Salama Madagascar!

Recent news stories from Madagascar...that aren't about the movie

2012-07-05T11:20:00.005-05:00

After a few weeks of my Madagascar news alerts being dominated by Madagascar 3 box office reports, there were actually a few relevant updates this week about conservation and other developments that have to do with the real island, people, and biota. Amazing.

Here is a blog from the New Internationalist that bemoans just this and catches all of us up on the recent political history that has been blotted from our minds by cartoon zoo animals.

Centre Valbio, long an active force for conservation efforts and ecological science in Madagascar, has finally opened its research center. This will ensure that Ranomafana continues to be the research hub on the island, and will ensure that international collaboration continues to be fruitful, though I worry that it will keep attention focussed on a very well studied area that isn't necessarily emblematic of the rest of the island. For example, huge amounts of tourism dollars flow to Ranomafana, but how well can conservation efforts there be transfered to other parts of the island that are far of tourist's maps? This blog from Scientific American has the story.

Along these same lines, International collaboration will be even easier, as the country has launched an online research network that, according to the Science and Developmnet Network, "aims to boost science, technology and education in the country, as well as internationalise its science."

Madagascar recently signed an Economic Protection Agreement with the European Union. Under the agreement, Madagascar, along with several other nations will have reduced tarriff access to European markets. This would be awesome if it had happened before Madagascar lost a similar deal, AGOA, with the US and had to shut its textile factories down already, and if it didn't force the developing countries to open their markets to European goods as well. The African Development bank is already warning Zimbabwe that this is a bad deal according to allAfrica and it looks similar for Madagascar to me.

While they are at it, they should probably renegotiate their fishing access fees, since the European Union has been exploiting them and paying far less now then they were 2 decades ago due to fixed fees, according to a new study in Marine Policy (Check out the PhysOrg write-up on it). Shout out to Blue Ventures for their contributions to this research. They are an RPCV-managed NGO garnering major accolades for their innovative marine conservation and community development work.

And we all know music and aid go well together. Well, Razia is at it again, pulling together a great lineup to tour the US and Canada to fight illegal logging in Madagascar. At a time when Nashville is pissed with the Fed's for targeting Fender's alleged use of illegal rosewood and ebony, Razia has garnered support from many big named acts to abide by the Lacey Act. She is tireless and if you are in Minneapolis, Madison, or New York, be sure to go. Anyone is SF want to come out with me in a couple weeks? Check out the schedule here, and enjoy the promo video below.

Corruption on high: Journalistic freedoms squashed to protect lucrative illegal logging

2012-05-17T08:01:00.001-05:00

A disturbing series of stories have been coming out of Madagascar about the crack-down on journalists and the erosion of free press. This is ironic because, as a former DJ and television station owner, Rajoelina stirred dissent against the former government for just this sort of behavior. Only this time, it is for investigating illegal logging, which happens to have ties to this government.

Africa Review - Madagascar court orders radio station sealed off:

A court in Madagascar has ordered the sealing off of the main access road leading to a media house that aired a story on the illegal trafficking of precious woods allegedly by a billionaire chum of President Andry Rajoelina.

Not only are they arresting journalists and shutting down stations, they are also going after the investigators themselves, having fired the Environment and Forest minister over the story:

The sacked man made headlines when he alleged at a press conference that a young billionaire, who is a close ally of President Andry Rajoelina, was behind the illegal trafficking of precious woods in Madagascar.

Even this article has to suppress the name of the logger to not get thrown in jail....I recommend reading the whole, short piece.

This government, and Rajoelina himself have been tied to the illegal logging going back 2 years. Here is a video from 2 years ago of some investigatory work that was recently expanded for a BBC special called Lemurs and Spies (article about Rajoelina and logging here).

How can you do conservation work with so much corruption up to the highest leves possible? Seems like an impossible situation.

New sapphire rush underfoot - this time in sensitive rainforest

2012-04-29T15:46:00.000-05:00

An article in the Telegraph sheds light on a rush to extract sapphires from the rainforest of Eastern Madagascar where I work.

This follows in the wake of substantial gold mining in the area in recent years. The mining has increasing become a problem in the absence of state enforcement and as local management groups are fighting to gain control over their forests. When I was there last July, I heard frequently the refrain that the law protects whats above the soil but not whats under it.

Artisanal gold-mining pits are rather small and though they may extend in a network over a square kilometer or more, the damage is far more localized than much larger open pit, organized sapphire mining. Photo © Sara Tolliver 2011

Many local people were turning to mining to make a living because they didn't see any other alternatives. It is perceived as a way out of poverty despite the fact that many toil severely without finding enough gold to make it worth their while.
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Sowing justice in the most fertile soils of California’s East Bay

2012-04-24T14:16:00.000-05:00

How did you celebrate Earth Day? Did you actively reclaim the last five acres of the most fertile soils in your metropolitan area to utilize it for an agro-ecological demonstration farm for and by the people in the face of a state-corporate partnership to develop it to be able to sell luxury food to the wealthy? No? Well these folks did.

Rallyers marched through North Berkeley and Albany energizing the community around farming and food soveriegnty

I think a lot about food security in Madagascar. About the role of hunting in peoples’ livelihoods; about the different forms that sustainable intensification of rice and other crops can take in order to diminish the necessity to cut the forest for hillside rice; about the benefits the forest provides in terms of soil fertility, water retention, flood mitigation and a safety net to provide resources in the lean months.

But what about here at home? The talk i'm hearing is less around food security and more about food sovereignty. Much of the large tracts of agricultural land in the U.S. has been sucked up by corporate agri-business to plant mono-crops to feed industrial food systems that American consumers are then dependent on for subsistence. Food sovereignty is the idea that we need not be yoked to this system for our right to food, that we can democratically govern our own food systems. A working definition might be the ability of a community to control where its food comes from. Farmer's markets, small family farms, farmland protection, and Community supported agriculture (CSAs) are all essential elements of food sovereignty. Growing Power, out in Milwaukee, WI is showing us one way that communities, can come together to utilize small urban plots to intensively grow quality food where before little was present, and how effective this can be in. The occupy movement is engendering a more radically democratic vision for what food sovereignty can mean. It will be exciting to watch, participate in and learn from this emerging experiment. Raj Patel does a great job making this link over on his blog

Inspired by the Occupy movement, which has built widespread moral support for providing with those who were previously denied – the 99%, East Bay activists held an Earth Day rally and marched to the Gill Tract, in Albany, a piece of experimental farming land owned by UC Berkeley, who has been planning development activities on the land to fill budget shortfalls. The rhetoric at the rally and march, as well as the organizational structure of the fledgling farm are straight out of Occupy – food for the people, daily community meetings, decentralized management. They are showing us that democracy extends to all our systems and people can take back that which is so primary in our lives: food and the cultural and ecological systems that we derive it from.

The activists are asking the University to protect the land under a permanent agricultural easement. At only 5 acres, if the farm is operated as a CSA it could only support about 250 families, but it could serve thousands as an educational hub for how to run a democratic farm, and millions as a symbol of democracy in action and the principles of food sovereignty.

First acre cleared and planted - at least 4 more to go!

Go to the movements website to see whats happening out at the Gill tract and for opportunities to get involved and support the effort. You can also find them on twitter at @occupyfarm and #occupythefarm. Better yet, head on down and get your hands in the dirt. They have only planted about 1 acre so far and could definitely use more hands.

Info and literature tables are present, as well as food
and medical stations

Whether Madagascar or the USA, we all have a right to food and should create and maintain the sustainable agro-ecological systems that provide it. In Madagascar, food sovereignty is almost a given since it is mostly subsistence farmers disconnected from the global market, yet food security remains a major concern. Both here and there, though, visions trend toward the same solutions: diverse, democratic institutions to maintain social and ecological resilience amidst rapid global changes.

