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.