Lemurs DO live in Madagascar!

So sorry about the lack of pictures, the internet/computer wasn't letting me load them, but if you want to see some photos, you can go to tagged pictures of me on facebook and that will let you in to the album called Madagasikara by Jesse Assael Berkowitz which has some really good ones on it.  Also you can go to zatosary.blogspot.com which is the blog of another girl on the trip, and she should have some pictures.  Hopefully I'll be able to get some up soon!!!  Missing everyone of you lots and lots!

We finally saw lemurs!  We drove 4 or 5 hours, again on the national highway, which makes Marshall Cove Road in the rainy spring season look like Route 1 (for any islanders),  but it was absolutely incredibly worth it.  Our trip took us to the dry spiny forest in the Androy region of Madagascar, which is north-west of our home base in Fort Dauphin.  There is actually a tree called named Roy (pronounced rewy), for which the people and the region are named, which is a very spiny bush-like tree that catches any bit of clothing or arms or legs that brush against it.  The area only gets 300-500 mm of rainfall on average each year, so it was incredibly hot and dry, but there was so much to the forest that we were exploring!
We set up our campsite in a little village which is part of the Ifotaka commune (40 km squared of 14 little villages), next to the Mandrare River, which was really more of a trickle because it’s one of the 10 months of dry season out of the year.  The villagers herd zebu and goats and sheep, grow manioc and corn and sweet potatoes, but this is one of the only regions that doesn’t have rice because it is so dry.  The campsite was in a grove of Euphorbia trees, which have a latex sap which can make you go blind if you get it in your eyes, but luckily there’s another medicinal plant that can take care of that.  We were just on the edge of the semi-protected area of the forest, so the first morning we went into the forest to find lemurs with some local guides, which are like lemur whisperers, I swear they know exactly where the groups are at all time.  We had only walked about 15 minutes gaping at the coolness of the plants, including aloe, another species of euphorbia that looked like part of a coral reef, and these really strange, tall, also coral-looking trees called Alloudia, and lots of baobabs, when we saw our first lemurs!  Sifaka lemurs, which are white and furry with black faces and travel in groups were the most prevalent in the forest, but we also saw some adorable nocturnal mouse lemurs and lepilemurs, which are much smaller and just hang out in the crook of Alloudia branches during the day.
The lemurs are so incredibly cute!  If they don’t mind the fact that you’re there, they just hang out and eat the flowers which grow on the tops of the Alloudia trees, or leaves off of some other tree species, but if they are bothered by you, they hop away, almost flying from tree to tree, much more gracefully than squirrels, and bouncier than birds if that makes any sense at all.  We saw some mother lemurs with their little babies on their backs, which was fantastically adorable. The babies just hang on to the mother's back or stomach as they jump from tree to tree or hop on the ground.
We did three different studies, one of population density, one of behavior, and one of habitat, which all basically involved trekking through the spiny forest trying not to get to scraped up or drown in our own sweat because it was so hot, and then finding and following different lemur groups.  It was really amazing to follow the local guides around and get experience doing field work, especially because the lemurs calmed down and actually let us watch them for hours!
I also ran in the morning on the "road," and some local villagers who were bringing things to the market stopped and laughed and pointed and kind of gave encouraging sounds (I think, hopefully that's just not my absurd faith in humanity coming out), which was fun and funny.  It's so easy to connect with the local people doing things like that, or just mirroring the little kids until it becomes a little game or dance, which they really love.  In some ways the language barrier is so frustrating because you can't talk in depth with people enough to get down to their character or any abstract beliefs without a translator, but in other ways you don't need language at all, besides laughing and motioning with your hands.  Some girls in the fruit market where we stop frequently got really into it, and we were dancing around and laughing for such a long time, which was really adorable.

