As of this moment, I am cut loose. Independent study has begun, stipends have been given, last warnings offered, and now nobody is responsible for feeding me but myself. Haven’t missed many meals yet. So far, living in Madagascar without supervision has been a breeze, mostly because I’m not really on my own. The plane I took to Fort Dauphin was also being taken by five other students and one of our professors, so there wasn’t much to fear. Even so, when I got off the plane and everyone started taking taxis in different directions it really sunk in that I was on my own now. I’d arranged to stay with my host family again, and my host father came to pick me up in a quad. Then I spent anafternoon arranging a translator for my trip and buying supplies. My meals for the next few days are going to be rice and beans and cucumbers and pasta. Which is exactly what they’ve been for the past few months, but this time I decided on amounts and I spent the money. Next on the list is taking a taxi-brousse into the wild and fending for myself for the next month. For those who might be worried, I’ll be camping in a village and have already arranged to be accommodated by the Chef du Fokontany there, so there will be no spear wielding villagers wondering what I'm doing there. 

I have my research plan more or less decided, though the amount of second guessing going on over here is truly alarming. for the most part I think the doubts are all in my head, but it's hard not to keep thinking of other things I should or should not be bringing, and to waffle over all my decisions when it's only me making them. 

Tana was a really strange experience for all of us. It really was a combination of hilly san francisco and french style buildings, and for every fruit peddler on the street there might be almost as many more 'conventional' super stores selling exotic produce like marshmallows and grapes and apple juice. The markets were like anywhere else, eclectic and confusing, except that they were twice the size and twice the people and five times the noise. Things were a lot cheaper, and there were a lot more of them. The most surprising items creep into the country. You can buy shaving razors or showercaps from almost any peddler on the street, but you have to take a taxi nearly out of town to find a store that sells duct tape. I didn't even buy it, then, because it was so expensive. In Malagasy terms it was 22000 Ar, about 11 dollars for half a roll. When you consider that a nice restaurant meal should be between 7-10000, and that clothes can be bought for 2-3000, that's a lot. Tana also had real streets, real cars, it even had roundabouts and street signs! No stoplights or stop signs of course, but hey, what do you want. There were even designated parking spaces. In the south, if you have a car, you stop it wherever you want to. Nobody is going to get in your way.

In Tana we had a lot more free time to float around and practice buying our own meals. A lot of it got wasted attempting to find our way around the city and figure out what things were closed when, but we also got to see a lot of interesting parts of the city too. We saw the Queen's palace and Anosy Lake, the artisanal market and the first Malagasy printing shop. We also had the best Thai food that I have ever, ever experienced, and I have to say, all the Americans who think they like Thai because they've had Pad Thai have absolutely no idea what they are missing. I may never eat Thai again, to show proper respect for that meal. Malagasy cooking in Tana was just as bad as Malagasy cooking in the south, except there were better odds of the restaurant having ketchup. 

We have also, since I last posted here, traveled to Andasibe and seen the Indri, the largest (or tied to largest) lemur species in Madagascar. They're beautiful, with impossibly long arms and black and white coloring and gold eyes. They came so close to us, and the way they moved was jsut too impossible. One moment they were crouched against a tree, looking so very human, and the next they had launched themselves 8 meters or so directly behind themselves, and yet still landed facing forward, having executed perfect half-twists in the air. They sing as well. Please imagine. All this trip, we have been told by people everywhere that the Indri songs are one of the wonders of Madagascar, that they are like the calls of humpbacks, that we must hear them. There were four students who carried tape recorders with them the entire journey just for our single day at Andasibe. When we saw the Indri the entire wood was filled with chatty french and british tourists, but they all went silent the moment the first Indri opened its mouth, threw its head back, and belted out a sound like a three toned fire alarm. whaaeeEEEEET! WAHHHHHHT! WOOOOOooooo! whaaeeEEEEET! WAHHHHHHT! WOOOOOooooo!All the Indri began crying out this incredibly loud descending scale of hoots, and we all began to silently shake with mirth. From a distance, this call rings  eerily through the forest. From up close, it makes you want to file towards the exits. Well, we spent the rest of the week making Indri calls to each other; one of us would be  in our hotel room and want something, and we'd just start hooting out the window until somebody next door heard and came to see. Nothing like the call of wound up, overstressed SIT students (we had papers due right before our departure for ISP's) late at night. 

