Madagascar in Crisis?

Hey, since people are starting to find out about the situation here and ask me about it, I thought I ought to finally say something to assuage the fear.

The country is in a political crisis as the mayor of the capital is calling for the president to step down and the entire country has erupted in looting against the president's factories.

I am in the capital, safe and sound, just waiting out this situation. It is calm now but could still get worse.

Don't worry for me - there is no targeting of foreigners and i am staying in a walled compound with some friends - we even have internet!

below are a few links to sites you can get updates if you are so inclined. It is hard to get breaking news in english but there are a couple blogs being updated frequently.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119668520021
this is a facebook group where news is being posted as its found out. it is a good site to find out about the current status of peace corps in madagascar

http://dropsmakewaves.blogspot.com/
a former volunteer's blog who is living in antananarivo right now and very active in keeping the world alert to current issues here

http://www.sobika.com
in french but has up to the minute falsh news briefs. probably more relevant to us in the country actually...

If you find other sites please post them to the comments to help others learn about this situation

As I am not allowed to have a political opinion here I cant comment any more on the reasons this situation erupted but you can easily find out for yourselves. I really just wanted to let you all know that I am just fine and this is all more interesting than scary for me (really its incredibly boring sitting inside all day so you should email me and let me know how you are doing).

Life is Rice; Rice is Life

Most all of you know by now that rice is a cultural obsession here in Madagascar and that it is eaten by the heaping plateful at every meal. When I am invited to someone’s house, what acts as more of an indicator of how Gasy I have become than my level of fluency in the language is the amount of rice that I eat (“Well, he’s kind of dumb but at least he knows how to eat rice,” I can hear my hosts thinking). It occurred to me, however, that perhaps not all of you fully grasp what it means to eat rice so frequently here. Of course, you know that it’s not buying a big bag at Costco (or reusing your own at the bulk bins of the Co-op), popping it into the rice cooker, and sitting down to meal. But how involved a process is it? I’ll spare you the technical details, which us environment volunteers love so much, on this journey from field to table, but I hope you will nonetheless get a sense of why rice is more than a meal here, why its a way of life.

First stop: tanim-bary, or rice paddy. In the Central Valley of California we have huge paddies - expansive, flat, mechanised operations, complete with aerial pest control – that contribute a large amount to world rice stores. Needless to say, that is a model not readily adopted here in Madagascar. Aside from not having the capital to purchase the inputs (tractors, pesticides, fertilizers, etc.), the topography is too rugged to permit such large-scale operations. There are a couple of areas, like near Lac Aloatra, the so-called bread basket of Madagascar, where tractors are in use, but by and large, what feeds people here are small-scale, organic, labour-intensive, family ‘farms’.

We have all seen pictures of Burma and Thailand with the beautifully terraced hill slopes, neatly distributing water through all the level fields. That is pretty incredible technology and speaks to the power of cultural heritage to pass along and perfect an agricultural technique over thousands of years. We have paddies like those here, too, passed down from that same cultural heritage and thought to have been brought with the last wave of Indo-Polynesian settlers maybe 500 years ago. Their descendants, the Betsileo, live on the plateau and are known for their rice culture. They build terraces every bit as impressive as the Burmese. But many of the tribes, such as those near me in the South East, don’t possess this inherited knowledge and use different techniques. The people in my region have traditionally lived in relation to the forest. Aside from harvesting many products from the forest, they practice slash and burn agriculture. After clearing a tract of forest, they grow rice and manioc on the hillsides using the stored nutrients for a year or two, until they are depleted, and then repeating the process with a new tract. But now that the forest is nearly gone and slash and burn is illegal, they are having to learn how to build paddies and manage the land more sustainably. It is hard work, and rice is now grown mostly in valley bottoms here- not yet on hillside terraces.

The stages of rice’s journey that take place in the tanim-bary will be recognizable to anyone who has spent some time on a farm. First, before rice even enters the story, the paddies need to be prepared. Here, that means men and cattle will be out tromping in the pudding like mud, mixing in manure, and flattening whatever weeds grew in the off season, until man and beast are equally unrecognisable under their sun-baked, grey plaster coats. It takes a few days and if there aren’t cattle, the work is all done by hand.

Then for the next couple weeks women will be transplanting seedlings, one by one, throughout the valleys. They are bent over for hours and their work is punctuated by the sounds of conversation and laughter (at least every time that I walk by or help out). I find it to be a really pleasant activity, but were I to do it for as long as they, I am sure that I would awaken moaning from a sore back.

