwing ridiculous second hand clothing parties, and rearranging the dining room for candle-lit “family” dinners. After the weekend the Environment folks took a tech trip out to one of Dan’s other tree nurseries in Moremanga and I helped to teach fruit tree grafting and marcoting to the other volunteers. Additionally, we learned about vediver grass, a really amazing way to prevent hillside erosion. We got to take a mini-train up the side of a mountain to a beautiful overlook where hillside reconstruction was being done. There will be more info about vediver in later blogs . Returning to Tana on Thursday, our country director invited all the PCV’s to a barbeque at his place. Free beer and meat cooked on a grill 4th of July style. For the past two weeks I have been sleeping, eating, talking, working, and playing like an American. It has really been wonderful so it’s going to take some adjusting once again when I get back to Ranomafana .

Marcoting

2010-05-08T15:34:00.002+03:00

Rodrigue left for a trip to Mananjary (that city on the coast that I strongly dislike) on Monday leaving me the only person working in the nursery for three days. I used the time to reorganize our native palms and marcot litchi trees. Marcoting or air layering, for those of you who don’t know, is a simple and effective method of replicating certain varieties of fruit trees. Using a branch of an existing tree, you peel away all the living bark cutting of the supply of water to the leaves on the branch. You then cover the area with something wet and porous (we use moss, thin barks, or manure mixed with sawdust) and secure it with clear plastic. Wait about a month and a half until the branch sends down roots, cut the branch down, cut all the leaves off, and stick it in the dirt. Presto! You got yourself a new tree.
For me, marcoting is a work related excuse to spend the entire day climbing trees and playing with sharp knives. When I was eight, this would have been my dream job. Litchi trees are incidentally extremely fun to climb. The branches are unnaturally strong and flexible meaning I never worry about a branch being able to support my weight. In order to get the best marcots, I have to climb to the highest part of the tree and stick my head out of the canopy to ‘work.’ Typically these trees are occupied by one or more chameleons who eat all the ants and other nasty bugs so I don’t have to worry about that either.
Many of you have written me expressing concern about rodent problem in my house so I thought I would give you an update in the Rat War.

The news from the front is good. Although the Michael-Sharbaraz coalition has been unable to strike any fatal blows to the Rodent Axis, tactics used by the allies have forced enemy forces into a strategic withdrawal to positions beyond the front door. Beginning in February, all food items were sealed in the government issue metal trunk to prevent their capture by the enemy. The rats retaliated by laying waste to a series of dish scrubbies and destroying a wooden cooking spoon. Additionally, the rats initiated ‘Operation Squeaky’ spending all night romping and making noise safe in their attic-fortress trying prevent the other inhabitants of the house from getting any sleep. When neither of these measures was successful, the rats unleashed their most destructive and powerful weapon: poop. Each night axis forces would leave new stink-mines in strategic locations around the house. They focused their efforts on the kitchen and clothing storage areas of the house.
After keeping up their assaults for almost two months the rodents, facing an increasingly large kitten and still without a consistent source of supplies, moved their center of operations else where. Rodrigue and his family have no metal trunk and his home and food supply offered a tempting target for invasion. Others found the oranges falling from the tree behind the house more to their liking. The allies, however, are taking nothing for granted. There is no way to guarantee another invasion will not take place once the oranges run out or Rodrigue’s house becomes too crowded. Next week Sharbaraz will be deployed to counter the infestation at Rodrigue’s while Michael seeks further council at his In-Service Training Conference in Montasoa. Stay tuned for more updates.
In other news, there are new volunteers in the area. The newest set of trainees swore in on the 4th and four of them are being installed in my area. Two are near Farafangana, about 280 kilometers south of me, another is near Ashley and the fourth is near Fianarantsoa. With all the new people, Peace Corps has resurrected the Volunteer Action Committee (VAC). The VAC is a six-member council that meets with the administration three times a year and each committee member is responsible representing the volunteers in his or her region. Last week I was made the VAC representative for South-Central Madagascar. Being a member of the VAC is a honor, and I wish I could say that I had earned it but at this point I am the only volunteer in the area with access to Fianarantsoa (the regional capital) and consistent cell phone coverage so it sort of happened by default. None the less I am really excited about being a VAC member and I take the new responsibility gladly and seriously.
On Friday I will be heading to Montasoa for In-Service Training (IST) and I will be there for the rest of the month. Internet access will likely be spotty so there may not be another post until June (sorry) Hope you are all well, thanks for the letters!!

Rice Harvest

2010-04-29T17:34:00.003+03:00

Early Saturday morning I had the privilege of participating in one of the oldest traditions in Madagascar: the rice harvest. Before I begin to recount the day’s events I think it is important to impress upon you how serious the Malagasy are about their rice. Madagascar is the world’s #1 consumer of rice per capita. The average Gasy eats ½ a kilogram of rice every day. For a fun activity at home boil yourself just over a pound of uncooked rice and eat it all in less than 24 hours. Then repeat indefinitely and you will know what it is like to live in Madagascar. Rice is consumed for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A meal will always consist of rice and ‘loka’ which is whatever flavoring is accompanying the rice. Pasta is considered a ‘loka,’ in case half a kilo isn’t enough empty carbs for you. In my area, the word eat (mihinana) has been contracted with the word for rice (vary) to form mihinambary which means ‘to have a meal.’ In most areas of Madagascar, eating things besides rice is not considered eating real food. Its like rice is gasoline and everything else is STP.
I learned that Rodrigue was planning to harvest his family’s rice field the day after I got back from Fianarantsoa and I invited myself along. The rice field is about a kilometer away from the tree nursery and is located behind Rodrigue’s father’s house. With Rodrigue’s father and two hired hands there were five of us to accomplish the task. I was handed a piece of stringy bark and told that I would be a porter. The actually harvesting was done entirely by one person. It was my job to go behind him and collect the cut stalks and carry them to the threshing floor where the grains would be removed by whacking the stalks against a log. Unfortunately the rice fields in question weaved their way half way up a relatively steep mountain. The path up was little more that some connected irrigation canals and field dividers that after six months of use, were already is sad shape. The ‘path’ quickly became little more than a muddy slick that was literally disintegrating under our feet. Upon reaching the rice field being harvested I would wade through ankle-knee deep mud dotted with newly sliced stalk (which is sharp mind you) to collect it and tie up a large bundle with the bark I had been given. Then I would pile the bundle on my head for a dangerous trip down the hill (As demonstrated above by Rodrigue). Oh yes, and rice leaves are much like corn, if they come in contact with bare skin they will leave little micro-cuts all down your arms and legs.
It may sound like I am complaining about this work, but in fact I LOVED it. It was really awesome getting into the mud and doing something really challenging like this. I also got the chance to do some of the threshing down at the bottom of the hill. When it was all said and done I felt great and we had about 120 kilos of rice to show for it. Between the two families, it would last about 2 months. I would say that I can’t wait to do it again next year but on Sunday my body had an allergic reaction to the little cuts from the rice stalk and I broke out in a handsome rash all down my arms and legs. It’s terribly itchy and after four days Peace Corps Doctor put me on a steroid and told me to take it easy.
Other than that this week has been relatively uneventful. I am now making occasional visit to the Friends of Madagascar house down the road to give a short English lesson to the cooks there in exchange for a meal. They wanted me to teach them how to cook American food so I showed them how to make guacamole, rice stuffed tomatoes, and alfredo sauce. Turns out alfredo sauce doesn’t work so well with sweetened condensed milk, but the guac and tomatoes went over well.

New Year New Friends

2010-04-24T15:42:00.002+03:00

Picture is of Fianarantsoa

My birthday started early this year with an unexpected visit on the 15th from my very good friend Melissa. She is a PCV almost 8 hours south of me and was passing though Ranomafana on her way up to Tana. She knew it was my birthday so she stopped at Matt’s old site and plundered it for presents. Matt left Peace Corps in February and his old house was still full of all the things he could not fit in his suitcase. Among other things, Melissa brought me:
A propane tank
7 rolls of toilet paper
Boric Acid (for bugs)
Hydrocortisone Cream
She also took me out for lunch in town and got me a beer. I was thrilled with all of this and so passed probably the only birthday I will ever have when I will be happy to get TP as a gift. Before she asked Melissa asked me a favor, she heard a guy named Peter was in the area and that he had some supplies that she could use down at her site. She left me his number.
On the big anniversary of my birth (the 18th) I met up in Ranomafana with my friend Jose. Jose is one of the guides in the National Park and he is opening a new shop and restaurant in town. He spends most of the time hanging around his shop, so he is a great person to sit and chat with for a few hours. He also spend five years living in Oregon so his English is pretty good. Jose got out some snacks and drinks, some more of his friends came over and he put in a movie (Planet Earth). It was an excellent and relaxing day.
I called Melissa’s contact Peter a few days later at about 11:30 after spending the morning in the tree nursery. By 12:15 I was sitting down to a lunch of pork chops and sautéed vegetables at one of the nicer hotels in Ranomafana with Peter, his driver, and two Malagasy marine biologists. Peter is the President and only employee of Friends of Madagascar, a non-profit that does education and environmental development all over Madagascar. Essentially Peter is a one man army crusading against poverty and environmental degradation. He brings in shipping containers full of donated materials and distributes them to people in need. Currently he is sitting on some 20,000 soccer uniforms as well as balls, shin guards, school supplies, and health materials. Peter is also working to start a project involving fruit trees and reforestation in the Ranomafana area, nearly identical to the one I am working on with SAF. Amazingly however, Peter and Dan have never spoken.
After lunch we drove down to Friends of Madagascar’s Ranomafana HQ. It is located about 7k from my house. Peter showed me through the facility. It includes three large bedrooms, a full kitchen with fridge, full bath, a small fruit and palm tree nursery and a litchi orchard. Peter told me that in June, a Duke University grad student would be living there for five months working with the fruit trees and doing reforestation. Although I should feel free to come down and use the facilities any time.
Peter left me with about 35 pounds of soccer equipment and health materials for Melissa and full of ideas about co-operating a project with SAF and Friends of Madagascar. This chance meeting was a truly amazing thing. The Duke student and I should be working very closely together in the coming months and I can not imagine a better set of people to work with.
The next day I had to go up to Fianarantsoa again to give Melissa all the stuff from Peter. We had only had an hour or so together in Ranomafana so we had much to catch up on. We spent a full day out on the town together and returned to the Peace Corps house and prepared ourselves a truly delicious meal of banana bread and burritos. A fitting end to an amazing birthday week.
Thank you all for the birthday wishes!

The Trip

2010-04-16T08:03:00.002+03:00

The picture is of the tree nursery I work at
In order to make it to Tana on time to meet Dan I had to leave Ranomafana on the day after Easter, incidentally this is also the biggest day for tourism in Ranomafana. Thousands of people pour into town from Tana and Fianar to swim in the hot springs and picnic in the valley. Not only was I forced to miss out on all this fun, but it made getting a taxi-brousse OUT of Ranomafana a frustrating task. I walked into town at around 7:30 and proceeded to wait for three hours while van after van of holiday makers poured into town. Finally at 10:30 a crammed red taxi-brousse pulled up into town and I was able to secure a seat.
I use the term ‘seat’ loosely because where I ended up was more or less squatting in the space between seats. I had to prop myself up on the benches next to me so I would not collapse onto the chicken which occupied the floor-space above my hovering bottom. This proved to be very uncomfortable and my legs lost circulation almost immediately. My predicament left me leaning rather heavily on the woman on my right who had a small child in her lap who, frightened by the white person, screamed in moral horror every time I so much as shrugged my shoulder. The van’s engine kept over heating on the way up the mountain so every 20 minutes we would stop and everyone would pile out and pick strawberry guavas off the trees while the driver fanned under the hood. I ended up befriending a nun from the bench in front of me and made pleasant conversation while we munched on fruit waiting for the engine to cool.
I slept poorly in the Fianarantsoa hostel and was up at 5:30 the next morning to catch a taxi to Tana. I have learned to have low expectations of actually leaving on time, so I was mildly impressed when we left only an hour and a half behind schedule. While I waited I made friends with a young lady from Glen Arbor who was visiting her boyfriend in Tulear. We left for Tana at 7:30 and made steady progress. We only broke down once and the only other significant impediment to our progress was the 2000 head of cattle strolling down the highway just south of Ambostra. Nine hours later I arrived in Tana seriously exhausted, but was greeted at the Peace Corps house by a small contingent of fellow volunteers passing though the capital. This necessitated me staying up much to late yet again sharing stories, pictures, and dinner cobbled together from the overpriced snacks at the gas station.
I was up again at 5:30 the following morning to meet Dan on his way out to Moremanga. We arrived early (always an unexpected surprise with Dan) so I toured the impressive, developed tree nursery run by SAF/FJKM in Moremanga. SAF is celebrating its 20th year in Moremanga and I was told that there would be a ceremony to celebrate the event. I had few details about what to expect, Dan had said something about a slide show, a 10 minute speech, and maybe food (coffee and munchies?). After all, Dan planned to lay out an entire fruit orchard and drive another hour down the road to spend the night after the ceremony was finished, how involved could it be?
We began at 10 AM with a full church service out on the driveway to the tree nursery. Hymns, prayer, sermon, collection, the works (keep in mind it is a Wednesday). This was followed by the unveiling of a new sign and the ceremonial cutting of a ribbon. Then came a series of speeches by various notables in SAF’s Moremanga operation, including Dan. Some 200 people had turned out to the event, decked out in their finest suits and skirts and about 15 people were diligently documenting every captivating second with digital camcorders and cameras. The speeches rapped up around 1PM and guests were given 20 minutes to explore the tree nursery and poke around SAF’s facilities before everyone was herded across the street for food.
A red pole barn had been prepared with clothed tables complimented with complete table service and a wide selection of chilled fizzy drinks. What unfolded over the course of the next three and a half hours was a four-course feast. The main course was rice served with fried chicken AND beef AND pork no less. Cake and ice-cream were carried out for dessert as well as a collection of fresh fruit juices. All the while we were serenaded by a Malagasy singing group from an artificial stage constructed on the far side of the barn. Unfortunately Madagascar has not yet grasped the concept of ‘background music’ so conversation was a challenge. At 4:30, having consumed more food than I thought possible, we all stood up, held hands, sang a song, and danced a little jig behind our chairs in unison.
With the sun sinking low Dan, myself, and some other SAF employees dashed out to our prospective orchard and began measuring distances and plotting trees. We jotted down the basics, drove out to Sara’s site where we would be spending the night and stayed up till 11:30 planning everything out.
That night all the early mornings, late nights, and soda pop caught up with me. I got very sick and was feverish and nauseated all night. I spent most of that day on bed rest, talking with my doctor on the phone, and limping back in the direction of Tana. This included a very unglamorous hour nap on a slab of concrete outside one of SAF’s Moremanga buildings. Back in Antananarivo, the doctor managed to rule out malaria he gave me some pills to settle my stomach. I finally got a good nights sleep.
After a recovery day it was back on the roads. One of the signs that Madagascar is starting to get under my skin is that nine and a half hours in a crammed little van doesn’t phase me anymore, in fact the drive is quite pleasant. The further you go south the bigger and more spectacular the mountains get. Route Nationale 7 is lined with fruit and craft vendors selling fresh persimmons, apples, bananas, you name it. It was a beautiful day and the air was filled with the aroma of burning eucalyptus baking red mud bricks. However, due to the poor budgeting of yours truly, I arrived in Fianarantsoa on Saturday with a dollar and a half in my pocket. With barely enough money for food and the banks closed until Monday, I spent the weekend exploring the hills of this fascinating city and scrounging the markets for cheap rice and veggies. My banking town was officially changed from Mananjary to Fianarantsoa this week so I will be seeing quite a bit more of this city in the future. I was more than pleased.

Where is my Letter?

