WWF Explore Madagascar: A Temporary Goodbye

Friday, October 1, 2010

A Temporary Goodbye

Hope you are all enjoying the chronicles of our voyages, thus far, in Madagascar! This is a brief note to inform you that we will be leaving Vondrozo tomorrow, Saturday, October 2nd, for three weeks of conservation awareness-raising and restoration activities in the field. We will be backpacking amongst several remote villages north of Vondrozo and will not be back within internet, phone, or even electricity range until Saturday, October 23rd. I apologize for the pause in posting but assure you that we will have much to share upon our return.

One quick teaser for the adventures to come...

Christa and I opened our sack of WWF tents last Monday and were astonished to discover that we did not intuitively know how to set up the tents. We had to ask the WWF field agents for help. Help setting up a tent! That is not something that either of us ever expected to ask for in our lifetimes.

Turns out our tents are heavy and canvas with metal A-frame poles that recollect my parents’ old red tent from the 1970s. When we asked where the rain fly was, one of the WWF agents held up a second canvas sheet. “What if it rains?” I asked, in French. That fly was definitely not waterproof.

“It’s the dry season in Madagascar,” he replied. And what has it been doing the last three days during our séjour in Bevata? You guessed it—raining. And where are we headed? You guessed it, again— the rainforest.

3 comments:

momOctober 6, 2010 at 3:48 PM
Hey, I'll bet I could have put up those tents! Sounds very much like our ancient red tent and I was pretty good at setting that one up!
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UnknownOctober 8, 2010 at 7:19 PM
I remember the red tent too it had a good run! But I'm sure a modern northface tent would be more durable, lighter, smaller, more waterproof, etc. Love you cara!
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UnknownOctober 22, 2010 at 2:11 PM
Cara - I'm getting so excited for your return and to hear how everything is going. I hope you have had a great three weeks in the rainforest. I'm writing you from Costa Rica now and on to Yucatan tomorrow. What adventures...! Hugs!
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Henintsoa écrit pour le « blog » aussi !

Que représente pour une Malgache un volontariat à Madagascar, au sein du WWF Madagascar and West Indian Ocean ?

Alors que la plupart des jeunes Malgaches en France n’envisagent même pas de revenir ici à Madagascar en dehors des vacances habituelles au « pays », et encore moins de s’y établir, j’ai voulu faire un volontariat ici, j’ai envoyé ma candidature, j’ai été sélectionnée et me voilà partie pour 3 mois… et je souhaite même plus tard travailler et vivre ici, au moins quelques années. Suis- je un spécimen rare parmi ces jeunes?

Les autres volontaires venus de « l’Occident », Christa (canadienne), Cara (américaine), Sergio (espagnol) et Kuni (autrichienne), s’accordent tous à dire que leur première réaction, et celle de leurs amis tous envieux, lorsqu’ils ont su qu’ils étaient pris pour ce volontariat a été « wouaouh, je pars pour Madagascar », pourquoi ? Parce que c’est Madagascar ! Un des « hot spot » de la planète, « the place to be » au niveau de la biodiversité et donc de la protection de l’environnement, mais ils ont aussi découvert ici des paysages magnifiques et des gens sympas avec une culture différente et unique. Ils rêvaient de lémuriens, de tenrecs et de forêts primaires et ils ont trouvé encore mieux: les mofo, les litchis, le café-fary, des enfants souriants, une population accueillante et hospitalière, un pays au riche potentiel naturel et humain qui ne demande qu’à être appuyé, et non assisté, dans son développement. Et c’est pour ces mêmes raisons que j’ai voulu faire ce volontariat, parce que je connaissais déjà en partie cette hospitalité, cette gentillesse, cette générosité de la population, la richesse de ce patrimoine culturel et environnemental, mais c’est aussi et surtout parce c’est mon pays, j’y suis née, je suis malgache quoi qu’en pensent certains… ce n’est pas le fait de parler malgache qui fait l’identité malgache (même si ça aide beaucoup à la communication) et encore moins le fait de manger du riz trois fois par jour, mais c’est le sentiment d’appartenance, et quand ces mêmes personnes auront compris les enjeux qu’il y a pour un jeune franco-malgache à parler malgache et la pression que cela peut créer sur lui que ce soit de la part des parents, des autres adultes ou des « Malgaches de Madagascar », enjeux qui ne pèsent pas sur les « Vazaha » volontaires, alors peut-être certains sauront-ils montrer plus de compréhension envers ces enfants d’immigrés dont on dit parfois qu’ils ont « le cul entre deux chaises ». Pour ma part, être malgache et française signifie avoir la chance de posséder deux cultures riches et de savoir concilier le meilleur des deux et non pas d’être perdue sans repère parce que pas vraiment française et pas vraiment malgache.