After the planting comes the weeding of course - a couple times over the next month until the plants are big enough to shade the competition. The men use tools if they have them and the women use their hands. Rice takes about three months to grow so the next two months will then be turned to other tasks.

My favourite part of the process is harvest, not solely because I get to indulge in the pleasure of playing with sharp things. The men work in a line, spread out shoulder to shoulder, cutting swaths with their razor sharp sickles, as the women follow behind bundling the severed stalks with a stray piece of straw. A morning spent harvesting is an incredibly rewarding experience. It is the climax of a story that we have been telling repeatedly for the last 12,000 years (not to mention the, what, 2 million? year old roots of playing with sharp things). A fair comparison is made in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when he describes the exultation Levin feels while participating in the wheat harvest.

I think most North Americans, including myself, have a hard time picturing what happens to the rice next, up until we see it on the shelf at the grocery store. Maybe it travelled across the world; but even if you live in California and are lucky enough to eat Lundberg’s organic basmati grown along the I5 it’s no less mystifying where that rice has travelled and what machines, factories and warehouses it has visited along the way to transform a petulant stalk of seed heads into those pearly white maggots in a bag. You’ll have to turn to other sources to solve that mystery. I do know, on the other hand, what happens every step of the way from the fields surrounding my town here in Madagascar to my plate. It may be laborious, but it is intelligible.

Once it is taken from the field, and before being dried in the sun, the rice needs to be threshed. In my area, the women take a bundle of rice on a straw mat or tarp and knead it with their feet. The loose grains fall from the matted stalks, which when removed, leave a golden pile of unhulled rice. You can imagine how much time it takes to thresh a whole hectare worth of rice in this manner, which is how much one family can reasonably handle, provided they are lucky enough to have rights to that much land.

I don’t know where the origins of the word ‘thresh,’ as I neglected to pack a good dictionary in my suitcase, but after participating in the use of another threshing technique I’m sure it must be related to the word thrash. In out training village on the plateau, a big rock or oil drum is laid out, again on a mat or cleared area, and a big bundle of stalks is taken in each hand and beat against the object repeatedly until all the grains have flown loose, showering the area with loose rice. If any of you enjoy beating a punching bag when you are stressed, you should try this. Another great thing is that the whole family gets to participate.

After threshing, some poor girl gets suckered into watching rice dry on woven mats laid out in the sun for a couple days, fending off the voracious chickens, ducks, pigs, and whatever else attempts to gorge itself on the oh so tempting bounty. If it is for family consumption it will get stored in this state in large gunny sacks until needed. But if bound for market, it will need to be hulled. In wealthy areas it is taken to a hulling machine, but for most families (wives) this means pounding it in a giant mortar and pestle, sometimes in a rhythmic refrain with one or two other women.

If you are be or another ‘city’ dweller, this is when you get to buy the rice. In my market there is a row of people from the country, all sitting with their baskets of rice and one of the ubiquitous kapaoka, or tin can measuring devices. All the rice is the same price but there will be different varieties and varying states of unhulledness and bug-filledness (very technical terms) and it is your job as a shopper to find the good stuff.

Before cooking, it still must be winnowed and washed. For many families, this process is repeated before every meal. After being picked through for unhulled grains, bugs and stones, it is tossed in a sahafa to remove any light bits of hull that are left. It now looks like what you are used to eating, except that it is of a varying shade of red, a characteristic of our special Malagasy varieties.

It remains paradoxical to me that for how much effort goes into the cultivation and preparation of this culturally defining foodstuff, there is next to zero effort in the actual cooking. Attention all good Persians: read no further – what follows may horrify you. In the absence of temperature control, the idea seems to be to get the flames as hot as possible, toss rice into a pot full of water, cover, and wait. Sometimes its too dry, usually its soggy and mushy, and always the rice on the sides and bottom are burnt. Turning this into a virtue, we re-boil water in the pot and drink this as a tea. Being that most Malagasy seem to drink nothing else, this has become the national drink. In fact, it is important enough that technologies introduced to help reduce fuel wood consumption (like solar cookers) have failed here because while they cook the rice just fine, they don’t get hot enough to burn the rice.

The Malagasy obviously take pride in their rice culture and know more about the varieties and subtleties of the farming practices than us volunteers can ever hope to learn, even though we are busy teaching them new techniques (S.R.I. is cultivation process that has spread throughout the rice growing world. It has yet to catch on here, even though, ironically enough, it was originally developed in this country). Nevertheless, that pride has infected us volunteers, too. There was one volunteer who, while doing business in the capital for a few days, bought a bag of clean rice at the Malagasy Wal-mart because he was tired of winnowing it. When we saw what he bought it took a little while to register in our brains, but then we all burst out laughing at the novelty of it. Now if you see me in a couple years standing petrified in front of those bulk food bins, you’ll have some idea what might be going through my mind.

