One more: The Mat Weavers

SIT prides itself on experiential learning, and our classes more often take place beside village huts than behind desks. Yesterday, after a morning listening to a Malagasy expert on ethnobotany, we all piled into our beloved TaTa and drove off, out of the extensive village of Fort Dauphin, past rice paddies and roadside bageda vendors, to the village of the mat makers. In every Malagasy house, there are tightly woven reed mats which are used for work and eating (in most houses the floor cannot be expected to be very clean. My own host family serves the children on these mats while the adults plus me eat at imported patio set which is our kitchen table. When we were in Manantantely we practiced cutting manioc on those mats, and they are as prevalent in the market place as the plastic buckets we use to take showers. The mats are handwoven by communities of women who gather the wild Manampy reeds by hand, press and dry and cut and dye them, then weave elaborate constructions of them. This is “woman’s work”, the knowledge and practice of which has been passed down to them through the ages by their ancestors (nothing has greater weight in rural Malagasy life than the doings and opinions of their ancestors). In the past, dyes were found locally ans rarely used, as weaving skills were limited to simple baskets and the tsiki mats I mentioned above. The only exception are the hats which are worn widely and vary according to region. Ceremonial ones are decorated with colored reeds and sometimes more elaborate ornaments, depending on context. I’ll mention one of those later.

The village we visited, however, has some innovative new designs thanks to QMM and tourism. A group of woman from the village formed an association and asked QMM to find them a way to market their skills to a broader audience; ie, Vazaha such as myself. QMM helped them purchase dyes from China, which are more varied than their traditional ones, and provided them with new patterns which a Westerner would recognize as cup and pencil holders, shopping bags and purses, table runners and of course increasingly gaudy hats. The woman set mats they had woven down on the ground outside their houses, crisp reeds making a stark contrast to the muddy packed earth around it where livestock and people alike took care of necessities in the open air. We sat upon these while the village gathered around to be interviewed by the curious foreigners. They tolerated what must have been bizarre questions as we tried to get a sense of how QMM had improved or changed their lives, of why weaving should be only woman’s work, and what it was like to grow up in a village where only one industry was available to you to feed and clothe your family. At the end, they offered to make us whatever we cared to commission. One woman working one day, they told us, could complete about 15 square feet of patterned and decorated mat, which could be worth about 15000 ariary, or roughly 7.5 US dollars. In their world, that could buy them several pairs of shoes, or 750 sweet potatoes. Big money here, where most people survive as subsistence farmers.

A quick note on why you won't hear from me for a week or so (again)

Tomorrow I leave for my second homestay, in an isolated Tandroy village. I’ve been looking forward to it almost since I arrived. We’ll be traveling to Faux Cap, a major village close to the ocean. Around Faux Cap are twelve villages, all nearly in the heart of Antandroy. Two SIT students and one French speaking Malagasy student are assigned to each village, to stay for five days. Although the professors will be coming by almost every day, to check in and bring water, we will essentially be on our own. We are expected to speak only Malagasy while we are there. My partners are Cedrick, one of my favorite CEL students, and Brandon, my partner in naturalist obsessions. Well, that’s a lie; he’s more of a mentor. He’s far better at spotting and identifying than I am. Our host family’s don’t have houses large enough to fit us, so we’ll be in tents. My host family lives in Antseva, 3 km from Faux Cap. They raise cattle and grow manioc and sweet potato, and cannot eat pork or tortoise meat. The father’s name is Sokafa, and the mothers’ names are Selambo and Augustine. Oh yeah, did I mention that wealthy Tandroy are usually polygamous? I’m incredibly excited, I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Lots of love from Tolagnaro, Charlotte

My very first animal sacrifice!

SIT is well loved at the village of Ifotaka, the Tandroy village I already mentioned. Last summer our organization built a small campground (where we stayed these past few days), a shower (a walled in space with a drain and a bucket), a toilet (located appropriately west, traditionally the direction of impurity) and most importantly provided the funds for a new schoolhouse. We’ve also made ourselves a major source of income for the village, as every time we visit (three times a year) we hire local guides, local cooks, and pay various villagers to submit to intensive questioning about their lives and habits. This year we did one more thing too, to inaugurate this summer’s success. We bought a zebu, the local breed of cattle which represents wealth to the local people.