Alors je comprends ces jeunes Malgaches de France qui sont sous-estimés par leurs propres compatriotes toujours ici au pays juste parce qu’ils ne parlent pas la langue malgache, je comprends qu’ils ne se reconnaissent pas dans un certain état d’esprit propre à ceux « d’ici » et que « ici » ne les attire pas plus que ça, ou que ce manque d’intérêt des Malgaches d’ici pour connaître les réelles conditions de vie là-bas puisse les agacer. Comme le pensent les sociologues, ceux qui sont restés au pays ont une image idéalisée, ou plus exactement très naïve et stéréotypée (en terme de stéréotypes construits sur des intérêts matériels : la vie en France c’est facile, il y a du travail et de l’argent) de la vie des immigrés et ne cherchent surtout pas à connaître la réalité. Mais je pense aussi que certains nés ailleurs qu’ici ont oublié d’où venaient leurs parents, qu’ils ont la critique facile contre ceux restés ici et qui ne vivent absolument pas dans les mêmes conditions, contre ce pays « où règne la corruption, le clientélisme, où les crises politiques se succèdent », etc… oui, ces mêmes immigrés et enfants d’immigrés ont aussi une vision qui peut être simpliste et pleine de préjugés.

Alors cultivons l’ouverture d’esprit et il n’y a rien de mieux pour ça que le voyage, l’échange culturel et le volontariat pour une cause et pour autrui, et vous en retirerez personnellement beaucoup plus que ce que vous en attendiez. Alors venez faire du volontariat au WWF (ou ailleurs), à Madagascar ou ailleurs, que vous soyez Malgache ou Vazaha, Malgache de France ou Malgache de Mada.

.Christa's blog contributions...

An Ode to Peanuts. 3 December 2010.

Grown right here in Madagascar! I have quickly learned the many names by which they call this treasure to ensure that I never miss an opportunity to sample them (or outright gorge myself): arachide, cacouette, or pistache are widely understood French-isms; or, to be more authentic , voanjo (“voo-an-zoo”) is their proper title in Malagasy Officialy.

In Vondrozo there are two elderly women at opposite ends of the market that prepare voanjo for streetfood-style consumption. Justine runs the peanut operation near our favourite coffee/mofo-akondro stand, where you can buy roasted, salted peanuts by the teaspoon for 10 Ariary per spoon. That amounts to CDN$0.005, or half a penny, per spoon. She loves to count with me as I dish roasted peanuts into my insufficiently sized palm: raiky, roa, telo, efatry, …, FOLO! Ten. I worry daily that this amount might be viewed as gluttonous and so I make use of both stands in succession to satisfy my obsession. Martina sells them as candied peanut bark for 50 Ariary per piece, also known as bonbon voanjo or Cracker Jacks to the American crowd. Not only a penny-pincher for a snack, but the Kinesiologist in me notes that they also serve a multitude of nutritional purposes, including the necessary protein to stabilize blood sugar levels and foster longer attention spans while working (for example to prepare outstanding videos for WWF). Really, the more I learn about this SuperFood in Madagascar, the more infatuated I become.