Well, it's time for me to finish up here and go pack my things for tomorrow! Buy some phone credit and maybe take a nap. 

Until the end of November,

whaaeeEEEEET! WAHHHHHHT! WOOOOOooooo!

I have officially achieved two decades! My birthday, we drove from Ranomafana up into Tana, which should have been terrible since it meant a ten hour ride by Tata. Fortunately, my Madagascar friends are really the best. The night before my birthday, we launched a minor pranking war, involving catapulting of plastic dinosaurs, mysteriously multiplying cucumbers, and somebody, I still don’t know who, switching out all my shoes with Carly’s. Pranking people when everyone’s tents are piled right up against each other is a bit difficult, but we apparently decided to rise to the challenge. The next day everyone had managed to find little gifts for me on the road. I got bars of chocolate and cookie boxes from the gas stations we’d passed, gift wrapped in plastic baggies, a crumbled muffin from a roadside vendor with a lollipop through the top like a ghetto cupcake, and a card that was signed by people while riding the tata, and so was filled with the most wonderful notes from all my friends in the most appalling handwriting you can imagine! Lunch we stopped in a random field and had sandwiches, and we found a chameleon while we were eating. i posed tto kiss it, and the silly thing climbed up on its hindlegs, leapt forward (in slow motion) and latched itself to my nose, causing all my friends to start laughing and screaming. I'll try to talk them into posting some of those! We had a really wonderful car ride, with a lot of loud music and hanging out the window and dancing as best we could in the Tata aisles. I've gotten quite good at the hanging over one seat, hanging from the railing Tata dance. When we finally arrived in Tana, our eyes were popping out of our heads. from a distance, we saw city lights covering most of the hillsides, and a shocked muttering rose up in the tata. we passed a road sign, and everyone gasped. we hit traffic, and a spontaneous cheer rose up. It's so strange to be in Tana now. The streets are like a combination of San francisco and Detroit. there are cars and parking spaces and buildings with more than two stories and actual air pollution. We're all having a little trouble coping right now. Not kidding. Anyway, we arrived at our hotel and had just barely enough time to put our things down before rushing off to our dinner at an authentic indian place that served us saab and mango lassis, more flavor in each bite than we usually got in our meals in a month. Again, culture shock. Then, it was time for the cake. Please try to imagine this scene. The scene is an indian restaurant with all my friends gathered around. the lights dim. My professor waves to the Merina man behind the counter, who turns on an actual tv and pulls up a music video with a title written in Hindi. It starts to play, and it turns out to be a Bollywood clip of indian actors bellydancing around cakes, spliced with random interjections of Sitar and, oddly, a techno version of Old McDonald Had a Farm. Meanwhile, my forty something teacher scoops up the enormous strawberry cake and begins moonwalking across the floor to me, spinning around and dancing back and forth and generally filling us all with terror; after a week of condensed milk, we really wanted that cake! Meanwhile my other teacher, N'aina, scoops up the knife and starts dancing too, so that the two of them ended up parading the cake to me to the techno hindi beat. At some point in here somebody started flickering the lights. then I started dancing too, and it was all just crazy. In short, it was one of the BEST birthdays I've ever had, and so very typically madagascar. Then I got sung to in French, and English, and Malagasy. That last took twice as long as the others combined: arabaina ny tratry ny fitsinerana ny taona nahaterahanao... it was really truly amazing. And now I've officially beaten teen pregnancy! woo!

La vielle ville

Hello everyone, I’m writing from Fianarantsoa today, quite some distance from where I last had internet access, and I’ve seen so many beautiful things since then. Right now, we’re traveling from Tulear to Tana, hitting landmarks along the way and stopping irregularly for discussions with local communities and NGO workers about the programs that they’re running. It’s a manic mix of pure tourism, hiking through gorgeous cliffs and photographing lemurs, and our school work. We’re getting better at asking questions all the time, as we learn to anticipate the problems of community oriented management programs, government involvement, and reliance on donor funds. We’ve all become astonishingly cynical, but at the same time there’s a lot of hope. To explain, we no longer accept anything an NGO tells us as given, always questioning their goals and their sustainability and how well they communicate with the community. But as we learn to ask harder questions, we find that there are NGO’s and people working here in Madagascar who are ready to respond to us, who can point to solid successes and places where they have been able to pull out of a community and have left it with more sustainable resources, better healthcare, maybe even a source of income. I wouldn’t say that I’m a practiced traveler now, but I’m learning to love the inconveniences of the third worls, and I can find my way around a new city comfortably. Bedbugs and dirt are common, but I have yet to catch malaria, so life is well here.

