Tourist Season

I should have anticipated this one a little better. Ranomafana and its environs occupy 3-4 pages of any decent guide book on Madagascar and a few kind words in Lonely Planet will send busloads of people with pasty skin in your direction. Late January, when I arrived in Ranomafana, is low tide as far as visitors are concerned. The months of September and October are the reported peak.
It isn’t hard to see why they come. Ranomafana is a place unlike any other in Madagascar. Set in a green valley surrounded by dense cloud forests, it is one of the biodiversity hotspots of the island. It is one of the last strongholds of the Greater Bamboo Lemur, perhaps one of the most endangered primates in the world. In total, Ranomafana National Park encompasses nearly 40,000 hectares of picturesque forest, concealing numerous springs, waterfalls, and granite cliffs. Since the Park’s creation in 1991, the village of Ranomafana has adapted to accommodate the tastes and preferences of the “adventurers” who visit. The town of less than 5,000 people has 8 major hotel complexes with a 9th under construction. Cell phone coverage is ubiquitous. Internet is always available. One can even buy boxes of cereal in the market place. Fancy restaurants serve steaks and flaming deserts. The old adage “you build it they will come” is certainly true here. Before the 2009 political crisis, all the hotels in town were booked solid between the months of June and November. After that boom-year, this little jungle town raked in some 3.4 billion in local currency ($1.7million).
All of these dainty luxuries are well out of reach of the underpaid Peace Corps volunteer living on the outskirts of town with his tree nursery. My trips into town to buy vegetables and plug in my cell phone have become stark reminders of the world of wealth that I am no longer a part of. There is no denying that compared to the Malagasy who live around me, I am very wealthy. But when you compare me to the French ladies with painted faces dining on prawns on the deck of the Manja Hotel I’m a pauper indeed. I have found it fascinating to watch their seemingly odd behavior. They take pictures with long-lensed cameras of inconsequential elements of village life; like Bananas on a stand or kids loitering in a gutter. They are desperate to appear comfortable in the muddy marketplace as they finger through woven mats and baskets, careful not to appear too interested and attract the attention of the seller. My presence is generally not appreciated. Most appear to be disappointed to have traveled so far to a place as remote as Ranomafana and still run into other white people, especially one who hasn’t shaved in a week and has a ripped t-shirt. At least I’m not walking around in a matching designer hiking outfit, sun hat, and fanny pack. Who looks silly now?
Despite my mixed feeling about tourists, I have been complicit in attracting them to the area. A second bed as became a new addition to my living room and I have been hosting other volunteers and friends of volunteers since I returned from the bike tour. The volunteers teaching English are on their well deserved vacation from school and are taking their first vacations since January and I opened my house to anyone interested in stopping by. Haley, a volunteer from an isolated town called Breville took me up on the offer and has been living with me for three weeks now. Meanwhile, Peace Corps continues to stuff this country full of new volunteers and I had the opportunity to meet my new site-mate when she was down for a visit this past week. Rebekah is an education volunteer who is living in Ifanandiana, only 20k from me. She is incredibly intelligent, witty, and really likes books. I took her and Haley out to some of Ranomafana’s more notable attractions and we cooked up different sir-fries on my modest stove for dinner each night.
In the coming weeks I will be, of course, busy. SAF/FJKM wants to do a major training on fruit trees in mid September and I am hoping to do a trip down South with Mark to meet some of his contacts and scout out some Mango production possibilities.

Bike Trip

None of us really knew what we were signing up for. All we knew is that we were going to be allowed to travel to another part of the country with other volunteers without having to take vacation. Sign me up. I understood biking was involved and that we were doing events involving HIV/AIDS. In 11 days we biked to 9 different towns with long names surrounding Lake Aloatra.

Amparafaravola
The trip to Amparafaravola, at approximately 70k in length, was the longest leg of our bike trip and trip planners thought it would be a good idea to get it out of the way first. Our biking brigade, consisting of 22 eager PVC’s, hit the road like a bunch of eager lemmings and raced to our first destination. The road was paved and the terrain only slightly challenging, plus we had the wind at our backs. The Lake Aloatra region is known as the “bread basket of Madagascar” and like most “breadbaskets” world round, it is topographically uninspiring and there aren’t any tourists. We easily tackled the low rolling hills and long stretches of pavement through lowland rice paddies, but by the time we arrived in town we were exhausted and ready for bed. We set up camp in front of a city office. There was one toilet. As we set up our tents we began to collect a group of curious onlookers. Since there is zero tourism in the region, the sight of 20 white people erecting nylon habitations in the center of town garnered more than just passive interest. When we emerged dreary eyed and disheveled the next morning, there were already 6-7 Malagasy watching us intently like a bunch of kindergarteners watching eggs hatch.
The first run of our festival was a little rocky. We tried to build homemade-budget collapsible tables for each of our five learning booths. Alas, the finished product would implode into a pile of wood and string if there was so much as a gentle breeze. We attracted a crowd of eight or nine hundred people and stumbled through our respective speeches on condom use, nutrition, health, HIV/AIDS and budgeting. Unfortunately the majority of our participants were young children for whom a lesson on family planning was about as useful as a lesson in microbiology.

