If it’s been a while since I’ve last updated, it’s been
because there is little time left in the day after class, homework, and living
in Malagasy culture to sit down and reflect over what has happened in the past
two weeks living in Fort Dauphin. As I mentioned in my past entry, I am staying
with a host family in the outskirts of Fort Dauphin, a forty-five minute walk
to school every day. Homestays are exhausting but enlightening as well; I can’t
imagine being able to adjust to Malagasy culture without my host family. I
actually don’t spend that much time at home, since I leave my house at 7 for
the walk to school and usually return around 6 or 7 at night after some
post-school swims at the beach or hanging out at one of the two hotels in town
that have wifi (provided you buy a beer or a pastry). My father works as
Secretary General for the Anosy region while my mother stays home with their 1
year old Abigail, and I usually get home an hour or so before dinner. Malagasy
cuisine to be honest has been a difficult transition point for the group,
especially those of us who are vegetarian. Rice (vary) is the staple food which is served at every meal three times
a day. Before I came to Madagascar I knew I would eat a lot of rice, but not as
much as this, and I was also expecting some wonderfully seasoned rice dishes
that would put the Uncle Ben’s dirty rice minute rice packets to shame.
Unfortunately, the rice here is served plain in a dry form or a wet
porridge-like dish (vary sosoa), and
is quite bland. Meat is served at every meal, and has also proven to be an
adjustment challenge. Zebu, the ubiquitous cattle, is eaten the most, followed
by tough and skinny chickens. To my dismay much of the zebu meat is not in the
form of familiar steaks and other beef cuts (which are considered the least
valuable part of the zebu), but usually in the form of the various internal
organs. So far I’ve had the dubious opportunities to sample tongue, kidney
(very common), and intestine. Zebu intestine is one of the vilest things I’ve had
the misfortune to taste, with the chief horror resting in its pale, slimy,
quivering appearance and texture. Rice water (ranampango (spelling?)) is served
quite often as a drink, and as one of the girls in our program stated, tastes
the way old people smell. Vegetables are close to non-existent, and I would
kill for green beans or leafy greens. Fruit, however, is plentiful and
delicious, and even if the food has been difficult to work through at least
everything is extremely fresh (I can see the abattoir from my house and I pass
through the market every day where everything is fresh as of that day).
Classes on my
program are all day affairs, quite a difference from my loosely scheduled
college classes, with Malagasy, French, and conservation science classes all
day. However, we are given the opportunity to do some fascinating excursions
during our time here. We visited a conservation zone around the QMM/Rio Tinto
ilmenite mine. The mine is around ten years old and has been a major focus for
the first part of our program. While Rio Tinto has some appalling mining
projects elsewhere in the world, they have chosen to use the QMM mine as a
poster child for net-positive impact mining. They have made extensive efforts
to recompense displaced persons, provide alternate income sources for those
whose land has been impacted, conserved existing forest fragments around the
mine while planning to restore 10% of native forest after the mining machine
sweeps through a region, and finally planting fast growing exotic plants to
provide an alternate source of charcoal and building supplies. However, many
people have felt that QMM Rio Tinto has taken advantage of them, and that the
mine is greenwashing their image with quick and cheap projects that have little
impact. Furthermore, the mine has completely crashed the tourism business in
Fort Dauphin, and there is a dichotomy in town between the workers who live in
a gated community and the rest of the populace living in the labyrinthine town.
It was while
visiting the mine that I began to feel quite ill. I had taken anti-diarrheal
medication to take care of some annoying traveler’s diarrhea, but with the
unfortunate effect of preventing my system from flushing out whatever bug I had
and making me extremely dehydrated and verging on heat stroke. As the
naturalist Gerald Durrell noted when he visited Madagascar, I would have gladly
pawned off all of my internal organs to the first person who asked. I was
rushed by the ever-indispensable program coordinator Mamy (which means “sweet”
in Malagasy) to the clinic where my body was pumped with IV glucose, saline,
Cipro, and several other mysterious bags which felt wonderful. I felt better
within two hours and went home vowing to never ever take anti-diarrheals again.
The only other guy on the program, Jake, also fell really ill with dehydration
and heat stroke recently on our camping trip to Sainte-Luce, a protected area
of littoral tropical forest where we were doing vegetation surveys. It’s
amazing how much water you lose here by sweating. The difference with his case
is that we were a good four hour taxi-brousse (bush taxi) ride along appalling roads
to Fort Dauphin, and had to be driven home once again by Mamy.
Travelling by road
in Madagascar is an adventure all in itself. The National Highway leading north
from Fort Dauphin is little more than a rutted, potholed dirt track through
villages and heavily degraded savannah where drivers rarely speed above 25mph
an hour. Therefore short distances of 30km take hours to complete, and is, as
Barry our professor stated, a bone-jarring full body massage. When we went to
the fishing village Evotra to interview fishermen, we took a fleet of SUVs, but
when we went to Sainte-Luce we took a wonderful taxi-brousse painted red, gold,
and green and was emblazoned with the name “No Problem” across the front. No
Problem was basically a small tractor-trailer (camion in French) with a few benches screwed into the back deck
with our bags strewn over the rest of the truck bed and foam mats placed on top
for lounging. This mode of transportation, while still jarring and tiresome,
was still a great experience, as we were joined by our Malagasy counterparts
from the Libanona Ecology Center (CEL) for this trip and so we were all
sprawled out on the mats and watched the rugged Malagasy countryside bump on by
through the open sides. While it rained torrentially during most our stay in
Sainte-Luce, making the tent camping uncomfortable, it was great to get out
into such a unique system that is the littoral forest. I saw my first troupe of
lemurs (Red-ruffed brown lemurs if I remember correctly), chameleons, and a lot
of interesting other critters.
There is so much else that I could write about which I just
don’t have the time or energy to do, including going to a football (soccer)
party and a zebu slaughter. We are leaving soon for a week-long village
homestay in the Faux-Cap region in the extreme south. This region is in the
rain shadow of the Anosy mountains, and is quite dry. There is currently a drought
and impending famine in this general area (we are assured we will be fed), and
so it will be interesting to see this compared to the wet climate and abundant
food of Fort Dauphin.