Studying a Dr. Seuss Forest

One of the spiny trees whose uses I forget, but just reminded me so much of  Dr. Seuss that I had to take picture

Over the last 3 days, we camped in Andohahela National Park, in Parcel 2, which is the transitional forest between the dense, humid forest to the east, and the dry, spiny forest to the west.  The 10 Americans and 10 students from the Centre d'Ecologie a Libanona (sorry about the lack of accents) or CEL came along with us.  CEL is sort of the only accredited university in the Fort Dauphin area, so the Malagasy students that do really well in high school but don't have family in Tulear or Tana (the capital city) don't really have any other options.  They were all really nice, and they had done the fieldwork inventory project that we did before, so they were like extra guides for us. On the ride there, we stopped at an agricultural project which exports medicinal plants, including one that is being used for cancer research in Europe, and we ate pure sugar cane! It was really tough and you mostly suck out the juices and spit the fibers, and naturally addicting and tasted really good, but was definitely too much after a while.

The waterfall and pool where we swam

The first day, we hiked around the tourist circuit trail, and actually saw some tourists, which was amazing.  It was a really great path, with little signposts and a bunch of different species of lizards.  The heat was fairly dry and intense, but the hike wasn't too strenuous.  I saw my first baobab, which was SO cool, and we saw one that was growing out of an old baobab that had fallen down, so it was like a right angle of baobab.  There are no species of cacti endemic to Madagascar, but plenty has been introduced, and some species are very invasive.  Over 80% of the plants in the park have a use for the people, either medicinal or artisanal.  We saw ebony, three different kinds of aphrodisiac (mostly just legend that those actually work), plants which cure malaria, and others that can straighten hair and you can use in shampoo, and of course several species of aloe.    Our walk/hike took us to an amazingly beautiful natural swimming pool at the foot of some waterfalls.  The water was refreshing and the rocks were hot and the water coming off the waterfall was warmer from coursing over the rocks, so it was the closest thing any of us had to a warm shower in a long time!
The next day, we did our field study in four groups of five students each, mixing the CEL students with Americans, and one guide each.  We surveyed 10 m by 10 m of fairly thick forest/bush, identifying and counting all the plant species in our plot, and trying to get the uses of any plants with the help of the guides.  The language barrier was really hard for this part, because not only had we never done anything like this, but all the people that spoke Malagasy were at least somewhat experienced, so we felt even more like dumb Americans than usual in the beginning.  Luckily things improved as everyone got used to each other, and we ended up identifying 35 different species in our plot, 34 of which were endemic!!  We had some ebony, a tree bark that you can bathe in that tightens sphincter muscles in the body (anti diarrheal, female lemurs rub up against it after birthing to tighten vaginal walls again), and anti-malarial plants.  One of the new professors, who is Malgasy but studied at UMass Amherst, said she did a similar field study in New England, and found only 5 different kinds of trees in an entire forest, and we found 9 in one 100 square meter plot!

Our field study group (Jess, Isaiah, Theo (a CEL girl), me, Sylvan the guide, and Frederique, another CEL student)

In the afternoon, we visited the village just on the edge of the park, and saw some more evidence of the lack of emphasis put on education in the more rural areas.  There was one teacher, one room in one schoolhouse, and 100 children in the village.  They had a church, but also sacred areas where the house of someone who had died used to stand.  You can't throw things in this area (trash, etc) or defecate near them.  The same goes for the Tamarind tree which stands in the village as a gathering place.
That night, after our 8th consecutive meal which included rice, we danced and sang with the Malagasy students, which mostly meant that they sang and we all danced.  It was kind of like being around a campfire dancing and singing but imagine not knowing any of the words, but everyone around you knows what's going on.  When we slept, it got really really cold (meaning 40 degrees fahrenheit), which apparently hadn't happened previously, and the teachers were all sure that this was a sign of climate change, which is pretty scary.
On Sunday, we're going to another national park for a couple days to do lemur ecology, so hopefully my next post will include some pictures of lemurs!

Bring Your Own Nurse

I saw birth!!!  I went to the hospital with Claudine (my midwife mom here) for her 24 hours off to spend the night and hopefully see a birth, and I saw 3!!!!

