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.