Hey everyone, and sorry for the weeks of delay!
I'm finally settled down in Fort Dauphin with internet access and computer chargers! It took long enough, but I'm operating on Malagasy time over here. I'm not sure how to describe Madagascar day by day, so instead of an account of my voyages expect installments on Malagasy life. A quick summary though, of my voyages since my Boston flight. After hours and hours of plane ride, we arrived in Tana to be overwhelmed by a city that to western eyes feels more like an overgrown rural village than the capital of a country. The next day we flew to Fort Dauphin in the south, seeing most of the west coast along the way. From the air, Madagascar looks like crumpled red construction paper. The many mountains that form the backbone of the island make the country look like it was squeezed and crushed from all sides. Which is fairly accurate, given the island’s messy breakup with first Gondwanaland and then India. The land is red, not green, because less than 10% of Madagascar's unique forests still survive, and from the air it is as if the whole land had been scrubbed raw, leaving little oozing rice paddies and long dark strips of shacks and hovels. Roads are rumored, but rarely seen. Once we arrived, a bouncy bus ride brought us to a local boarding school in the village of Manantantely (the name means the place of honey). Manantantely is surrounded on all sides by the sort of mountains I described, large and almost scalloped, as elegant as if a japanese artist had painted them. They even have a bit of greenery on them, though our walk through the “domain de la cascade”, the protected land there, wound past acres and acres of burning land as people went on with traditional slash and burn, or tavy. And as environmentalists, none of us can blame them because these people have nothing but their manioc fields on which to survive. Most children run around naked and barefoot, few go to school or can read and write, and they all seem undersized to us because southern Madagascar still suffers through years of famine whenever there is a significant drought. Recent estimates have said that as many as half of the children in this region are malnourished, and Madagascar was recently reported by Forbes as having the worst economy in the world. Everything is different here, where the only manufactured products are those that have filtered in from the low priced cast offs of overseas and anything mechanical works only with a lot of juryrigging, and prayers. The people though, are incredibly friendly, and greet you everywhere you go with smiles and warm welcomes. Sometimes, since we are always perceived as the rich foreigners, their attention can be uncomfortably pecunial, but much of the time they are genuinely just a friendly, generous people, accustomed to knowing and greeting everyone as close friends and family, and always willing to help you through your day.