The plant itself is rather insignificant-looking with frail green leaves that have seemingly given up on life – barely able to hold themselves up off the ground. Next to the mighty cabbages, manioc, and cucumbers that grow alongside them, the peanut appears to be the runt of the Malagasy veggie patch. But then it is always the one you least suspect that pulls out something spectacular, isn’t it? If you follow those frail stems underground you will be faced with an intricate array of bulbous hard shells cluttering the root system of the plant. Yes, peanuts grow in the ground. The Plantars peanut himself was born of the soil. The twins encased within each bulb hold a key to mitigating many of the nutritional deficiencies of the developing world. As a major source of protein, fatty acids, and essential vitamins, peanuts can serve as a nutritional accompaniment to any meal and even substitute for meat. They do not spoil easily and taste good in both sweet and savoury recipes.

WWF Madagascar has already realized the potential of the peanut and so incorporated its cultivation as a primary workshop in their Holistic Conservation Project for the Vondrozo region. As Cara has mentioned in her Conservation by Cooking entry, this has been the focus of our last three months in country: growing and cooking with peanuts. Once you’ve sampled fresh, organically grown peanuts, roasted and crushed to a natural peanut butter in a giant mortar and pestle, then lightly salted and served alongside rice and a ripe banana plucked from the tree just outside your tent, there is certainly no other worldly comparison. Ever striving to practice-what-[I]-preach, I feel justified by my morning tour of the Vondrozo market, promoting the future economy and cultivation of peanuts for the Malagasy people.

Tiako voanjo!

The ultimate ice-breaker. 26 September 2010.

This week we were invited to a private dinner at the gazebo of the Chinese-Malagasy couple. To access the private dining room we had to battle the hutong-esque maze behind their convenience shopdodging maimed stray dogs and massive sacks of overflowing rice,always wondering if one of those massive palm-sized spiders will ever drop down on our heads. We arrive at a dimly lit large dining table somewhere in the backstreets of Vondrozo. We are served a deliciously traditional Malagasy meal: mountains of rice, a side dish of grated carrots and cucumber in a tangy vinaigrette, and a side dish with three modest pieces of chicken in tomato sauce. These feasts are always served with several bowls of chicken bouillon to offer some welcome flavour and moisture to the remains of Mt. Rice and several pitchers of ‘rice tea’ prepared by boiling water in the burnt bottom of the rice pot. While it is a little odd to the ways of Western cooking, the simplicity of Malagasy ingredients make every meal indisputably tasty.

Coming back to the Chinese heritage of our hosts, we notice partway through our meal two mysteriously small sauce bowls holding no more than half a tablespoon of red chilli sauce. I admit, I was a little confused at the miniscule portion offered to a table of ten people, but this premonition did not learn the ever-eager traveller in me. Always looking for ways to confirm my love of spicy food in public places, I take a generous portion of mystery sauce in my next bite. It tastes fabulous, but before I’ve even swallowed one mouthful my body spastically revolts into tremors of hiccups, coughs, involuntary salivary gland secretions, and tears. Our bottles of orange soda haven’t arrived yet and rice does little to chase the chilli. I suffer rudely for a few minutes while my colleagues (understandably) have a good laugh at my expense. When I finally manage to regain my senses I aggressively retort: “Sergio, if you are so happy to laugh and act all tough, why don’t you try it?” Ever-ready to defend his orgullo (Spanish for ‘pride’) Sergio takes a timid bite. He is fine. I am crushed. My one chance at payback to my teasing nemesis and I’ve failed.

The conversation moves on to other things and after about 60 seconds I return my gaze to Sergio at my side – he is red in the face, his lips are pursed, and he looks as though he is about to burst. Noticing my attention his body caves and projectile tears erupt from his eyes. He laughs his loud jolly laugh, wipes the tears and cries, “what is happening to me?” in his thick Spanish accent. We all have a good laugh, for we know that Sergio has left his orgullo in Spain for precisely such occasions. Funny how the greatest icebreakers sometimes come in the form of a little competition and the tiniest speck of Nature’s treasures: chilli.