How should we prioritize conservation action globally?

2012-04-09T14:05:00.000-05:00

Warning: technical material ahead...

Driven by the agreement set by the signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity to “significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 (Jones et a 2011),” conservation prioritization became a hot topic. In light of recent indications that the rate of biodiversity loss has not declined and pressure on areas of high diversity has increased (Butchart et al. 2010), this continues to be a pressing issue. Here I review a piece from 2006 by Brooks et al. entitled "Global Biodiversity Conservation Priorities" which tries to sort out the most effective way of prioritizing conservation ahead of the 2010 assessment, and apply the lessons to what we see in Madagascar today.

Brooks et al (2006) looked at prioritization schemes set by major conservation NGOs and classified them based on axes of irreplaceability and vulnerability. Irreplaceability is usually indicated by levels of endemism, but can include taxonomic uniqueness and rarity of habitat types but these are hard to quantify. Richness is not of primary concern because “species richness is driven by common, widespread species; thus, strategies focused on species richness tend to miss exactly those features most in need of conservation (Brooks et al 2010).” Vulnerability is not clearly defined here but is a temporal indicator of threat. The most commonly used indicators are proportional habitat loss and protected area coverage. The authors bemoan the lack of consideration of demographic change, pressure from hunting, governance and institutional weaknesses and (which I found hugely surprising that it wasn't present) cost.

There is also a spatial component to these schemes and they all use overlapping “ecoregions” to define funding rather than a grid-based system. This has substantial effects on prioritization and the authors suggest normalizing these ecoregions because they are biased towards larger ones. Grid-based methods, however, like that used by Kremen et al (2008) to prioritize nationally in Madagascar, should supersede this concern.

By mapping the 9 most common prioritization schemes the authors were able to find high overlap within two groups of strategies, proactive and reactive, but not across them. Both proactive and reactive strategies prioritize high irreplaceability but reactive strategies also prioritize those with high vulnerability because these are the sites where action is most urgently needed while the proactive strategies prioritize low vulnerability because this is where conservation is most easily done(less politically charged and often cheaper).

The authors judge the success of the prioritization based on how much of the flexible funding available for conservation it was able to capture – the wrong measure. Shouldn’t we judge success on conservation outcomes? If we are going to focus on finances we should be looking at cost-effectiveness, which isn't included at all here, rather than funds captured. This data is becoming more readily available and will be a factor of future prioritizations so as that data is incorporated, this is likely to change. There are also political reasons why this is the wrong measure – CI appears to be moving away from the Hot Spot approach (or so says Kareiva, the head of The Nature Conservancy), lauded here for garnering the largest share of the pie, and turning to a people-centered ecosystem service approach to prioritizing funding. If the "success" of these priorities are so transient they are not useful in making future prioritizations.

Most of Madagascar, especially the highly diverse moist forests, is prioritized by most of the reactive schemes, while the dry deciduous forests of the west are also prioritized under proactive schemes that look for areas of low threat. The overlap here demonstrates the need to more deeply investigate the level of vulnerability of this ecosystem.

Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena (CAZ) illuminates some of the complexity of prioritization. Madagascar itself was identified under the Hot Spot approach by Conservation International, a reactive scheme, but the particular site, an approximately 400,000ha area of contiguous forest, was selected based on irreplaceability and low vulnerability (ie it was an easy area to protect because of low human populations in the forest interior). Now, an ecosystem-service narrative, rather than a biodiversity one drives continued funding and discourse around CAZ. This shows the differences of scale and discourse in prioritization, which aren’t captured by an assessment of global schemes.

While there may be overlap between biodiversity priorities and ecosystem service priorities in terms of carbon and water quality, they by no means must overlap and we need to be clear about what it is that we are prioritizing. As of now, while we are shifting toward a commodity view of how to protect areas, there is far too often a lack of clarity. In fact, we still don’t have a strong understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and specific ecosystem services. This muddiness and ambiguity is yearning for clarity.

Citations

Brooks, T. M., Mittermeier, R. A., da Fonseca, G. A. B., Gerlach, J., Hoffmann, M., Lamoreux, J. F., Mittermeier, C. G., et al. (2006). Global Biodiversity Conservation Priorities. Science, 313(7 July 2006), 58-61.

Butchart, S. H. M., Walpole, M., Collen, B., van Strien, A., Scharlemann, J. P. W., Almond, R. E. a, Baillie, J. E. M., et al. (2010). Global biodiversity: indicators of recent declines. Science (New York, N.Y.), 328(5982), 1164-8. doi:10.1126/science.1187512

Jones, J. P. G., Collen, B., Atkinson, G., Baxter, P. W. J., Bubb, P., Illian, J. B., Katzner, T. E., et al. (2011). The why, what, and how of global biodiversity indicators beyond the 2010 target. Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 25(3), 450-7. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01605.x

Kremen, C., Cameron, A., Moilanen, A., Phillips, S. J., Thomas, C. D., Beentje, H., Dransfield, J., et al. (2008). Aligning Conservation Priorities Across Taxa in Madagascar with High-Resolution Planning Tools. Science, 320(222), 222-226. doi:10.1126/science.1155193

Has anything happened in Madagascar the last 6 months?

2012-04-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

Re-revving the bloggin engine.

Here are a list of links that focus on Madagascar and/or conservation that I was considering reacting more fully to over the last 6 months. Oldest first.

New research agenda for Africa’s dry forests defined at Durban - CIFOR
Back in December, in conjunction with COP17 in Durban, a 1 dy conference was held to discuss dryland forest. Despite covering much of the African continent, this ecosystem has been largely ignored by carbon politics because it is far less densely forested than humid forests. It also happens to support more than half the population of the continent. This piece highlights the take homes from the conference, dryland forest value and some of the challenges.

Madagascar squares up to 'extreme' climate vulnerability - AlertNet
Also at Durban, there was discussion of the vulnerability of Madagascar to climate change. "Maplecroft, an international risk analysis firm, ranks Madagascar third for “extreme” climate risk in the world, behind only Bangladesh and India, Rakotoarisoa said." FOlks are working on rice intensification through low-till processess and flood and drought resistant seeds. THey have also been developing early-warning systems for cyclones, which became very necessary as two major cyclones hit Madagascar in the months after this report.

Madagascar’s Lemurs, Sacred No More - NYTimes
There was a flurry of coverage in the wake of a couple of papers that came out around hunting and taboos in Madagascar. One of the things things that Jenkins et al (2011) noted was that as traditional taboos were changing (due to migration and religious transitions amongst others) that endangered lemurs were becoming more culturally acceptable to hunt. This work was done very close to and found far higher rates of bushmeat consumption than we did.

Caution urged in sale of Madagascar's illegal timber stockpiles - Mongabay
In light of the recent announcement that Gabon is set to burn its ivory stockpiles, this February discussion of how to deal with Madagascar's illegally harvested precious hardwood's gains some poignancy. "Done right, funds from selling timber at auction could go toward forest protection and poverty alleviation efforts. Done wrong, sales of confiscated timber could enrich traffickers, boost demand for Madagascar's rare hardwoods, and spur new logging."
Help Madagascar Silk Weavers Share Their Experiences and Work Towards Sustainability - Hurry Boy It's Waiting There For You
Intrepid blogger and Madagascar RPCV Chris Planicka shares a story about the silk weavers of Madagascar and their (still current) efforts to get the cash they need to build markets in the US for their amazing scarves and hats. This effort is being innovated upon by NGOs in the north of the island in their attempt to find sustainable incomes for folks living next to and within new protected areas. The PCV -partnered project that Chris talks about seems to have better footing to me.