Break from Site

It has been a few weeks since I have been at my site. My WWF agents are in the field right now and my work with Stan and the meeting I had in Fianar precluded my going with them this time. The last month I was there, I was really unsatisfied with the work I was doing. I tagged along with WWF on our last field tour, but I didn't really bring anything to the table and didn't feel like i really made a difference in any of the villages we visited. So I am travelling around a bit, trying to get reinspired. I think it's working.

I spent about a week at Brittany's site.
We farmed vanilla and did compost and double digging workshops, held a meeting with her nascent womens group (they want to farm ducks, for eggs) and built a bed for rice transplants. The amount of blisters I got definitely told me that it has been way too long since I got my hands in the dirt and I was very glad to be doing some agricultural work.


Then we spent my birthday in a coastal city near her village. We had to walk 11km to get to the crossroads where we could catch a ride, but then we instantly got in a camion (cargo truck) and were on our way. It was amazing! I mean, can you imagine not having to wait for hours to catch a ride? oh yeah....well it was an amazing thing here, but nevermind. We met a couple of health volunteers and and had 'Gasy food and beers (batter fried peppers stuffed with onions anyone?) and then crashed at a hotel that was full (they graciously let us sleep in their defunct restaurant turned meeting room so long as we vacated by 8:00, and they even gave us a Peace Corps discount). All in all, a memorable b-day if rather mellow. Kind of how I prefer it.

I have since been in Fianar for the past few days. We had a provincial meeting with all the volunteers in the area. i think about 20 of us attended. We discussed house issues, had spiels from Diversity and Women in Development committees, and discussed the big Halloween party we were throwing that night. We were co-sponsoring with a major cell phone company. It was at a discotheque and was advertised around town. They don't celebrate Halloween here so it was a good cross-cultural experience (they do honor the dead on Nov. 1 though). i couldn't believe how many Malagasy showed up and how good their costumes were. they definitely prefer the scary to the farcical with all sorts of ghosts and demons abounding. They had a kicking sound system too, which was the first i had seen here; that could be explained by the fact that this was the first club I had ever been in. Periodically the DJ would call out to people to wave their cell-phones in the air - I guess to appease the cell-phone company. I went as a common sack of produce with the ubiquitous can of milk measuring cup on top. When I get a hold of some pictures I will show you all. it was a really fun party for me.

Tomorrow evening I will head down south to help open an English center, visit an Environment volunteer, and go to a Malagasy music Festival. This is my first time off the plateau or out of the rainforest so I am really excited. It is the spiny desert down there and the culture is totally different - they don't grow rice, for one thing, and their dialect is very different as well. Then Lisa, an Education volunteer near me, and I, will try to make it up the coastal road back to site through an area with no public transport. It should be an adventure.

So unless you get to me in the next 24 hours, The next time we can correspond my computer will probably be Christmas. I of course still love letters though, just a reminder...

Introducing Peace Corps

The mayor points towards a building that was a little further up the dirt track from the cluster of houses we just rolled into. “Erryyy,” he says with the upward inflection used when indicating a location a little ways off. He directs the driver to his office, which is across the soccer field from the elementary school. As we pull up to the office and get out, we are swarmed by hundreds of students in their green and white checkered school uniforms, curious to see who the guests are that have arrived in such a nice Land Cruiser. The teachers must be in a meeting because it seems like none of the children are actually in the classrooms even though it is midmorning. Then again, as I later learn, they have 1300 students and only seven teachers in this commune, so maybe they are just waiting for their turn to get to learn.

This is one of two towns in the area that we are visiting as part of the site development process, in the hopes of placing a new environment volunteer here early next year. Stan, my fearless leader, is based in Tana and on this road trip to make sure all the preselected sites are up to snuff and that the villagers are still motivate welcome a series of Americans into their community for the next 6 years to help them with environmental work. He has invited me along to these two sites to give a volunteer’s perspective about the town and the potential work, and to introduce me in case any follow up needs to happen before the volunteer arrives.

On paper, these sites are very similar. Both sites are in the south-east, are both of the same tribe and are both commune seats, meaning they have all the county level offices and if there is a hospital or middle school, it would be in these bigger towns. Still, there are big differences between these two, due largely to the location of one along a major road with easy access to bigger cities, and this other, where we are now, a several hours walk to the nearest public transport and shipping route.

