Vignt-six

Picture is of me sitting on a gastank to so it will work down in Lopary last month

June 26th is Madagascar’s big national holiday. Although the holiday commemorates Madagascar’s independence from the French colonial oppressor, fifty years later the Malagasy continue to refer to their national holiday using French numeration. In spite of the confusing its designation, Vingt-six is quite the party.
On the evening before the holiday, the festivities got started with a sumptuous meal with Rodrigue’s family. There was fried tuna tails, select chicken organs (intestines, gizzard, etc), cubed pork fat, and some cooked leaves. All this was served with a side of heavily coagulated chicken blood over a bed of rice. I helped myself to a heaping portion of the leaves and took my helping of chicken blood home and fed it to my cat.
After dinner everyone descends on Ranomafana for the Children’s Lantern procession. Little kids dressed up in their finest meander all through town with paper lanterns for about a half hour before everyone consolidates on the market square. Then there is a monster dance party. This dance party was like nothing I had ever experienced. The entire village turned out and the entire mass of people was breaking-it-down. Old malagasy grandmas, moms with infants strapped to their backs, the odd French tourist, swarms of five to ten year olds. It was truly impressive. Have you ever seen an elderly Malagasy man try to break-dance? Because I have. After four hours of seriously intense partying, with the marketplace still packed with people, I biked back home and put myself to bed. I woke up at 4:30 to the sound of music still blaring in town 1500 meters away. At 8 when I finally woke up, there was still a party going on in town.
The music stopped around 9 so that the speeches could get started. The entire village had by now reassembled into a droopy eyed mass. For the next 4 hours various Malagasy dignitaries talked themselves hoarse into the microphone about how wonderful everything was while the indifferent populace napped, played marbles, or carried on their own conversations. The speeches were followed by one of the strangest parades I have yet witnessed. Essentially the entire town participated in the parade leaving very few spectators. All the schoolchildren went first followed by the local hotel employees, soccer teams, Park Guides, power company maintenance people, karate club, the list goes on. My friend told me if I wrote PEACE CORPS on a large piece of cardboard that I too could be in the parade. I passed.
The procession soon turned into a disorganized hoard when things got a little backed up near the mayor’s box and the operation was abandon. Then we broke for lunch. Rodrigue had killed another chicken that morning so we ate it over rice (no blood this time) and I brought a bunch of bones home for my cat to munch on. Exausted by all the day’s festivities I retired to my bed for a short power nap. I was awoken a few moments later to one of my cat’s chicken legs disappearing into a rat hole in my wall. After an ill-fated attempt at tug of war with the offending rodent the bone was lost forever into the labyrinth of the rat fortress.
Determined no to let the setback in the Great Rat War ruin my holiday I returned to Ranomafana at 2 to find another dance party already in full swing. This party continued on all afternoon as the kids got increasingly rowdy and the adults got increasingly drunk. Besides the chicken blood, getting pass-out-in-the-dirt drunk was the other Malagasy tradition that I did not partake in. Almost everyone was drinking more than their fair share of moonshine, even the sweet old lady who I buy eggs from was wandering about screaming incoherently in the street. When night fell there was second rendition of the Children’s lantern parade thing and the dance party was shifted to the community center. Replacing the dance party in the market was the large screen projector which piped in the Ghana-USA match much to the amusement of all assembled. So passed a big happy Vingt-six.