2010-04-13T10:35:00.004+03:00

Over the past two weeks I have been truly blessed to receive an abundant supply of letters and packages from you all back home. However, you may be wondering to yourself, “Why does he never write back?” The truth is I have been writing back quite consistently. Chances are if you are a consistent reader of this fine blog that I have written you at least once in the past few months. However, as of late my mail has not been getting through.
I thought perhaps I could shed some light on the situation for you. While I am clueless as to what happens to my letters after I drop them into the mail slot, if what happens at the post office before they are mailed is any indication then my letters have a better chance of reaching home if I stuff them in a bottle and throw them into the Indian Ocean.
Allow me to Explain
As follows are the events as they transpired on April 1, 2010
At 1:50 PM I bike into Ranomafana with this month’s collection of letters to send. The post office in Ranomafana occupies and optimistically large building on Ranomafana’s market square. The building’s stout concrete pillars and steel bar doors give off the charming impression that the place used to double as a prison, but I guess with all those precious stamps and postcards inside, basic aesthetics are a small price to pay for the added security. Securing my bike onto the building I stroll into the big lobby. This time I am lucky and there is an attendant behind the counter. During previous visits, postal workers had to be dragged away from their shopping to process my envelopes, that is if the person on duty can be located at all. Think of all the postcards I could have run off with while they were out!
This month I am mailing five envelopes. One packed with letters to various recipients in West Michigan addressed to my mother, another to my fellow PCV Jenny in Mali, and three that I am mailing for my friend Ashley. I am doing her this favor because conditions at her local post are somehow worse than they are in Ranomafana. According to Ashley her post ran out of high denomination stamps months ago so in order to send her modest-sized envelopes to the states she is forced to carpet both sides of them with nearly worthless sheets of stamps. She is also under the sneaking suspicion that insead of being flown to America, all her letters are accumulating in a very expensive heap under the clerk’s desk.
The first step in the postal process is the weigh in. Each little envelope is carefully weighed on a huge scale that appears to be designed to weigh sacks of potatoes. After each letter has its weight written on the corner, a ratty little chart appears from under the countertop and each weight is matched with its destination to arrive at a price. There is some disagreement as to where Mali is but the argument is settled after I point out the postman that it does not matter whether Mali is in Oceana or Africa, postage will be the same price either way. Amazingly this process takes 15 minutes and when he pulls out the calculator to add up the prices I decide to bop out for a snack.
Returning a few minutes later with a bunch of bananas he has only just come up with a total: 12180 Ariary. Both he and I know this is not what I will actually pay to have these letters sent. As I begin to peel my first banana he begins the process of marking up each of the letters. You see none of the amounts listed on the ratty little chart actually corresponds to any stamp value in Madagascar. For example a 5 gram letter to America is 1900 Ariary. There is no 1900 stamp. As far as I can tell stamps come in the following values: 2000, 1500, 1100, 180, and 80. Oh and don’t be fooled by the stamps themselves, many of the stamps are still listed in Malagasy Francs, a currency that went out of circulation six years ago but the stamps are still hanging around. The conversion rate from Francs to Ariary is 5 to 1 so even though the stamp says 900 on it, it’s really only worth 180. My letter to Mali is 2740 Ariary. Try doing that in your head. You can see how stamping five envelopes can take one guy with a pocket calculator quite a while.
Twenty minutes later I am through with my bananas and am leaning uncomfortably on the Formica counterpace because although the lobby is as large as my house and people obviously do plenty of waiting here, there are no chairs, just lots of blue tile. The post man has taken my letters to the back room and is now searching through his stamp book to see if he can find the stamps he needs to make the numbers work. I have already been given a new total of 12380 Ariary but this is not what I will actually pay either. In my boredom I have begun to make faces at the kids playing on the porch in front of the office.
At 2:30 eight German tourists march in to the post office in their shiny new hiking boots, kaki pants and safari hats. As they begin fingering the warped postcards on the metal rack the postal worker jumps up to help them. They each want three or four cards and the stamps to go with them. (Post card stamps are 1680 so that’s relatively easy math, one 1500 and one 900). Thankfully another postal worker has appeared from behind the scenes with my stamps. He lays them out with my envelopes and I set to work licking and sticking. The Germans at this point have taken out their cameras and are taking pictures of the postal worker organizing the stamps to their post cards (I’m serious). Since each of my letters requires any where from 2 to 6 stamps and of course all the stamps a much to large to fit nicely into the top right corner so the stamps need to be placed haphazardly on the front and back sides of the envelope being careful not to cover any of the addresses written on them. I finally get my final price of 12440, but they don’t have any change so I fork over 12500 and call it good.
At 2:45 I finally depart the post office having sent my mail. One can only hope that the rest of their journey is a little bit less complicated. As a matter of note, this entire mess could be avoided by the use of Areograms or Passeros which are pre-stamped international envelopes one just writes on and sends. Although advertisements for these precious items paper the lobby, the post workers in Ranomafana (and at Ashley’s site) seem not to have heard of them.

Hope you all get mail from me soon!

After writing this post I received word that a pile of mail arrived at home, go figure.

Dan and the Plan

2010-03-31T04:43:00.005+03:00

Though I would like to continue with my description of Ranomafana, much has happened this week so that will need to wait. First I must begin with a short description of what my work here involves. Although technically I am an employee of the US government, many volunteers are partnered with Non-government Organizations. These “partner organizations” ideally will help a volunteer get started with development work and provide community contacts and structure to the volunteer. My friend Ashley’s partner organization sometimes takes her on hikes and she often tags along on development projects.
My situation is different. My partner organization is SAF/FJKM, a Malagasy environment group that works all over the country. SAF owns my house, SAF owns the tree nursery, SAF started the Arboretum in Ranomafana, SAF employs Rodrigue. In an unofficial capacity I too work for SAF. The man in charge of the tree nursery and the founder of the Arboretum is Dan. Dan lives in Antananarivo, but lived in Ranomafana for some 20 years before he came to work for SAF. Everyone in town knows Dan, when I meet people on the street, all I need to say is that I work with Dan and their eyes grow wide and they nod knowingly. Dan is my main contact at SAF and funding for projects and maintenance of the tree nursery is funneled through him.
I knew Dan was a big deal but I was totally and completely unprepared for what happened. Last week I wrote about the changes caused by cyclone Hubert. This week we had Cyclone Dan. My preparations for Dan’s arrival seem frivolous in retrospect. I spent most of last weekend digging up a garden next to my house and was thinking that we could talk about some vegetables or rainforest plants I could grow there. Dan was due to arrive in the late morning on Tuesday. Sara, another volunteer partnered with SAF was due to come with him. At 4:45PM Dan’s brown Toyota ground to an exhausted halt in front of my house. Dan, Sara and two Malagasy SAF employees piled out of the vehicle. We exchanged hellos and decided to go down the road to have “a quick look at the Arboretum.” Two hours later I returned home 15 minutes late for dinner.
The next morning I went on a short hike with Sara and by the time we made it the Arboretum Dan had mustered a workforce of 80 Malagasy to do weeding, trail-building, and other chores for the day. Dan was going a mile a minute trying to install 50 some new signs that he had brought down from Antananarivo and was coming up with new ideas for the Arboretum and the tree nursery. At lunch we sat down and Dan gave me his vision for the tree nursery’s future as well as enough stuff to do to keep me busy well into the next decade. Here is a run-down of what we talked about:
1.The Big Project: Dan is going to write a grant to get money from somewhere to start a major fruit orchard project in the 8 Communes (Communes are about the size of an American township) surrounding Ranomafana National Park. The grant would help to fund the Tree Nursery and hire a new Malagasy employee. In the target communes, this ‘new guy’ and I would locate 100 motivated farmers and 10 motivated group leaders. The group leaders would receive extensive training from us in Ranomafana and would be responsible for overseeing 10 of the farmers in their area. Using money from the grant we would give each farmer 20 different species of trees from the nursery and each group leader 30 trees. Thus, the little tree nursery behind my house is going to be responsible for producing approximately 2300 high quality trees sometime before December (is the goal). This includes some 800 grafted trees, of which there are currently 37.
2. Expand the Nursery: Dan is hoping to return in May to double the size of the tree nursery to accommodate all these new trees. He also hopes to use this expansion to begin selling finished trees to people passing along on Route Nationale 25.
3. Build a Trellis: Build a structure for climbing fruit vines like passion fruit to grow on in the Arboretum
4. Develop an Understory in the Arboretum: Currently the Arboretum has lots of interesting trees, but the ground looks a little shabby and is essentially a bunch of weed and grasses. I am to collect seeds from bushes and shrubs in the forest to develop them in the Arboretum to make the Arboretum more appealing to foreign tourists.
5. Work on “The List”: Dan gave me an annotated ‘wish list’ of 65 tree species that are around the Park, but not yet in the Arboretum. Most are very rare and quite remote. Find these trees and plant them in the Arboretum
6. Trip to Tana April 4-13: A new orchard is being planted near Tana and Dan wants me to see it and be able to apply what I learned to the Big Project so next week I’m going up NORTH!
7. Locate and collect samples of rare plants: There is lots of cool stuff around here. For example the only Climbing Palm in the world grows only in a patch of forest about 30 kilometers down the road. There is also a rare palm called PALMAE Dypsis interruptor that is also in this patch. There has been only one documented sighting of this plant. Also hike to Vatovavy
8. Start a co-operative project with my friend Ashley: My only neighboring PCV and I are hoping to collaborate on an education project to bring grafting and quality fruit to a poor area of Madagascar.
I hope you can see how after this meeting, my original plan to ‘start planting my garden next month’ seems like small potatoes. This is lots of work and it’s honestly super ambitious, but I hope I’m up to the challenge. Some of this stuff like the tree collecting isn’t critical, but I would still like to try. Add to this that Dan is leaving the country in June for a year so his availability a resource is limited. No more will Dan be able to come down and cram two weeks of work into two days every few months. We spent most of the rest of that day hammering this plan out. Not surprisingly I was late for dinner again.
Next week I will be on the road in Fianarantsoa and Antananarivo so I don’t know when I can post, but for now I have trees to graft.

p.s. 1st mail from the US arrived today at my current address! Sent March 15! Thanks Al & Judy!

MAIL CALL!!!

2010-03-25T04:33:00.002+03:00

As of Wednesday, Michael has received most of the mail and packages that were sent to the Niger and the Antananarivo addresses. There are probably a few still out there, but for those who are wondering, here is what he excitedly opened today:
Pkgs:
Aunt M-sent Dec. 9- contents are currently being enjoyed!
Dan/Diana/Al/Judy-sent Dec. 9
Letters:
Jenny R-sent ??
Al & Judy-sent Feb 9
Erica-sent Feb 10

So far he has not received any mail that was sent to Ranomafana from the US, but we expect that will start to happen soon....it's been 5 weeks since he got that address. There is still no mail arriving from Ranomafana either! A lesson in patience, I guess!

Ranomafana and Avocadoes

2010-03-22T09:05:00.001+03:00

Coinciding with last week’s flood of rain came an unprecedented flood of another kind entirely: a flood of avocadoes. In the small orchard behind our peppenaire there are four sizable avocadoes trees that are heavy laden with fruit, and last week they began shedding their bounty. It started slowly, Rodrigue’s wife stopped by with three that she had found fallen from the trees and I quickly set to work making some fresh guacamole. Now we have more avocadoes than we know what to do with. Last Saturday I went out in the orchard in the morning and returned with 35 of them, and that does not include the ones that had broken open on rocks or been skewered by the bamboo fence surrounding the yard. What three adults, a third grader and a toddler can possibly do with a shopping cart full of avocadoes is beyond me. At the moment we are trying to stem the tide by devouring them like children with serious self control issues. I eat four a day in a homemade guacamole that I eat with a small pile of tortillias I make on my skillet. Usually I run out of flour for the torts and end up eating the guacamole out of a bowl with a spoon. Rodrigue’s fam has been pulling their weight too, eating them for breakfast and lunch with their obligatory rice but to be honest we are still loosing ground to the tide of avocadoes. Last Sunday Rodrigue’s wife took four grapefruit sized ones into the market and managed to sell the lot of them for a measly five cents, so I was thinking about introducing the Malagasy to avocado wiffleball to help get rid of some of these things. If you have any other ideas I’m open to suggestions.
Not much else has happened in the past few days. I brought Rodrigue’s family a jar of strawberry jam back from Fianarantsoa as a thank you for watching Sharbaraz while I was out, instructing them to use it as a spread for breads and biscuits. To my horror they consumed to whole thing in a day, mixing it in with tsako (essentially corn porridge) and of course using it to flavour avocadoes.
I thought I would include a short description of the city of Ranomafana for you all considering I have written sparingly little about my new home. Ranomafana is located about an hour east of Fianarantsoa and is the first major town on Route Nationale 25. This major highway bisects the town and actually passes a few meters from my front door. Normally I would not been very keen on living next to a major thoroughfare, but traffic on the road is surprisingly sparce, especially considering that it is the only passable road that serves four major cities on the east coast.
Taking the road East from Fianar, the first thing you come to is the forest. About twenty minutes outside of Fianar, the grassy plains and rice fields disappear and suddenly you are descending into a lush forested valley next to a rushing, cascading river. After about 30 minutes twisting and turning down the road you reach the park entrance, a rather unassuming stop on the right side of the road. After the park come the hotels which hug the sides of the valley sporting spectacular view of the lush valley below. 10 kilometers down the mountain from the park entrance you pass the last hotel and enter the Commune of Ranomafana. Ranomafana is a sizeable little burg with a few multi-story buildings, Gasy restaurants and hotelys, as well as a nice Sunday Market. It sits high up in the valley and everywhere you are surrounded by mountains topped with rainforest and accented by waterfalls. Most of Ranomafana is located on the North bank of the river, but the baths, the president’s villa (yes the president has a house here), as well as some Gasy homes are located on the South side. Thankfully a new bridge was cobbled together yesterday so one no longer needs a canoe to visit the other bank.

And I’m out of time, more next week

Mike

The Mail List

2010-03-21T20:51:00.002+03:00

This is a blog addition written by 'mom' to communicate information to those of you who are writing or sending packages to Michael and wondering, "Does it ever get there?" The answer is "no" in the eyes of a monarch butterfly whose lifespan is only 2 months long, but there is hope for us humans who tend to survive a bit longer than monarch butterflies, so please keep the communication headed to Madagascar...he loves hearing from everyone! He also has some great expectations for this week...the forestry expert he reports to is coming from Tana and, hopefully, delivering all the mail and packages that have been collected for him in the past 4 months...including items that originally went to Niger and have since been delivered to Madagascar. In other words, he gets to celebrate his birthday a month early with, hopefully, lots of great communication and letters!! I will update this after I talk to him midweek, but, to date here are the 4 pieces of mail that HAVE arrived as of this past week.
Ms. N's class from PA--sent Jan 15
The K family---sent Jan 19 (loved the hand written notes from each of the boys!)
Mom & Dad--sent Jan 23
Bro--sent Jan 30
He says that he has sent several letters this direction as well, but none of them have arrived yet. There is another batch going out in the next week or so that are being transported to the US and then sent...those will likely arrive the fastest!
Meanwhile, stay posted to the blog for the weekly updates!

Hubert

2010-03-18T08:51:00.003+03:00

This is a waterfall in Ranomafana

On Wednesday evening, tropical storm Hubert ambled ashore just north of Mananjary. Though Hubert did not have the powerful winds that would classify it as a cyclone, it had immense volumes of rain built up and proceeded to dump it all over Eastern Madagascar. Peace Corps Security had been warning me for days that something was coming and that I should refrain from travel so Sharbaraz and I batted down the hatches and hoped for the best. The storm hit Ranomafana just as I was going to bed on Wednesday night. The rain was unreal. I laid in my bed unable to sleep all night because the sound of the rain hitting my tin roof was loud enough to do serious ear drum damage. It was like trying to sleep with a gas lawnmower in bed next to you. The rain brought by Hubert wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t already been raining here for six days prior. As I mentioned in my previous post, Mananjary was already partially underwater last Saturday and the rain had not stopped since. On Friday the rain had finally ceased a people emerged from their homes to inspect the damage.
Ranomafana actually didn’t fair too badly. Years ago there was a cyclone that flooded the highway and ripped the large pedestrian bridge over the river down. It sits in a jumbled heap of twisted metal between the Station Thermal and the hot baths. To compensate, the Malagasy build a ramshackle wooden bridge with logs and boards that wove its way through the wreckage, sitting just a few feet above the water. On Friday that new bridge was a thing of the past and Ranomafana’s connection to the other side of the river was severed save by means of a canoe. This has left my counterpart Ratsabotsy stranded in his home on the far shore until something is done to fix the bridge. Down the road to Mananjary things were much worse. The highway was covered or destroyed altogether by landslides and over 38000 people have been left homeless nationwide. Mananjary itself is a mess, five people died in the storm and a significant portion of the homes in the city were destroyed. My co-worker Ashley was stranded at her post and had to hike 7k just to reach a place where she could catch a bus.
As I wrote last week, I needed to make another trip into Mananjary to compensate for last weekends failed attempt at using the bank. Not surprisingly, after the storm Mananjary was a no go. Therefore Ashley and I got approval from our APCD to go to Fianarantsoa and bank there on Monday. Fianarantsoa is my new favourite city in Madagascar, it has an uncanny beauty that I have not seen in any other city I have visited. Ever. It sits in a valley surrounded by green grassy hills reminiscent of what you would expect in Ireland. The city itself is a complex network of charming villas that were likely constructed during the colonial period. Everything is within walking distance and best of all Peace Corps owns a transit house that we were welcomed to use. The transit house is located right downtown in a beautiful white colonial building. It has soaring ceilings, a kitchen, bath, hot water, computer, library, oven, and anything else you could possibly ask for. Our original plan was to stay one night but we ended up staying two. When I wasn’t taking a hot shower or watching Across the Universe on the DVD player I was shopping in a real supermarket and also making visits to the offices of two large NGO’s in the region. It was an awesome three days.
This was not all that great a week for Sharbaraz. While she has learned HOW to use the litter box, she is still facing some challenges with consistency. This problem was highlighted on Monday night when she decided that it would be too much work to walk all the way to the other room and opted to make use of my laundry hamper. For this she received three quick flicks on the bottom and promptly lost privileges to my sleeping quarters. Her banishment was short lived, but the next evening I noticed she was getting sick. Whatever ailment she had rendered her weak and nearly unable to walk. At about 2AM on Tuesday I awoke to noise in the other room and found Sharbaraz valiantly dragging herself across the floor in a determined quest to get to the litter box. I was touched, proud, but also very concerned for her health. I scooped her up and carried her the rest of the way. She remained ill for almost two days. She was very cold so I brought her to Rodrigue’s so she could sit next to the cooking fire, however, she tried to walk around it and burnt her paw on a hot coal. She has since recovered from her sickness, but her right paw is still a little tender.
I also received my first bit of mail at site this week, and was at first disappointed to find that it was only a package from the med office in Tana. It contained two things: a new package of cypro- the antibiotic equivalent of the hydrogen bomb, and two sticks of something called “peaceful sleep” Its made by a company in South Africa, probably by elves using pixie dust and unicorn horns this stuff is that amazing. You put it on before you go to bed and it keeps the fleas off you while you sleep. It is now one of my most prized possessions and if you’re reading this Dr. A my legs thank you.

