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.