Yes I Really Do Work

Anyone reading my past few blog posts should be forgiven for thinking that all I have been doing here is gallivanting about Madagascar on the government’s dime. This, I can assure you is not the case. Peace Corps, as it turns out is about volunteering and helping the people of impoverished nations and in-between my forays to Fianarantsoa and Farafangana, I have actually been quite busy.
If you recall, last March Dan Turk came to Ranomafana and gave me a bundle of great ideas to work with. However, the item he really emphasized was a fruit tree reforestation initiative in the areas around Ranomafana National Park. The idea of the “The Project” is to put high quality fruit trees and the means to propagate them into the hands of Malagasy families. While the first few months of my service involved producing many of the fruit tree, I am now deeply embroiled in the politics of development. As it turns out, two other organizations are also interested in doing a fruit tree project in Ranomafana, these organizations (which I talked about in previous blogs) are Friends of Madagascar and Centre Valbio.
This week Friends of Madagascar sent Mark to work on their project. Mark is a Duke University forestry student from Petoskey Michigan. He also came with all the materials to build a monster greenhouse near the Friends of Madagascar house. Mark is about 6’5” therefore he hits his forehead on more doorframes than I do which makes me feel much better about myself.
The situation with the project is very complicated. We all want the same thing, namely a successful fruit tree project, and each organization has a different piece of the puzzle, but they all have slightly different ideas about how to get there. Compounding this problem is the fact that while I work with SAF/FJKM, I am in no position to represent their concerns, and no administrative people from SAF live in Ranomafana. It pretty much just means that I end up running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to invent answers that I don’t have and spending more time parked in front of a computer screen than in the nursery.
One of SAF’s people, Rolland, came down to Ranomafana as well this week. I got about 4 days notice of his arrival. I had planned a meeting in Fianarantsoa that day so I missed seeing him but when I returned I was in for a shock. Rolland had doubled the physical size of the nursery by flattening a hillside behind my house and clearing out a grove of trees. To my dismay that included most of my avocadoes. I seriously don’t know what I am going to eat next March and April.
In other non-work related news the World Cup is going on. The Winter Olympics were over before I even knew they were going on, but the World Cup has captured the attention of practically the whole country. The Ranomafana Community Center was taken over by a large projector television, entrance is 10 cents for ‘important people’ (that’s me) and 5 cents for your average Gasy. The bats get in free through holes in the roof. Rodrigue, who spends his evenings in town watching the action on television, has been replaced at the dinner table by a Malagasy radio commentator who screams incoherently every 1-2 minutes. The new song about Africa by Shakeria is all the rage. Playing it three or four times in a row at full volume is not considered excessive noise pollution here. I have noticed that the lower a nation’s Gross National Product, the more support it seems to get from the Malagasy people. People in the community center are practically jumping up and down whenever Ghana gets anywhere close to the goal box and seemed downright smug about France’s early exit. One exception to this rule is the United States who people are proud to tell me that they support. I for one am backing the Dutch.
Next week is shaping up to be as exciting as the last, Madagascar is celebrating its 50th anniversary of independence on Saturday. Should make for some good blogging.