The wide-eyed boy. 19 September 2010.

Exploring the tsena (market) in search of our morning Madagascar coffee, laced with equal parts coffee and sugar, all eyes of Farafangana are upon us. All eyes, except for those of a young boy no more than two years old, who wobbles along with uncertain steps chanting loudly to himself and whomever else cared to listen. He ambles through our cluster of six, oblivious to the vazahas until the last moment when his eyes stumble upon Brian’s feet. He stops dead in his tracks. He slowly, carefully raises his gaze, eyes wide, to gawk at this monster before him. Ghostly white with pale blue eyes and brite yellow scarecrow hair. What’s worse, this monster smiles at him and greets him, not with the gurgle of a monster, but in Malagasy! While our language skills assist in making friends of the adult variety, the child simply cannot understand.

Sergio’s Blog Entry: Five Reasons to Love Madagascar

Here I am, answering to the call to arms from Cara, who has already got exhausted of trying to convince us to write something for her blog about our Malagasy experience. And yes, I do really think that I have waited too long before writing something. Specially now, that most of my friends are connected to this webpage from various and remote places of the globe (because everywhere is remote from here, which is almost the same than saying that we are extremely far away from the rest of the civilization).

For all the readers, I think I should start by excusing myself for the poor prose, grammatical faults and lacerant vocabulary poverty. But I am Spanish, not an English native speaker, and since I am equally proud of my English skills as of my accent, I will try to do my best.

I am writing this text in Farafangana, a small and charming city in the Southeastern coast of Madagascar. We have spent the last few days surrounded by the sweaty riksaw drivers, the fleas and the mosquitoes; with our feet always half drowned in the sand that floods the streets; looking for the mysterious man that sells delicious bread with chocolate in the afternoons (which I have never seen perssonaly, reason why I am starting to believe that it is merely an urban legend, opposite to the girl’s statements); having our sugar with coffee in the extremely chaotic market of the city under the always-aware looks of the locals and, in definitive, enjoying of our short three-day resting break in just the middle of the program. During these days I have had a few moments in which to think about what could I write for Cara’s blog, blaming “this damned girl has already taken the best things and wrote about them, what the h*** am I going to talk about?”. So, a bit demoralized, I have finally seen the light in the end of the tunnel. I am aware that my idea is not precisely original, so keep that commentary to yourselves, please. Nevertheless, it gives me the opportunity to show you some of the things that are making our time here so interesting and enjoyable and have still not appeared in the blog.

Hence, without more preamble, I proceed to show you my selected five reasons to love Madagascar, its people and its nature!

1 – The children
“Bonjour vazaha!”. This is the constant cry that you hear absolutely everywhere you go. And, of course, even though you have heard it already a thousand times, even though you know perfectly what is going to happen next, even if you have just arrived from a long walk under the justice sun of the tropic of Cancer or just woken up in the morning, it doesn’t mind: you turn your head with delight, see the expectant faces of a group of small boys and girls with widely open eyes and crystalline smiles, who try desperately to hide one behind the other, timidly, and answer “Akorabe!”, showing your most friendly face with and your best smile. Of course it is nothing new, and it happens 25 times a day, but you cannot help that you face shines a bit when you see their nicely surprised face after hearing your answer in Malagasy and answer, timidly and excited and the same time, “Tsara be. Akorabe”. And you all laugh in this very moment of connection and complicity.

By this moment, I am sure everybody has realized that I really like children, and concretely the Malagasy kids. But I cannot help it. They are absolutely charming. Maybe it is because their curiosity towards strangers, maybe for the way their smiles fill their dark and colorful faces, or maybe because of the intonation they use when they pronounce “vazaha”. But their never-ending joy, cries and looks make our work way much easier and nice.

