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.