An example of how important the zebu is to their culture. We interviewed one of the local subsistence farmers, a man who has spent all sixty something years of his life working the same traditional plot of land that his ancestors had cleared uncountable years ago. One of the girls wanted to know, “Are you satisfied with your life?” and got an immediate no. Our translator asked him what he was missing, and the man told us that he needed three things to be happy. Most important, more zebu. Second, more children. Third, money. This comes from a man who lives in the region most afflicted by droughts, famines, and poverty in all of Madagascar (in its turn one of the poorest countries in the world). What’s missing in his life? He could do with a few more cows.

So. We bought a zebu; medium sized, with a white forehead. In Madagascar, the markings of a zebu often predetermine its future use. Zebu with white foreheads are sacrificed to celebrate grand occassions. At midday, we gathered around the Kily (Tamarind) tree, a traditional meeting place in Antandroy. Under it’s shade were already assembled the twenty or so men of the village, and some important personages from around the rest of the Fokontany. Children were welcome to lean over shoulders, so long as they were quiet, but the woman had to listen from afar; decision making is men’s work. First came the speeches, an important part of village life when there is no written culture and one’s importance is measured by one’s ability to orate (and the number of zebu in your herd, of course).

First, the speaker of the village talked; he crouched towards the eastern side of the group, crouched so that he could be on the same level as us when he spoke. It would be very rude to speak to someone if one of you were sitting and the other standing. He spoke at length, and to little effect, about reciprocity and hopes for a good future with SIT. The eastern side of the tree was then yielded to Barry, one of our professors, and then Jim, his boss. Next the Chef du village spoke, and finally the President of the Fokontany. The most important person always speaks last; it has been explained to me that the rational for this also explains why the rear of the zebu is the most prized part, and why it is acceptable to speak with your back to the east. The president of the Fokontany (a Fokontany is a region that is self governed by a locally organized government. Often, local people completely ignore state law, obeying only dictates from within their Fokontany. If something is stolen, they are more likely to report it to the President than to the local gendarmes) went to some length to assure people that our presence here was a good thing. The Vazaha, he reminded all there, brought light to Madagascar. He gestured to his shoes and pants as examples of the good work we have done. “These Vazaha”, he told all there, “Have not come to steal our land or harm us, but to help”. We hadn’t realized before this was translated for us that those other options had generally been considered a strong possibility.

Once the speeches were through, we had to demand a blessing of the village elder. He was an old man of perhaps seventy, who sat with the others, listening attentively and wearing a traditional woven Tandroy hat. The hat was a rounded dome with a narrow spiked brim, and was decorated with a metal ring, a pouch of medicinal herbs, chicken feathers, and some plastic jewels. It was quite the hat. A gift of money was required to “Open his mouth” and once Jim and Barry had handed this over, the man stood slowly. We all got up too. Carefully, he selected a branch from the Kily tree and broke it off. We all made our way to the western side of the school, where our Zebu was lying on it’s side, legs tied together. We crouched down again in a large group, while the old man took the branch and began splashing water with it from out of a coconut shell. He splashed us, then made his way in a clockwise circle around the school, splashing as he went.

The young men gathered around the zebu, some to hold it down, one with a bucket and one with a bowl, and another with a kitchen knife. The elder returned, and with him standing by, the zebu’s throat was quickly slit, right through the arteries, airway, and esophagus. The men calmly held it still while another solemnly caught the blood in a bowl and poured it into the bucket. There was a lot of it. The elder leaned over to dip the kily branch in the fresh blood, mixing it back into the water. He then walked around the school again, splashing, and went inside to splash the desks and chalkboard as well. When the zebu was just about finished, we were gestured forward into the school. Most of the village plus us attempted to cram into a tiny space, squeezing up against each other and around blood spattered tables. The speaker of the village stood at the front and spoke again. One of our Malagasy professors, N’aina, brought forward three bottles of Malagasy honey rum, which were accepted graciously. The bottles were then passed around the room and everyone sipped.

By then, some of us were close to passing out in the heat, and so the SIT students left to return to the campsite. We left by going the long way around the building, so that we didn’t pass by the zebu but instead walked towards the north east and left towards the southeast, moving clockwise.

The final step of this rite, the division of the meat, was not open to us. Because we had given the zebu to the village, it was there to divide. The order of division of the pieces of meat was indicative of position in the village; this time the most important ranks go first. We were given a piece third; it was delicious. The best ritually sacrificed animal I’ve ever tasted.