Farafangana

It just so happened that a Peace Corps vehicle was heading south on the same weekend as Alison’s (one of my good PC friends) birthday. Additionally I had some fruit trees and soccer uniforms that I needed to give to the other volunteers on the southern coast so it was a great occasion to take a trip.
The car arrived in Ranomafana about an hour early and Joanessa, Peace Corps head of security, jumped out to meet me. Peace Corps was sending Joanessa south to do security assessments on volunteer sites and develop new sites for other volunteers. Joanessa, with his gold-rimmed glasses and friendly smile, is about as intimidating as a vanilla wafer. This is in sharp contrast to our safety officer in Niger who
had arm muscles the size of bowling balls and is a former Niger national champion in Judo. He took one look at my house, asked me if my window hinges were ok and told me to get my things.
This was my first time south since the big tropical storm last March and the road south of me was still in a dismal state of disrepair. Near where my friend Ashley lives large chunks of pavement are sitting in rice paddies 100 feet below where it had been a few months earlier. Three months of work by road crews and earthmovers have made the way passable, but barely. Once we had made it out of the mountains on to the coastal plain road conditions improved, but the landscape was
rather depressing. To say deforestation is a problem on the coastal hills of southern Madagascar is like saying that the lost island of Atlantis has a water management problem. There are no trees save some scraggly ravenala palms as far as the eye can see in some places. It looks like African Savannah except no wildlife lives there.
The journey down was not all doom and gloom. We paid a visit to a volunteer named Tadashi because his outhouse had collapsed and the villagers were slow in building him a new one. While Joanessa gave the builder responsible some gentle encouragement, I noticed a peculiar tree growing next to the ruined latrine. The tree had big green fruits that were filled with brown flesh. The Malagasy call it “Voankazo Tainakoho” or ‘the chicken shit fruit’ because the insides resemble
the excrement of certain poultry. However, Dan Turk and SAF/FJKM have been encouraging people to call it “Kaki Chocolat” or ‘Chocolate Persimmon’ so that it sounds more like something you would want to put in your mouth. Dan and I have been trying to track down some seeds of this peculiar plant for months without success and I found one literally growing in a volunteer’s yard. I quickly gathered up about
50 seeds and a few fruits for my nursery and told Tadashi to collect every seed he can get his hands on.
The rest of the way down to Farafangana Joanessa and I did site development for the new volunteers coming in August. This involved a whole lot of hiking up hills looking for phone service and talking to local big men about the security situation in the area. We spent the night in Manakara at the ironically named Sidi Hotel (pronounced ‘seedy’). It was actually a nice place; the room even came with a color television, although it only had one station and the decibel level of the air-conditioner was enough to inflict serious ear damage. The next afternoon Joanessa dropped me off at Alison and Melissa’s sites.
Alison and Melissa live about two kilometers from each other in Lopary and Mahabo respectively. These two tiny villages of a few hundred people are located on opposite sides of the Mananivo River and the two towns do not get along. The only reason Lopary requested a Peace Corps Volunteers was because Mahabo had one and they didn’t want to be left out. The area around Alison and Melissa is about as poor as
it gets in Madagascar. There is a hunger season that stretches four to eight months and even when there is enough food, many families eat only breadfruit, a food with the nutritional value of construction paper. Alison and Melissa face problems at their sites that you can’t even imagine would be issues. For example: one would imagine that getting used to using a kabone (outhouse) everyday would be difficult.
During the rains in March Melissa’s kabone flooded to within an inch of overflowing and the gound around Alison’s kabone became so soft that it collapsed into the pit taking a horrified Alison down with it.
Both of the girls have houses made of sticks, leaves, and bark. This becomes a problem when the legs of the bed begin breaking through the floor. (Something which happened to Alison when I was there) Have you ever tried sleeping on a bed that is not level by about 10-15 degrees? Well I did when I spent the night at Alison’s and let me tell you it is almost impossible. Tired and sleepless Alison tried cutting at her mattress with a kitchen knife as if it were a big coffee cake at 1:00 in the morning in a desperate attempt to correct the problem, but we ended up having to tear apart the entire bedding apparatus anyway.
The next morning, on about four-five hours of sleep, we hiked five kilometers to Melissa’s CSB (local health clinic) because a population control NGO was in town doing vasectomies and tubal ligations. The health hut was about five rooms and there was a long line of women outside waiting for the doctor. The cost of an operation was 500 ariary or about 25 cents. One woman there was 28 years old and was already the mother of 8 children. Unfortunately here in Madagascar, birthing eight kids at a young age does not get you a multi-million dollar reality TV contract, cover-shoots with People Magazine or guest appearances on Dancing with the Stars. It lands you in a big mess of poverty. After a morning at the CSB, we went out and investigated
Alison’s sweet potato field and paid a visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden’s tree nursery in Mahabo.
On Friday Joanessa returned from his work to give us all a ride in Farafangana. Farafangana is a coastal town and is the district capital for Alison, Melissa, and two other Volunteers who met us at the hotel when we came in. The five of us booked a single hotel room, changed into swimsuits and hit the beach. Unlike Mananjary, Farafangana has special beaches where people can go and swim without worrying about
deadly undercurrents or the occasional Lincoln Log floating by. Although we did have to share the palm trees and spectacular ocean views with a herd of cattle. That night we grabbed some beer and street food and watched the first game of the World Cup on a hotel TV the size of a toaster oven. Then, to celebrate Alison’s birthday, we went out dancing at Farafangana’s only night club. We were the only whities in the place but that didn’t bother us at all. So we danced the night away to Malgasy tunes and did not retire to our hotel room before 1:30. It was an excellent way to end the trip.
I have another busy week this week. Going to Fianarantsoa on Thursday and have some people from SAF/FJKM coming to expand the tree nursery.