The places I’ve been in the past few days are too beautiful and numerous to describe, but I’ll do my best. We visited Isalo national park, which at first seems to be a long sweep of limestone studded savannah, ringed by the peculiar mining towns that have sprung up around illegal sapphire mining in the region. As we entered the park, however, we found that rainforests of Pandemus palms still survived at the very peaks and basins of the cliffs. Steep cliffs reminiscent of the grand canyon hide waterfalls which tumble into little pools and lakes among the rocks. We explored several of these, and uncovered several species of Opleurus lizards and Madagascar beeeaters, now one of my favorite birds. We also found tombs hidden amongst the stones, and had an interesting discussion about how local people are able to use the cliffs to temporarirly enter bodies (local customs require them to be kept in the cliffs before they are buried a second time)

Then, a long tata ride to a little community reserve set in a crumbling granite clifftop. These local people decided mostly on their own to conserve some remaining forest for ring tailed lemurs, and the results for them have been spectacular. At the same time, though, as we were seeing the wonderful things ecotourism has done for their community, our readings (you have no idea how hard it is to do class reading on a moving bus) were walking us through all the limitations. We came away from a beautiful hilke over and under enormous boulders the size of houses with the sense that though ecotourism was locally viable, the scope couldn’t begion to touch the many other endangered sites in urgent need of protection.

Next, to Andringitra, the second highest (and highest accessible) peak in Madagascar. It felt like coming home, to climb up to 6000 feet and suddenly find autumn. Cool weather, invasive juniper scrub, and tall grass like English heathland made me remember for the first time that my birthday is coming up. We spent several days there, and climbed up to the summit at 8000 ft. The mountain there is called “the place close to the heavens” and it is undescribable. Tall fingers of gray rock every where, and below it stretches of twerraced rice paddies, and not a bit of it like home.

Now we are in Fianarantsoa, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen, apparently because it is an endangered cultural heritage site, and so foreign money has been poured into restoring the painted wood balconies and clay roofs of not quite 200 years ago. It’s surreal, to see buildings without obvious cracks, and to see such a picturesque landscape surrounded by the same firescarred fields and eroding rice paddies.

Tomorrow we lwave for Ranomafana, and I won’t have internet until we hit Tana, the capital, on my birthday. No computer either, so I need to go write a paper… until then, wish everyone the best, much love from Madagascar. I still don’t have malaria.

-Charlotte

My goodness, where was I?

I have half an hour to attempt to update you on everything that has happened in the past fortyeight! Where to even begin?