Mananjary

2010-03-08T08:45:00.000+03:00

I realize that last time I ran out of time before I got to the fleas portion of my post so I’ll start there this week. Yes I have fleas. In America, admitting that you have this skin parasite is equated with bad personal hygiene or lazy pet care. Not so in Madagascar. Here maintaining a flea free household is like trying to go waterskiing without getting wet. Everything has them, I assume this includes the rats which still inhabit my walls and I can usually find one each morning on Sharbaraz. Not only are these things as common as tourists on the Eiffel Tower, they are also next to impossible to kill. As soon as you find them they run away faster than a speeding train or jump over tall buildings in a single bound. I wonder if there is any kryptonite available in Madagascar.

The most notable casualty of my flea infestation are my legs. I don’t know what it is about this country but it does not agree with my legs. Between the fleas leeches biting flies and mosquitoes, my lower appendages have been transformed into a minefield of sores, bites, and strange bumps that I itch involuntarily causing them to break open. No amount of medical cream seems to help. Honestly someone needs to combine insect repellent, SPF 30, triple antibiotic, and hydrocortisone cream into a single tube and sell it to tourists as they deplane in Antananrivo. You could call it Crème de Malagas, it would make millions.

This week I had quite the adventure trying to use the bank. There are no banks in Ranomafana, so if you recall I had set up an account in the coastal city of Mananjary and each month Peace Corps allows us to make a trip to our banking town without using vacation time. The plan was that I would catch an early Taxi Brousse out of Ranomafana, pick up Ashley, a fellow PCV along the way and get to Mananjary by 10. Then we would spend the day banking, eating out, and shopping before catching a taxi back and being home before dinner.

I made it to the taxi stop at 6AM on Saturday and proceeded to spend 2 and a half hours waiting for the first taxi in the pouring rain before a rickety white van pulled up and I was stashed into the back seat. Though Malagasy taxi-brousses do not have seat belts, interior upholstery, or water sealed windows they all have a small flat screen television that plays Malagasy music videos on full blast for the entire journey. By the time we picked up Ashley there were already 20 people in the taxi van with me and we would cram in two more before it was all over. It took four hours smashed in a corner with an elderly Malagasy man in a straw hat asleep on my shoulder to reach Mananjary. It was 1 PM if I wanted to be back by dinner I would need to be back in the taxi in less than an hour, and it was raining. Ashley and I quickly made the decision that we would be spending the night and that our first order of business would be lunch. After ravenously consuming a steak frite at the most expensive restaurant in town we asked the waitress for directions to the bank. She told us where to find it but told us that it was no use going there because it wouldn’t open until Monday.

Mananjary was a depressing sight. The steady rain we had been receiving has flooded parts of the city to the point where stagnant water sat in the marketplace and long boats were parked in the streets. News also reached me that there were multiple confirmed cases of Dengue fever in Mananjary in the past week. We stayed in the ‘white person’ part of town, so called because it contains the only structures built out of cement in the entire city. Half of these buildings are abandoned and there is at most a handful of foreigners that live there but no matter. The entire rest of the city is a collection of bamboo huts with leaf roofs. If a steady rain can flood the place, I would hate to see what would happen after a real cyclone. If a big enough ocean swell came with it there wouldn’t be 20 buildings left standing in this regional capital.

Ashley and I looked in our wallets and realized immediately that we did not have enough money to stay in town until Monday and it was already too late to catch a taxi. Desperately we called Ryan, a PCV from another stage stationed in town and he graciously allowed us to sleep on his floor for the night. The next morning we caught another taxi and I limped back to Ranomafana with less than 30 cents in my wallet and only a small jar of strawberry jam to show for the weekend. We are going to try again next Tuesday. Wish us luck.

Fleas and Food

2010-03-01T08:20:00.002+03:00

Picture is of how laundry gets done here

I apologize for the short post this week, I had to write a monthly report to Peace Corps about what I have been doing here. If you would like to see a copy of it, send me or preferably the blog administrator (my mother) and e-mail and we can forward you a copy.

Well I've been here a month now, in sometimes it feels like it has been a few days, other times like I have been here a year already. I started to get into a routine that keeps me going. The first couple days in my house were, in retrospect, a little crazy. I had no furniture, little to do, and no idea how to take care of myself. Food was the main obstacle. For the first few days I biked into town and ate soup at a local hotely because my gas wasn't connected yet. Once that got taken care of I realized that my abilities in the kitchen were limited to say the least. For two weeks I at one of three dishes:

Mike's Menu

Pasta
Pasta noodles
one small tomato diced
one small onion diced
garlic clove diced
Thai hot sauce

Veggies
Half a zuccini
two tomatoes
hot pepper
some strange veggie I cant identify
carrot
onion
Chop everything up and cook in oil until it looks edible

Eggs and bread
2 eggs
bread
salt

breakfast everyday:
4 bananas

And I actually thought for a few days that I could get by on just that for two years. Eventually I caved and like any good American I subcontracted out the labor. Now I eat dinner each night with Rodrigue's family. Its a great deal because I get rice and something nutritious each night and I can work on my Malagasy with his wife and two young children. That is as long as you don't mind a few rocks in the rice and having peppered pig-intestines on Fridays.

Miss you all

Mike

2010-02-22T15:32:00.003+03:00

Last Wednesday Rodrigue showed up at my door holding the stiff rain-soaked remains of my first cat. “Maty” (dead) he said and he went over by the leeche trees to bury it, apparently life in the woods did not suit it well. Sharbaraz on the other hand is doing splendid. She figured out how to use a litter tray and has become taken with dozing in the sunlight on the floor.
That’s all the feline news for the week, I know last time I promised I would talk about work. My main work in Madagascar centers around a tree nursery run by SAF/FJKM that is located immediately behind my house. My two Malagasy coworkers are Rodrigue, my neighbor, and Ratsabotsy, an older man whose knowledge about the area seems limitless. We grow two types of trees in our nursery, fruit trees and “hazoala” or native rainforest trees. The fruit trees are our main concern. SAF/FJKM brought over a collection of high quality fruit trees from America and planted them in the Ranomafana Arboretum. Our job is to replicate these trees using direct seeding and grafting and then hopefully sell them to local people who can in turn make a living selling high quality fruit. The nursery was only started in May of 2009 so we don’t have anything sold yet. We have however been grafting and filling plastic pots with cow manure. Fun
The other part of the nursery is the hazoala. In order to acquire the seeds/seedlings required to grow these trees, we need to collect them directly from the forest. I have been on two such trips so far and they are quite an ordeal. I was warned ahead of time that they would be tough and to watch out for leeches so I donned my sole long sleeve shirt, long pants, running shoes and heavy socks. When I met Ratsabotsy at the trailhead he was in shorts, a t-shirt, and was barefoot. In order to get into the forest without going through the park (we aren’t allowed to collect in the park for obvious reasons) we need to take non-traditional paths up the slopes of mountains to reach the primary forest. On the first day it took us two hours of hiking up what can only euphemistically be called a trail to reach the forest. Once there we abandon the trail and began bush whacking through the undergrowth looking for anything interesting, and boy did we find some interesting stuff. Besides seeing two boas, we saw an endangered species of bird, lots of strange looking bugs and even one lemur, I think it was a Golden Bamboo Lemur but I am not certain. Ratsabotsy listed off countless names of different trees and plants to me in Malagasy and I remembered none of them. We collected seeds to one of the worlds smallest palm trees, some berries that were robins-egg blue, and a few things that Ratsabotsy didn’t recognize. It was great. Ratsabotsy had a good time too because he was laughing at me most of the time. The trail was slippery so I fell on my butt four or five times descending hills and I would stop every 25 meters in a vain attempt to keep the leeches from finding my legs. He found this very funny. The leeches had a hard time penetrating his calloused feet but they certainly had a heyday with my legs. By the time I got back I had well over 30 leeches on each leg and there was blood in all my clothes. I didn’t realize how serious it was until I stood up to fast and, for the first time in my life, nearly blacked out. As I lay on my floor, still bleeding from my ankles and recovering from what was a five hour hike, Ratsabotsy showed up fresh as a daisy ready to plant up out findings
The next time I was more prepared and had my pants tucked into long tube socks (much to Ratsabotsy’s amusement) but some of the leeches managed to suck though my socks, but I think if I double layer the socks next time I should be able to keep them out. Oh and another thing about leech bites, they itch like crazy for a week.
In other news, I am trying to start a garden without much success. There is a place next to my house that I have been trying to dig up, but the soil is very rock and I keep digging up old chunks of Route Nationale 26 which evidently bisected my yard at some point. I also had the idea to build a small shelter in the nursery for us to work in which we finished this week. Despite all that’s been going on it has been kind of a hard week here. I found out there was a coup d’etat in Niger so while it is a good thing I left, I have no idea about the safety of my American and Nigerien friends who are still there. There was a death in the village yesterday and some of my Peace Corps friends are having trouble at their sites which makes me worry, but there is nothing I can do. I also have way too much free time so I read A LOT. I published a reading list below so you can keep up with what I’m reading.
Anyway, Miss you all

Mike

2010-02-15T17:10:00.002+03:00

Picture is of me and my friend Katie weeding a rice field during training.

The first couple days at site were rough but ultimately rewarding. While I was held up in the hotel I made daily visits to my house and “helped” build the shower stall. By helped I mean stood by awkwardly and taught the kids how to play tic-tac-toe. I should have taken it as a bad omen when a papaya tree spontaneously cracked in half and fell on my shower, crumpling the roof and destroying one of the support beams but I was unphased.
The first night in my house was without exception the worst night of sleep I have ever had. First, my new foam mattress was as hard as a rock and would require some breaking in before I could sleep comfortably. Second, I was severely sun burnt from my afternoon washing my laundry in the river. And third, my house had rats.
After I blew out my candle my house was completely black, and I had naively not brought any light generating devices to bed with me. Thus I spent at least an hour listening in the dark as the rats climbed all over my things. I could hear them on my bike, on my gas tank, on my silverware and knocking over my water bottles. I took some comfort in my well secured mosquito net which I was certain that no rat could breach. Or so I thought. Did something just touch my foot!? I sat up in bed and hurled my Air-France courtesy pillow in the darkness at my feet. Nothing. I curled up in a corner and wondered how long it would be before exhaustion overtook me.
Suddenly I had a revelation. My watch! It has a light. I took it off and desperately began scanning the room will the dim green light let off by the display. Sure enough there was a rat in my net. As reached for a pillow it bolted into a corner and fled. At this point I was faced with a choice: wear out my watch battery from the breached fortress of my bed, or go out and bring the fight to them. Using my watch I emerged from my bed and located by cell phone flashlight and a heavy shoe and for the next thirty minutes chased rats (at least two) around my living room floor. My efforts were ultimately futile but I climbed in bed tired and feeling at least somewhat avenged.
The next morning I surveyed the damage. Large chunks of my newly whitewashed walls lay on the floor where new rat holes had been constructed. The tree samples I had collected the day before were destroyed, and the pineapple I had purchased for breakfast was half eaten. Rats 1 Michael 0.
After cleaning up I went immediately to my neighbor and co-worker Rodrigue (pronounced like Rodrigez but without the z) and told him that we needed to find a cat TODAY. So he graciously walked me down the road to a guy in town who had two extras. One of the cats was a two month old kitten who was still snuggled up with its mom and the other was a year old feline who was completely indifferent to my presence in the room. Being that I was looking for a cold calculated killer who would initiate a reign of terror over my resident rat population and not a cuddly ball of fur, I opted for the older cat. I stuffed it in my backpack and walked home. I owned that cat for about three seconds before it bolted to the door and disappeared into the banana grove behind my house. After three days of searching by the entire neighborhood and two very long nights spent in mild terror in my bed I went back to the cat guy and came home with the kitten. Her name is Sharbaraz.
Sharbaraz is the name of 4th century Persian general who was commissioned by his king Kousrau to destroy the Roman Empire. I thought the name was fitting for the situation I was bringing this cat into. Never mind that Sharbaraz failed to defeat the Romans and actually overthrew Kousrau but the name sounds feline and fierce and I like it.
Sharbaraz demands my complete total and undivided attention at all times. For the first few days she had a serious infestation of fleas (affectionately called parasy in Malagasy) which I spent hours diligently picking off of her. She likes to lick my chin and sleep on my shoulder. If I am not holding her she cries. When I cook dinner she cries, when I go to bed she cries. When I leave for work, she cries on the mat by the door until she falls asleep.
Now if I could only get her to use the litter box. Everytime it seems that I leave her alone in the room I come back to find a kitten surprise left in an unsuspecting corner. She once even made piddle in my laundry. She also is not old enough to catch rats, but her presence has resulted in a noticeable decrease in rat activity in the evenings.
That’s all for now, I promise I will write some about my work next time, but my hour is up.