Indonesian 'Eves' colonised Madagascar 1,200 years ago - PhysOrg

A recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society determined from genetic analysis that about 30 women (plus men, potentially) settled Madagascar from Indo-Polynesia about 1200 years ago. Women weren't found on trading vessels so the question is open as to how they came to arrive in Madagascar...

Species Hitched Ride to Madagascar on Floating Islands - Live Science

Madagascar has been seperated from the mainland for 80 million years and the species on the isalnd radiated after that time. So how did they get there? By comparing the times and locations that current species on the island would have separated from their nearest neighbors, Karen Samonds from the University of Queensland, Australia says we can conclude that it must have been on large rafts of vegetation floating across the Mozambique channel. "For example," she says, "DNA evidence indicates that just one primate species made it across, probably 40 or 50 million years ago, and that ancestral form gave rise to the 101 descendent species you can find in Madagascar today."

and finally...

Learning on the Road to Nowhere in Madagascar - NYTimes Scientists at Work Blog

An entomologist who has worked for years in Madagascar tries to reach a largely pristine forest in one of the remotest corners of the island during the peak of rainy season. What can go wrong. This exciting post shows how adventurous (and maybe a bit crazy) we have to be to love doing this kind of work.

Gibson and CITES: Attention finally being paid to Madagascar?

2011-10-03T13:25:00.000-05:00

If you know anything about socio-ecological issues in Madagascar, you know that exploitation of precious timber, especially rosewood, ebony, and polysandre, has been especially egregious since the 2009 coup d'etat. Even if you don't know anything about Madagascar, you might have heard recently of the ramifications of this through your rabid devourment of American political news. US Fish and Wildlife Service investigations of Gibson guitar have become a battleground between tea-party activists who think the government is over-regulating and environmentalists who see corporate greed ravishing the forests of impoverished nations like Madagascar. Here's a link to a fairly comprehensive article about the case from the Tennessean, published in the home state of Gibson Guitars.
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The Myth of the Virgin Forest

2011-10-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

A new meta-analysis of 138 studies across the tropics was published in the online edition of Nature a few days ago and found that, “primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining biodiversity.”

I was drawn to this article because it has been picked up by the popular media. This piece is already being wielded to call from stronger protection of these forests. In interview, one of the first authors does just this. Luke Gibson tells us, “It is therefore essential to limit the reach of humans and to preserve the world’s remaining old-growth rainforests while they still exist. The future of tropical biodiversity depends on it.”

What interests me is that it is never clear what forests they are talking about. Part of the problem is that the language is loose. Are “primary” and “old-growth” the same thing? Gibson seems to imply so.

In a quick google search of the sources publishing about this article, nearly every one on the first page uses a different epithet for these forests. From the first 6 headlines we get: “Virgin forests,” “natural forests,” “old growth forests,” “primary forests,” “pristine forests,” and “rainforest.” All of these names seem to conjure an idea of an untouched forest far from humans where nature can thrive free from the negative effects of our species. They all embody the wilderness myth.

To further highlight this let’s see what kind of land this pristine forest is contrasted against. “Degraded forests,” “disturbed forests” and “a re-modeled home,” and one piece from The Conversation tells us, “We live in an age of vanishing rainforests.”

This is the conservation myth.
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Anatomy of an Expedition. Part One.

2011-09-18T22:46:00.000-05:00

In August, two fellow grad students from UW-Madison came out to Madagascar to conduct fieldwork for a project to document the critically endangered Greater Bamboo Lemur, Prolemur simus, using trail cameras, and to gather interview data related to forest use and specifically the culture of hunting. They stayed for 2 weeks. Here is a log of our expedition (a word I do so love to use).

August 4

I picked up Erik and Britt at the airport a bit after midnight. We headed back to the hotel to have a preliminary meeting with a preliminary THB (Three Horses Beer, the national beer of Madagascar), and to catch up and revel in the excitement of the impending expedition, before catching a few hours of zzzs.

Erik and Britt still bleary-eyed from two days travel in the down-stairs part of our little loft at Sakamanga

Toaka Gasy!

2011-08-18T17:13:00.001-05:00

Just got back from an amazing two week expedition with colleagues from the CHANGE program at UW-Madison to find the critically endangered Greater Bamboo Lemur and to investigate the effects of hunting on this and other species in the region around my research area. Next time I will post an anatomy of the expedition, as a sort of digital field journal.

But, as there is nothing better than a cold beer to soothe the physical and mental exhaustion after such an endeavor I thought it would be appropriate to share short photo essay on toaka gasy, Malagasy moonshine, before heading back out for another 10 day field trip. Not that it is anywhere near as refreshing as beer...

Agroforestry Conundrums: Vanilla vs. Camphor

2011-07-19T10:49:00.006-05:00

A recent series of posts (Well, back in May, but still…) by Noah Jackson, over at Rainforest Alliance’s Frog Blog, focused on vanilla farming in Madagascar. He is an auditor for RA, travels the world meeting farmers and foresters, assessing the sustainability of their practices and compliance with certification standards. He makes the point about how important it is for vanilla farming to be sustainable. Especially in Madagascar:

Vanilla grows in the northern part of the country, where coastal and montane rainforests thrive. In a place as biodiverse as Madagascar, growing and cultivating crops like vanilla in harmony with nature is particularly important – irresponsible farming could threaten the integrity of this incredible landscape.

But if its like most of the crops in Mada very little is certified because of how expensive it is to do the audits and stay up to date with the latest requirements. There are, however, folks trying still export crops the right way. People like From the Field Trading, composed primarily of 2 rpcvs and the farmers that they have lived and worked with for years.

My (not so) Nightmare Third World Dentist Experience

2011-07-09T23:06:00.002-05:00

I got off the taxibe 165 as if I was going to The Cookie Shop, a little cafe in the capital that is the closest thing you can get to America this side of Africa. Unfortunately, as soon as I neared the shop, I had to ignore the little latte fiend in my brain and turn down a side road instead. This road heads past a strip of chop shops that leads to an informal market surrounding the “stinky lake,” the most foul, putrescent cesspool of a pond in Tana (and people fish in it). I did this because I was headed to the dentist, having ejected a filling from a lower incisor and subsequently swallowing it while therapeutically biting my nails the week before. I think I should take up smoking instead - it would be better for my teeth.

Searching for freshwater fish in Mada - what it can say about forest conservation

2011-06-29T04:38:00.002-05:00

In a new blog post from the field for The New York Times, John Sparks describes his search for an incredibly rare and recently discovered species (1990s) of Damba, a genus of fish endemic to Madagascar.

He highlights the plight of freshwater fish on the red island:

“It should be painfully obvious to the reader from my earlier posts that Madagascar’s native freshwater fishes are in very serious trouble — narrow endemism and widespread habitat degradation are a dangerous combination. Throw in competition with an array of exotic species, and you have the ingredients for a full-blown disaster. Essentially, freshwater fishes are afforded little protection within the isolated patches of protected forest that remain throughout the country, and within which one can still find relatively healthy populations of lemurs, chameleons and other native vertebrates. Most of these forest reserves are at higher elevation, where there is little suitable habitat for fishes other than rheophilic gobioids (gobies and eleotrids). In addition, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a watershed that has not been affected to some degree by deforestation throughout its course — and obviously, the negative effects of siltation persist downstream to the sea.”

But its not just fish that are threatened in freshwater systems: The lac alaotran lemur is critically endangered and the Alaotra grebe has recently been declared extinct.

One thing in his post that intrigued me is his emphasis on tilapia and their importance to local livelihoods:
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....And the Wheel Turns: A year in review

2011-06-27T06:26:00.001-05:00

Well... I’m back! Both to Madagascar and to this digital weblog of my exploits. As I continue my protracted transition from Peace Corps volunteer to academic / conservation professional I am reevaluating the purpose of this blog and its potential (more on that in a future post), I realize many of you may not quite know what I’ve been up to. That may be exacerbated by the fact of my signing off of here so abruptly and then disappearing from normal human reality into my own personal malarially-feverish year of grad school. So in lieu of the malagasy folk-tale about how the gecko got its spots (also in a future post, you better believe), I’ll just do a quick picture post of some of the highlights of my last year to get us all back up to speed. Then i’ll be free to focus on Madagascar and conservation.

