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.

Alternative Housing

The typical house in Madagascar is constructed loosely out of general wood debris from the forests and roofed with palm leaves. A typical family of ten (most rural families have a mother and father and eight children under one roof) lives in a space about the size of a one car garage. There is one room where the whole family sleeps and lives together, and meal preparation is done on mats outside. Doors are a western innovation, although some families put sheer curtains in front of the main entrance. Houses are usually set in a yard about the square footage of a three car garage, unless they are part of a larger property. The fence is also made of assorted sticks and planks from the forests and tied together with natural lianas. A cement house is a sign of status and wealth here; my host family has a cement house about the square footage of my living room at home. There is one main room that takes up most of the space, and two smaller bedrooms; one for the parents and one for the children and me. In the yard is a shack for cooking, and two small cement walled rooms, one for the toilet and one for showers; it has a drain, a broken sink, and an assortment of buckets. The yard is fenced but not locked; our house has doors and shutters which are locked at night but during the day are always open. I had the luck yesterday to spend a day with the host family of my friend Carly. They are about as well to do as one can be in Southern Madagascar, because the host father works in a high level position at the local mining company. Their house was built and rented to them by QMM, and is built around more western sensibilities. It is built of aluminum siding and linoleum floors, and had a shower, a toilet, and a kitchen sink. In size, it is about as large as a four car garage ( I’m bad at estimating square footage, ok?) and has three small bedrooms, the bathroom, and the rest is open kitchen an slicing space. It’s furnished with everything one could buy if one took two thousand dollars toWalmart, including an enormous big screen TV but excluding paintings or carpets. I also had the chance to see the house he is building as his retirement home, once he has to give up the rented home. Since he is building it himself, with virtually all the resources a Malagasy could reasonably have at his disposal, it was interesting to get to see what his dream home looked like. The property was large, and consisted of four buildings. One was the main house, and it was average sized by reasonable American standards and made of cement. One was what would be best translated as the Rec center, where he planned to put in a game room; that was made of brick. The other two were wooden shacks, a large one (think one car garage) for the maid and cooks and their families. The other one was half that size and was for the watchman and his family of six. They brought us baked sweet potatoes to eat while we wandered around. Inside, there were two large rooms, which were big enough that an American wouldn’t quite have know what to do with the space. One was floored with cheap blue and white tile, and had a fireplace. Built off it was the master bedroom, a space the size of the watchman’s shack, with attached bathroom that contained the first bathtub I’ve seen in Madagascar. The other space was floored with linoleum and had a halfwall that sectioned off an awkwardly built kitchen, where the oven was running into the cabinets. The countertop was gain of cheap linoleum, but the cabinets were of old growth wood. You have to realize that that wood is easy to obtain here; he could easily have done his entire house in tightgrained hardwood. For the Malagasy, poor quality linoleum is more valuable. Built off the enormous open space were three smaller bedrooms, each tiny, and another bathroom which also had a tub. That bathroom opened to the kitchen area, though it was between the bedrooms and in a western house would probably have connected to those rooms instead. The focus of the house was definitely on the common area of the kitchen, rather than the individual bedrooms which could just hold the beds they contained. Each of the rooms had matching, handmade glass light fixtures which were beautiful and ornate, and would have been very hard to get in the US. All of the rooms were painted badly, so that the color was uneven and paint had dripped all over the floor. The house had an upstairs, too although that room was bizarre; it had clearly been added as an afterthought, and did not have full walls, and the chimney from the fireplace actually opened into the room. They expected to use it as a guest bedroom. All in all, the house was like a case study of how different wealth looks in Madagascar. Handmade and natural is cheap; it’s processed and factory made that’s hard to get, so the more it looks like Made in China, the more valuable it becomes.

Finally getting started

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.