How to Get from Ranomafana to West Michigan

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

Peace Corps Madagascar

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

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

(photo credit: Alison Thieme)

Health

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

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

Nosy Be

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

Maromandia

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

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

Alison

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

Cloud 9

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

Family Vacation Part 2

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

Family Vacation Part 1

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

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

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

My Life Part 3

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

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

My Life Part 2

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

My Life Part 1

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

The Holidays

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