After touring the North of the island with a bunch of amazing friends, going to places like this...

...and this...

...and then my 6 months were up and it was time to come on back to Fremont for a couple

Photo Essay: How a vazaha tries to support community-based conservation in Madagascar

2010-06-02T03:08:00.022-05:00

[disclaimer: my 'w' key is quite broken; if any are missing from the following post, please blame the beer I spilled on my computer at the internet cafe]

After months of wrangling with the writing on the avowed blog post on the intersection of conservation and development; after venturing to begin stories in formats such as the academic essay, the travel log, and the fictional account; after starting and scraping a plethora of garbage stories all in an attempt to tell the story of what I am doing here in an informative and engaging way - I give up.

After fretting so profusely, I realized that I am in the capital now, have a decent internet connection (wireless!), have a bunch of photos and that it is easier for me and probably more enjoyable for you, just to post some pictures, with some minimal words to provide context. Why didn't one of you experienced bloggers clue me into this oh-too-obvious format earlier? For a funny and informative (and more frequently updated!) discussion on some of the frustrations of working on these issues nearby in Madagascar, you should totally read Chris Planicka's blog. This post will be limited to explaining some of the work I have been doing. Maybe, in the future, but at this rate probably not, I'll actually write that other post I keep mentioning....

So here we go. What do I do?
I work with groups like this. It took me a day to ride the 55km or so that it takes to get out to
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Support CLIC!

2010-04-02T05:30:00.008-05:00

Bibliotheque CLIC (Centre de Lecture, d'Informtation et de Culture) is the new library in my community, Morarano.

They just opened two weeks ago, and as you can see, they can certainly use some more resources.

Their plan is to be a regional information hub and they hope to have the resources to promote language study and to act as a technical library for improved farming techniques. They are working on getting solar power to run a computer, photocopier, TV and VCR/DVD player in order to make multimedia available to the local community.

Right now they are requesting books!

Especially:
- French/English dictionaries, textbooks, and other learning materials
- Atlases and Travel Guides with pictures
- Childrens Books

Materials can be sent to me or directly to the librarian:

Bibliotheque CLIC
Tendry Maharavo Joël
c/o Chez Meur. Le Chef ZAP
EPP Morarano Gare
Moramanga 514
Madagascar

If you want to do anything else to help out, like organize a drive to cover the shipping costs on a box of books, let me know!

Respect My Boundaries!!

2010-02-26T09:47:00.003-06:00

Call the doctors! (wait....on second thought, don't do that - he'd be pretty mad at me) I think I'm suffering from a failure of my creativity systems (how does a doctor treat one for that, anyway?) because for the life of me I can't figure out how to make my work sound interesting... I know, I know- I live in Madagascar and work in the rain forest helping local people manage their forest; how can it be anything but interesting!? All I have to do is describe my yard, or the chameleon I saw yesterday, or the national park I visited, or what species of tree is dwindling in numbers (no), or what I had for dinner last night, or the role of CIREF in forest delimitation (no), or the funeral I went to, or maybe my life here with regards to coffee, or the training I'm developing on the statutes of the VOIs (no, no, no!), yet somehow I am having trouble.

As you can see, anything related to daily life here has some general appeal. I just read my friend Sara's blog and was thoroughly entertained by her descriptions of the left-overs she ate for breakfast and her ride to site the first time. But somehow I feel compelled to use this blog to highlight the incredible complexities or working in the field of natural resource use and conservation on this ecological wonderland of a economically impoverished island – but the daily realities of it are so tedious and boring! What to do? Describe breakfast (some cocoa cereal and decent coffee – I am in the capital right now after all), or write something only the most stalwart of my eco-nerd friends will appreciate? Oh, how about this: I draw you in with big picture goodies about life in Madagascar to set the stage and then bring it down to the nitty gritty details in such an insinuating manner that you don't even realize you're being hit with science.

Scratch that. All of it. I'll save the professional-like sciency stuff for a less SalmanRushdie-inspired-self-reflective-mess of a post and hit you with a couple anecdotes about the meaning of boundaries in Malagasy culture instead.

How do you like that?

I don't care, I'm doing it anyway...

One obvious boundary that has shaped the Malagasy psyche is that of the Mozambique channel. Being adrift in the Indian ocean has certainly created a disconnect with the rest of Africa. There is very much a sense of island isolation – difficulty in coming and going, for people and for goods, has created a strong sense of being Malagasy, as opposed to being vazaha, or an outsider. This sense was heightened by French colonial power, engendering a sense of inferiority. So at one and the same time there is a pride in being Malagasy and a strange sense of cultural shame. Malagasy tend to hide their traditional practices, rather than flaunt it like many Africans. Being a tourist here is a different experience than in the rest of Africa: it would be very difficult to find a village here that encourages tourists to join their life for a day, sing their songs, see their traditional clothes and share their meals.

That's my biased snapshot of the Malagasy view towards foreigners, but when you look within Madagascar, the Malagasy are just as adept at establishing that boundary between us and them. Are they from the highland or the coast? What tribe are they from (there's about 23 officially but they are constantly evolving)? Are you a newcomer to the village? Are you a family member? Male or female? Catholic or Protestant? All of these things will be ascertained quickly and often subconsciously as a way of defining one's role in society...

Ok, enough waxing psuedo-anthrolopological... my point is that the Malagasy are very aware of the boundary between us and them, which makes it very curious to Western eyes how apparently oblivious to personal boundaries they are. Enough stereotypical baloney. I said anecdotes...

One morning, soon after getting to site, I decided to take the taxi brousse the 30km from my village into the main town to do some marketing. Thus far I had gotten rides in private cars since my return from exile, I mean home, so I was rather happy to be riding in a brousse for an hour, reconnecting with 'gasy culture, reminiscing about the two day long brousse nightmares I had experienced in the past and musing about how many people they pack into these things and how interesting it is that nobody minds being squished in, butting up against your neighbor with a random baby's head on your shoulder and a chicken at your feet. At this point we were 5 across which accounted for all the butt-space available in the rather narrow row (5 random Americans would not fit, I can tell you that). We were about half way to town by this point and full up, but there were more people clambering to get on. "Do six 6 across," the driver's assistant tells the bus. "um..," I'm thinking as people grumble and start shifting around to get cockeyed with one cheek on, one cheek off, to add an extra rear end in there. There is no way that we are going to get 6 of us in that row. I had the middle seat, which is a board that spans the aisle between the two benches, so naturally when we had to get another butt on the bench and couldn't, my thigh became the bench and I had a random girl sitting on my lap (this was one time I wasn't made to feel like a foreigner). Similar arrangements we being arranged in the other rows. We didn't talk. She just sat half-in-my-lap and the only time we communicated was for me to say "excuse me," as I reached my hand under her butt to extract my bus fare from my pocket. She didn't even feel the need to reply. Trying to imagine this scene taking place in America, I decided then that I needed to write a few remarks about boundaries.

One other incident, illustrative in another way of the Malagasy view on personal boundaries, was when a fellow volunteer got her camera stolen during a training. About 60 villagers (and 3 volunteers) were brought to Tamatave, the big port city on the east coast, for a 3-day training given by a big conservation NGO. On the third day we had coffee break around 10 o'clock and shortly thereafter the volunteer noticed her camera missing. It had been really hectic, with people in and out during the break, so it easily could have been removed from the otherwise encapsulated training space. Lockdown! Was it because it was a volunteer's (i.e. vahaza's) camera? Was it because it was a NGO training and the NGO wanted to demonstrate it's concern for our wellbeing? Was it indicative of everyday life in Madagascar? I was told repeatedly by the people carrying out the actions to come that it is the latter: "don't worry, they're used to it!"

