Rice Harvest

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

New Year New Friends

Picture is of Fianarantsoa

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

The Trip

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

Where is my Letter?

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

Hope you all get mail from me soon!

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