The Whirlwind Return

Still stuffed from the previous night’s barbeque, the three other volunteers in the South East and I set of to return to our sites at 6:00 in the morning. Although we had reserved seats in a taxi-brousse ahead of time, I still ended up sitting in front of the lady barfing into a plastic bag, on top of the engine, next to the driver in the seat least accommodating to posterior comfort. The only way for someone of my size to fit into this most unfortunate of locations was to have my left leg on the gear-stick interfering with the driver’s attempts to shift and have my right leg pinned firmly against the hyper-sensitive volume knob on the radio. Thankfully, the car made it to Fianarantsoa in a blazing eight hours.
Rather than subject ourselves to more taxi-broussing the next morning, we decided to take two nights at the Peace Corps house in Fianarantsoa. Peace Corps just installed a new group of volunteers at the beginning of May, nine of them are near Fianarantsoa and two of them were sharing the house with us when we arrived. We spent the day getting to know one another and preparing a truly unholy amount of Mexican food and banana bread. We did have one close call when a malfunction in the gas oven resulted in a fireball that shook the house to its very foundations and singed a good amount of Melissa’s hair, but otherwise the evening was uneventful.
Returning to Ranomafana the following afternoon I received a warm welcome from my neighbors who enthusiastically informed me that I had gotten fat over the past three weeks. When I got back into my house, the first thing that I noticed was that my war on the rats was back on. In my absence Sharbaraz had caught her first rat while staying at Rodrigue’s house. Terrified, the remaining rats fled back to my empty house and proceeded to trash the place, defecating all over the furniture, floor, kitchenware, and books. The place was a virtual rat latrine.
No sooner had a put my bags down than my phone rang. It was a professor from the University of Michigan who I had been occasionally corresponding. She told me she was coming with some students to Ranomafana in less than 24 hours and wondered if I might be available to show them around for the afternoon. I gave her directions to my house and spent the entire next day scrubbing my house as not to give off the impression that it is inhabited by some seriously negligent rodent enthusiast.
Back when I lived in America, the English “Some students” translated to 5-6 people. Therefore you can imagine my surprise when a medium sized tour bus parked itself in my lawn the following afternoon. Apparently “some” now means 17 students 2 professors, 3 National Park guides, 1 driver, 2 young folks with Latin American accents, and a dude from Tulear. (That’s 26 in case anyone was counting) My neighbors stopped what they were doing and looked on in amazement. Sharbaraz fled the house and took shelter under Rodrigue’s bed. I approached cautiously and introduced myself as a Peace Corps Volunteer from Holland Michigan. A girl in the back row shouted “NO WAY I’m from Holland too!” Her name was Caroline, she lives on 38th street. A later round of Dutch Bingo would reveal that we had been on the same trip to Costa Rica when we were 13, although we didn’t remember each other.
Over the next two hours I talked myself hoarse about Peace Corps, Ranomafana, fruit trees, and what on earth I am doing here. I toured the entire mass through my house, the nursery, and the Arboretum before we broke for dinner. Over brochettes and beer one of the professors invited me along to the Centre Valbio the next day where they were hearing a lecture by one Patricia Wright.
I am going to pause here to say a few words about Patricia and Valbio. Patricia Wright is an American biologist who first came to Ranomafana in 1986. Back then Ranomafana was a dumpy backwater with one decaying hotel and an impoverished population. In the course of her expeditions into the forest around the town, Patricia discovered a species of bamboo lemur that had previously been unknown to science. Not satisfied with just one noteworthy accomplishment, Patricia took her new lemur to Madagascar National Parks and USAID and founded Ranomafana National Park. The Park is now the #2 park in the country for tourism and the little town of Ranomafana rakes in $1,700,000 annually from pasty Europeans with big cameras. Patricia, however, didn’t stop there and in 2003, with the support of a laundry list of NGO’s and American Universities, she opened Centre Valbio. Valbio is a modern research center about 7k from town in the rainforest. The Centre is a hub for researchers and students who have the place so busy that it is currently undergoing a massive expansion. So when I got an invitation to come up and meet Patricia (who because of her work is only around for a few days at a time) I was on it like butter on bread.
After she completed her lecture for the Michigan students, she and I got some time to talk about the fruit tree project that I am working on with Dan. While Patricia knows Dan, neither she nor any of the Valbio staff was aware of what Dan has been doing down in the tree nursery. She was very supportive of my ideas and offered Valbio’s resources to put me in contact with good people to work with around the park. This is invaluably helpful and has the potential to save me months of work finding motivated farmers to do projects with around the park. The people working at Valbio have also offered to take me to some of the outlying villages on their expeditions, put their computers and extensive library at my disposal, and offered me free rides up the mountain from Ranomafana any day I need them. How awesome is that?