Whatever the impetus, for the next hour-or-so various searches were carried out. The doors were shut and the facility searched – had it just gotten misplaced? Then everybody's bag was taken to the front and searched in case somebody had stolen it and stashed it. People were asked to accuse the perpetrator. I think that in The States we probably would have made an announcement that the camera was missing, ask if anyone had seen it, maybe search the room, and then call it quits saying, "I can't believe someone took it..." or the like. It didn't stop there. Oh no. While bags were searched, men and women were lined up and pat-downs were carried out. Finally, we were all allowed to go to lunch, the victim apologizing that all this time had been taken up on her account, mortified about what was being done in her name (they really didn't seem to mind all that much though). Deliberations were carried out. It was decided that one of the participants was sketchy because he went to the bathroom and they agreed that his room at the hotel should be searched during lunch. Woah – just so you know, if NGO staff suspects you of stealing they can tell the hotel staff and get a key to your room. Yeah, there is no word from privacy in Malagasy...

Coming back from lunch we got on with the training, sad to be missing the camera and glad to be moving on from the inquisition and to have that uncomfortable situation behind us. But was it done? Not yet! Before going home they brought it up again. New accusations were raised, inquiries made. It was decided that a box should be placed near the women's bathroom, which was behind a partition. One by one, with our bags, we were to go to the box and either put a piece of paper with information-which-leads-to-the-apprehension-of or the camera itself in to the box (you know, as an act of shame brought on by the extensive efforts made to wear down our souls).

No camera. Accusations were read. Nobody directly implicated. Debate drew to an end. It was over.

Just like this blog. Now that I have worn down your patience you are free to go. Just after you line up and one-by-one deposit your comments in the form linked to the comment button below (really though, it would be wonderful to hear from all of you!). If you feel guilty for not having done so before, you can deposit goodies in your mailbox and send them to the address in the sidebar of this blog (the title of this should link to the blog if this was sent as an email to you). Just to make it easy: c/o Conservation International, BP59 Morarano 514, Madagascar

Maybe for next blog I'll get to that stuff that I care enough about to leave family and friends half a world behind in order to work on for 6 months. Maybe I can put CBNRM in the context of boundaries, to tie it to these fun stories and make it more interesting. Boundary to Development in Madagascar: Lack of Alternatives to Over-exploitation of Natural Resources! reads the headline...

Ugh...already sounds boring...

It's a Different World Up Here!

2010-01-20T01:18:00.004-06:00

Pardon the typos, but I'm back to having to use a French keyboard in a slipshod internet cafe. That's right, I'm finally back in Madgascar! It only took me 10 months of frustration to get here and I'm still not even sure this was the right decision, but I'm here for the next 6 months so hopefully soon I will feel like I belong again.

Part of my difficulty is the rapidity of the transition. I arrived a week ago and had two days of orientation before being brought to site. Last time around I had 10 weeks of training and the opportunity to gradually get used to things. I certainly appreciate the confidence that everybody has in my ability to thrive despite any real idea what the hell I am doing but it would have been nice to at least see my friends first...

Now I'll put away that grumbling voice that seems to have arisen in me some time in the last few months. Hopefully, next blog I will be able to post some pictures; I just have to find a place that I could plug in my own computer so I could prepare the next blog ahead of time while the clock is not ticking. For now, though, maybe I will just highlight a few of the similarities and differences between my old site in the South-East, and my new one, up on the plateau but still near the rain forest corridor.

Similarity: I'm still working with community based management groups (COBAs) charged with managing swaths of a large new protected area. Again this time there are way too many (16) to work effectively with all of them during my 6 months but at least i can try to meet with them all and really benefit a few (which is the realization I came to after my first year in Vondrozo). The work should take me out into the forest again, though just like before, I live a few kilometers away (in fact, where I am now, I can't even see it for all the eucalyptus that has been planted).

Difference: Before, I was working with a field team of 5 Malagasy WWF empoyees who were pretty knowledgable and quick to learn, who had connections and a good rapport within the communities already and who were dedicated to conservation and helping the locals develop. This time around my aim is the same, but I'm working with Conservation International and I AM the field team. That's right - just me. Melissa and Lety are doing the same job in nearby areas but we all work independently. So my hopes of accomplishment are much lower this time around, though I should be able to transmit enough insight about the reality of things on the ground to CI that they decide they aught to have a field team here (the local office closed during the political crisis). This time around though, there are federations that link the COBAs together. There was nothing like that in Vondrozo and I think it is a great idea. So maybe I can spend much of my time developing the federation instead of working directly with the COBAs. We'll have to see how this goes...

Difference: People are really friendly here! I walk around my village and everybody smiles and says 'hi', they seem stoked to have me around and not put off by me. In Vondrozo, I was the first PC volunteer and they hardly ever get white people out there so they were scared of me and didn't really know what to do with me. Up here they are used to vazaha, foreigners, and in fact called me "Aaron's replacement" for the first few days! I'm working hard on establishing my own identity and assuring them I wont leave after a few days (maybe thats why they seem so friendly - they are really trying hard to make me like them so they won't lose their vazaha again!). It took a long time before I really found out who I could work closely with in Vondrozo and to build the trust needed to be effective. I've already here had the head of the Parent's association at the school come to me seeking advice on a grant proposal, right after she handed me the curtains and sheets she had offered to sew for me (I never even ahd curtains in Vondrozo!) Seems like folks are a little less kamo (lazy) here and ready to work. I better step it up!

Difference: They are really good farmers up here. My village is on a fairly major road, 30km off the road to the most visited tourist site in the country and the main shipping thouroughfaire in the country. Im near if not in the breadbasket of the country and man do people know how to farm rice here! I've been walking around taking pictures (which i would have been self-conscious to do in Vondrozo) of rice fields, tractors, fertilizer, etc. because I am so struck by the knowledge base and ensuing wealth here. I won't subject you all to another blog on rice, don't worry, even though i do want to post the pictures. I'll just have to write my next update about some of the wildlife so I can show off the beautiful birds and moths that I have been seeing (all very commonplace but still beautiful).

Ok, Im sure that's more than enough to sate your appetites for now. I do wish this computer's spellcheck wasn't in French...

Miss you all! Mandrapihaona!

Goodbye Madagascar

2009-03-27T09:57:00.004-05:00

I keep trying to write on paper the blogs that I want to post, about the political situation, how it has effected my work, my mentality, its root causes, the way it impacts peoples lives in the countryside, Malagasy people's takes on things, what its like being evacuated, what I'm doing next, etc. At first I couldn't really process things. I couldn't even keep a journal. Now, all these ideas and all my experiences over the last two months are all run together and I still can't make sense of things, nor write clearly about them. So rather than try to analyze it all or really share my experiences, I'll just give you a dry, blow-by-blow to bring you up to date. It'll be bare bones, but maybe after some questions from you all I will be able to elucidate matters a little more. I'll try to post some pics, too.

So late January I left my site to go to the capital and pick up my good friend Alex, who was visiting from the states. We had grand plans but unrest broke out the day he arrived. After driving through looting and general mayhem, we holed up at a Malagasy friend of mine's house. After a few days with no resolution in site, Alex left for South Africa to take his vacation elsewhere and I got consolidated with about 50 other volunteers. We stayed at a training facility for three weeks playing volleyball, reading, getting daily briefs on the situation, and generally going stir crazy. We all wanted to get back to our communities. During this time Liz was supposed to have arrived to come down and work in Vondrozo again with me, but WWF suspended volunteer activities so she couldn't come.