This reminds me a funny anecdote. During our “three musketeers” time in the village of Vohimary Nord, we spent the beginning of an evening exchanging songs with the children of the village, all sat down in a big circle around us. After a long series of songs, in which we sang one, and the children followed with a demonstration of a traditional song of the area, we finally arrived to one song that we all knew: the Waka Waka, by Shakira, which is really popular in the island. We finished improvising a choreography and dancing this song with them, in front of the astonished look of the WWF agents and the parents of all those kids.

2 – The breakfasts
Probably one of the things that we are looking forward most to when we arrive back from our adventures to Vondrozo is not sleeping in the comfortable bed of the hotelis. Is not a meal in a restaurant, nor the taste of meat after three weeks eating rice three times per day, nor simply having rest for a while. Not. All those things are good, but they are not up to the wonderful breakfasts of Vondrozo. Every morning, when we all are finally awake, we meet together and walk until one of the small street shops in the nearest corner, where we have coffee and just made “mofo-akondro”. Black coffee with a ton of sugar on it, and the delicious fried bananas that are making us addicted: the perfect combination!

3 – The color of the soil and its unexpected consequences
For a person that was brought up in Europe this is something absolutely new, whereas for the Malagasy people is something absolutely obvious and natural: “Really? What’s the color of the soil in Europe, then?”. So you answer that black, brown or even yellow, but never like this! The soil of Madagascar is red. Red like and oxidized metal, or a brilliant ferruginous orange, and its powder spreads over everything.

This everything includes the air. Hopefully my lungs are already red, and all that ruddy dust won’t make a noticeable difference down there. Most of the time you don’t realize of this fact, you are simply wondering how can your clothes earn that color so fast, making your laundry a never ending business. But under some circumstances you can perceive it. This was the case of the first electric storm that we attended, in Vohilava. It was so unbelievable that when the lightning struck, all the sky were painted in red!

Or, for example, one night back in Vondrozo, I felt so suspicious: “I’d swear that yesterday the moon didn’t have that color”. But, effectively, the satellite had turned orange. In opposition, the following night it was tinted in a fluorescent yellow, like the one of the highlighters.

All this phenomena have trapped all my attention on the last days, and keep me looking forward the next and non-expected change in the color of the things. But I think none of them can beat the sunsets. Seeing all the sky painted in the most vivid bloody red color you have ever seen while the sun sinks beyond a horizon silhouetted by the contours of the ravinalas... is simply priceless.

4 – The continuous challenge
Maybe for other people that wouldn’t be a reason to love nothing. But for us, it plays a key role in our experience. Challenges help you to develop your personality, to test and expand your limits or to discover new facets of your skills and abilities that you previously ignored. And in this country, everything is a challenge.

Eating rice three times per day is a challenge, for not speaking of the rest of aspects of this new diet: lack of milk and lactic products in general, small rations of everything (but rice), not much variety...

The living conditions are a challenge: living in a tent built up in the middle of the village, having the woods as toilet and the river as shower and washing machine, having no clock but the sunset and the sunrise, having to walk from village to village either with an infernal sun or an inclement rain, discovering that your boots, that have survived to several trips and hikes, are not up to the task...

The weather is a challenge: the sun, the rain, the humidity of the air, the fact that it is almost impossible to do nothing useful from 11 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon (half of the time you spend awake) due to the merciless heat...

The communication...

All the animals that are trying (and generally succeeding) to feed on you...

Surely, an experience that is not for all the audiences.

5 – The smells
This is one of the first things you realize from the very moment you land in Antananarivo: the innumerable, diverse and embriagating smells that flow over the country, trying to overcome over each other towards your senses. In the big city, the parfum of the air changes every two or three meters, ranging to the smoke of cars, the flowers, the food of restaurants, the barbecue or the infinity of unknown particules that float in the air of Tana.

Out in the field, the smells become less varied, but inmensely more intense: the smoke of the tavy, the fabrication of bricks, the pepper seeds drying under the sun in the streets, the zebu, the sweat, the forest, the soil, the food on preparation, the market, the flowers of the coffee trees that suddenly appeared one morning and vanished barely five days after, flooding everything with their parfum...