This week I’ll be in Farafangana visiting some other volunteers. More fun stories I’m sure.

In-Service Training

In 2001, President Bush committed a huge sum of money to the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. This money was funneled into a fund know most commonly by the acronym PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) that is managed by USAID. Most of the money was rushed into the most seriously affected nations in Southern Africa like Lesotho, Botswana, and South Africa. Additionally some money was earmarked for the island of Madagascar. On paper, Madagascar has one of the lowest instances of HIV/AIDS of any nation in Africa with an infection rate holding at around .13%. Although the actual infection rate is undoubtedly higher than official figures suggest, the fact remains that Madagascar got a lot of PEPFAR money for not a lot of HIV/AIDS.
For this fiscal year, Madagascar got an unfathomable mountain of dollars to use for PEPFAR. All of it needs to be spent by October or it disappears back into the bureaucratic maze of Washington DC. Peace Corps volunteers are welcome to use this fund for their HIV/AIDS related projects, but with the political problems and last year’s evacuation, the money was not being used. Instead of letting the money go to waste, Peace Corps Madagascar decided to use some of it to pay for each volunteer to bring one co-worker or counterpart up to our In-Service Training on Lake Montasoa.
After coordinating the transportation for four volunteers and two Malagasy counterparts and sitting through an ABBA hits marathon between Fianarantsoa and Ambostra, Rodrigue and I arrived at the PC training site. Because Rodrigue’s trip was paid for by PEPFAR money, the Peace Corps training staff was obligated to spend half of the training doing HIV/AIDS activities. While I am all in favor of HIV/AIDS awareness and education, the sessions that we put through were truly nauseating. Peace Corps attempted to do group activities with approximately 75 participants including a disappointing round of “AIDS Jeopardy.” However, not all of our required programming was a total loss. On Tuesday we threw an “AIDS Festival” down in the city of Montasoa. When I spent time in Montasoa during training, my Sunday strolls into the town center would usually draw a few onlookers interested in watching the white person. Now imagine the crowd created by 34 Americans marching into the city center singing songs, throwing candy to children and carrying banners with smiley condoms on them.(see photo) By the time we arrived at the commune office, the meeting room was crammed beyond capacity and many people found themselves standing out in the rain peeking in through the windows. Volunteers and community members did condom demonstrations, made speeches, sang songs, and did plays. Additionally Peace Corps bussed in a vanload of commercial sex workers from Antananarivo to talk about how they try to protect themselves, their clients, and their co-workers from contracting the disease.
Though most of the HIV/AIDS workshops were not terribly relevant to fruit trees in Ranomafana, but there was some programming that it was very useful for Rodrigue to participate in. It was great for him to learn about what this crazy American living next door to him is supposed to be doing in Madagascar, and what his role is in my Peace Corps Service. The week was also a kind of reward for working with me. Going to Tana is a big status thing for Malagasy who live far from the capital due to the high cost of transportation, and he got to learn quite a bit about American food. The cooking staff completely spoiled us and mealtimes served as excellent showcase of good old American overeating. Meat was on the menu three times a day (a major luxury) and the variety of food served was epic. One lunch featured hamburgers, pork chops, refried beans, and rice flavored with shrimp. Another meal included duck.
Rodrigue and the rest of the counterparts left after the first week of our training and we were alone on the training site for the weekend. Left to our own devices, we actually had a relatively productive weekend and bonded as Peace Corps volunteers. Activities included building forts out of the furniture, throwing ridiculous second hand clothing parties, and rearranging the dining room for candle-lit “family” dinners. After the weekend the Environment folks took a tech trip out to one of Dan’s other tree nurseries in Moremanga and I helped to teach fruit tree grafting and marcoting to the other volunteers. Additionally, we learned about vediver grass, a really amazing way to prevent hillside erosion. We got to take a mini-train up the side of a mountain to a beautiful overlook where hillside reconstruction was being done. There will be more info about vediver in later blogs . Returning to Tana on Thursday, our country director invited all the PCV’s to a barbeque at his place. Free beer and meat cooked on a grill 4th of July style. For the past two weeks I have been sleeping, eating, talking, working, and playing like an American. It has really been wonderful so it’s going to take some adjusting once again when I get back to Ranomafana .