When we left off, our heroine was surveying the mechanical wonders of Dr. Rananasomethingmalagasyzana. (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I cannot remember Malagasy names, who also showed us his Sprigula growing farms and fed us some, to our delight. Then, we set up camp on property owned by our academic director, consisting of a shoreline of mangroves and beach, twisty dunes covered with scrub, and open huts where we set up our tents. It was beautiful, and filled with Madagascar kingfishers, paradise flycatchers, and some surprisingly ambitious crabs. Then it was off to tabletop mountain, long time dwelling place of two spirits. there we met the Ombiasa, a medicine man who instricted us in traditional healing herbs and pointed out such interesting things as goat horns left over from sacred healing rites and the sacred tree... complete with graffiti from Christian's who had cut "Jesosy" and a picture of a man on a cross into it in order to "send the tree's spirits into the church" They had also apparently built a statue of jesus on top of the mountain, which was promptly knocked down by other villagers. They then tried to fill in the sacred cave (the source of the mountains holiness, as it is where the spirits sleep) with rocks. And the other villagers dug it out again. They then went and built another cross and Jesus statue on the mountain across the way. This version of religious warfare is, I think, fairly typical of the Malagasy approach to everything. Very passive, with a lot of repetition. I suppose that could be seen as insulting, except that it is very true. Here, time is cyclical and exists only in three parts. Morning, Evening, and Night.
So, we all climbed this mountain just around sunset and sat around on top of a very self-imporant, very empty pedestal while my friend Lindsey and I peppered the Ombiasa with questions about all the creatures of Malagasy mythology. Then we all crowded around the sacred cave, while the Ombiasa and his assistant burnt incense and laid out cookies and spilled sugar and sprinked rum and said many things in Malagasy which amounted to greeting the two spirits of the cave and asking their blessing.
Ahh, I'm getting kicked out of the internet cafe!
Quick!
I suppose I can summarize the end of that particular ceremony with, and then we got to eat the cookies, and there was much rejoicing. There's a bit of back story about the nature of the two spirits, but it isn't terribly interesting. One's name means "Cold Water" (roughly) and he hides out in the cave full time, becasue he's apparently too chilly to leave. The other only lives in the cave after sundown. Some of us observed that it was then a bit odd that we were sacrificing to him during daylight, but the Ombiasa was really set on the idea that the cave was an answering machine, and that when the spirit would return he would appreciate the fact that we briefly placed cookies there and then scarfed them all ourselves, and respond by blessing us with great success in academics in the future. That night, I waited eagerly for spirits, but instead had a dream that they served us octopus for dinner, and we covered it with peanutbutter. Probably brought on by the fact that I have been eating octopus for dinner, in addition to snails, raw sea urchins, and grasshoppers. So in fact, the only supernatural part of the dream was the part where Skippy peanut butter somehow managed to find its way into the country of Madagascar. I'm still reflecting on the religious symbolism of this, I'll let you know when I figure it out. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, on a sacred mountain with an Ombiasa at sunset with a full moon rising in the sacred East. We made it back into no-spirits land with no incident, for which I was grateful, and on our way my friends Carly and Lindsay and I discovered that there are apparently mermaids (luludrano) living in the mangrove forests nearby. We know they're there, b/c our academic director believes in Madagascar's spirits and he told us that there was a man drowned by them a few years back. Well, we immediately made up our mind to go looking for them.
Yesterday was the full moon still, and the night of our sheep and goat sacrifice. A sidenote; when this trip began, about a third of us were vegetarian, and the rest almost universally said things like "I don't really eat meat". A few weeks into the program, we brought live chickens with us to eat, and it was a Big Traumatic Deal. Two days ago, Jim asked all the vegetarians to raise their hands, and was met with nothing but unanimous, meat-craving silence. And yesterday, Cassandra, a reformed vegetarian, had to shove people out of the way to get to be the one to slit our goats throat. And all the other former vegetarians spent its death throes muttering to themselves about "why  can't we just eat it now? Do they really have to cook it first?"
That's how things go in Madagascar
and as usual, I love you all!
 But I have to go!
LOVE

From Tulear

This post, a quick forewarning, can  continue only so long as I can keep from being forced out of  the lovely ex-patriate restaurant I am currently hanging out in and pushed back into the Tata bus. We arrived in Tulear after waking up at 4:30 to rush to the airport for our six o'clock flight, which landed about half an hour after our supposed embarquement time. The moral of the story; time in Madagascar does not exist as Westerners imagine it does. There is morning, lunchtime, and night; nothing else exists. We made our way through airport security, which consisted of filing past an x-ray machine and metal detector, one of which was broken and the other of which was off. Our flight brought us in to Tulear very tired, and the first thing we did was make our way to the Marine ecology center for a lecture which I'm sorry to say I may have drowsed through. But I got all the lecture notes on a thumbdrive, to read later! Anyway, once he realized that we were barely conscious, the lecturer instead took us to his home which he has turned into a manufacturing site for solar powered inventions which can bake bread, generate electricity, and generate methane gas and compost.... and I have to go!
 So sorry! But I promise better updates soon, involving roomfuls of octopus and receiving the blessing of an Obiasa on top of a sacred mountain and my first ice cream in a month. LOVE

What happens en Brousse...

Hello all, I'm freshly back from my adventures in a Tandroy village. Spent all Saturday in a Tata on the road home, spent all Sunday recovering. Bucket showers never felt so luxurious.

A quick summary:
Things I have eaten since I last saw you all:

• Sea urchin, both cooked and raw.