Vohitsara
The morning after our event in Amparafaravola we began on our ‘typical schedule’ namely biking and doing a festival in the same day. We packed up our tents (under the close scrutiny of our Malagasy observers who were up to see us off at 6AM) and hit the road for a 40 kilometer bruiser before Vohitsara where we arrived at lunchtime giving us just 90 minutes to set up before our festival starts. Vohitsara is a small sandy town located on a bit of high ground surrounded by an endless expanse of rice paddies. The entire town turned out to our festival. The ‘stage’ the village had constructed out of woven plastic sheeting for us to use for our speeches was torn asunder by the wind and had to be abandon in favor of a dirt clearing. The villages were so enthralled by the singing/dancing white people (we had written some HIV/AIDS jingles) that we soon found ourselves completely surrounded by a eager mob of 900-1000 Malagasy people. As program progressed the children sitting in front gradually encroached so that there was hardly room for us to stand.

Tanambe
Located a short 7k from Vohitsara, Tanambe is the market town and administrative head of the west side of the lake. It is also one of the dirtiest and least appealing cities I have ever visited in Madagascar. The streets were crammed and congested. It smelled like burnt garbage and latrine everywhere. The one hotel in town hosted some of our ‘daintier bikers’ and everyone was excited to take showers there. When I turned on the water a weak cold trickle came out and by the time I had my hair damp the water stopped completely and my shower was abandon. The festival in this town was a little lackluster, the wind was unbearable and it tore our paper information posters apart, nearly destroying our information booths. I participated in a new game we invented called “The-first-kid-to-catch-the-white-person-gets-a-free-pencil” To add some time to our already 4-hour program we began filling our dead-space with all-volunteer dancing to American pop-music on stage. The Malagasy would just stare at us not sure whether to be entertained or confused. It was after our event in Tanambe, we began to feel like a traveling white person circus.

Ambohitrampirana
The bike to this town was the 2nd longest but also most beautiful ride of our trip. We left early but I got a flat front tire about ten kilometers in. There was a little repair hut on the side of the road and I lost about 10 minutes on the pack so I had to bike quickly to catch up. This bike ride was also notable because half way in we ran out of pavement and the rest of the trip was conducted on dirt roads. We stopped for food in the market town where we wolfed down some bread as almost 60 curious Malagasy watched us from the street. Ambohitrampirana was the tiniest town we visited. Located on top of a hill composed almost entirely of crystallized quarts, the area was dry and was the closest approximation of Niger I have yet seen in Madagascar. The water in Ambohitrampirana is thirty meters down and looks like iced tea. Because the number of people in the town was small, four of us wandered into the countryside on a “rabble-raising” mission. As we wandered into the adjoining villages, children fled at the sight of four uniformed (we had made T-shirts) white people walking into town. They probably though the French colonizers were back.

Antanandava
This town is near the entrance of a National Park. It has received five tourists in the past 6 months, and for good reason, there was nothing particularly interesting about it. Once again our festival suffered due to high winds. It was a Sunday so many of the men showed up at our festival drunk. Stephanie lip-syncing to Eminem’s and Rihanna’s new duet became a permanent part of our program (with required backup dancers).We were served beans for dinner for the 5th day in a row.

Imerimandroso
Although the it’s the capital of the North-Western part of the lake Imerimandroso is a ghost town. Suffering from years of depopulation and decay, most of the buildings in town are falling apart and the stores are all closed. We are given a beautiful spot on top of a hill overlooking the lake to do our festival. The lake, as it turns out, is more of a bog. Most of the marshy areas have already been converted into rice paddies and long reeds grow in the shallow bottoms almost out to the center of the lake.

Ambatosoratra
Ambatosoratra is a pleasant town down near the lake shore. It required a considerable amount of effort to bike the 20k into the wind on a dirt road. The villages were very interested in our festival and we were served chick-peas and meat rather than beans. This stop on the trip was also significant because it was my first shower. It is also next to the only place in the region where one can see the Aloatra Reed Lemur, a rare and endangered species. Unfortunately the lemurs are nocturnal so a group of intrepid volunteers, myself included, woke up at 4, biked blindly into the middle of a field and paid a guy with a dugout canoe $2 to go find some with us. The mist was heavy and the full moon was out. In the east we could see a moonbow. Skimming smoothly across the lake between the reeds and bailing water out of the boat with a metal bowl, we heard something in the distance. It wasn’t a lemur, it was another canoe with a radio playing Justin Bieber’s new hit “Baby” on full volume. Proving once and for all that American culture can follow you no matter how far away you go. We found the lemurs; they looked like a mix between a miniature monkey and a muskrat, although they were really cute.