Baby #1!  Boy, Garcon, Lehilahy (8 lbs)

The first one was a tiny girl who was 16 and it was her first baby, so it was hard, and it's taboo in madagascar to cry or shout or basically show any facial expression at all, because birthing is a woman's job and you should be able to do it without complaining. Claudine had to give her oxytocin to accelerate the birth, but it still seemed to take longer than the other two births I saw. This girl was so young though that she cried out a little bit but her mom and Claudine just told her to be quite and push, no hand holding or forehead wiping or anything.  The baby was so big (boy, about 8 lbs) that she needed sutures to repair a rip between her vaginal and rectal cavity afterwards, which was done without any prior cleaning or anesthetisizing of the area.  The whole time after the birth she was super cold and shivering during the sutures, and they didn't get her a blanket until after Claudine had finished the sutures.  The mother and baby were both lying in different places in the room (her on a hard metal table and the baby under a heat lamp across the room) and she didn't even get to hold him for at least 20 minutes afterwards. It's a bring your own nurse situation, and because it is taboo to have men in the room, you have to bring female friends or family members.

Baby #2!  Girl, Fille, Vehivavy (7 lbs)

The next birth was a 35 year old woman who was having her 7th child (!) so she was a pro, and you could barely tell when she was having a contraction, she was so calm and stoic.  She didn't need any stitching, and her friends/relatives seemed way more helpful but maybe that was because she had more of them and they weren't telling her to be quiet because she was already completely silent.  She gave birth to a girl that was 7 lbs around 7:00 at night (right after dinner).  

Baby #3!  Boy, Garcon, Lehilahy (8 lbs)

The last birth was a 19 year old girl who was having her second baby, and it happened at 3 in the morning but luckily Claudine had promised to wake me up.  She was kind of in the middle in terms of crying out, but she had some helpful women family members there too to help her out so her baby boy (8 lbs) was cleaned up and wrapped up fairly quickly.   
I also saw an abortion, or the aftermath of one anyways.  Because abortions are illegal, people induce abortions at home (presumably with a rusty coathanger or something equally dangerous) and then come to the hospital when they start bleeding out.  This woman was in pretty bad shape, but Claudine said she would live, and I saw the fetus that had come out.  She was 3-ish months along, so it was definitely a human baby, but only about the size of my fist.  Claudine said that she could see that it was a boy though, which made her think that the woman might have been a little farther along than she said she was.  Evidently there are plenty of illegal abortions all the time in Ft Dauphin, and the ones that put the woman in terrible danger end up in the hospital.  


All of the other monthers and babies were perfectly fine and healthy and everything though, which was fantastic.  Just as I was leaving, 2 more women were coming in to give birth!!!!!

Hiking, Fishing Village, and the Mining Project

View from Pic St. Louis.  Classes are held at the tip of the peninsula on the right hand side, and my house is along the beach two coves closer to town than the school.

On our first Saturday here, we hike Pic St. Louis (named after one of the million King Louis of France, the one who happened to be king when France first colonized Madagascar).  The hike would have been really rough except that we had a bunch of homestay family members with us so we took a bunch of breaks all the time.  The views were beautiful, but also there were a bunch that were really sad, because there was so little actual forest left, and at least 8 separate fires were visible from the top of the mountain corresponding to rural people burning grass to make it more tender so that zebu could graze.  From the top, we could see all the way to Libanona, and I could see my house, but we could also see the giant port and mining project put up by QMM/Rio Tinto.  On the way down, we passed right by a fire, but they don't seem to be out of control blazes, because somehow they are always very small and contained even though there is vegetation everywhere and it's fairly windy and not incredibly humid.  We had one of our many picnics for lunch (that's what we do most of the time, and they really know how to bring great food!), and drove back to town on the TERRIBLE roads.  The road system hasn't been updated at all recently, and to us it feels like it hasn't been redone since the French first arrived!  4x4 trucks are recommended/required for travel anywhere outside the immediate city of Fort Dauphin unless you're traveling on QMM roads which are brand new but only go to their sites.

The next week we actually started classes, and we've had several guest lecturers come talk about different NGOs, which has been sparking my interest in working with one for my independent study project.  Their programs generally include some kind of sustainable farming education/building of new schools or latrines in the countryside, health and sanitation education, and anti-AIDS/sex education.  All of these things seem like such imminently needed causes that I just want to do all of them!  Teaching English or French is also an option, but I haven't really started thinking as far ahead as to what to do.  The NGO's get most of their funding from USAID and private companies, but since the political coup (Non-elected government took power in early 2009 and the head of that movement is president.  He looks like he's about 15), a lot of the funding has dropped because of government money laundering and corruption.  

