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.