Dancing with the Tandroy

A few days ago, our troop took off for Ifotaka, a little Tandroy village set in the middle of a patch of preserved spiny forest. The little patch of scrub has been protected from traditional “tavy” by its sacredness; one part is the burial ground of the ancestors, another the dwelling place of a powerful spirit called a kokopeli. Four kinds of lemurs live there, all of which we were able to spot in our few days stay. Two were small nocturnals like chipmunks with monkey hands and faces; Microcebus murinus and Microcebus griseorufus. We also found a Lepilemur, the white footed sportive lemur, although we saw only a bit of face and fur; he was curled up in the center of a spiny Allaudia tree. The Sifaka, Propithecus verreaux verreauxi, was easy to fund and we saw dozens. They leaped sideways from tree to tree over our heads, several of them carrying babies on their backs or around their waists. One night a friend and I were coming back from a nightime lemur walk, when we suddenly stumbled back into the village proper, into a melee of chanting, stomping children. Seeing us, they immediately rushed to surround us. The Tandroy, the people of the thorns, have a peculiar kind of song and dance. It is meant to mimic the power and energy of a zebu, the animal which sustains them in a land which suffers through frequent droughts and a desert like climate. The children ringed us, stomping in tandem with their hands held to either side, elbows crooked like a zebus horns. As they stomped, they made a hissing noise as they breathed in and out: HHsshhh HHHssshhhh HHHssshhh. As the dance picked up its pace their hands lifted first to their shoulders, then above their heads. Those with instruments held them up above their heads in imitation of the adults who do this dance with spears. The breathing rythym became a heavy grunting, like a zebu’s bellows HUNHhuh HUHNHhuh. Suddenly, with a shrill whooping cry, one of the older boys leaped into the circle. Legs kicking frantically, he danced in a wild spinning circle, bent almost double with his hands held out flat in the center. Another girl leaped in after him, joining him in a sideways crouching dance. Someone pushed me from behind, and suddenly we were all spinning together, and all I could see of anyone were the flashes of hands and swirling lambas illuminated by the stars and distance cooking fires.

The Tandroy are the ethnicity (perhaps better translated as tribe) that we are spending the most time with here. My host family is Tandroy, although they live in Fort Dauphin in the region of the Tanosy. We’ve visited the Tandroy cultural museum at Berenty, and we’ll be spending a week living in a Tandroy village with just one other American student for English speaking company, starting this Sunday. In the rest of the Madagascar they have a reputation for being primitive and dangerous, as the ethnicity least affected by the modern world’s influence on the country. Historically, Androy is also one of the few regions that was never subjugated by the forces of the Merina , the highland people.

A translated quote, from the DeHeaulme’s cultural museum:

Androy, where one is often thirsty, always hungry, and the people are strong and proud.

Andohahela

Haven’t been writing for a while because of a three day camping trip to Andohahela national parc. We voyaged there by Taxi-brousse, an aged van in which we crammed far too many people and on the top of which we packed twenty odd framepacks and a basket of live chickens. The ride was incredible, taking us bouncing along dirt roads past little villages where they were baking bricks and making charcoal. When we got to Andohahela, we were in the « transitional forest » part of the reserve, where most of the plants are dry and spiny and the landscape is reminescent of the Grand Canyon. Or maybe mars. Sisal plants, an incvasive brought here from Mexico during the colonial days, grows everywhere in bizarre spiky lumps. While there we practiced conducting a biological botanical survey, a process made almost impossible by the Malagasy/French/English language barrier ; we were all required to speak french exclusively, resulting in many malentendus. After a long hot day in the spiny forest, we were led down a twisting path to find that the mostly dry riverbed slowly turned into a stream, a series of deep pools, and then a cascade. The water was amazingly warm thanks to the hot rock it was running over, and the pools were all deep enough to dive deep into. I even got to play with my first leeches, about which I was ecstatic. During the mornings I was able to get up early and pot Souimanga sunbirds, jerries, and coucals. At night my friend Brandon and I went hunting through the forest and found a nocturnal mouse lemur, and the fattest chameleon I’ve yet seen, a tiny pink and green creature smaller than my fist. When we returned to camp, it was time for a Malafranglish singing and dancing session. We sang Malagasy songs and played rock on the guitar Sosony, a professor, had brought along. Then we taught the Malagasy students some dance games and had a great time mixing cultures. The chickens were disposed in an exciting way; our professor, Mamy, taught us how to pin them down, then passed around the knife. I was the third to kill a chicken, and it was… dramatic. Not only is it true that the body, once decapitated, continues to move around, spraying blood as far as a yard away, but the head continues to blink and twitch. Nonetheless, I killed my chicken, and ate it for lunch later that day. It likely won’t be the last, either. Sorry if this is a bit abbreviated, but I need to get home to my host family; we’re due for some more Malagasy lessons, and I have some tables of spiny forest plants to write up. Love you all, feel free to email!
-charlotte