Harbor of the fishing village where the fishermen launch their boats

Americans in a traditional Malagasy fishing boat

After talking about rural village life and marine protected areas (how to conserve the marine habitats around Madagascar) we went to a rural fishing village. The roads getting there were so bad that it took us 2 hours to go 30 km!  We went through what seemed like rivers and just over ditches deeper than the wheels, and every village we passed all the kids pointed and said "Vasa, vasa!" as usual.  The fishing village was actually two villages, and the site where the boats are launched and the men leave to fish is just over a little hill.  Here in the country more than ever is it really visible that half the population is under age 15.  It felt like there were 50 little kids and only about 30 full grown adults on the beach where we were waiting for the fishermen to come in from their morning of fishing.  We interviewed the first boat to come in with our Malagasy teachers as translators, and found out some really interesting things about life as a fisherman in Madagascar.  First, not unlike other marine traditions, it is taboo for women to go out onto the water in boats to fish, although they can fish from shore.  Because fishing is so dangerous, it is also taboo for a woman to make herself up/look beautiful, throw water out of the house, or clean the house, before the man has returned from fishing in the late morning or afternoon.  They said that they lose about 3 or 4 boats every year, and each boat has 3 or 4 people in it, so about 12 men a year are lost at sea from this one village.  The boats are carved out of trees, so are not stable at all, and the oars are much smaller and more stick like than the oars we see here in the US on rowboats (even on little dinghies).  Once the men come in with the fish, the people load it into baskets, the women balance a basket on their head and sometimes they'll sell the fish to a middleman who will walk it to the market near Fort Dauphin, 20 km away, every single day.  The fish seem to stay alive or at least fresh, because they are still sort of flapping around in the market where they are sold.  After talking with the fishermen, we drove to a tiny, secluded, absolutely beautiful paradise beach where we had another picnic and lesson in Malagasy on white sand after swimming in the turquoise, warm water and exploring an island we could wade to.  The whole place was pretty perfect.

The very next day we visited the mining project, which was way more depressing.  We went to the port, mining site, and conservation area all in one day, and found out that basically all the benefits promised to the people from the mining (mostly tourism) aren't really coming to fruition because of the political crisis.  The Malagasy government built the port (taking loans out from the World Bank), in anticipation that not only would QMM use it, but also cruise ships could come and provide more of an ecotourist economy to the area, and bigger fishing vessels could make it a stop, which would also bring business to Fort Dauphin.  Of course it didn't really work out that way.  With all the Somalian pirates, and the political crisis, all potential investors in hotels, malls, stores, and tourist industry related businesses have completely pulled out, and the port is really only used by the ships from the mining project carrying ilmenite to Canada once every six weeks. This is made even more devastating by the fact that basically a whole village was displaced (compensated obviously, but huge sums of money given to people that haven't ever had that much never really ends well) to blow apart a quarry to get stone to build the port, and fishermen had to change their launch site while the port was being built to accommodate construction.

part of the basin of the mining site.  really clear where the mining ends and the wildlife can begin again

the actual mining apparatus

After the port, we saw the mining site, where they are extracting black sand (ilmenite), which, when chemically processed in Canada, turns into the whitening agent in toothpaste, paper, and plastic.  It is an important whitening agent, because it is one of the few which is non-toxic, so it is in fairly high demand, and this project should yield about $400 million over the next 20 years.  The mining process here in Madagascar is all physical and mechanical, with all of the chemical processing completed in Canada, but there is still a radioactive element in the soil which is exposed during the mining, and the workers have to take precautions against it.  Our QMM tour guide was obviously pretty vague about the dangers of the radioactivity and didn't really go into the exact methods of protection and their success rates.  The mining site looks like the moon-no trees, just sand and dunes everywhere, and an artificial basin where the huge mining contraption sucks sand out of the ground, extracts the 5% of ilmenite, and dumps the other 95% silica back behind it.  