-Mike

The Big Transition

2010-02-08T07:33:00.001+03:00

The events of the past week serve as a case study of what happens when a first world bureaucracy and a third world social organization combine with a language barrier to boot.
On Sunday everyone was bussed in to Antananarivo in preparation for the big day. There were many meetings to attend and papers to sign as well as lots of shopping that had to be done. First however, I needed money. Because all the branches of my banking company in Madagascar are locked in a childish battle for supremacy, I was unable to open my bank account in Antananarivo, I would have to do it in Mananjary. Peace Corps solved this problem by handing me my entire settle-in allowance and my first months pay in cash as I left the bureau HQ. Thus for the next week I would be responsible for keeping track of a stack of bills the size of a small chapter book all while commuting around a city that is experiencing one of the biggest spikes in crime in recent memory. Awesome.
Swear-in was great. It was held at the American Ambassadors residence in central Tana. It was a beautiful complex with landscaped gardens and an astounding view of historic Antananarivo. Despite the fact that most of the ceremony was conducted in incomprehensible rapid fire Malagasy, all of the trainees remained entertained by the huge lawn turtle that patrolled the grounds occasionally attacking the ambassadors folding chair. After the ceremony we were given run of the house and the pool as well as having Pizza and beer catered in. However, the highlight for me was my 5 minute conversation with the ambassador about the current state of Malagasy politics.
After that, chaos ensued. All 36 of us VOLUNTEERS, staying at two distant hotels in the city, needed to go to banks, do protocol visits, and shop for our new houses in the remaining daylight hours without the use of Peace Corps vehicles. The result was a frequent clown-car style taxi rides in little Renaults that only started by rubbing two wires together.
On Wednesday I was up early to catch the van South and by 7:30 we were “off like a herd of turtles” as Melissa so eloquently put it. By “We” I mean Ashley, Matt, Alison, Melissa, and myself, the sole volunteers responsible for the Sud-Est region of Madagascar. (A chuck of mountain and coast with two paved roads that is the approximate size of Portugal.) After passing through the beautiful cities of Ansirabe and Anbostra, we arrived first at my site, Ranomafana, by late evening. The plan was to visit my house, introduce my to people, and most critically to leave most of my belongings locked in my house while I continued on to Mananjary to do my banking. When I arrived at my house there was a very happy Malagasy family of four living inside of it and a big pile of sand and rocks outside on the road which turned out to be my no-yet poured cement floor. My house needless to say was not ready. We were assured that it would be ready soon, they only needed to pour the floor and finish building the new house for the existing Malagasy family. The family’s new home was next door to mine and was still lacking a roof. “It will be done by Saturday when you return!” Right.
Thus we were off like a herd of turtles again to Mananjary. We arrived before nightfall and Peace Corps put us up in modest beach side bungalows on the beach overlooking the Indian Ocean. Although the waters are shark infested and the under toe strong enough to drag down a full grown water buffalo, it did not prevent us from stealing out to the beach in our underwear at 9:30 for some frolicking in the waves by moonlight.
Now to the task at hand: Banking and Shopping. Essentially we had 24 hours to do all the shopping for our new homes and set up new bank accounts. The only hard part it turned out was buying a gas stove top. After buying the stove and the gas hose at store A (where incidentally we were greeted by the reigning Prime Ministers brother serving White Wine in plastic cups) we toured the city trying to find the gas to hook up to it. Eventually we returned to store A to buy an empty gas tank, bought a connector at store B and proceeded to store C to have it filled. However, store C which had earlier reassured us that they has gas was now suddenly out of gas, as was every other store in the entire town (we checked). This required us to drive all the way to Fianar the next day, an hour in the wrong direction, to finally get the gas.
Upon my return to Ranomafana, My house was still not done (surprise surprise) so I got put up in a Hotel until Wednesday when I was allowed to move in. There is lots more to say, but I cant afford to stay on the internet for more than an hour at a time so until next week

-Mike

Training in Anjozoro

2010-02-01T08:08:00.002+03:00

I apologize for my lack of writing in the past month, but I have thankfully been very busy and I have not seen a computer with Internet access since Christmas so to make up for it, this post is going to be immense.

Christmas in Madagascar turned out to be a flop. On Christmas Eve I came down with apocalyptic food poisoning out the backside and was forced to spend Christmas morn curled up in my bed listening to reruns of “Car Talk” and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” from last summer on my IPOD. Thankfully I regained enough constitution to brave the three-hour ride to Andasibe National Park on the 26^th. Our day at the park was a resounding success; we saw three different species of lemurs, including one family, which descended to the forest floor to play a game of tag while our cameras went wild. In addition to the primates, we also saw snails the size of tennis balls, Roly-Polys the size of golf balls, as well as colossal tree ferns. It felt like we had been transported not to a national park, but to the late Creosotic Period.

New Years in Madagascar was a tricky affair, mainly because none of us could agree on what time it was. The party planning committee (including myself) orchestrated an elaborate system of banners to be unfurled at various intervals leading up to Midnight when a big red exercise ball inscribed with HAPPY EW YEAR would be lowered from the ceiling. In the end, our decorations failed to be opened at the correct time and the ball dropped when no one was looking, hitting Melissa in the head and prompting everyone to yell Happy New Year at about 11:53.

Home stay

With the holidays out of the way, all of us trainees were moved into our Malagasy host families for the last 3 weeks of training. Thus on Jan 4 we were shuttled out into the sticks to an idealic little Malagasy hamlet called Anjozoro. My family turned out to be an older Catholic couple pushing 60 with six grown kids. How many people are in our house at any given time is completely variable, but most of the time my family consists of Mom, Dad, their 21-year-old daughter Flora, the heavily pregnant daughter Clara, her four-year-old son, and a 23 year old named Antoine. Additionally, there are three cows, three kittens, one cat, four pigs, two ducks, a bunny, one puppy, and a gaggle of the most poorly behaved chickens I have ever met. The chickens are constantly invading the house and my room looking for little specks of food to steal. I cannot leave my bedroom ‘door’ open for more than 30 seconds without a mother hen and six chicks leaping through the door.

The cats my parents own are seriously ugly felines. Aside form being uncomfortably skinny; their coats are a combination of orange and grey. They look as though you had taken an already unsightly orange tabby cat and stuffed him in a vacuum cleaner bag for a few ours. Unfortunately one of the kittens perished in one of the freak rainstorms that strike at least once every day. Our puppy is a different story. Shortly after I moved in I asked Flora what his name was, but she looked at me as if I had just asked her to name a gardening trowel. After I explained to them that all dogs in America have names, my mother proudly announced that the puppy’s name is Roky. Dad bought Roky for a chicken and he is maybe five months old and is incredibly cute when he is not covered in mud or bugs, which is not all that often. I also think Roky is responsible for the fleabites I have covering my legs and stomach.

We live together in a mud-brick house with five rooms. Per Peace Corps regulations I have an entire room to myself on the ground floor. The only way to get into my room is to climb through an oversized window because some large sacks of feed block my bedroom door. When I first arrived, I found my room furnished with a desk, bed, bookshelf, a broken coffee maker, and a refrigerator dating from the colonial period. My family has no electricity so I used the appliance to store my trunk. On the walls my family had hung a collection of Catholic paraphernalia, including a calendar from 1999 featuring the Virgin Mary and a portrait of a Malagasy Cardinal who I think died during the course of my home stay. His funeral was turned up on the radio in the kitchen for an entire day.

My mother is a stately old woman with skin that looks like old leather. She is an amazing cook and has been making amazing meals almost everyday. Food with my family is usually rather simple, always rice with some sort of veggie or sauce and desert always involves some fresh bananas or pineapple. Mom usually spends most of her day in the smoke-filled kitchen over an open fire making up the next meal. Her kids like to tease her because she has only five or six teeth; a condition she claims is a result of eating too many peanuts.

Food at my host family has been an interesting affair. We eat around a table in one of the bedrooms, by candlelight for dinner. As follows are some the high and low points of what I have been eating.

Lows-

Mangahazo (Cassava) –

Both the root and the leaves of this plant are considered edible here and Madagascar and it is the leafs that are particularly unappetizing. They are generally served pounded into a green pulp with pork over rice of course. Although it is probably healthier than swallowing a fist full of vitamins, it has the effect of making perfectly good meat taste like mud. One could probably replicate the taste, appearance, and flavor of this popular Malagasy dish by scrapping out the underside of your lawnmower and mixing it in with pulled pork in lieu of barbeque sauce.

Trondro Frite (Fried Fish)-

I normally like fried fish; fried Perch has to be one of my favorite foods. However I am not a fan when the fish are the size of match-boxcars and is both served and consumed whole. It reminded me of the locust I ate in Niger, crunchy and mushy at the same time.

Peanut Butter-

My family mistook the practice sentence “Mihinana voanjo aho” (I eat peanuts) written in my Malagasy notebook to mean that I love peanuts and all of their byproducts above all other foods, and I don’t have the heart to beak it to them that I only really like peanut butter spread over toast with honey or jelly. Thus breakfast was often simply peanuts, peanut butter, and plain rice. Better than just plain rice, but not by much.

By the end of my home stay, I was actually very somewhat thankful to my mother for preparing these dishes because I have actually developed an appreciation for these foods that I originally baulked at. I can de-bone a fish with confidence and have even acquired toleration for cassava.

Highs-

Soseti-

Soeseti is a hairy lime-green fruit that looks like a cancerous pear. It grows on a vine and I think it is in the squash family. In spite of its lackluster appearance, it is really tasty, Served with beans, it has the texture of a cucumber with twice the favor.

Rano Garana (Passion Fruit Juice)

Passion Fruit grows like a weed around here and there is tons of it in my parent’s garden. Flora will often come in before dinner with 30 of them and her and I will juice them by hand by candlelight before dinner.

Mofo Akondro (Banana Bread)

In America banana bread means bread flavored with bananas. In Madagascar, it is fried breaded whole bananas. Probably the best way to eat a banana in earth.

Overall my mother is an amazing cook. For a diet that is restricted to rice and the things that go on top of it, there are a so many tastes and flavors that the Malagasy have invented to top it. Seriously, Malagasy food is good stuff.

My chores around home have been pretty typical, do the dishes, cut up the onions, and look after Zaza manditra be (The very misbehaved child). I did get to spend some time climbing the family plumb trees picking fruits and passing them down to my dad. Saturday was laundry day and after an hour of unsuccessfully trying to was red mud out of my kaki pants; my clothes, underwear and all, were hung out next to the muddy road leading to the center of our village.

Things got a little crazy on Sunday afternoon as we were sitting down for lunch. Mother and Flora had prepared a meal of rice with soseti cooked with peanuts (sigh) when it started raining. Again. Flora and Clara jumped up and ran outside to grab my laundry, which after 24 hours, was still out by the road drying. At this point Clara went into labor and soon everyone was out of their seats running about except dad and I who sat eating our lunch and exchanging awkward glances. Mom ran in and shoved four clean plates in her purse and Antoine grabbed the big duffel bag of clothes as the family prepared to walk the 8 kilometers to the doctor’s office in the rain. After dad and I helped ourselves to a double helping of fresh pineapple for desert, father roused himself, went downstairs, captured one of the chickens running around the yard and stuffed it, clucking and squawking, into a yellow plastic bag. He told me that the family would eat it when they got to town. Flora returned later that day to report that Clara was in fact not having her baby but would remain in town for a few days with mom.

In Madagascar, one’s ability to stay clean is intimately related to the weather. Laundry must be done out doors when there in no rain in the near future. Hanging it out to dry is a real challenge. The sun is rarely out for more than an hour at a time so if you expect it to dry in one day you need to be lucky and pick a day with an abnormal amount of sun. Time on the line is often cut short by afternoon showers. When the rain does come, attentive housewives desperately collect the damp laundry, but sometimes it is left out is left out in rain. It will dry eventually. Bucket baths here are more challenging because of the weather. In Niger, our water was warmish out of the well and made hot by the afternoon sun. Here, summoning up enough gumption to pour a truly frigid cup of water over one’s head is more than can be asked of someone on a daily basis. There are two solutions to this problem. One is to ask my family to make a fire out of wood cut down from the forest to heat up my bath water. Not a terribly sustainable thing to be telling my host family as an environment volunteer. The other is to leave my bucket out in the sun for a few hours to warm it up. Again, very dependant on having a few hours of uninterrupted sunlight. Thus the more rain we get, the less likely I am to be showered or in clean clothes.

On January 22^nd, 2010 exactly three months to the day after we landed in Niger we officially competed our Peace Corps training. All of the trainees were moved back to the lakeside-training site and subjected to a language assessment. At 2:00 Peace Corps brought all of our Malagasy families to our training center for a thank-you ceremony. Each family was presented a certificate, the Country Director and the Mayor gave a speech, and all 36 trainees stumbled through a Malagasy song about being homesick. After the ceremony the kitchen staff rolled out a feast worth of appetizers that we demolished with astounding efficiency. Our families, some of whom barely have the means to put enough rice and beans on the table, were treated to shrimp, egg rolls, meatballs, peanut butter, brownies, and pizza. The scene that unfolded gave new meaning to the phrase ‘storming the food table.’ My sister told me she had not ever had many of the foods served, but still consumed them eagerly except the mini-pickles which she did not enjoy. Nothing went to waste. The unfinished bottles of soda were slipped into purses and little kids stuffed their pockets with broken potato chips. Once everything was picked clean, an impromptu Malagasy dance party ensued in the cafeteria. Everyone, including the mayor, chief of police, and elderly Malagasy mothers were all in on the action. Unfortunately all of our families had to be bussed back home before dark so the festivities were cut short.

The plan for the next couple days promises more excitement and activity. We are being taken to Antananarivo on Sunday where we will be prepped for swear in at the Ambassador’s residence on Tuesday. The event will be televised so any of you with Malagasy TV can tune in at 3 AM to watch. I want to give a special shout out to Grandma W who sent me the awesome package; it arrived on the 22^nd Thank you so much. Thanks as well to everyone who has sent letters everyday mail comes it is like Christmas for us. I will have a new address in the coming days, but the old one will still work, PC will just forward any mail on to my new one. I HOPE to have some decent Internet access at Ranomafana so I will be able to update my blog more thoroughly communicate more regularly with you all.

The promise

2010-01-31T21:54:00.002+03:00

I received word today after talking to Michael that he WILL be posting to this site by tomorrow!! Yeah!! He also indicated that he should have enough regular opportunities to visit the internet cafe to keep up his own blog from here on out!!! YEAH!!! More variety, more first-hand news, and MUCH more interesting tales than the alternate administrator has to share!
He told me lots of interesting stories today, but the one that really got my attention was when he said his roommate was back for the evening....I didn't know he had a roommate! He then explained that his roommate was a bat that comes and goes, and when I winced about that, he said there were many more critters in Madagascar that would be more frightening than a bat as a roommate. As a result, I am thankful, today, for my bat-free house!

New Title!

2010-01-27T06:35:00.002+03:00

Michael was officially sworn in as a Peace Corps VOLUNTEER today! What a great day for him!
He spent celebratory time eating burgers with his fellow volunteers and spent time at the US Ambassador's home with the Ambassador. Apparently the US Ambassador had a previous acquaintance with a Peace Corps Volunteer who became a Foreign Service Officer and was from Holland Michigan, so they talked about that a bit.
For the remainder of the week, Michael will travel to the coast to buy everything he needs to furnish his house....bed, table and chairs, etc. and get settled into his house near the National Park where he will be working. He is learning a bit more about his job now, and, as he describes it, "I am going to be doing almost the same work as I did at Walter's Gardens except with trees!"
He said the next time he gets near internet access he will download his latest blogpost...which he says is FOUR pages long! So if you see a post from him soon, put your feet up and grab a beverage. Happy reading!

pictures from the Peace Corps

2010-01-23T05:39:00.003+03:00

One of Michael's fellow PCT's published some pictures on the web, so I was able to borrow them and post them for his followers to see. I am still waiting for Michael's photocard to arrive, but he is waiting for the replacement photocard to reach him before he sends his out to me. Some of the pictures are from Niger; others are from Madagascar. Can you decide which one is from where?

Where is Michael???

2010-01-20T05:49:00.002+03:00

Unfortunately for the faithful readers looking for an interesting writing from Michael, you will be disappointed. This is just a quick update from the administrator. We talked to Michael on Sunday. He is enjoying Madagascar and is amused by its stark contrast to the living conditions that he had in Niger. It rains everyday in Madagascar....sometimes for the whole day! His cleanliness, he states, is dependent on the weather! He cannot do laundry on a day when the sun does not shine because the clothes will not dry. He also finds it difficult to bathe on cloudy or rainy days because it is such a moral dilemma. A dilemma? To bathe? The dilemma arises because if it is raining or cloudy, the water is REALLY cold! If the sun is out for at least a little while during the day, the sun will warm the water, and then it is a good day to clean up. If the sun does not shine, the water is too cold. The only other option for warming the water on a cloudy day is to use chopped wood to build a fire to warm the water. Hmmmm. Let's review: Michael is assigned to the PC to help in reforestation efforts because so many of the trees there are being chopped down for personal use or for sale and are not replanted. So how can the reforestation volunteer justify using wood to build a fire to warm the water just to wash up? Well, maybe tomorrow will be sunny!
The food situation is good there. Most things are served with rice, but there is much more balance in the other food groups. He gets meat and fruits and vegetables, so he is able to stay well nourished and keep weight on better.
He is currently staying with a host family who speaks only Malagasy, the language he is learning in class everyday. That is helpful for language skills. He likes his new "family", especially since there are no little children hanging on his pantlegs anymore!
He is greatly looking forward to his swearing in ceremony which takes place next Tuesday, January 26. He will then officially leave his "Peace Corps Trainee" title behind and become an actual "Peace Corps Volunteer". He is really excited about that. Shortly thereafter, he will transition to his new "home" near the National Park where he will begin working on the reforestation efforts.
He promises there are blog posts on his computer stick which he just has to plug in to a computer and upload when he has computer access. He isn't quite sure when that is going to happen, but it should be sometime soon, so keep checking for updates!
Thanks for reading!