Photos

Photos are really hard to post from where I'm getting my internet; it takes about ten minutes, plus or minus, to upload a single photo. I've put up a few, and you should be able to see them in the slideshow. The building is where I take classes at Libanoona. It's a one room schoolhouse built up on a bluff overlooking ocean on all sides. Between classes we can step out and watch whales breaching as they swim past our cliff on their way to Antarctic waters, or I can watch the family of yellow billed kites building their nest overhead. It's all overhung by a kind of non-native tropical pine originally planted by homesick Lutheran missionaries. The Centre Ecologique, as it is called, consists of some odd houses owned by the teachers, all fairly large by Malagasy standards, a classroom, and a library. the library houses a collection of ancient textbooks, binders of printouts of papers and journal articles, and all the old ISP reports which are kept in woven baskets. the classroom is pretty small, but can have electricity; every morning the teachers run an extension cord from one of the houses into the room, which gives us lighting about 70% of the time.
The picture of the little girls is my host family! Cardy is the little one, then the other two are Erika and Dilla. Cardy, Erika, and their two year old sister Sunny live with me, Dilla is a distant cousin/best friend who has been living with us for the past week. They love "Hahnah Mohtahna" and playing with my hair. They think I'm an enormous doll.
The view is of Libanoona beach, where I live in Fort Dauphin (Tolagnero if you're looking for it on an official map). the town is a sprawling collection of shacks and wooden stalls and vendors, with odd sections of paved road and cement buildigns where people have built expensicve hotels for tourists. Like the one I'm sitting in right now, for internet.
The picture of the white kids all falling over each other is from one of our day trips, this time a hike up Pic St Luic. There was one pick up truck and ten people who needed to be in it. We put five people in the cab (nobody uses seat belts here, it would make it too hard to cram people in) and five of us climbed in the back. We were all sitting on each other's laps and trying to hold onto the sides while the truck careened over pot holes the size of a bath tub and wove (there is also no sense of a side of the street, or really of any traffic laws whatsoever) past pedestrians and cyclists carting huge loads on their heads and shoulders. transport in Madagascar uses any tools available to it. A moving vehicle is an open invitation to anybody who can hold on long enough to catch a ride, and most vans have rope attached so that people can hang onto the back or roof. Roads are really just paths absent of trees, and are always filled with people carrying goods either to town or back again. The driving technique is to go as fast as possible whenever there are no obstacles in your path (or a reasonable expectation that said obstacle has good enough reflexes to not be there when you reach it) becasue of a certainty 90% of any road not recently rebuilt by QMM, the local mining company, will be mostly rocks and ditches. We have driven for forty five minutes to come out in view of our departure point, just a little ways down the beach.

Cruelty to animals?