The conservation site is QMM's attempt at rehabilitation and "leaving the area better than they found it."  Of course, they bulldozed over 200 hectares of original forest, which is 10% of the remaining coastal littoral forest in the area, but they have saved all of the seeds of the endemic trees and are evidently going to regrow the forest exactly how it was after millions of years of evolution as soon as they're done.  They are also planning on planting non-native species such as eucalyptus (of which there is already quite a bit here) for the country people to cut down and use for charcoal because it grows so much faster than the native species.  This, of course, has some terrible potential for overgrowth of non-native species and suffocation of the endemic forest, which is already a tiny island in the middle of a huge slashed and burned area.  In all, a very depressing, up close view at mining destruction, and the only way that they got away with doing this project at all was because it was such a poor country that is now getting only 20% of the profit (windfall for the Malagasy government), and "the people were wrecking the forest anyways, so we could wreck it and then rebuild it."  One article put it very well: "When someone's drowning, you hand them a lifejacket, not a millstone."

It is so hard to be in such a beautiful place with so many problems that it's hard to know where to start fixing things, and how to fix things in the most efficient, effective way.  

Fort Dauphin

Marco, Me Aina, Claudis, and Claudio (brother and cousins at home)

After orientation we headed to Fort Dauphin (Tolagnaro) for our month-and a little bit homestay with a Malagasy family, and school.  Fort Dauphin is situated on a peninsula, surrounded by the Indian ocean on three sides, and our class/school area is right on the tip of the peninsula, in the area/quartier called Libanona.  I'm living with a midwife, Claudine, and her son Marco (11 yrs old) in a house that is in a small compound with some of her EIGHT siblings and their various family members.  Some of her cousins and their family members live in the compound next door, so there are family members everywhere!  Unfortunately, very few of them speak any French (Marco doesn't, and almost none of the people living in the compound), but a little cousin Aina, who is Marco's friend and also about 11, goes to the Alliance Francaise school and so he speaks quite a lot of French, so he's a translator for Marco and me, and he is also completely adorable and we're friends now.  Claudine works at the hospital 24 hours on, 48 hours off, so she's either gone, resting from having just returned from work, or resting up to go back to work a lot of the time.  We've had a lot of dinners together though, and she's very nice when she's there.  I told my family that my nickname was Kat, which is the word for cat in English, so now they call me Pishu (Peeshoo) which means cat in Malagasy.

My house and some of the compound (no chickens, dogs, or ducks visible, but they're there!

The eating patterns here are WAY different from the health nutty ones in my family, at Bowdoin, and anything you ever read in magazines about healthy eating.  Firstly, the Malagasy eat more rice per capita than any other population of humans on the face of the planet.  They actually pile a mountain of rice onto their plate at almost every meal, and there is usually some meat or fish (they're not super big on vegetables).  As foreigners to the bacteria/viruses/worms that are in the water, we're not supposed to eat uncooked vegetables that haven't been washed in a lightly bleached water solution, but I've cheated a couple times just because I was craving vegetables so badly, and so far I haven't gotten sick (knock on wood).  It depends on the family, but there doesn't seem to be money for dessert, but they dump mountains of sugar in to their tea or hot milk in the morning, and everything is very heavily salted.  The only thing that is keeping me from being 3249327 lbs right now is that they don't have any snacks at all, and breakfast is just bread and butter and tea, so we (the Americans) are either starving between meals, or stuffed right after them.  Luckily bananas grow in abundance here, and when we're at school they sometimes will bring out bananas midmorning if we're all looking really pale and weak and tired.
School is basically intensive Malagasy, some French grammar which isn't too bad, and guest lecturers that come and talk about NGOs, national parks, mining projects, kind of anything about Madagascar is what it seems like at this point.  This is the first time since high school that I've actually sat in a classroom from 8-4 (8-5 some days) and learned stuff with only little breaks, which is hard, but everything is so foreign and new that it's pretty hard for it to be boring.  Most of our lectures are in French, so my notes are a funny French-English mix, but it's definitely helping me concentrate on French comprehension, with a Malagasy accent (they roll their r's which sounds really different).  It's humpback whale migration season here, so at lunch we go and whale watch on the bluff, and the other day we saw a whole tail as the whale dove!  That's part of the really surreal experience of being here: I'm almost comfortable enough to feel like I know my way around and forget that I'm halfway around the world, and then I remind myself that I'm whale watching at lunch and walking to school through a tropical city on a beautiful peninsula surrounded by turquoise water.