Paris and Starting Over

2009-12-26T10:15:00.000+03:00

Paris
Our last few days in Niger dragged on for what seemed like weeks. Extended goodbyes, desert heat, and uneventful afternoons combined to make us all very tired and vary lazy. With almost nothing to do all day we bided our time watching taped episodes of Six Feet Under and Weeds on people’s laptops. We did your best to take everything in, waking up early to watch the sunrise and 13 hours later walking out to the mesa to watch it set over our training site. Our last few hours in Niger were spent sprawled out on our beds watching the stars in silence for almost an hour. At 9:30 we were crammed into vans for a final trip into Niamey. Arriving at the airport, we wandered through three separate metal detectors, two bag searches, and more passport checks than I can remember before we were finally allowed onto the tarmac for our 12:30 flight to Paris. I popped two benodryl as I stepped on the plane and successfully knocked myself out for the entire flight.
Paris was, as usual, a great experience. Being that this was my third time to the city of light, sightseeing was not high on my priority list, but there were many members of our stage who had never seen the city. We checked into our hotel near the airport early that morning and walked a mile and a half to the RER-D stop in the adjacent town. The Peace Corps had generously given us a whopping 20 euros to spend (sarcasm) and the ticket into town cost me 10 so after a fresh baguette, big chuck of cheese, and bottle of wine, I was done spending money. After gracefully scarfing my purchases in a Parisian park, I went on a walking tour of the city with my friend Julie, who had never been to Paris before. I tour-guided for her and a few other friends all around Paris’s major sites complete with visits to the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, and Notre Dame. By dinner we were beat so we retreated back to our hotel for dinner and hot showers.
The Paris hotel as well as our flights to and from Charles De Gaulle turned out to be a great stock-up opportunity for me. From the hotel I restocked on some much needed soap and shampoo. I also acquired two new pillows, two blankets as well as some magazines courtesy of Air France. It also gave me the opportunity to indulge just a little before heading back into the thick of things. I took three very hot showers in a 12-hour period just because I could and I used a hotel hairdryer for the first time in my life, just because it was there. Yet after all that cleaning I still had Niger-colored dust in my toenails.

Starting Over in Madagascar

Madagascar is a place that everyone seems to like in theory but no one really knows anything about. Most people know where Madagascar is and seem to enjoy the animated children’s movie set on this island nation, but that is all. I must admit that my knowledge of Madagascar was no more extensive. Once the transfer from Niger to Madagascar was announced, the 10-page section of the Lonely Planet Africa featuring Madagascar became a sacred text to all us trainees. Now I realize why so little is known about the world’s largest island nation: No one who comes here ever leaves. Madagascar is a stunningly beautiful nation of mountains, rainforests, rice paddies, and intense thunderstorms. Though Peace Corps has only been active here since 1994, there are at least 64 former Peace Corps volunteers that decided to make Madagascar their homes after their service was completed and after just 2 weeks here, I can’t say I blame them.
Our stage arrived in Madagascar at 1:00 AM on the morning of December 10th and since then we have been living at the main Peace Corps training facility. The term ‘training facility’ is not really a good term to describe the place where we live. If the training site in Niger could be called “Fort Peace Corps” the place in Madagascar could be called “Resort Peace Corps.” Located hour’s drive east of the capital Antananarivo, the center is built on a green peninsula jutting into a massive mountain lake. Our dining room boasts splendid mountain vistas with large bay windows and our accommodations are complete with beds, flushing toilets, hot water, and big closets. When I am not in language class my time is divided between long bike trips into the mountains or canoe rides into unexplored coves on the pristine lake.
Our afternoon activities are only restricted by the weather, which is predictably rainy. It has literally rained every single day since our arrival. The day can start out without a cloud in the sky, but every evening without fail a massive thunderstorm will roll in off the Indian Ocean complete with searing lightning and rolling thunder. The clouds usually begin to assemble by three of four and by dinnertime a full-scale monsoon is barreling down on us. After most meals a group of us assemble on the dining room porch to watch the towering clouds conquer the green mountains as brilliant lightning strikes on the distant hills. On one particularly eventful evening, we could see the moonrise, sunset, and lightning storm move in all from one chair. It is like nothing I have ever seen anywhere. I can’t imagine what this place is like when a cyclone hits.
After almost two weeks in language classes here, I can now say with some confidence that Malagasy is the worst possible language to play Wheel-of-Fortune with. The language is guilty of the drastic over use of the letter ‘A’ and every word seems to contain one ‘M’ or ‘N’. One can actually form a complete sentence using only these two consonants. (Manao inona ianao?) Additionally, Malagasy words are ridiculously long. Common verbs in English that require just a few letters require four or five syllables in Malagasy. The verb ‘meet’ translates to ‘Mahafantatra’ and the verb for ‘run’ is ‘Mihazakazaka’. If one can manage to pronounce these gargantuan words, Malagasy is an exceedingly simple language grammatically. All the verbs start with M and to change a word in to past the first letter changes to N and in the future the first letter is H. The language, however is nothing like anything I have learned before as it is actually most closely related to a language spoken on the Indonesian island of Borneo.
In the coming days and weeks there is allot of excitement planned. On the day after Christmas we are going camping in Madagascar’s most famous national park where we anticipate seeing some interesting wildlife, including the world’s largest lemurs. After New Years, We are going to be transplanted from our resort into the village at the bottom of the hill to live with Malagasy host families for three weeks. We have had some opportunity to explore our new village and it is a really fascinating place. It is located in a valley filled with lush green rice paddies and teeming with life. Ducks and geese patrol modest yards sporting huge pink hibiscus bushes and roses. The Malagasy people are all about six inches shorter than the average European so all the homes, while usually two-stories tall, look like they are build for dwarves. I anticipate that this will be a problem for me once I move into my Malagasy house considering I already have to duck to enter most of the shops and stores.
Yesterday also marks my first Christmas away from home with Peace Corps. Curiously enough, the holiday season in the third world is markedly different from what I have grown accustomed to. A brick of newspaper failed to arrive at my doorstep to mark the eve of Black Friday, I have seen no inflatable Santa-and-reindeer snow globe lawn ordainments, and I have yet to hear any Christmas advertisements to attract me to the malls. Christmas in Madagascar has really been a low-key affair. In all honesty it is really hard to get into the ‘holiday spirit’ when you are around no family, in the middle of a jungle and you wake up early on Christmas morn to attend a 2-hour Malagasy language session. There has been a concerted effort to bring some holiday cheer to our training site. Each of us was assigned a Secret Santa and a budget of 5000 Ariari for gifts, one of the girls has been playing carols off her IPOD during meals and during a long drive to the market town our van stumbled though as many Christmas tunes as we could remember. The real ‘presents’, however, come when someone gets a phone call from home and the lucky recipient always hangs up with a smile on their face and a little Christmas in their hearts.
I can say with some confidence that Madagascar is the exact opposite of Niger. Niger was hot, dry, flat, landlocked, and Muslim. Madagascar is cool, green, wet, hilly, Christian (for the most part) and a tropical island. The currency here is called Ariari; the exchange rate to the dollar is approximately 2000 to 1. In terms of dollars, things here are even cheaper than they were in Niger. One can buy a kilo of rice for 50 cents and a chocolate bar will put you out a solid 12 pennies. The national beer in Madagascar is called Three Horses Beer and one can buy a .65 liter bottle for approximately 80 cents. Surprisingly, Three Horses aka THB is actually really good, better than any mainstream American brew I have tasted. However, on our budgets 80 cents is rather expensive so I have limited myself to just two bottles since our arrival.
As I expect my mother has already written, I got my site announcement a few days ago. After I swear in as a PCV at the end of January, I will be moving to the village of Ranomafana (Malagasy for ‘hot water’) a few hours south of the Capital Antananarivo. Although I know very little about this place that will be home in a little over a month, I do know that it is adjacent to one of Madagascar’s biggest and most renown national parks so I expect to get very close with some of the very unique wildlife that calls Madagascar home. In terms of flora and fauna, Madagascar really is in a league all its own and Ranomafana is reported to be one of the great sactuaries of Mother Nature. There are 12 species of lemur and 68 species of bird that are only found in Madagascar which can be found in this park and the plant life is supposed to be just as impressive. Thus I am very excited to FINALLY finish Peace Corps training and become a volunteer.
While Madagascar is a paradise in almost everyway, politically this place is an absolute mess. Isolated up here in the mountains we don’t receive allot of news, but what we have pieced together about what is happening in the capital is not very encouraging. The coup d’etat, which ousted the president in March of this year, is still in full force. As a result the man with the power in Antananarivo is a 34 year-old former DJ who is constitutionally forbidden from assuming the presidency. There was a transitional government formed, a government that has one president and two ‘half-presidents’ however, many foreign governments, including the US, do not recognize the transitional government. In November the three presidents went to Africa for some confrence and in doing so perturbed the DJ turned dictator who now refuses to send a plane to bring them back to Madagascar. In playground terms the new kid pulled up the rope ladder to the tree-fort that is Madagascar. So while the only government with any thread of legitimacy is hundreds of miles away in Mozambique or South Africa, the economy of Madagascar has gone to the dogs. What once was a healthy tourism industry has taken a 90% hit. Some generous trade programs with Madagascar have been suspended and a bunch of factories may be forced to close. As a result many Malagasy have been forced to turn to illegal logging for income. The rainforests and wildlife here is some of the best in the world but it is impossible to keep people from logging when the starvation of their families is at stake. I anticipate much of what I will be doing at Ranomafana will be related to preventing this from taking place. Even here at the PC training site deforestation is evident. Entire hillsides are left barren exposing the red soil underneath. When the cyclone rains come later this year, much of the topsoil will be washed into rivers, which will turn a crimson-hue as a result. During past years of heavy deforestation, astronauts have commented that after a heavy rain, Madagascar looks like it is bleeding into the Indian Ocean, and in a very real sense, it is.

I hope everyone back at home is enjoying their holiday and the cold weather, although mail service to Madagascar is reportedly even slower here than in Niger, letters are highly sought after and appreciated.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Michael

The Assignment

2009-12-22T06:38:00.003+03:00

posted by the administrator

Michael received his assignment today and was very excited to find out he would be doing environmental work in the cloud forest of Ranomafana. Near the town of Ranomafana is Madagascar's largest National Park where he will assist in reforestation efforts there, perhaps do some rice farming, and work on any other project that his community will need. He will leave for his village assignment after his swearing in ceremony at the end of January. See this link for more information on the area.
http://www.wildmadagascar.org/conservation/parks/Ranomafana.html
I'll post more later and watch for a personal post from Michael in the next few days!

News from Madagascar

2009-12-11T06:22:00.003+03:00

Michael chatted with us this morning from his new home in Madagascar. Here are some highlights:
-Life in Madagascar is the opposite of living conditions in Niger; they currently have all the comforts of home: toilets, showers, hot & cold water (either/or but not warm water), closets, buildings made of bricks with windows, trees, rain most every day, good food, fruits and vegetables, etc.
-The place they are currently staying is a training center that is often used by other high-ranking officials for retreats and meetings; it is very beautiful, located on a peninsula jutting into a lake in which they are allowed to play with boats and canoes--as long as they do not swim in the water. There is a risk of contracting Schistosomiasis, so there is no contact with the water.
-Madagascar has lots of trees and hills. They have been doing some mountain biking for fun during breaks from their lessons.
-He is now learning the native language: Malagasy; although it is confusing to be learning yet another language, he says it is a very logical language which helps his learning process
-The people there are "small" in comparison to most Americans. Most do not get much taller than about 5'6".
-He gets paid less in Madagascar, but things are typically cheaper. He can buy a beer for about 80 cents.
-Most of the clothes available for purchase there are second hand from the U.S. He isn't really opposed to wearing second-hand clothes--except for the socks and underwear!
-There are not many roads in Madagascar so road transportation is long and laborious. The roads they do have are often washed out by the flooding that occurs when the cyclones hit. If one needs to be transported for a medical issue, they will send a plane.
The French have a big influence there which gives them access to delicacies such as Laughing Cow cheese!
Michael knows he will be posted in the northern section of Madagascar, and he will find out specifics about his post and his job in about a week. Look forward to more posting then!

Old Update #3

2009-12-11T05:07:00.003+03:00

November 18, 2009
Our PC retreat began on Sunday, November 15. Typically Sundays are really boring days for us trainees; we have no scheduled class or activities and we are responsible only for finding our own breakfast. By 8am a large group of us Anasara (white people) had gathered on the street to slurp bags of sulani next to piles of smoldering garbage. All of the Zarma trainees who are housed in other villages had biked into our village for lack of anything better to do, so there were even more of us loitering around than is normal. By 10am we had broken into smaller groups; I hiked through the fields and villages surrounding the water hole with a group of friends, and, after lunch, settled down in a friend's hut to wait out the afternoon heat.
At 3pm there was a knock at the door. It was our language teachers. The Emergency Action Plan had been activated. Because of where the PC operates, it always needs to be ready in case a situation should arise in a country. Therefore, the PC uses a 3 stage response system. Stage 1 is standby--restricted travel and no leaving the village. Stage 2 is consolidation--report immediately to a safe house so that all personnel are accounted for and are in a controlled environment. Stage 3 is a full nationwide evacuation. The teachers informed us that we were at Stage 1 and not to panic because there was a possibility that this was a test.
Sunday was also the day the weather changed. For the first 3 1/2 weeks, the weather was constant and predictable. The sun beat down on the parched Nigerien soil from 9am until 6:30pm when the dimness brought on by an impending sunset made walking in unshaded areas tolerable once more. After we were moved to Stage 1, something changed; a deep haze enveloped the country. Visibility dropped down to a few hundred meters, and the once punishing heat of the sun was dulled as it continued its westward journey. It was as if a heavy smoke or fog had moved in, but the air remained dry and sweet smelling. The weather, combined with our lack of knowledge about what was happening gave everything an eerie quality and had all of the trainees on edge.
As I walked home, I turned the corner only to run into a fellow PCT. We were both startled and she tried to comfort me by giving me a big hug. While a hug from a friend certainly helped, its comforting qualities soon wore off when at 5pm I discovered we had been moved up to a Stage 2. All of the Zarma trainees who had biked in that morning were forbidden from returning home and instructed to report immediately to the safe house. Those of us living in the village were ordered to return to our houses and travel only when necessary and only in groups. None of us had been told what had happened, only that this was not a test and we would be briefed on the situation in the morning. I got a call from home at 6:15pm. With Grandma, relatives, parents, and family friends all conferenced in on the call, I resisted the temptation to alert the home front and conducted the phone call as if all was well.
The rest of us trainees were evacuated to the safe house the next morning. we were told to go back to our host family's and pack one bag for the next 2-7 days and not to tell anything to our Nigerien hosts. As could have been predicted, this sudden evacuation was enough to upset some of the host mothers who quizzed us in Hausa as to what was happening as we packed up our things. It was all we could do to respond only with "Ban sane ba" (I don't know) and hurry out the door. The safe house is one of the safest places to be in all of Niger. It has enough bed space and food to host us for a week. Once we were all safe, we were briefed on the situation. Four armed gunmen attempted to kidnap three American foreign service officers in Tahoua. The attack was unsuccessful, but it set off alarm bells all over the American Intelligence community. The situation has been weighing heavily on us. We have been sequestered here for a week, and we are not scheduled to be released for another 3 days. It is tough to stay focused on learning Hausa and agriculture when we have no interaction with average Nigeriens and are faced with the possibility that we could be evacuated if something else happens.
Thankfully the food here is great (I have put a few pounds back on!) and the staff has done their best to keep our spirits up. We were given an entire day to rest and tonight we are throwing a dance party in the cafeteria. Our country director got special permission from the Ambassador to come out and spend time with us answering questions and calming us down.
Apparently PC has decided to close the Tohoua and Konri regions and cram the existing PCVs into other regions. Then, by December 30, our Associate PC directors will need to find places for us 26 PCTs in the same regions. Needless to say, these terrorists have turned PC Niger into a logistical nightmare. In the end, none of us really know what is going to happen to us. Living as an ex-pat has taught me a lot about patience and going with the flow. We are scheduled to be released from our safe house on Friday. Hopefully we will be able to complete our service without any more consolidations.
--Michael