I said that people here are incredibly nice, and it really is true. If you ask someone for directions, they won’t just stop to tell you, they’ll leave whatever they were doing and take you there. People love it when you try to speak to them in Malagasy ,and will spend hours patiently coaching you through how thigs are said. They’ll also remember your name for days after they met you and seek you out to ask how you’re doing and whether you like Fort Dauphin. When I’ve played with the kids here, I’m amazed at how well they behave with each other; older kids are tolerant of younger siblings and include them in all the games. Adults rarely keep a toddler from participating fully in whatever is going on, letting them play with phones or serve themselves at the table. In other ways though they can be extremely cruel, at least by our standards. Although children are rarely scolded, when they are it often involves a menacing fist. Animals are treated according to their usefulness, and are rarely loved just as pets. Dogs here are considered dirty animals and are kept out of houses with yells and kicks; they are never pet and are used only as guard animals and waste disposal. The dog eats what the family doesn’t, and if there are no scraps the dogs get nothing. There are always some scraps though, because except for zebu (the local cow) most meat you’ll be eating comes to you as the whole animal, and is killed and cleaned right in the yard. Most animals, even the pets, are mangy and beat up, with an abundance of broken legs or missing ears. None of them are spayed or neutered of course, and none of them have had rabies shots, so we’ve all gotten practiced at grabbing stones to ward off the couple of town dogs who chase and bite people. There are a couple of bands of children who I’ve made friends with on the street who are used to hanging out with me and teaching me Malagasy; sometimes we play football together, and they love teasing me when I can’t pronounce words. I was hanging out with a bunch of them at the beach last weekend, and a couple were holding grasshoppers the size of your finger. I asked what they were for; I’d seen kids catching them before. They told me they were for playing with. They toss them up in the air, let them fly a ways, then run after them and catch them again. Once they get bored they pull the legs off slowly, then the wings, then toss them away and run after another one. They also brought me some crabs that they were playing with too. They yanked off the front claws, then tied strings around them and pretended to make them fight or whirled them around their heads like slings. The crabs were alive the whole time. Again, when they got bored they just tossed the animals off into the bushes and moved on to another game.  I hadn’t realized up until then how inculcated I had been in the western concept that if it breathes and has eyes, it’s life is in some way sacred. While watching the little boy grin at me as he tried to force feed the declawed crab the still living grasshopper, I thought about how distanced American’s are from any form of harm to animals. Comparing the processed fish sticks I was used to  to the fins and bones that had been mixed into my rice the night before, I wondered what had caused what. Were these kids so careless of animal life because they were used to animals as tools, not companions? Was I so much more shocked because in my life, animals as friends and as food had always been separated by a long supply chain, lots of food coloring, and a grocery store package? A few days after my experience with the grasshopper kids, another band of children I know accosted me on my way home. One of the boys had something in his hand, which he proudly showed me; a baby greenbul, too small too fly or care for itself. It was hard to tell the species at its side, but based on distribution maps it was certainly one of those that my bird book refers to as “uncommon or rare”. The kids didn’t speak more than a few words of French, but my friend and I managed to find out that the boy had shot it out of its nest with a slingshot and they were playing with it. They gave it to me as a present, assuring me that there were plenty more, though they wouldn’t or couldn’t understand to tell me where. In the end, my friend  (who hunts doves in the states) ended up twisting its neck to kill it. Although at home her family hunts all their meat, she couldn’t stand the thought of the baby bird slowly starving or freezing to death on the seashore anymore than I could. And that’s the end of any western Pocahontas type delusions about the Malagasy and their incredible natural environment.

Toilet Seats in Madagascar

There are no toilet seats in Madagascar. Toilets do exist, although only the rich can afford the luxury, because a working toilet  requires a level of infrastructure and organization that is almost impossible to assemble without quite a lot of cash on hand. One needs to have running water, which in itself is only achievable in major cities like Fort Dauphin (about half the population of Newton). One needs to assemble people capable of putting together a toilet, which is made somewhat easier by the extreme adaptability of the Malagasy handyman. Since replacing anything factory-made is usually close to impossible, the average Malagache can repair just about anything with determination and a screwdriver. Having a toilet, however, also requires you to successfully import all the various parts of a functioning toilet, which is in fact a project of its own thanks to corrupt officials and the complete lack of roads or delivery systems. That isna’t although; there is also the problem of the complete uselessness of the Ariary in national market. 2000 Ariary, approximately one US dollar, can’t be used for purchases overseas. A would be purchaser of toilets has to contact the National Bank in Tana, where they retain all the foreign currency which comes into the country. Extensive So, once people have gone to the enormous trouble of importing pipes and basins and tanks, they cannot be bothered to then go out and try to buy a toilet seat too. It’s just too expensive. Even should they for some reason want one badly enough to go through the trouble, Madagascar apparently usually is only capable of buying bargain toilet seats from China, and they are often only good for a few uses before you are in need of another one. And should fortune conspire and you manage to import a toilet seat which is fully functional and can be fit onto your toilet… don’t expect it to remain long. This national inability to obtain toilet seats has made them so valuable, that they aren’t likely to remain in place long.
 Of course, for most Malagasy toilets are unnecessary anyway. Those with more moderate incomes have latrines, a hole in the ground with two planks on either side for bracing your feet on. For everybody else, streets, yards, and the beach serve well enough. Open defecation is a serious problem ere, ironically because of cultural taboos involving cleanliness. Culturally, rural Malagasy consider feces the most disgusting of all things, and so raise reasonable objections to spending precious resources to building a structure beside their homes just to stockpile it. Attempts to convince villages that smelly communal latrines were cleaner than letting nature take care of business had been met with strong resistance, until the advent of community organixed sanitation. Instead of spending money building latrines or educating villagers on germs, faciltators ask “leading questions” which gradually point out to villagers just how much of their neighbors excrement is making its way into their cooking water. They then let peer pressure do the rest. Already, the local NGO Azagady has had an incredible success rate with it, but they don’t work here in the city, so we’re careful where we step. Myself, I’m lucky enough to live in an upper class home, where we have a toilet (no lid) which flushes about 8 times in 10. It’s a real luxury.