Walking into the office, we greet everyone, saying hello and shaking hands with all the men present, left hand placed under right elbow. Then we sit and say hello again, ask the news, etc., before getting to our business. This is a procedure I have grown used to over the past few months, repeated every time I have entered an office or been invited into someone’s home. Stan introduces us and then we go outside and wait, as the mayor spreads the word for the town meeting. Within half an hour we are seated in the shade of some mango and litchi trees (it is sweltering hot), on a woven mat that has been brought out for us, joined by the mayor and a couple of his side kicks, with all the men and women of the town gathered around us. The women sit together with their babies under one tree, the men under another, with the mpanjaka, or traditional king, sitting at the sacred north east corner of the assembly. For about an hour, Stan and the mayor take turns explaining the situation, what peace corps is, what their responsibilities are and the like. Villagers ask questions, they debate about the house and then things start winding down. I have been mute until this point and even though it has been explained that volunteers speak Malagasy, they clearly don’t yet believe it. But then Stan asks me to speak. I say nothing more then my name, where I live, who I work with- all totally basic and not even that in good ‘Gasy. But they love it. Everyone gets really excited and they start asking me questions and applauding and praising me. It is a really beautiful moment for me, and I see that their whole understanding has changed about what it means to have a Peace Corps volunteer in their village, how different it is than working with other NGOs. A vazaha speaking their language is as seemingly wonderful to them as if I had made their forest regrow. The rapport built from that simple act will make regrowing that forest with the community that much easier.

We are treated to lunch in the mayor’s house: Rice (duh!), canned sardines (a luxury item, meant to impress), beer, cola, and bananas for dessert. Then we spend the afternoon wandering around the countryside, checking out all the cool things they are already doing. They already plant cloves and pepper, vanilla and coffee, transplant Albizzia and Gravilia which are two nitrogen fixing shade trees. They are really excited about new techniques and are excited to share their knowledge with me. We head down to the river where there is a beautiful swimming hole. We have been regaled in true country side manner. We finally leave, feeling really excited about the site.

The next day we head down to repeat the process at the second site. The Minister of Transportation hails from the city just to the south, so the road here is amazing. Traffic flows both ways here between the two regional hubs at either end of this 100 km section of road. It takes us a third of the time, to go the same distance as yesterday, and we aririve to find that it is market day, which means are Moses of an SUV has to part the sea of people that pool everywhere.

When we get to the office, greetings are done as usual but then we find out that the mayor is busy because someone has died but we should be able to have our meeting in a couple hours and we are left to explore the market in the meantime. It is the crowded market I have been in; we are constantly being elbowed aside and have to fight to move along. I have to duck my way under the shade tarps, being a head taller than most folks around, and am luckily still aware enough to catch the would-be pickpocketer as he tries to reach into my pocket in the chaos. At one point, Stan and I get stuck, or way blocked by a current of bodies that we are unable to break into. We have to retreat and decide to go out into the countryside, to wind our way among the coffee and rice to eventually get back to the mayors office.

When we finally have our meeting, it is in the school house. This town is much to big and chaotic to assemble everyone; instead, it is the lehibe in town, the big shots (all male of course), who show up. Stan, the mayor, his side kick, and I are seated up front as a panel facing the other 25 or so men. I see that this meeting is going to be more formal, sticking to the power hierarchies. This time, when Stan speaks, he does a kabary, the traditional Malagasy speech. He thanks the big wigs, apologizes, does an introduction and uses proverbs, all before actually talking about Peace Corps. When he and the mayor are finished, and after a few other men have stood up and given speeches, too, Stan asks me to speak. I am nervous because I haven’t memorized how to do a kabary yet, but I screw convention and just start rambling about all the same stuff I talked about yesterday, trying to throw in jokes about eating so much rice and what not. Grafefully, they were as receptive an audience as any I have had in this country and ate it up just like the day before. They got really excited and we chatted about swimming and being afraid of sharks and all formality was dropped for a few minutes. That couple minutes of connection was well worth the stress of the market place.

This time, when the meeting ended, there was no other plan. We didn’t walk around town or go to see projects with the mayor or the forest they are supposedly trying to protect. The mayor was busy. He paid for us to eat in a little hotely across the street from his office, though he had to run to eat with someone else. The laoka was tilapia, that ubiquitous farmed fish, despite the fact that we were only a few kilometers from the ocean and right on a major river. Says something about how depleted the fisheries are around here (sound familiar to anyone?).

As we leave this town I am questioning whether these folks will actually come together to build the house the volunteer needs and wondering about what rapid development has done for the people their. I know which of the two towns that I had visited in the past two days I would prefer to live in, but the real question, which I can’t yet answer, is which one they would prefer.