Old update #2 Demystification

2009-12-08T05:58:00.006+03:00

Written over Demyst: November 6-13, 2009
Fifteen days down; 784 to go! Things are cooling down here in Niger, the weather becomes tolerable around 5pm, and it is getting legitimately cold at night. I finally broke out my light sleeping bag. I am adjusting to life in my town. We did a tour of the village the other day, and now I can navigate the streets confidently in the pitch black that blankets the town at about 7:30pm each night. Suddenly where the moon is and what cycle it is in has become very important. While the moon has been relatively bright for the past few nights, the moon is rising later and later each night so when we go to visit our friends after dinner we are often tripping over the garbage littering the streets. I have been playing lots of cards in the past week. My roommate, Matt, gave his cards to our kids to play with; big mistake. In less than 5 days half-eaten cards had found their way all over my family's compound. The queen of spades somehow found its way 3 blocks down the street. To avoid my kids, some of us have been meeting for games in our huts. I taught a bunch of fellow PCTs how to play Up and Down the River and now we play it almost everyday. We find ourselves avoiding the children a lot. Don't get me wrong, the kids are great, and they are really good and really patient teachers, but there comes a point when you don't want 6 very dirty, naked African children grabbing for your hands and asking for your camera. The novelty of friendly African children has completely worn off. We were sitting in our test gardens yesterday, and a group of Zarma-speaking children stood at the fence screaming, "FoFoFoFo!" (hello) "Comment to t'appelle" which means, "what is your name?" in French and is the only French any of these kids speak. We ignored them for 1/2 hour.
I have been reading tons since I got here. I finished Birds without Wings and polished off Blue Like Jazz in less than 2 days. It was really good, thanks, Diana! This, however, means I have already halved my supply of books (so send more!)
We all look forward to the core days we have on Tuesdays and Fridays. The name of our training site in Hausa means "top of the rock". We like it because we can eat a lot of fruits and veggies, spend a few minutes with air conditioning, and we can behave like Americans for a few hours. After our language and shots are done, we change into shorts, put our Ipods on speakers and play volleyball for 2 hours. Yesterday was a special core day because the American Ambassador came to speak to us. She is a stately African-American woman who is nearly finished with her time in the Foreign Service. We got to ask her lots of questions and she gave us some hope that the travel ban to Agader would be lifted. She also told me that 15% or so of Foreign Service officers are former PCVs so that gave me a lot of hope for getting in to the Foreign Service after my PC service. Ambassador Allen gave all of us her card and stayed for lunch with us. There was meat in our rice for lunch, and for dessert we all got a meningitis shot! After lunch she had to go to a meeting with the Prime Minister; things are not well in Nigerien politics.
Now I am on Demystification, aka 'demyst'. This is the period where we leave our training town and spend 5 days with a real PCV in the field. My "demystifier" is named Errin and her site is in the Dosso region. Her village is 10 km from the main road and any electricity. The cool thing about this area is the giraffes. We got dropped off by the PC "magic bus" (magic because it has air conditioning!) off the side of the road where Errin met us. She told us that we would be walking 10K out to her village. Luckily, a few other PCVs showed up and wanted to go out to see the giraffes. One of the PCVs had her parents visiting her and they wanted to see the sites. The very last herd of West African giraffes lives in this region. There are only about 150 of these types of giraffes left in the world, and they are all here in Niger. We all hopped on the bandwagon and drove out to the bush for a giraffe safari. My fellow demystee, Alison, and I were sitting in the back of an SUV driving through the bumpy fields We were warned not to lean back or we would risk the backdoor latch failing and falling out on to the dirt. After 20 minutes our guide pointed right and suddenly we were in a herd of 13 West African giraffes. It was amazing! Here we were in the middle of the bush chilling next to a herd of endangered giraffes. There was a baby between 1-6 months old in the herd; it was really cute. It was a surreal experience; giraffes are really mellow creatures. You can walk right up to them, maybe 20-30 meters away. They stare at you like a confused puppy, and then they keep eating. I took tons of pictures! Following our mini-safari, the other PCV's dropped us off in Errin's village, thankfully sparing us the walk. Her village is considered the epicenter of nowhere because the water table is so low and there are few water sources around here. The town well is 50 meters deep and women can pull no more than 7 buckets without exhausting themselves. Errin tried once but it tore up her hands so now she leaves it to the locals. Errin has her own concession with a shade hangar, small hut, latrine, and a pet cat named gutter. Her hut is surrounded by a millet stalk fence which has collapsed 3 times in the last year. Last time the neighbor's cows came and ate her roof. Her millet-stalk door had fallen apart so, after playing some cards, we set to work making her a new door. It took us about an hour, but eventually we threw together a sturdy door out of millet and a few strips of cloth. The next day we were toured around the village. It took a few hours because literally everyone and their cousin insisted upon greeting us and inviting us to sit. We met the chief of the village, a wide-eyed friendly old man who, according to Errin, sits under a big tree and reads the Koran all day, although we really have no idea how much Arabic he actually understands. Various aid organizations are active in this village. The EU has build a grain bank and an Islamic aid organization built a foot pump at one of the wells and a health clinic that is occasionally staffed.
All of the PCVs I have encountered comment on how clean and "fresh off the plane" we are. Alison and I have likewise been observing how "weathered" all of the PCVs look. Their t-shirts are streaked and faded in the sun with holes stitched up with sewing kits. I am learning new things like "sun washing" clothes which really doesn't wash them but keeps them from smelling too badly. Or, if you put your water bottle in a clay jar filled with water, it will stay cool even in the heat.
For dinner we managed to put together some spaghetti-type stuff. After we had finished eating, the neighbor boy brought over some locust he had caught and cooked up for us. We were obligated to try them as that same boy had tried some almond M&M's Alison had brought for Errin. He was convinced the M&M's were poison, but he ate them anyway. The locust he brought were fried or something because they tasted like a bad potato chip. After that ordeal passed, we sat out on mats and stared at the stars until 11pm. I managed to get a hold of mom & dad on Sunday, and I found out I passed the Foreign Service Exam, but I don't know how to get to an interview when I am held up in the middle of nowhere.
On Tuesday we got up before the sun came up around 6am. We were meeting up with the other PCVs at the Peace Corps hostel. However, in order to get to the road, we needed to hike 11 km through the open bush to get to the road. If we left much after 7, it would get too hot and we might not be able to go. We got everything in the backpacks and left by 6:45am. We arrived at the road 2 hours later just as the heat was setting in. A Nigerien man flagged down a bush taxi for us. Nigerien bush taxis are just larger than a VW bus and have the approximate body structure of a poorly-constructed tin can. Errin, Alison, and I, as well as 16 other Africans, smashed into this mobile death trap. Errin told us that she once had to sit next to a woman with a bucket full of dismembered goat parts on her lap. After a very hot hour ride, we arrived at our destination and made our way to the hostel. At the hostel I stocked up on books and met lots of current PCVs.
On Wednesday we bussed into Niamey. There is one "foreigner" store and restaurant there; we were so famished that we ordered pizza and burgers at 9am.
I don't know if any of you have been paying attention to the political situation in Niger, but things are not well here. We only get snippets of news from the BBC or other volunteers, but apparently government leaders are behaving in a way that the other countries in the region find undemocratic. In the past Niger has set the example for democracy in the area. There has been free and fair elections here for years now. Therefore, what is happening now is considered a big deal: ECOAS is upset with Niger and some states are talking about sanctions. So keep Niger in your thoughts and pay attention to the news because Niger is really exploring some new territory here.
Being in Niger has taught me so much already about the little things. Mirrors, for example, are a little thing that we never really think about, but when you remove it from your life, looking in a mirror becomes a strange luxury. Little bits of American food or candy are priceless gems here. All of the PCTs share religiously. One of my friends got a package from home and the first thing she did was pass around the dried apricots and cheddar flavored snacks. Another big thing that we miss immensely here is cheese! I never realized how much I love cheese until now. All of the goat/cow/sheep milk here potentially has TB in it, so we can't drink any unprocessed milk or cheese (which is 90% of what is available here). We are essentially getting only one of the food groups consistently, that being breads and cereals; everything else just does not exist for at least 20 miles in all directions. To help out our bodies, Peace Corps has us on prenatal vitamins, but that can only do so much. I have already dropped 12 or so pounds, but I am not yet sick. Some of our other volunteers have not been so lucky. At least 8-10 of the other PCTs have gone up to the infirmary for treatment in the past 2 days--an alarming trend for sure!
Today in gardening we got to plant our veggies. The main season for gardening here is during the cold season even though it may seem counter intuitive to lay down a garden in the middle of November, that's how it goes here. I planted tomatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, lettuce and sweet peppers. It is unlikely, however, that I will see any fruits of my labor before I am sworn in and placed at my site on December 30.
I find out what village I will be living in for the rest of my term of service on December 1 (Happy Birthday to Lauren!), so that is a big day for me. After we get assigned our sites we go out and spend a week at them in early December, so I will have a really good idea of what my service will look like after that.
I hope all is well back in Michigan or wherever this letter may find you. While I love being and working overseas, I always miss my hometown, my family, and my friends immensely.
--Michael

Old Update #1

2009-12-08T04:28:00.004+03:00

As the current blog administrator, I have been asked to post the letters Michael sends to me. It took until last week for me to get any letters after the one he sent on day 2 of his Nigerien experience...then I got 3 all at once. He has since posted "live" last week but has asked that I still post the "old news" because he invested so much time in sharing his experiences with you, his followers. I am posting these in reverse order, and I may not get them all done at one time, so keep checking back! Grab a beverage and get comfie; these are long entries!--the mom--
10/26/09
Dear friends and family,
I have been in Niger for only four days now and I have enough strange and interesting cultural experiences to fill an encyclopedia. I should start by saying the the Peace Corps is hard, very hard. Two days ago I moved in with my host family. Our place is a large concession with 2 trees, a garden, 2 adobe buildings and a grass hut. There is also a pit latrine and an animal enclosure propped up against the tall walls that surround our house. Our place is way on the outside of the town. It is on the side of town with the "lake" on it. By "lake" I mean seasonal water hole that is at best a pond and at worst a glorified mud puddle. It is the end of the wet season, so the water hole is rather full with reddish-brown water that actually looks rather gross. My family consists of a mom, dad, four young children between the ages of 3 and 12, three sheep, ten hens, and two very loud roosters that wake me up at 5am. My roommate, Matt, and I live in the grass hut in the middle of our concession. There is a little grass fence surrounding our hut. We keep our stuff in the hut and sleep outside. There is a padlock on the hut, but I doubt it would dissuade any potential robbers as the walls are made out of dried millet stalks. The lizards have already found their way in! The first thing my host family did was to give me a new name. My Nigerien name is Habibou (Ha-bee-boo). I was named after the youngest of my brothers, an adorable little boy who runs around all day wearing only a tank top and has a huge protein deficiency. We spent our first day in the village exploring with an armada of young African assistants carrying our water bottles and monopolizing our cameras. We have our own money for breakfast each morning, and we go down the main drag for some good eats. The only road with any stores is the main "paved" road running out of Niamey and some of the huts there have electricity. My favorite breakfast so far is a chilled yogurt drink that comes in a bag. It costs 100 CFA (about 20 cents).
Lunch and dinner are served at our host family's house. Eating in Niger is a very interesting experience. We sit on mats in the dirt in a circle. Dinner comes on a massive platter; my host mom generally uses a colossal pizza pan. Then we all eat out of the same dish with our hands. I'm serious. This presents a host of potentially embarrassing issues. Generally the food is served really hot, and I have already scalded the tips of my fingers on overheated rice. It is recommended that you mash the food into a ball in the palm of your hand because your plam can take more heat; this means you must literally shove your whole hand into the same dish everyone else is eating out of. Once you have the food in your hand, one is presented with the challenge of getting it to your mouth. I am a messy eater to begin with, but trying to eat rice or small bits of pasta with your hands while seated on the ground has taken me to an entirely new catagory of messiness. Once I am finally done eating, there is food everywhere: on my face, on my pants, on the ground, in my hair, etc. It looks like someone dropped a small grenade into the dish. Once the food is to your mouth, you still have to get it inside. Nigeriens can gracefully pop their balls of rice into their mouths; I essentially wipe my food all over my face in order to get any inside. Additionally, we are almost invariably overserved. The dish served to Matt, me and the father was about 1 1/2 inches deep with rice over the whole pizza pan. It is all I can do to just polish off a tiny corner of the pan. Once we have finished we are expected to take our bucket shower and go to bed.
It is really hot in Niger. We are moving into the "cold" season and it is still unbearable everyday from about 12noon-4pm. In the states we can escape the heat by going inside to the basement or taking a cold shower. In Niger there is no escape. There is no where to go and cool off for a bit. No cold shower; not even cold drinks. The heat is everywhere. The best one can do in the hot hours is find a shady spot and bed down for a while hoping there is a breeze. I have started learning the Hausa language and tomorrow is our first big day of lessons. There is a lot of importance placed on learning it. My host family has been drilling me on random vocabulary that I can't make sense of. I need to attain an intermediate level comprehension of Hausa in the next 9-11 weeks or I cannot be placed at a service site for the next 2 years. It is a lot of pressure, but I keep thinking that, if you put together enough heat and pressure you will get something beautiful out of it. :>)
It keeps occurring to me how fitting the colors of the Nigerien flag are. The orange-brown on the top is the color of all the dirt and sand here. The pale green is the color of the Gao and Eucalyptus trees that are everywhere and the white is the color of the blinding sunlight that bakes this place 12 hours a day.
The Peace Corps is very concious of the health of the volunteers. We get lots of shots; today we got typhoid and rabies #1, and there are more to come. The main concern of our med staff is 'Mr D.' coming to visit us. Mr. D., aka diarrhea, is a serious problem in Niger because there are a plethora of water and food borne pathogens that can cause it. Today one of our doctors used the "Welcome to Niger" poster that was made for us to list all Mr. D's possible causes. For every 100 PCV's ther are 175 reported cases of severe acute diarrhea per year. Because Niger is so dry, Mr. D is no laughing matter as it can very quickly lead to dehydration. We are accustomed now to hearing horror stories about Mr. D visiting PCV's at the worst possible times, i.e. when crammed into a bush taxi with 18 other people. This phenomenon has been termed "riding it hot" by other PCV's. If Mr. D does pay me a visit, we are all trained to use our intestinal pathogen detector kit" to submit a stool sample to the lab in Niamey for further analysis. In addition to our shots and anti-diarrheal precautions, we are all on 2 types of malarial meds. The first is a daily green pill that makes the skin extremely sensative to sunlight. Good thing Niger is not a sunny country! :>) Luckily we only have to be on it for 2 weeks. The other is a weekly pill whose side effects are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, in particular vivid, crazy dreams. This I need to take for my entire service. I am not sure if it is affecting me yet, but I did have a dream last night about trying to buy an advanced electric hot water heater for $3045. Tuesday is market day in our town, and it is pretty much chaos. Everyone seems to have brought all their livestock to the center of town for some reason. I have never seen so many skinny cows and overladen donkeys. People bring their various products and set them up in stalls made of sticks. I saw piles of clothing just like the stuff I baled in Holland being sold right next to traditional fabrics. There are large portions of goats and sheep hanging from crossbeams, completely skinned except for their tails. The whole area is under the continuous assault of flies which are ever-present in rainy season. Walking through the village it almost seems like a big step back in time. It seems like life has been like this here for hundreds of years, and it has changed very little. The only difference is the garbage. There is trash everywhere on the street and most of it is non-compostable cheap plastics. There is plastic garbage all over, and there does not appear to be any organized way to dispose of it. Some big heaps of trash have begun forming in abandoned houses and dead-end alleys, but I still feel guilty disposing of my trash on the ground.
My Peace Corps group thus far is great. There were supposed to be 42 of us but 3 never made it to staging, one girl was told at the Niamey airport of a family matter and was rushed home, and another girl gave up after 2 days, before we were placed with families. The attrition rate for Peace Corps Niger is really high. A past group lost almost 50% of its members over the 2 years. It is testament to how difficult things can be here. Niger is also Mr. D's favorite place to visit of all the PC countries. However, I cannot imagine any of the remaining 37 would leave at this point. We are all becoming very close, and we are all interesting and motivated people. All of my fellow PC trainees (PCTs) live with various families in the area. It is really good to meet up with them occasionally and tell stories. On the first night we were with the host families, one of the girls' mother had a baby. In Nigerien culture it is considered shameful for a woman to cry out during childbirth, so the PCTs did not know the baby was born until the next morning. Another family celebrated the arrival of their PCTs by slaughtering 6 goats and leaving their severed heads in the courtyard overnight. I have not had the pleasure of slaughtering an animal, although I think one of our chickens might get the axe soon. Another PCT complained that the rooster woke her up in the morning and returned home to find she was eating it for dinner. I can only hope my rooster meets the same fate soon.
Here are some other things I have learned in and about Niger:
1. Goats taste like they smell
2. Everything is cheap except postage
3. Assume everything is contaminated with Giardia or E-coli
4. Everyone likes Obama
5. pooping in a hole the size of a tin can is not easy
6. Toilet paper is not native to the area
7. Chew with caution
8. clothing for children under the age of 7 is completely optional
9. Niger has more wildlife than you would expect
10. poop is a common and very serious topic of conversation among PCTs
There is so much more to talk about; it seems the further from America I go the more interesting things there are to write about. I am sorry my blog posts are not up to the same standard as they once were, but without the luxury of a word processor, it is impossible to properly organize and edit my thoughts as I did before. I hope this post/letter finds you all well. I think about home all the time; I am confident that the Chips (CMU Chippewas) have continued to dominate the gridiron, and I hope for the success of MSU at the expense of OSU. It is strange how no one here has even heard of the things that are so important to us Americans. Please write lots.
Love you all,
Habibou