Finally, things were deemed face enough for us to go back to our sites under a heightened security protocol. I tried to get back to work on my way down to site. We had written a grant proposal before I left and I took it to a couple donors. It was clear though that things were pretty much at a standstill and agencies were waiting for things in Madagascar to get better before resuming normal operations. Then I got caught in town with some shooting and had to be moved with one other volunteer to a safe town for a couple more days.

I finally got back to Vondrozo in late February. The students I worked with were disheartened by the whole deal and not motivated to keep doing projects. My WWF agents were grounded and not allowed to go out in the field and do their work. So my work changed. I did some project planning with WWF and helped a friend to plant rice using improved techniques. It was a productive week of work, all in all. But then the military factionalized and the security situation in Tana degraded substantially. Peace Corps decided to pull out.

A week later I was in South Africa, with all 120 or so of us who had not chosen to leave earlier. We had a rushed conference to either get reassigned or separated from Peace Corps. I was not done and really wanted to transfer, but my medical exam turned up some things that Peace Corps was not comfortable with, so they want me to go back to the states and get healthy. Immediately after finding out I couldn't transfer, I booked a flight to Cape Town and the next day was here.

I've been here a few days and love the town. Tomorrow a few friends and I will rent a car and do an overland journey through southern Africa. We are all really excited for the trip but still stressed and sad to see others go.

Next month Ill go to Malaysia for two weeks with Liz before returning to Africa. I want to make it up to Cairo and into Europe. We'll see how far the money lasts. Eventually, I'll get back stateside to have these medical check-ups while I wait for things in Madagascar to right themselves so that I can return.

Damn, I miss that island so much already...

Madagascar in Crisis?

2009-01-29T01:55:00.002-06:00

Hey, since people are starting to find out about the situation here and ask me about it, I thought I ought to finally say something to assuage the fear.

The country is in a political crisis as the mayor of the capital is calling for the president to step down and the entire country has erupted in looting against the president's factories.

I am in the capital, safe and sound, just waiting out this situation. It is calm now but could still get worse.

Don't worry for me - there is no targeting of foreigners and i am staying in a walled compound with some friends - we even have internet!

below are a few links to sites you can get updates if you are so inclined. It is hard to get breaking news in english but there are a couple blogs being updated frequently.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119668520021
this is a facebook group where news is being posted as its found out. it is a good site to find out about the current status of peace corps in madagascar

http://dropsmakewaves.blogspot.com/
a former volunteer's blog who is living in antananarivo right now and very active in keeping the world alert to current issues here

http://www.sobika.com
in french but has up to the minute falsh news briefs. probably more relevant to us in the country actually...

If you find other sites please post them to the comments to help others learn about this situation

As I am not allowed to have a political opinion here I cant comment any more on the reasons this situation erupted but you can easily find out for yourselves. I really just wanted to let you all know that I am just fine and this is all more interesting than scary for me (really its incredibly boring sitting inside all day so you should email me and let me know how you are doing).

Life is Rice; Rice is Life

2008-12-15T06:59:00.003-06:00

Most all of you know by now that rice is a cultural obsession here in Madagascar and that it is eaten by the heaping plateful at every meal. When I am invited to someone’s house, what acts as more of an indicator of how Gasy I have become than my level of fluency in the language is the amount of rice that I eat (“Well, he’s kind of dumb but at least he knows how to eat rice,” I can hear my hosts thinking). It occurred to me, however, that perhaps not all of you fully grasp what it means to eat rice so frequently here. Of course, you know that it’s not buying a big bag at Costco (or reusing your own at the bulk bins of the Co-op), popping it into the rice cooker, and sitting down to meal. But how involved a process is it? I’ll spare you the technical details, which us environment volunteers love so much, on this journey from field to table, but I hope you will nonetheless get a sense of why rice is more than a meal here, why its a way of life.

First stop: tanim-bary, or rice paddy. In the Central Valley of California we have huge paddies - expansive, flat, mechanised operations, complete with aerial pest control – that contribute a large amount to world rice stores. Needless to say, that is a model not readily adopted here in Madagascar. Aside from not having the capital to purchase the inputs (tractors, pesticides, fertilizers, etc.), the topography is too rugged to permit such large-scale operations. There are a couple of areas, like near Lac Aloatra, the so-called bread basket of Madagascar, where tractors are in use, but by and large, what feeds people here are small-scale, organic, labour-intensive, family ‘farms’.

We have all seen pictures of Burma and Thailand with the beautifully terraced hill slopes, neatly distributing water through all the level fields. That is pretty incredible technology and speaks to the power of cultural heritage to pass along and perfect an agricultural technique over thousands of years. We have paddies like those here, too, passed down from that same cultural heritage and thought to have been brought with the last wave of Indo-Polynesian settlers maybe 500 years ago. Their descendants, the Betsileo, live on the plateau and are known for their rice culture. They build terraces every bit as impressive as the Burmese. But many of the tribes, such as those near me in the South East, don’t possess this inherited knowledge and use different techniques. The people in my region have traditionally lived in relation to the forest. Aside from harvesting many products from the forest, they practice slash and burn agriculture. After clearing a tract of forest, they grow rice and manioc on the hillsides using the stored nutrients for a year or two, until they are depleted, and then repeating the process with a new tract. But now that the forest is nearly gone and slash and burn is illegal, they are having to learn how to build paddies and manage the land more sustainably. It is hard work, and rice is now grown mostly in valley bottoms here- not yet on hillside terraces.

The stages of rice’s journey that take place in the tanim-bary will be recognizable to anyone who has spent some time on a farm. First, before rice even enters the story, the paddies need to be prepared. Here, that means men and cattle will be out tromping in the pudding like mud, mixing in manure, and flattening whatever weeds grew in the off season, until man and beast are equally unrecognisable under their sun-baked, grey plaster coats. It takes a few days and if there aren’t cattle, the work is all done by hand.

Then for the next couple weeks women will be transplanting seedlings, one by one, throughout the valleys. They are bent over for hours and their work is punctuated by the sounds of conversation and laughter (at least every time that I walk by or help out). I find it to be a really pleasant activity, but were I to do it for as long as they, I am sure that I would awaken moaning from a sore back.

After the planting comes the weeding of course - a couple times over the next month until the plants are big enough to shade the competition. The men use tools if they have them and the women use their hands. Rice takes about three months to grow so the next two months will then be turned to other tasks.

My favourite part of the process is harvest, not solely because I get to indulge in the pleasure of playing with sharp things. The men work in a line, spread out shoulder to shoulder, cutting swaths with their razor sharp sickles, as the women follow behind bundling the severed stalks with a stray piece of straw. A morning spent harvesting is an incredibly rewarding experience. It is the climax of a story that we have been telling repeatedly for the last 12,000 years (not to mention the, what, 2 million? year old roots of playing with sharp things). A fair comparison is made in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when he describes the exultation Levin feels while participating in the wheat harvest.

I think most North Americans, including myself, have a hard time picturing what happens to the rice next, up until we see it on the shelf at the grocery store. Maybe it travelled across the world; but even if you live in California and are lucky enough to eat Lundberg’s organic basmati grown along the I5 it’s no less mystifying where that rice has travelled and what machines, factories and warehouses it has visited along the way to transform a petulant stalk of seed heads into those pearly white maggots in a bag. You’ll have to turn to other sources to solve that mystery. I do know, on the other hand, what happens every step of the way from the fields surrounding my town here in Madagascar to my plate. It may be laborious, but it is intelligible.

Once it is taken from the field, and before being dried in the sun, the rice needs to be threshed. In my area, the women take a bundle of rice on a straw mat or tarp and knead it with their feet. The loose grains fall from the matted stalks, which when removed, leave a golden pile of unhulled rice. You can imagine how much time it takes to thresh a whole hectare worth of rice in this manner, which is how much one family can reasonably handle, provided they are lucky enough to have rights to that much land.