A Couple Quick Plugs

I just wanted to give you all a couple of links to other blogs and pictures. These will round out your ideas of what I am going through a bit.

Brittany has a blog that you all should read. She lives in the same region of the country and is the closest environment volunteer (only a day and a half travel) to me, but is having a quite different experience. You can find a lot of great links on her page, too. She has some great pictures of our trainings and other travel (including to my house) that you might also want to check out.

Liz just sent me the link to her blog. She has posted some wonderful pictures and stories from the summer she spent here in Madagascar as a WWF volunteer. We worked closely together (I can't wait to work with her again come January!) and you can get a really good idea about some of the stuff I have been doing the last few months, and the places I have been.

Also, I have a few photos uploaded though I haven't yet got them sorted at all, but you can find them here.

I hope I am not bombarding you all but I want to give you as much as possible before I disappear off the map again...

For the Love of Petrol!

As I am traveling back to site after a month of training and meetings and fine dining (where else can you get an exquisite French meal for $10 except Tana?) and merrymaking, I am reminded about what havens gas stations are in this country.

Its not that they are anything special from an American perspective - in fact they look just like gas stations back home - but that is what makes them amazing: they are like gas stations back home in a place where nothing is like back home. Not only is it comforting for the homesick, but also for the road weary traveler in Madagascar.

Just like home, it is a few pumps with a convenience store and a bathroom. Imagine a convenience store in a land where nothing seems to be designed with convenience in mind. This is a tropical country, so its hot, and it is easy to get overheated or dehydrated. For many of us that is a constant struggle and the only thing to find is a warm coke or THB. But at the gas station they have refrigeration so I can get a cold drink or, heaven forbid, an ice cream! Many shops here don’t even have an electric lightbulb, let alone a refrigerator.

Then there is the bakery. Not all of them heave this feature, just like not all gas stations back home have an Aztec Grill or some such. If you are fortunate enough to have one of this style in your area, it becomes like Mecca: If I had one I would know exactly which direction it is when I am surveying trees in the forest and would be constantly pulled by it’s energy. While the bread is twice as much as the stale baguette on the corner, it is warm and soft and ….oh so delicious. With the puff pastries and turnovers and other Frenchie thingies, it is hard not to come back multiple times a day when you are near one.

Now, some places in this country are more sanitary then others. In my area, as in many, people don’t even use latrines – they just do their business in the woods or, after dark, wherever they please. You can imagine the stank around those places people pick as their favorite doodie spots. So when you have been traveling and have to use the kabone (latrine) it is amazing to come across a gas station where you can use an actual toilette that usually flushes. And the sink might even have soap.

There are some differences from back home, however. Here, the ‘Gasy seem to know how amazing this Western convenience is and take pride in it. Gas stations are actually clean here – usually immaculately so. They are also quite conspicuous here, where most buildings are more like shacks or crumbly brick leftovers from colonial days. They are apparently such targets that they need to hire guards at night, armed with 50 year old rifles, to deter theft, though I guess maybe it is just that gasoline is so frickin’ expensive these days.

Those of you that know me probably won’t understand how I can write such a post. While I may have avoided these cesspools of capitalist exploitation like the plague back home, I have learned to appreciate even the lowly gas station in a place where everything else makes me feel like I am on a different planet.

Wishlist

Several of you have asked if I need anything and if they can send packages.

DHL will ship to the Antananarivo address but I am not sure about the other one. The packages will then be forwarded by Peace Corps.

Personaly I don't need anything- I like living on a basic diet of rice and beans and can get by just fine on what is materially available, but luxury is lacking. I would really appreciate anything you sent though, from a letter to granola bars to Dr. Bronner's (the soap here is straight glycerin). It is nice when I visit other volunteers to be able to bring them a small gift like a snickers bar, or Oreos. Also, any pens, or coloring books, or soccer balls and pumps, arts and craft supplies. etc. for the kids will be appreciated more than you can know. Oh, and if you have any pictures of your homes and towns and families, it would be wonderful to be able to give these people a wider perspective about the world, and for me to see your wonderful faces again. Oh yeah, and any semi current magazines like the economist or newsweek would be very much appreciated - I am in way more of a bubble than all you in Humbloldt/Trinity think you are.

When I can get people more organized around the projects they want to carry out, I will be hitting you all up for donations so you might want to hold out for that.

I think this will be my last post for a few months so I look forward to corresponding by letter with you all. Peace and love and all that hippy shit that I am so fond of...