Niger

2009-12-03T16:05:00.003+03:00

It’s true, after only six fabulous weeks in Niger, I am leaving. Rather than throwing all of my thoughts into an incoherent letter for my mother to copy down, I wanted to take a few hours to write something a bit more personal and organized, I think Niger deserves it. Niger is not an easy place to like. Most of the country is empty and featureless. Aside from the occasional mesa rising a few meters off the Sahel, there is literally nothing as far as you can see in all directions. Niger has no lakes, one river, and no coastline. The earth is either hard like concrete or thick with dusty sand. There are three things in Niger that make life here extremely uncomfortable. The first thing is dust, it gets into everything. I feel it in my hair, see it caking my feet and taste it when I eat the food. By American standards, there is nothing that is clean. In all honesty I would consider my kitchen floor cleaner than almost any surface in this entire country because as soon as you “clean” something a bug crawls on it, a breeze brings in a fresh coat of dust or a dirty child picks it up and starts playing with it. The second is the heat. When I came to Niger, the ‘mini-hot season’ was ending and cold season was moving in and for the first 2 weeks I seriously wondered if I was going to make it. None of us brought reliable thermometers, but the estimates for daily highs ranged between 105 and 120. I spent hours sitting quietly in my shaded Hausa class with beads of sweat dripping down my back and legs. All that heat and sweat requires lots of water and it is in short supply here. My family gets their water in buckets carried on their heads from a well about 600 meters from my house. Once it is there it needs to be filtered and bleached before Peace Corps considers it safe to drink. The result is about 8 liters of water that is already at body temperature and tastes like a swimming pool. Thing number three is the food. It is not that the food here is all bad. Don’t get me wrong there are some great tasting dishes that my host mother can make and I am developing a fondness for the taste of goat. The problem comes in the nutrition. All the foods available here are heavy in carbohydrates and low in almost everything else. It is like I am easting from only one of the five food groups. It isn’t that Nigerians don’t like other foods, they just don’t have them. You couldn’t buy them for $100. As a result I have lost a lot of weight. While we have been consolidated at our compound, the cooking staff has thankfully been insulating us from the Nigerian staples like millet and sorghum and providing us with some highly appreciated fruits and meats, but that is far from typical.
If you can get past those things, Niger may be paradise. The people here are more welcoming, more helpful, and happier than any people anywhere. The villages are quaint and idealic. Niger is a rare gem because it is so untouched by mass media and consumer culture. People here live and work just as they have for hundreds of years. Modernization has almost completely skipped over Niger leaving the land and its people unpolluted and unexploited. It is really easy to tell where the ideas and materials of the outside world have seeped in, mostly because there is garbage everywhere. Electricity and access to factory products has brought plastics which after being used are dumped casually in the road. Because our town is on a main road it has been exposed to a lot of ‘stuff’ from factories in Niamey and abroad. Thus, the garbage problem has come with it. Smaller less accessible villages are clean little islands of humanity on the open Sahel. These observations have led me to challenge allot of my conceptions of what development or aid means. Living and working in a village, I have tried to ask myself: “If I lived here, what could I do to help.” In many cases, the answer is nothing. Except for helping villages improve their own education, nutrition, and personal health, Nigerians really don’t need anything more. All the big economic data about GDP per capita and average daily incomes is completely irrelevant and frankly unhelpful when it comes to ‘helping’ the people of Niger. Who cares if the people live in huts made out of mud or millet? Enclosed areas are usually too hot to stay in and people live almost completely out doors. In many ways Nigerians have better lives than Americans simply because they know who they are and are content with what they have.
In a way I was expecting Niger to be like Turkey. In Turkey, everyday you step out the door it is an adventure. Niger is not like that at all. Life here is predictable, slow, and simple. The difference is that Niger changes who you are. The person who got on the plane in Philadelphia would not be able to make it for six weeks in Niger. I had to adapt, I had too change. I had to become someone who considers a bathroom luxury if there is a toilet in it; someone who can eat rice that bugs were crawling in; someone who is willing to walk all the way across town to buy a little cold water in a bag. Someone who can take whatever is thrown at him. I had to take to heart the Hausa phrase “Sai Hankori” or ‘have patience’ because in so many instances patience is the only thing there is.
Since it is likely none of us will ever see Niger again, the staff decided to let us go out with a bang. Our consolidation was lifted on Friday, just in time for the Muslim holiday of Tabaski and we were given one last day to spend time with our Nigerian families. Tabaski celebrates the near sacrifice of Ishmael by his father Abraham, a story that we would normally associate with Isaac but whatever. The celebration begins with a big prayer in a millet field followed by the sacrificing of a ram, mimicking the sacrifice made for Isaac/Ishmael’s sake some 4000 years ago. After prayer the people return to their homes where an absolute slaughter fest ensues. Practically every family in town slaughters another ram in their homes and eats it for the next two days. In my home we had three rams, two belonged to neighbors and the third was for us. The rams had spent a few days tied up next to the latrine and I had grown at least somewhat attached to the smallest one because he liked to be scratched on top of his head. Thus when the man in the white coat came with a knife I choose not to watch as my host father tied its legs and killed it. The experience was made even more unpleasant due to the fact that we were served lunch as the poor sheep was skinned not ten meters from where we were eating. After lunch I walked around town and observed as dozens of goats were strung up with sticks and placed over fires. There were parts of sheep all over. Horns littered the streets, small children carried around skins and heads, and intestines were hung out to dry on the clotheslines next to skirts and pants. Very little meat is actually consumed on Tabaski because of how long the skewered remains take to fully cook. By dinnertime most good mothers (including mine) had spiced and cooked the innards into charred but chewy morsels. They were served stone cold with plain rice. Tasty.
Once Tabaski was over we returned to the compound to await our departure. Rather than sit on our hands for a week while Peace Corps gets all their ducks in a row, we were enrolled in French classes and prepared various events to absorb as much Nigerian culture as physically possible. These included a Nigerian fashion show, Q & A sessions, a mock Olympics, and a day trip to Niamey. French classes quickly degenerated into chaos. Our class met once before we started playing cards and just chatting, only in French of course. We learned a West African card game called Huit Americain and talked about the state of Nigerian politics. Many of us just skipped class. A group of trainees planned a bunch of American games for us to play with our Hausa and Zarma teachers. Watching a group of clueless adult Nigerians play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and musical chairs to a remix of Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back” have to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I will miss Niger so much, but there are other plans for me. All I know right now is that I am leaving Sunday night, we have a 28 hour layover in Paris (on the US gov.) and that once I arrive in Madagascar I will be working as an enviroment volunteer working in forests or national parks. It is all very exciting. More later. I miss and love you all

Michael

Moving On

2009-11-27T06:47:00.002+03:00

Authored by the CBA--mom
Today was Thanksgiving in the United States, but Thanksgiving was also being celebrated by the PC Trainees in Niger. We spoke with Michael and he talked of the feast he was enjoying with the group....mashed potatoes, chicken, and more "yummy food". He said the girls had been cooking all day and it tasted GREAT! He and the group were also enjoying one of their last days in a country he has grown to love in just a few weeks' time. With much regret, he and his group are being relocated next week. He really wants to stay, but there are only more threats in areas where he was supposed to go, so the Peace Corps is abandoning their intentions to expand in Niger (although current volunteers will remain). On to a new frontier! His new home will be in Madagascar! He is not sure what his assignment will be or exactly what he will be doing, but flexibility is the key! He is very thankful that they get to remain in Africa, although the climate and the living conditions will be much different.....seasons, a house, electricity....he will likely be able to do his own blog posts!!!!
There are still many details to be worked out; I will update as I am able. Please hold off sending letters and packages for now---his address will be changing! He assured me that anything enroute will be delivered to him in Madagascar--eventually!
Thanks for all your continued love and support....

News from the Wanderer

2009-11-21T02:07:00.005+03:00

This post is authored by the current blog administrator--mom

When Michael left almost 5 weeks ago, people would ask us, "Are you going to visit?" We would answer with a quick "yes, we're planning to!". This week the answer changed; it became a hesitant, "maybe". As of November 19, the US Dept of State recommends against all travel to Niger at this time. Our answer is now, "maybe we can meet him somewhere in Africa for a vacation!".

He has been living in a safe place and he is well cared for in his current situation, but his movement around the area is limited. In the meantime, he has gotten to know his fellow Trainees well, has learned a lot of new card games and has established himself as a frequent winner of the Catan game that one of the Trainees brought along! I pity those who try to beat him!

He is getting letters and packages and is very appreciative of them. He is pleased to finally have a phone so the parents can call him whenever they want to! I, however, am not getting letters from him--thus the lack of personal posts from the owner of this blog. I hear they are coming.....so stay tuned! There should be more news soon!

Hello from the Bush

2009-11-10T18:58:00.002+03:00

Greeting friends and family. I apologize for my lack of posting, but mail home is painfully slow and this is the first access to a computer I have had since my arrival and I only have 10 minutes. Niger is great, Yesterday I went on an impromtu giraffe safari and saw a whole herd. It is super hot here and it is considered the cold season now. I am learning Hausa, eating rice with my hands, and sleeping under the stars. Good news, I passed the foreign service exam! Mom will post more on my adventures soon. I love you all!

How to get from Holland to Niamey

2009-11-08T01:02:00.003+03:00

Authored by Michael on October 23, 2009--two days after departure from Michigan
Dad & I left Holland at 4:15 a.m. EST. I slept maybe 2 hours that night, mostly as a result of nerves. Mom cried when I left which was sweet of her. Everything went smoothly at the airport; I made it through in plenty of time. I went to my gate, sat down next to some guy with ripped jeans and tried unsuccessfully to pass out. I did catch about 30 minutes of sleep waiting for my connection in Milwaukee, WI. When I got to Philadelphia and claimed my luggage, I saw the guy in the ripped jeans near baggage claim. Turns out his name is Aaron; he is a volunteer from Portage, MI! Together we caught the shuttle to the Radisson. By the time we made it to the hotel we were almost late for our meeting so we quick checked in and went to conference room 8.
These are some of the more interesting things I learned at staging in Philly:
1. Camel spiders, native to Niger, are the size of frisbees
2. We were expected to eat lunch before our 6 hour meeting so the 2 egg McMuffins dad bought me in Hudsonville at 4:30 am were clutch
3. You aren't supposed to touch anyone with your left hand
4. All 39 people in my Peace Corps group are super awesome and 5 of them are from MICHIGAN!
5. I am the only male volunteer assigned to agriculture; there are only 6 other guys--and all the girls are very pretty :>)
6. You will get sick in Niger
Once we were finally released from staging at 7pm, we decided to spoil ourselves with one last luxury. Fourteen of us decided on a nearby steakhouse. We all spent an obscene amount of money on an amazing steak filet and glass of red wine. We were all excited and shared lots of rumors about what we might find in the country.
On Thursday we were up and checked out early. We got on some tour buses for a trip to Philly. They parked us at the US Constitution Center, right next to the Mint, Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall. We were marched into a drab government building where we were each given a WHO card, a necessary travel document that makes me feel like I am being featured in a Dr. Seuss novel. We all got yellow fever shots and were led back to our bus. At this point we were abandoned by our training coordinators who bid us good lunch on their way back to D.C. We proceeded to JFK and boarded the 7pm flight to Paris.
I planned on sleeping for most of my trans-Atlantic flight as the in-flight movies were all bad. In addition, a fellow volunteer game me a Dramamine to put me down. My body and the infant of a hasidic Jewish couple had other plans. The Jewish child was screaming for most of the night and the Dramamine was not kicking in. I tried to help it along by drinking 2 things of wine and some liquor but by the time we landed in Paris I was wide awake. After a 2 hour layover, we boarded a flight to Niamey continuing to Ouadougov. O found it somewhat ironic that 80% of the 1st class passengers were Nigerien in fancy suits and the economy class was all Caucasian. After that I began a very strange sleep/consciousness cycle. I don't remember taking off from Paris only suddenly realizing that we were airborne. I chatted occasionally with the 81-year-old missionary on her way to a med clinic (nudge to Grandma). Air France installed a camera under the plane and broadcasted an image of the ground to the video screens of all the passengers. From this I learned that the Sahara desert is very big and dead. Arizona deserts have ground cover and cactus; the Sahara is all nothing, just sand. The screen constantly showed a big collage of neutral colors with no green in sight. The desert continued until the plane was putting down the landing gear and bushes appeared on the sand. The 81-year-old looked down and said, "Wow, look how green it is; you'd better look now because this is the most green you will see here."
We landed at Niamey "Airport" and stopped on the tarmac. Our Airbus 330 was certainly the biggest plane at the place, and I only saw one other plane with a jet engine. We were unloaded onto the tarmac and loaded into buses for the 100 meter trip to the "terminal". I made a quick stop at the men's room only to discover 1 working toilet with no seat, cover, lid or flushing device. Welcome to Africa. We were warmly greeted by Peace Corps staff in the dirt parking lot. All of our luggage was heaped on the back of a pick up truck, and we were smashed into 2 vans for a trip out to our training cite. Even though I was prepared to see rural poverty, I was blown away by what I saw just on the ride out to the training village. I am going to end my post now, but I already have a whole book's worth of stories and experiences to write about, and I have been here just 24 hours. You will have some good reading in the coming weeks and months.

A Delightful Fall Day

2009-11-02T02:21:00.004+03:00

Mom, the current blog administrator (aka CBA), Dad & sister Lauren had a delightful day! The cell phone rang at 12 noon with a strange number on caller ID. I took a deep breath, answered the call and heard the much awaited words: "Hi mom, it's me". The wandering Westendorp checked in with the family! Thanks to a fellow PCT, he borrowed her cell phone long enough to give me her number so I could call him back on Skype (at my expense, of course!) We were honored to then connect with him on Skype and talk for about 40 minutes. I will give a quick synopsis of the conversation.
-he loves it there!
-it is very hot....temps have reached 122 degrees to his knowledge
-time goes very slowly...he says it seems as though he has been there for 3 months instead of 1 1/2 weeks
-he is enjoying the company of the other PCT's. He said they are quite a compatible bunch
-he is reading a lot
-he lives with a family of 6--2 parents and 4 children between the ages of 3 and 12. The children love the PCT's and cling to them....he's adjusting to that!
-he has a new name Habibou....pronounced Ha-Be-Boo
-he eats a LOT of rice. He is adapting to eating rice with his hand and adjusting to the fact that his hand is not always that clean when he uses it to eat.
-he has encountered the bush taxis but is a little hesitant to ride in them. He says they load them up with 20 or more people, put the chickens and the goats on the top and the cows in the trunk. Definitely a transportation adjustment!
-there are letters en route to me that will, in usual Michael flare, describe his trip there and his first few days. I will post them as soon as they arrive and you will get a better picture through his eyes.
He hopes to get a cell phone at some point that will allow him to communicate with us more regularly. Until then we will wait for the next scheduled communication in 2 weeks.
But for now, we will enjoy THIS day!!