I don’t know where the origins of the word ‘thresh,’ as I neglected to pack a good dictionary in my suitcase, but after participating in the use of another threshing technique I’m sure it must be related to the word thrash. In out training village on the plateau, a big rock or oil drum is laid out, again on a mat or cleared area, and a big bundle of stalks is taken in each hand and beat against the object repeatedly until all the grains have flown loose, showering the area with loose rice. If any of you enjoy beating a punching bag when you are stressed, you should try this. Another great thing is that the whole family gets to participate.

After threshing, some poor girl gets suckered into watching rice dry on woven mats laid out in the sun for a couple days, fending off the voracious chickens, ducks, pigs, and whatever else attempts to gorge itself on the oh so tempting bounty. If it is for family consumption it will get stored in this state in large gunny sacks until needed. But if bound for market, it will need to be hulled. In wealthy areas it is taken to a hulling machine, but for most families (wives) this means pounding it in a giant mortar and pestle, sometimes in a rhythmic refrain with one or two other women.

If you are be or another ‘city’ dweller, this is when you get to buy the rice. In my market there is a row of people from the country, all sitting with their baskets of rice and one of the ubiquitous kapaoka, or tin can measuring devices. All the rice is the same price but there will be different varieties and varying states of unhulledness and bug-filledness (very technical terms) and it is your job as a shopper to find the good stuff.

Before cooking, it still must be winnowed and washed. For many families, this process is repeated before every meal. After being picked through for unhulled grains, bugs and stones, it is tossed in a sahafa to remove any light bits of hull that are left. It now looks like what you are used to eating, except that it is of a varying shade of red, a characteristic of our special Malagasy varieties.

It remains paradoxical to me that for how much effort goes into the cultivation and preparation of this culturally defining foodstuff, there is next to zero effort in the actual cooking. Attention all good Persians: read no further – what follows may horrify you. In the absence of temperature control, the idea seems to be to get the flames as hot as possible, toss rice into a pot full of water, cover, and wait. Sometimes its too dry, usually its soggy and mushy, and always the rice on the sides and bottom are burnt. Turning this into a virtue, we re-boil water in the pot and drink this as a tea. Being that most Malagasy seem to drink nothing else, this has become the national drink. In fact, it is important enough that technologies introduced to help reduce fuel wood consumption (like solar cookers) have failed here because while they cook the rice just fine, they don’t get hot enough to burn the rice.

The Malagasy obviously take pride in their rice culture and know more about the varieties and subtleties of the farming practices than us volunteers can ever hope to learn, even though we are busy teaching them new techniques (S.R.I. is cultivation process that has spread throughout the rice growing world. It has yet to catch on here, even though, ironically enough, it was originally developed in this country). Nevertheless, that pride has infected us volunteers, too. There was one volunteer who, while doing business in the capital for a few days, bought a bag of clean rice at the Malagasy Wal-mart because he was tired of winnowing it. When we saw what he bought it took a little while to register in our brains, but then we all burst out laughing at the novelty of it. Now if you see me in a couple years standing petrified in front of those bulk food bins, you’ll have some idea what might be going through my mind.

Break from Site

2008-11-03T02:40:00.003-06:00

It has been a few weeks since I have been at my site. My WWF agents are in the field right now and my work with Stan and the meeting I had in Fianar precluded my going with them this time. The last month I was there, I was really unsatisfied with the work I was doing. I tagged along with WWF on our last field tour, but I didn't really bring anything to the table and didn't feel like i really made a difference in any of the villages we visited. So I am travelling around a bit, trying to get reinspired. I think it's working.

I spent about a week at Brittany's site.
We farmed vanilla and did compost and double digging workshops, held a meeting with her nascent womens group (they want to farm ducks, for eggs) and built a bed for rice transplants. The amount of blisters I got definitely told me that it has been way too long since I got my hands in the dirt and I was very glad to be doing some agricultural work.

Then we spent my birthday in a coastal city near her village. We had to walk 11km to get to the crossroads where we could catch a ride, but then we instantly got in a camion (cargo truck) and were on our way. It was amazing! I mean, can you imagine not having to wait for hours to catch a ride? oh yeah....well it was an amazing thing here, but nevermind. We met a couple of health volunteers and and had 'Gasy food and beers (batter fried peppers stuffed with onions anyone?) and then crashed at a hotel that was full (they graciously let us sleep in their defunct restaurant turned meeting room so long as we vacated by 8:00, and they even gave us a Peace Corps discount). All in all, a memorable b-day if rather mellow. Kind of how I prefer it.

I have since been in Fianar for the past few days. We had a provincial meeting with all the volunteers in the area. i think about 20 of us attended. We discussed house issues, had spiels from Diversity and Women in Development committees, and discussed the big Halloween party we were throwing that night. We were co-sponsoring with a major cell phone company. It was at a discotheque and was advertised around town. They don't celebrate Halloween here so it was a good cross-cultural experience (they do honor the dead on Nov. 1 though). i couldn't believe how many Malagasy showed up and how good their costumes were. they definitely prefer the scary to the farcical with all sorts of ghosts and demons abounding. They had a kicking sound system too, which was the first i had seen here; that could be explained by the fact that this was the first club I had ever been in. Periodically the DJ would call out to people to wave their cell-phones in the air - I guess to appease the cell-phone company. I went as a common sack of produce with the ubiquitous can of milk measuring cup on top. When I get a hold of some pictures I will show you all. it was a really fun party for me.

Tomorrow evening I will head down south to help open an English center, visit an Environment volunteer, and go to a Malagasy music Festival. This is my first time off the plateau or out of the rainforest so I am really excited. It is the spiny desert down there and the culture is totally different - they don't grow rice, for one thing, and their dialect is very different as well. Then Lisa, an Education volunteer near me, and I, will try to make it up the coastal road back to site through an area with no public transport. It should be an adventure.

So unless you get to me in the next 24 hours, The next time we can correspond my computer will probably be Christmas. I of course still love letters though, just a reminder...

Introducing Peace Corps

2008-10-18T03:50:00.000-05:00

The mayor points towards a building that was a little further up the dirt track from the cluster of houses we just rolled into. “Erryyy,” he says with the upward inflection used when indicating a location a little ways off. He directs the driver to his office, which is across the soccer field from the elementary school. As we pull up to the office and get out, we are swarmed by hundreds of students in their green and white checkered school uniforms, curious to see who the guests are that have arrived in such a nice Land Cruiser. The teachers must be in a meeting because it seems like none of the children are actually in the classrooms even though it is midmorning. Then again, as I later learn, they have 1300 students and only seven teachers in this commune, so maybe they are just waiting for their turn to get to learn.

This is one of two towns in the area that we are visiting as part of the site development process, in the hopes of placing a new environment volunteer here early next year. Stan, my fearless leader, is based in Tana and on this road trip to make sure all the preselected sites are up to snuff and that the villagers are still motivate welcome a series of Americans into their community for the next 6 years to help them with environmental work. He has invited me along to these two sites to give a volunteer’s perspective about the town and the potential work, and to introduce me in case any follow up needs to happen before the volunteer arrives.

On paper, these sites are very similar. Both sites are in the south-east, are both of the same tribe and are both commune seats, meaning they have all the county level offices and if there is a hospital or middle school, it would be in these bigger towns. Still, there are big differences between these two, due largely to the location of one along a major road with easy access to bigger cities, and this other, where we are now, a several hours walk to the nearest public transport and shipping route.