On the walk to school

The poverty and lack of hygiene education in the city is really apparent: there is trash everywhere, and people just throw plastic bags and packaging everywhere, and they also poop anywhere in the street, on hills, behind houses, king of everywhere.  I have running water at my house, but I also have some cockroaches and spiders, and several students don't have running water, and we didn't have running water at Manatantely.  This means bucket showers with water that comes from a big oil drum that is filled once a week, so there is definitely a lot of contamination with dirty people and bugs and stuff, and not that many people seem to wash their hands very frequently.
The beaches are beautiful though, and I've been running every morning before school along the beach which is about 100 yards from my house with Marco and some other cousins.  The kids love playing with the camera, and I've had to start deleting some pictures because there are so many unfocused duplicate pictures of them being goofy (I still have PLENTY of pictures though).

I'm Here!

Sunrise in the valley by Manatantely

The group and teachers and coordinators (photo credit to one of the adorable girls living at Manatantely)

I got to Madagascar about 2 weeks ago, and we headed straight to the Fort Dauphin area at the southernmost tip of the island.  There are 10 students, all from areas around the United States, on the trip, one American Academic Director, and four Malagasy teachers/logistics coordinators.









For orientation, we stayed at a former missionary boarding school in Manatantely (Has-Much-Honey), while we tried to learn Malagasy as fast as we possibly could.
 It turns out that the fact that French was the required language for the program didn't mean that French is the main language spoken here!  It reminds me a little bit of the bay area of California: English is the language that everyone speaks, but there are a lot of people that speak Spanish too, and if you want to have a government or receptionist job or job in a hospital in a Spanish speaking area you most likely have to speak both, and almost no one speaks French unless they've had a lot of schooling and happened to decide to take French.  Here, Malagasy is like the English in California (everyone speaks it), French is like Spanish (more educated and government workers kind of speak it, and English is like French (no one speaks it!!).  Malagasy is most closely related to Polynesian Islands/Pacific Island languages (Hawaiian, the language spoken in Borneo), so it isn't like anything we'd ever heard before, and the pronunciation can be a little tricky sometimes.
In addition to trying to learn Malagasy as fast as possible, we hiked around the Manatantely area and saw our first bit of destruction of the forests of Madagascar.  The rural people rely on slash and burn agriculture for subsistance, creating rice fields, making charcoal to sell in the market, and burning pasture land on which to graze their zebu (cows).  This means that the hardest part about conservation in Madagascar is not only keeping the forests safe from any mining interests or investors that could potentially want to develop it, but also to supply the people with information on how to change their way of life to live more sustainably, which is, much of the time, very difficult.  As a result, parks that have already been created have pressure being put on them by people in surrounding villages using the park forests for wood and grazing land, and it takes a lot of effort and education (and obviously money) to create any new parks.
On a more positive note, the people are wonderfully happy and nice in general, and the kids are so incredibly adorable I can barely keep myself from taking them all home with me.  They all crack up any time any of us say "Salama" (hello) or even more when we try "Ino vovo" (een-vovo, what's going on).  You definitely can't come here and not be willing to be laughed at and called Vasa (vazah, foreigner, stranger) at every turn by all the kids.  The sad thing is that they are all so poor (average income is $250 US/year) and that no matter what your income was in America, you're automatically a rich person here (think the Bratislava part of the movie Eurotrip).  This means that there are always people trying to sell you silver bracelets, necklaces, berries, spears, anything really, and you can't possibly buy it all, and it feels like we are the ONLY tourists in the area, and we're not even really tourists because we're in school and living with Malagasy families!  This means that the people selling you things really don't leave you alone, because you're the only buyer around, and it's really hard when the kids put on a heartbreaking face and tell you that they're hungry and can you just buy them some bread.  Sometimes this isn't really true, but for a lot of them all you want to do is give them something, but if you give to one, you have to give to all, and you have to give every day.  That is the hardest part about being here so far.  It's not so bad in the country, but in Fort Dauphin, where we are staying until the middle of October, it has been pretty bad.