Safe arrival in Niamey

2009-10-26T04:31:00.007+03:00

The team of Nigerian Peace Corps trainees arrived safely in Niamey last week and posed to take a photo for us! The only other news is that they all survived their first African monsoon! Stay tuned for future posts!
the mom--current blog administrator

Chicago, Mount Pleasant, & Grand Rapids

2009-09-30T00:43:00.007+03:00

21 Days and counting until I lift off for the Peace Corps and I am really enjoying the time I am getting to spend in and around W. Mich. This weekend I made trips to Chicago, Mt. Pleasant and Grand Rapids. I managed to get myself invited to go to Chicago last Thursday with Ms. Ensink’s AP World History class. Our resident Korean Max Kwon is in the class so I was going under the auspicious label of “chaperone,” although I was more interested in talking with Thelma Ensink and seeing the Art institute than monitoring fifteen mature high school students. On Thursday morning we carpooled to Michigan City and caught the commuter train into town. The day was thankfully uneventful and after a morning in the South Asian and East Asian collections, we were released to explore the museum at will. Although I have an undying interest in world history, my favorite gallery in the art institute is the modern art gallery.
A lot of modern art I don’t understand. For example one artist chose to place bags of kitty litter throughout the room. Another artist spent millions having a bunch of Japanese guys carve a life-size replica of a dead tree trunk he saw in California out of stucco. The fun of modern art for me is that you never know what you will find when you walk into the next room. Although I may not understand a 2 ton carving of a decaying log, it certainly was a surprise to see. There were a few pieces in the modern art section which I did understand were incredibly interesting and powerful. It is like the artist and I are tuned to the same channel mentally so that he can send messages to me through his art. This is also why I prefer to go through the galleries alone, so I can be taken by what I enjoy and not feel the need to explain my fascination.
On Saturday Mom, Dad, Alaina (Aaron’s significant other), and myself piled into the fun bus for a day of athletic spectating. First up was my sister cross country meet in Lowell. Lauren Beth Westendorp is gradually becoming a great cross country runner, and she got her time down to a 24:39 5K. The course was soggy and the air was damp for the entire meet which bore bad tidings of things to come later that day. After packing Lauren back on the bus to Holland we continued on to the fun and excitement in Mt. Pleasant. Central Michigan University is located out in the “Deer & Beer” country of Michigan, a region of the state with which I am only vaguely familiar. While the natural scenery was quite attractive, I felt as though if we broke down we may be eaten by a roaming moose or polar bear. Arriving at CMU’s large and lively campus was a welcome sight. We stopped to stretch out and wait for Aaron to meet us at a 7-11 where various Central students were making their pre-game alcohol selections. Miller Light appeared to be the beverage of choice. Aaron appeared from a building in short order and showed us to his dorm where he needed our help hack-sawing the chain off his bicycle. He also gave me some official team merchandise to sport during the game which was really cool.
Central Michigan has a really cool football program going on in Mt. Pleasant. They have a medium sized but comfortable stadium with lots of fan support. It is a good experience without becoming too overwhelming. Mom had brought up helmet-shaped Jell-o and a pasta salad for tailgating with team parents. Other team moms had brought fried chicken, casserole, and other feast-like dishes. We left tailgating early, however, because warm-up is the only time when Aaron is actually on the field with a football. It was at this point I remembered my best friend from middle school was going to Central for meteorology and after a few well placed phone calls (thanks Obed) I managed to get in contact with him. Cort showed up just after the game started and just as the rain began. As a meteorologist, Cort corrected me as the precipitation we were experiencing was technically “drizzle” not rain. Regardless of what it was, it “drizzle down poured” for a good part of the first half and we all got soaked. The game itself was over before it started. Central was playing Akron, a team from Ohio with a pathetic looking kangaroo for a mascot and an inexperienced quarterback. The game lost its tension when Akron had negative total yardage in their first 4 or 5 drives while Central had racked up 14 points. The final score was 48-21, but the play on the field suggested that Akron should be thankful for losing by a mere 27. After the game Cort left and we met up with Aaron for some late Applebee’s and pleasant family conversation. I spent the drive home using my mother’s phone to send text messages to my little sister demanding that various chores be completed before our arrival. Overall a great day.
On Sunday I took Sally to Grand Rapids for the Artprize contest. I picked her up at the Janssen’s house where she had been enjoying a Sunday meal. Once the Janssen pet cat had been successfully located and returned to its cage we continued onto Grand Rapids. Downtown G-Rap was packed. One artist had just dumped 100,000 paper airplanes off 6 downtown skyscrapers much to the delight of the 20,000 people gathered below. Sometimes places were too crowded to actually enjoy the art that was on display. We located Sally’s restaurant pal Maude and walked through the un-crowded DeVos Place while Maude told us a story about flooding 7 stories of the Days Inn. Hilarious.
This week I am back at Habitat, but at a different house, this house was just started and still needs a roof on top of it.

Cincinnati

2009-09-22T00:25:00.003+03:00

It really hasn’t registered upstairs that I am about to leave the developed world for over two years. I haven’t really given myself time to savor my time home. Instead I have been running around the state visiting friends, tying up ends from my Turkey trip, and planning out my next 30 days at home.
One of the big things pressing on me right now is that my Grandpa Westendorp is sick. He was diagnosed with kidney cancer last week. The cancer appears to be aggressive and grandpa has been weakened by a heart problem so he has been suffering allot lately. Grandpa Alphenaar died almost a year and a half ago and I was forced to leave the country before the funeral for school in Paris. Now with Grandpa W in uncertain waters I feel bad leaving the country for so long.
This weekend I made the long journey down to Cincinnati to finish up some paperwork from my Turkey trip and say goodbye to my college friends. My mother, being the dear that she is, left me her tank of a van to take down to Xavier. Although driving 6 hours through rural Indiana and Ohio sounds about as much fun as having a foot amputated, I got my driving directions from NPR.org which came attached to a list of every NPR station along my driving route; transforming my drive from a boring labor to an introspective educational experience.
After getting slightly lost and nearly causing a head on collision in suburban Fort Wayne, I made a pit stop for dinner at Aunt Kim’s house. Kim is my dad’s sister and it had been a long time since I had seen the Fletcher family because of college and my summer travels. Though over half the family was away from home, Kim, my cousin Ryan, and I enjoyed a home cooked meal and updated each other on our lives. Ryan loves baseball and after dinner he wanted to go downtown to see the Ft. Wayne baseball team play and invited me to come along. The Fort Wayne ‘Tin Caps’ were bucking 17 years of truly terrible baseball by making the minor league playoffs. The three of us journeyed downtown to enjoy a few innings of baseball during which the Tin Caps scored and took the lead. Unfortunately I had to leave before the game finished in order to make it to destination before it got too late.
Unlike quality NPR stations like 104.1 in West Michigan which broadcasts the BBC World Service all night long, all the stations in Indiana and Ohio play classical music until the early hours of the morning. This did not make for good listening music so I preoccupied myself by arguing with the commentator on an AM conservative talk show.
Upon my arrival I quickly fell into my comfortable habits when I was back at school with my friends. We wasted 3 hours on Friday playing Frisbee golf through a park, watched long hours of college football on Saturday, and made frequent trips to Chipotle for burritos. On Friday night we had a great quantity of people over to the house I was staying at for a party. I spent so much time talking with my old friends about Turkey and the Peace Corps that by the time I went to bed at 2:30 I was exhausted and completely hoarse.
I had to leave Cincinnati at 7:00AM on Sunday to make it back to Michigan on time for Cousin Bethany’s birthday celebration. My absence at this festivity in the past has resulted in excessive chastisement directed to me by Bethany. Since I was not planning on flying back to Michigan in September of 2010 or 2011 my attendance at this event was essentially mandatory. Additionally, Alphenaar family parties are one of the biggest things I am going to miss when I am away so I really wanted to make it. I also used this opportunity to give my grandmother her 75th birthday present: a 6mm air soft handgun. She has been having trouble keeping deer out of her bird feeders so we are hoping a few bruising air soft pellets will scare them off. This also means my grandmother is going to be stalking her backyard with a pistol, something I would pay good money to see.

I got my staging information today and booked a flight out of Grand Rapids at 6:45 on October 20, 2009.

ITS HERE

2009-09-10T01:44:00.001+03:00

The suspense was awful. A few days ago our neighbors decided to have a tree removed and the sound of large mail-truck-sounding vehicles in front of my house all day was enough to drive me mad. The suspense was partially broken last Thursday when I got an e-mail telling me that I had been accepted and that my package was coming. The e-mail, however, contained no information about where I would be going or when. All the important stuff was in the elusive FedEx envelope.
It arrived on Tuesday. It would have been here on Monday but it was Labor Day and while all of you were out eating hotdogs and enjoying the weather, I was wishing the day would end so normal mail service could resume. I had just returned from my first 7 hours working at the local Habitat for Humanity house. I was contemplating what I would do if yet another day went by without any news when the big white truck came bumbling down the street. I met the FedEx guy half way up the lawn. It was all I could do not to give him a hug. Instead I awkwardly exclaimed, “You have no idea how long I have been waiting for you!” Laughing, he told me he had noticed the envelope was from the Peace Corps and asked me where I was going. “I am about to find out!” I interjected. Sensing the suspense, the FedEx guy waited with me as I tore open the package and shouted “I am going to NIGER!”
When you Google Niger (pronounced “knee-j’air”) the first thing that comes up says “Niger is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, with over 80% of its territory covered by the Sahara desert.” I am going to have my work cut out for me. One of my favorite teachers at Holland Christian spent a year in Niger at one of the schools there so I am looking forward to lunch date with her to discuss what it is like on the ground. The Wikipedia site, which I encourage you to browse through, lists six national languages and 90% of the country is Muslim. The largest city and capital is Niamey, a city of only 1 million people that contains no credit card machines. My over 200 pages of introductory material told me to familiarize myself with the cultivation of peanuts, highland rice, sorghum, and cowpeas before my departure on October 17th.
For the past 24 hours I have been rushing to fill out registration forms, passport and visa applications, medical releases, and reading through manuals. It is amazing how one envelope from Washington can complete change my life. The next 27 months of my life. Communication in Niger is not easy, but I am sure I will find a way to keep this blog updated.

Holland

2009-09-03T05:15:00.003+03:00

Holland is a great town. There are sandy beaches, a beautiful lake, tall trees, fresh air, and at least some cultural heritage. What I like most about Holland is that all the people who support and care about me can be found here (or at least nearby). These amazing people include Mary T who drove six hours round trip to come get me from the airport with my mother, Dan and Diana who are always ready to come play a round of cards, and Aunt Mary who always amazes me with how much she cares, just to name a few.

This trip home, however, has been somewhat spoiled by what is going on in my life and it has left me feeling anxious and frustrated. The major problem is that I don’t know why I am here. Am I here on a short term visit or am I here for a more extended stay? This question stems from the absolute silence coming from the Peace Corps Placement Office. I am nominated for a project leaving in late October and it is likely that I will be invited on to a 27-month mission in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, likelihood is not certainty and there is a possibility that my project could be significantly postponed. So what will I do then? Do I get a job? Do I try to get into grad school? Do I just wait around?

So I sit here in Holland living out of my mother’s basement with no purpose, and no plans past next weekend. It is a college graduate’s nightmare. Not knowing why I am here has affected all of my plans and activities. I feel paralyzed by a sense of powerlessness. Should I make arrangements to visit friends and family I will not see for three years or schedule job interviews? What do I tell other people about my future plans? My mother keeps telling me that God is teaching me patience, but considering I was originally told this information would arrive in sometime in April I think I am entitled to a little anxiousness.

Against the good advice of probably every psychologist, I have been hiding from my problems by staying busy. Since arriving at home my time has been divided between landscaping the Church Parsonage, baby sitting, mowing lawns, volunteering at the city mission, and re-decorating my little brother’s bedroom. My mother had always planned on redoing Aaron’s bedroom once he left for college, along with about 18 other household projects. However, this particular project was quickly moved to the top of the priority list when my mother arrived home from work to discover that I had ripped all the wallpaper off the walls. Because I volunteered to do the majority of the labor, I was co-opted onto the decorating committee where I obstinately refused to lift a single paintbrush unless I was allowed to paint something colorful. My suggestions for variations on purple, blue and yellow were quickly vetoed by the family matriarch. The deadlock was eventually broken when we agreed upon a good color for the back wall. Sorry Aaron, I am not telling what color it is you will have to come home and see it for yourself.

My work at the City Mission has also been quite eventful. Everyday the Mission makes the rounds of all the local thrift stores picking up all the junk that even the thrift stores can’t sell. I estimate that 80-90% of the stuff donated to thrift stores eventually ends up at the mission. Once it arrives there, the men living at the mission sort through all the clothes and throw them into massive compactors which crush the clothing into big fabric bricks. These are then exported to a wholesaler in Canada who ships them to poor African nations where the clothes are sold to African merchants who sell it on the streets. This dumping of old American clothing on developing nations destroys domestic textile industry, prevents job creation and only serves to increase foreign dependency. On the other hand, what else can we do with it? At least someone is wearing it. Nothing like a little moral ambiguity to get you up in the morning.

I am working there because there is so much clothing coming in from the thrift stores that the compactors can’t keep up and the growing mountain of used textiles has consumed about one third of the workroom and blocked a major shipping door. The people I have met at the mission could fill a blog post all by themselves. Overall it is a pretty unhappy bunch. There are guys convicted of DUI’s doing their 30 hours of community service, guys who got stuck in the recession and had no where else to turn, and guys who divide their time between working at the mission, AA, and meeting with parole officers. The stories are even more sobering as I consider my own awkward life situation.

I am going to keep blogging as I find out more about my future. Pray that the FedEx man comes soon with a big packet for me!

London

2009-08-22T18:49:00.001+03:00

In a stroke of genius, I booked myself a 17 hour layover in London on my way back from Turkey. I was going to take to Tube into town, have a beer at a pub, a long night sleep, and see a few landmarks before heading back to Holland. It was a fool-proof plan; or so I thought. I had a great last night in Istanbul. I went out for some Nargile with four of my hostel mates from various corners of Northern Europe. It was a fabulous finish to what had been a wonderful time in Turkey.
The next morning I realized how difficult it would be to be a handicapped person in Istanbul. I had two very large wheel-around suitcases weighing 23 and 19 kilos to get to the airport and I had decided to take public transportation to get there. This involved dragging them along a cobblestone street for 400 meters, down the stairs at Taxim Station, up the Stairs at Kabataş, up and down the stairs at the transfer station at Zetinbrounu, and up the escalators at the airport. At each one of these stations there are two turnstiles that require additional lifting. Needless to say by the time I got to Ataturk Airport I was ready to be rid of my additional baggage.
I arrived in London at 7:00 GMT. I found the tube station and got a ticket for downtown. After an hour of repeatedly being instructed to “mind the gap” I got of at Hyde Park Corner station. The hostel I booked was on the other side of park so I started walking. In traditional fashion I got myself lost a few times but somehow managed to find my accommodations. Unfortunately my accommodations were unable to find me on their reservations list and because I had left all my baggage at the airport, I had no way to confirm it to them. Undeterred I found a pub a few blocks away called “The Swan” and decided to think over my options with a pint of ‘London’s Pride’ beer. At the pub I met Ivan, the 26 year old Chemical Engineering Student from the Czech Republic. We spent the next two hours sharing stories, sipping on beer, and chatting with a gaggle of women in their 60’s sitting adjacent to us. The pub shut down at 12:00 so Ivan and I parted ways and I was left to figure out what I was going to do for the night.
With no place to stay I was facing a very long night on the streets of London. No thinking when I left Istanbul I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and the night was getting cold quickly. I eventually decided to find a place to sleep in the park and after an hour of searching I settled on a patch of dirt under a willow tree near the pond. At 2:10 AM after about an hour of uncomfortable shut-eye I was awaken by a hateful pack of geese that had wandered to my side of the lake. Unable to sleep with all the honking I got up to find another bed. At that moment I noticed the police car coming down the road scanning the park with a searchlight. I dove behind a nearby stack of lawn chairs until the police had vacated the area and made a quick dash for the park exit. Finding the gate locked I scaled a low spot in the fence and was deposited onto the streets of London.
Figuring that 2:30 in the morning was as good a time as any to go for a tour; I followed the street signs to Buckingham Palace. I was disappointed to find that the fancy guards with the fuzzy hats were not on duty. Apparently unrelenting dedication to protecting the Queen has its limits. After a quick photo I turned towards the river. The Thames River has to be one of the most disgusting waterways on the planet. Even during the night one can see that the water has the same consistency as a chocolate slushy. After finding the London Eye and The Houses of Parliament I decided to try to get some more sleep. I found a park bench by the river and passed out for another hour.
I was awoken this time because of the cold. The shorts and t-shirt were not cutting it and I was freezing. I got up and walked around for another hour before returning to the same bench for some more sleep. At 6:00 I woke to a stunning sunrise (pictured above) and a hungry tummy. I crossed the river and picked up some yogurt and granola for a few pounds and proceeded to locate some of the sights that I had missed the previous night. I found Westminster Abby, Lancaster Square, Trafalgar Square, Scotland Yard, 10 Downing Street, and the National Gallery. Unfortunately nothing in London opens before 10:00 and I needed to start back towards the airport by then. I made it back to Heathrow by 11:00 and found a couch to pass out on, but instead of sleeping I found myself engaged in a great conversation with a French/Australian University student on his way back to Paris.
When my flight finally lifted off at 2:00 I was still not tired so I indulged in the in-flight movies. Duplicity with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts was OK, but Knowing with Nicholas Cage was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. When we landed in Chicago it was raining (a strange weather phenomenon I was no longer familiar with) and Mom and Mary T were waiting for me at the gate. On the way home the rain got worse making Mary T and I understandably nervous about my mother’s driving. When we finally pulled off the highway to get some Wendy’s we discovered the Indiana town we stopped in had no electricity. We later discovered that the power outage was a result of a TORNADO that struck the city 15 minutes earlier. I finally arrived, exhausted and but safe at 694 Marylane Dr. at 10:45 EST.