Walking into the office, we greet everyone, saying hello and shaking hands with all the men present, left hand placed under right elbow. Then we sit and say hello again, ask the news, etc., before getting to our business. This is a procedure I have grown used to over the past few months, repeated every time I have entered an office or been invited into someone’s home. Stan introduces us and then we go outside and wait, as the mayor spreads the word for the town meeting. Within half an hour we are seated in the shade of some mango and litchi trees (it is sweltering hot), on a woven mat that has been brought out for us, joined by the mayor and a couple of his side kicks, with all the men and women of the town gathered around us. The women sit together with their babies under one tree, the men under another, with the mpanjaka, or traditional king, sitting at the sacred north east corner of the assembly. For about an hour, Stan and the mayor take turns explaining the situation, what peace corps is, what their responsibilities are and the like. Villagers ask questions, they debate about the house and then things start winding down. I have been mute until this point and even though it has been explained that volunteers speak Malagasy, they clearly don’t yet believe it. But then Stan asks me to speak. I say nothing more then my name, where I live, who I work with- all totally basic and not even that in good ‘Gasy. But they love it. Everyone gets really excited and they start asking me questions and applauding and praising me. It is a really beautiful moment for me, and I see that their whole understanding has changed about what it means to have a Peace Corps volunteer in their village, how different it is than working with other NGOs. A vazaha speaking their language is as seemingly wonderful to them as if I had made their forest regrow. The rapport built from that simple act will make regrowing that forest with the community that much easier.

We are treated to lunch in the mayor’s house: Rice (duh!), canned sardines (a luxury item, meant to impress), beer, cola, and bananas for dessert. Then we spend the afternoon wandering around the countryside, checking out all the cool things they are already doing. They already plant cloves and pepper, vanilla and coffee, transplant Albizzia and Gravilia which are two nitrogen fixing shade trees. They are really excited about new techniques and are excited to share their knowledge with me. We head down to the river where there is a beautiful swimming hole. We have been regaled in true country side manner. We finally leave, feeling really excited about the site.

The next day we head down to repeat the process at the second site. The Minister of Transportation hails from the city just to the south, so the road here is amazing. Traffic flows both ways here between the two regional hubs at either end of this 100 km section of road. It takes us a third of the time, to go the same distance as yesterday, and we aririve to find that it is market day, which means are Moses of an SUV has to part the sea of people that pool everywhere.

When we get to the office, greetings are done as usual but then we find out that the mayor is busy because someone has died but we should be able to have our meeting in a couple hours and we are left to explore the market in the meantime. It is the crowded market I have been in; we are constantly being elbowed aside and have to fight to move along. I have to duck my way under the shade tarps, being a head taller than most folks around, and am luckily still aware enough to catch the would-be pickpocketer as he tries to reach into my pocket in the chaos. At one point, Stan and I get stuck, or way blocked by a current of bodies that we are unable to break into. We have to retreat and decide to go out into the countryside, to wind our way among the coffee and rice to eventually get back to the mayors office.

When we finally have our meeting, it is in the school house. This town is much to big and chaotic to assemble everyone; instead, it is the lehibe in town, the big shots (all male of course), who show up. Stan, the mayor, his side kick, and I are seated up front as a panel facing the other 25 or so men. I see that this meeting is going to be more formal, sticking to the power hierarchies. This time, when Stan speaks, he does a kabary, the traditional Malagasy speech. He thanks the big wigs, apologizes, does an introduction and uses proverbs, all before actually talking about Peace Corps. When he and the mayor are finished, and after a few other men have stood up and given speeches, too, Stan asks me to speak. I am nervous because I haven’t memorized how to do a kabary yet, but I screw convention and just start rambling about all the same stuff I talked about yesterday, trying to throw in jokes about eating so much rice and what not. Grafefully, they were as receptive an audience as any I have had in this country and ate it up just like the day before. They got really excited and we chatted about swimming and being afraid of sharks and all formality was dropped for a few minutes. That couple minutes of connection was well worth the stress of the market place.

This time, when the meeting ended, there was no other plan. We didn’t walk around town or go to see projects with the mayor or the forest they are supposedly trying to protect. The mayor was busy. He paid for us to eat in a little hotely across the street from his office, though he had to run to eat with someone else. The laoka was tilapia, that ubiquitous farmed fish, despite the fact that we were only a few kilometers from the ocean and right on a major river. Says something about how depleted the fisheries are around here (sound familiar to anyone?).

As we leave this town I am questioning whether these folks will actually come together to build the house the volunteer needs and wondering about what rapid development has done for the people their. I know which of the two towns that I had visited in the past two days I would prefer to live in, but the real question, which I can’t yet answer, is which one they would prefer.

A Couple Quick Plugs

2008-08-26T04:12:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to give you all a couple of links to other blogs and pictures. These will round out your ideas of what I am going through a bit.

Brittany has a blog that you all should read. She lives in the same region of the country and is the closest environment volunteer (only a day and a half travel) to me, but is having a quite different experience. You can find a lot of great links on her page, too. She has some great pictures of our trainings and other travel (including to my house) that you might also want to check out.

Liz just sent me the link to her blog. She has posted some wonderful pictures and stories from the summer she spent here in Madagascar as a WWF volunteer. We worked closely together (I can't wait to work with her again come January!) and you can get a really good idea about some of the stuff I have been doing the last few months, and the places I have been.

Also, I have a few photos uploaded though I haven't yet got them sorted at all, but you can find them here.

I hope I am not bombarding you all but I want to give you as much as possible before I disappear off the map again...

For the Love of Petrol!

2008-08-26T03:48:00.000-05:00

As I am traveling back to site after a month of training and meetings and fine dining (where else can you get an exquisite French meal for $10 except Tana?) and merrymaking, I am reminded about what havens gas stations are in this country.

Its not that they are anything special from an American perspective - in fact they look just like gas stations back home - but that is what makes them amazing: they are like gas stations back home in a place where nothing is like back home. Not only is it comforting for the homesick, but also for the road weary traveler in Madagascar.

Just like home, it is a few pumps with a convenience store and a bathroom. Imagine a convenience store in a land where nothing seems to be designed with convenience in mind. This is a tropical country, so its hot, and it is easy to get overheated or dehydrated. For many of us that is a constant struggle and the only thing to find is a warm coke or THB. But at the gas station they have refrigeration so I can get a cold drink or, heaven forbid, an ice cream! Many shops here don’t even have an electric lightbulb, let alone a refrigerator.

Then there is the bakery. Not all of them heave this feature, just like not all gas stations back home have an Aztec Grill or some such. If you are fortunate enough to have one of this style in your area, it becomes like Mecca: If I had one I would know exactly which direction it is when I am surveying trees in the forest and would be constantly pulled by it’s energy. While the bread is twice as much as the stale baguette on the corner, it is warm and soft and ….oh so delicious. With the puff pastries and turnovers and other Frenchie thingies, it is hard not to come back multiple times a day when you are near one.

Now, some places in this country are more sanitary then others. In my area, as in many, people don’t even use latrines – they just do their business in the woods or, after dark, wherever they please. You can imagine the stank around those places people pick as their favorite doodie spots. So when you have been traveling and have to use the kabone (latrine) it is amazing to come across a gas station where you can use an actual toilette that usually flushes. And the sink might even have soap.

There are some differences from back home, however. Here, the ‘Gasy seem to know how amazing this Western convenience is and take pride in it. Gas stations are actually clean here – usually immaculately so. They are also quite conspicuous here, where most buildings are more like shacks or crumbly brick leftovers from colonial days. They are apparently such targets that they need to hire guards at night, armed with 50 year old rifles, to deter theft, though I guess maybe it is just that gasoline is so frickin’ expensive these days.

Those of you that know me probably won’t understand how I can write such a post. While I may have avoided these cesspools of capitalist exploitation like the plague back home, I have learned to appreciate even the lowly gas station in a place where everything else makes me feel like I am on a different planet.