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.