Ambohitsilaozana
After we docked the canoes we set off for Ambohitsilaozana. During our ride in, a beautiful rainbow emerged from the clouds in front of us and it sat magnificently in the sky for over two hours. Ambohitsilaozana was built around the now defunct train station in the center of town. A Peace Corps volunteer now calls the old ticket booth home. The village is also home to the best mofo akondro (battered and fried bananas) I have tasted anywhere in Madagascar. I worked the condom demonstration booth and did a very good session which included a woman who looked no younger than 90.

Ambatondrazaka
This town was both our starting and ending point for our trip. We all camped in front of one volunteer’s house near the high school and took showers. Our final HIV/AIDS festival was poorly attended (only a few hundred) but we were able to bring some doctors to do testing and 34 people were tested (all negative!). To celebrate the completion of the trip we went out the only dance club in town and stayed out late. The next morning we caught the early van back to the capital. The trip was 9 hours and we were all exhausted. Our driver was determined to play loud Malagasy music the whole time so Alison unwired the speakers in the back seat and we all passed out.

The Visitors

Last March when Tropical Storm Hubert rolled through a little red scar of exposed earth appeared on a distant hillside above Ranomafana. Although it appeared harmless enough when viewed from the town square, the landslide posed a serious threat to a priceless internet and cell phone tower perched on the hill’s summit. After the storm cleared, a helicopter bearing concerned big-wigs from the French telecom giant Orange flew out to investigate. The initial report was not good. All the earth supporting the east end of the pylon was gone and each new rain shower was washing soil out from under the concrete foundations of the substructure. Orange purchased a colossal green tarp as a stop-gap measure to cover the damaged hillside. Then they called Yoann.
Yoann Coppin is a French entrepreneur who I met last May during my IST conference. He is the owner of a small company that uses an amazing grass called veditver to stabilize hillsides and prevent further erosion. Yoann and I have been communicating since May about his upcoming project in Ranomafana. I offered to help him get the materials and labor together to jumpstart the project before he was due to arrive. He made me responsible for locating and purchasing 200 Eucalyptus logs and hiring 25 men to work on the hill starting on the Monday following Vingt-six. Preparing for Yoann has been one of my major tasks over the past few months. Eucalyptus does not grow in Ranomafana, so the logs had to be ordered and transported from Kelialina, a little village 10k away. I also collected all of the labor necessary, agreed on wages, and organized a meeting place. Then about 12 hours before Yoann’s arrival he called me and told me he was going to be a day late. Not wanting to disappoint 25 Malagasy men expecting work and a paycheck, I made the decision to start the job without Yoann. The first big task was to get the 200 logs up the hill to the tower.
The cell phone tower in question is a prominent feature on the Ranomafana skyline. Reaching it from the town square is a very strenuous half hour hike. Although only about a mile and a half away, the slope of the hill is steep enough throughout that my ears pop at least once during each ascent and decent. I expected that carrying these logs up would be a monumental task, but on the Monday we began work, it started to rain. The trail up quickly assumed the consistency of burnt rice pudding. By the time I made it up with my logs, I was covered in mud up to my knees.
Yoann arrived the following morn, but the rain did not dissipate, rather it continued to rain without interruption for the next 12 days. Unlike the tropical storms of January and February which clobber the island with torrential rains, put on fantastic lighting shows, and blow over in a few hours, June and July rains spray Madagascar with a chilly mist for weeks at a time. The rains made Ranomafana about as cold and miserable as Michigan in early November. Conditions on Yoann’s project continued to deteriorate. The Malagasy workers, without any serious cold weather gear, continued working in the mud, re-leveling the hillside and hauling cement bags full of manure up the increasingly slick trail. Pay for a days work was 4000 Ar., or just under $2.
Yoann’s presence provided an excellent excuse to bring some other volunteers up to my site to learn about erosion and vetiver grass. Originally I planned on hosting two volunteers at my house for a few days. By the time it was over, 8 different volunteers had made the trip to Ranomafana. My modest home was transformed into a sleeping-room-only hostel. My kitten, overwhelmed by events, had to go live with the neighbors. The packaged candies and meats I had been saving up from my precious mail pouches were almost entirely consumed in the course of less than a week.
On some days, the prevailing Nordic weather canceled work on the project so we were forced to seek other means of entertainment. We took one morning to take a hike into the Ranomafana National Park where we saw one of the most endangered species of lemur and plenty of other neat critters. Cold and dirty from the hiking and working, we made good use out of Ranomafana’s community pool (pictured). Fed entirely by a geothermal hot spring, the pool is always pleasantly warm, making for excellent soaking. On July 4th we were invited to a ‘small’ (turned out to be a crowd of 35) get together at the Director of Valbio’s place. Patricia Wright made an appearance and was a huge hit with the other volunteers, especially after she took us all to one of the nicer restaurants in town and bought us all dinner. Drinks were on the house.
Although my friends were learning a great deal and enjoying everything Ranomafana has to offer, Yoann’s project took a serious turn for the worse. Saturated by the unceasing rains, the top level of terracing collapsed, wasting well over a week of work. Planting of the grass was postponed until well after the volunteers were to leave so much of the training had to be done without doing any physical planting.

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 .