Guess which one is infinitely preferable? My host father dove into the reef and came out with 20 or so sea urchins. We started a bush fire along the strand and tossed them in. One eats them, then, by beating them with rocks till they crach and then scraping off the yellowish meaty inside with a fingernail and slopping it into your mouth, along with some incidental spines and sand. They're a bit of an acquired taste. Good as an accent maybe, a bit strong when you're on your fifteenth and there are Malagasy
yelling "masalasalanao misakafo!" at you. They love to force feed guests here.

• Snails, head, middle, and tail.

There was quite a bit of desperate under the breath muttering to my translator when a snail the size of my spread out hand emerged from the fire and was placed in front of me. "Oh yeah!" he said, "You can eat all of that, I used to have it when I was a kid" and he took one and proudly slurped (ok, gnawed. These things have the consistency of tennis balls) it all down, including the little squiggly end where the snail poop is. Well, not wanting to be a bad guest, I got to work. Ten minutes to get through the foot, 5 for the middle. Then the end. I have eaten a lot of things, but I have never, never, experienced anything as nasty as that snail. My CEL student was asking how it was, and I couldn't even hear him, it was taking that much concentration to keep my jaw muscles clenched. Well, I ate it. Once I'd swallowed, my host father returned from more reef dying, saw the snail and looked horrified. They may eat them in Tulear, but apparently even at Faux Cape, where in drought years they have to eat cactus leaves to survive, they let that particular delicacy slide. Thanks a lot, Cedric.

• Reef fish and under minimum lobsters

We ate them anyway. The first time a lobster, clearly too small, appeared from my host fathers sack, we had a little debate about it. Our host father realized we were concerned and went and got the stick that the authorities have passed out to show what size you can take. It's a piece of wood the size of your hand with a nail in it. You set the lobsters head against the nail, and the tail is supposed to be longer than the stick. Our host father propped up his two lobsters, and proudly showed us that they were a good cm short. Brandon and I nodded and smiled back, unsure why we were supposed to be comforted. Cedric laughed. "En brousse," he explained, "we use the minimum as the average."

• Chicken (neck, guts, heart, lungs... everything but the liver and the rear)

The liver because it is so good that someone else always gets it first. The rear because it is considered the best part and so is reserved for the head of household, the father. 

• Grasshoppers (well cooked)

Imagine this; you are sitting and writing in a notebook. The villagers are sitting around you, playing around and generally using you as a toy (we are the main entertainment, and there's always somebody with nothing to do) Suddenly, six wingless, legless grasshoppers are dropped onto your paper, and a smiling eight year old is repeating "tsara sakafo" (good food). Cautiously, I scooped one up and gestured toward my mouth. The mother shook her head "Manta Misaka" she said, which translates to roughly not ready to eat. She sent the girl off to the house, and she returned two  minutes later with freshly crisped grasshoppers. They showed me how to pull the heads off, then crunch them whole. They were actually one of my favorite things that I've eaten that trip.

• Tokogasy

The less said about Malagasy rum the better. It's nice that it's only available in small quantities.


Surprising gifts that I have received/been offered by my doting Tandroy host parents.

• A chicken

Her name was Mainty (black) and I ate her for lunch today. Carrying her home was a bit awkward, since my hands were full with our other gifts, but we managed, mostly because she was too exhausted from the bus ride to struggle much.

• A spear

not a real one, but a prop carved out of sisal stalk (they don't have any wood in Faux Cape, too few trees). We used it during our ritual zebu dance (read above) I offered it to my fort Dauphin host sisters and they promptly almost killed themselves with it, as would have children anywhere.

• Six uncooked bageda and a bag of antaky

Antaky is a bean which is dry, tasteless, and not worth much in anything but a corn dish; even the tandroy don't eat it on it's own. When they were teaching us words they thought were important (the time of the day  without a watch, the parts of their house, and things to eat. "Do you have this in the US?" they asked. "No" we responded. They were horrified. Then, when it was time to go, one of the girls appeared with a big bag of it. "To take back to the US with you", they explained. They are wonderfully thoughtful. I gave it to my host family here in Fort Dauphin, we'll see if it shows up at dinner tonight.

Love you all! More soon.
-Char

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.