Taxi Broussing

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.