Marcoting

Rodrigue left for a trip to Mananjary (that city on the coast that I strongly dislike) on Monday leaving me the only person working in the nursery for three days. I used the time to reorganize our native palms and marcot litchi trees. Marcoting or air layering, for those of you who don’t know, is a simple and effective method of replicating certain varieties of fruit trees. Using a branch of an existing tree, you peel away all the living bark cutting of the supply of water to the leaves on the branch. You then cover the area with something wet and porous (we use moss, thin barks, or manure mixed with sawdust) and secure it with clear plastic. Wait about a month and a half until the branch sends down roots, cut the branch down, cut all the leaves off, and stick it in the dirt. Presto! You got yourself a new tree.
For me, marcoting is a work related excuse to spend the entire day climbing trees and playing with sharp knives. When I was eight, this would have been my dream job. Litchi trees are incidentally extremely fun to climb. The branches are unnaturally strong and flexible meaning I never worry about a branch being able to support my weight. In order to get the best marcots, I have to climb to the highest part of the tree and stick my head out of the canopy to ‘work.’ Typically these trees are occupied by one or more chameleons who eat all the ants and other nasty bugs so I don’t have to worry about that either.
Many of you have written me expressing concern about rodent problem in my house so I thought I would give you an update in the Rat War.

The news from the front is good. Although the Michael-Sharbaraz coalition has been unable to strike any fatal blows to the Rodent Axis, tactics used by the allies have forced enemy forces into a strategic withdrawal to positions beyond the front door. Beginning in February, all food items were sealed in the government issue metal trunk to prevent their capture by the enemy. The rats retaliated by laying waste to a series of dish scrubbies and destroying a wooden cooking spoon. Additionally, the rats initiated ‘Operation Squeaky’ spending all night romping and making noise safe in their attic-fortress trying prevent the other inhabitants of the house from getting any sleep. When neither of these measures was successful, the rats unleashed their most destructive and powerful weapon: poop. Each night axis forces would leave new stink-mines in strategic locations around the house. They focused their efforts on the kitchen and clothing storage areas of the house.
After keeping up their assaults for almost two months the rodents, facing an increasingly large kitten and still without a consistent source of supplies, moved their center of operations else where. Rodrigue and his family have no metal trunk and his home and food supply offered a tempting target for invasion. Others found the oranges falling from the tree behind the house more to their liking. The allies, however, are taking nothing for granted. There is no way to guarantee another invasion will not take place once the oranges run out or Rodrigue’s house becomes too crowded. Next week Sharbaraz will be deployed to counter the infestation at Rodrigue’s while Michael seeks further council at his In-Service Training Conference in Montasoa. Stay tuned for more updates.
In other news, there are new volunteers in the area. The newest set of trainees swore in on the 4th and four of them are being installed in my area. Two are near Farafangana, about 280 kilometers south of me, another is near Ashley and the fourth is near Fianarantsoa. With all the new people, Peace Corps has resurrected the Volunteer Action Committee (VAC). The VAC is a six-member council that meets with the administration three times a year and each committee member is responsible representing the volunteers in his or her region. Last week I was made the VAC representative for South-Central Madagascar. Being a member of the VAC is a honor, and I wish I could say that I had earned it but at this point I am the only volunteer in the area with access to Fianarantsoa (the regional capital) and consistent cell phone coverage so it sort of happened by default. None the less I am really excited about being a VAC member and I take the new responsibility gladly and seriously.
On Friday I will be heading to Montasoa for In-Service Training (IST) and I will be there for the rest of the month. Internet access will likely be spotty so there may not be another post until June (sorry) Hope you are all well, thanks for the letters!!

Rice Harvest

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

New Year New Friends

Picture is of Fianarantsoa

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