The end of Tulear and all of a sudden there's two weeks left!

Maeva, me, Say, on the little roof deck over
Michael and Say's house in Ankilibe

Back in Fort Dauphin!  Independent Study Projects aren’t officially over yet because we haven’t turned in our papers, so obviously I’m writing this blog instead of working on my paper, but this is productive too…I think.  and we have 4 days.

Raouely and Neni cooking dinner
while Caramel (the dog) took a nap

So last time I wrote I was incredibly stressed out with my translator situation, but things have gotten so much better since then!  The day after I wrote, Tsibara came back on the very first bus at 7 am and we did 25 interviews that day, and then 12 more the next day, which brought me right up to 99 interviews.  He was such a sweet, nice person, really practiced as an interviewer, and knew the area well having worked on (unsuccessful due to villagers unwillingness to change habits) projects on replanting mangroves and creating a fishing protected area to try to rehabilitate the fish population in the area, so he was comfortable approaching people and asking where more people were at the end of each interview, so we were always going directly from one person to the next.  We thought at the end of the first day to stop with 20 interviews, but the women heard that we were doing interviews of women, and everyone wanted to participate!  It was far enough through the end of my stay that everyone would say “Oh, the girl who runs in the morning, entrainement (one of the borrowed-from-French words in Malagasy),” and it was great to connect with people by talking to them more than just saying hi (or puffing out hi if I was at the end of a run).

Me, Say, Maeva and Mari

By the end of the last interviews, I have a pretty clear idea of the situation in Ankilibe: almost everyone goes to school at around age 5 or 6 to learn to read and write and count, and then slowly drop out starting two or three years after beginning, but averaging 4ish years of school (lots of repetition in some classes, so the kids in the 5th year of school are often 14 or 16), some making it all the way to the 5th year and getting their Certificate d’Études Primaires, which is the diploma that allows people to continue to College (like middle school kind of).  Almost no one from Ankilibe continues to CEG because you have to move to a town 15 km away, St. Augustin, or to Tulear, 12 km away,  both of which are expensive (but wouldn’t kill the family budget if the men in the family didn’t drink away the money from the occasional good catch).  The reasons for stopping school were numerous, but mostly had to do with the proximity of the sea: the temptation of the easy money which can be had from gleaning, which is picking up shrimp and sea cucumbers, but also that kids just don’t want to go to school anymore, they want to “faire la vie” or live life, and get pregnant and have kids.  Kids with kids EVERYWHERE.  There were a significant number of people who did say that the fishermen who went to more school were more successful in problem solving and finding

playing the bottle caps game

 good places to fish, and even women who were just housewives were much better money managers if they had been to school, and even spousal communication was much improved between two educated people.  These benefits just aren’t quite enough, though, even though almost every single fisherman brought up on his own, without being asked, that all the fish were disappearing, and that life was changing and people would have to go to more school, because kids continue to drop out!  There is also, according to the director of the school and one of the teachers, a huge lack of parental support (parent-teacher associations do actually exist here, but there is not one in Ankilibe), the kids only come for the midday meal, and they never come to school if the tide is low so the teachers bike all the way from Tulear and have to bike back.  According to the

Me, Maeva, Mamato, Mari, and Franco

parents, the teachers are lazy and don’t teach the kids, and a few kids mentioned drunk teachers in class, and almost everyone talked about getting hit by the teachers at some point.  Lots of problems, and not a lot of people taking responsibility!  This is really great though, because with some help, the villagers have all the makings of people ready to turn around and get going to school, they just need some basic improvements.  Glass half-full becomes kind of necessary when you’re looking at such a broken system.
On the family side of things, everything continued to be fantastic.  Neni, Say’s mom, had to leave with Rasoa, Say’s only younger sister (18 with a 2 year old already), Franco, Rasoa’s absolutely adorable son, and some other family members to harvest rice and corn in Ambonaviatra (sp?) a few days before, which was pretty sad because Neni is just the most calm, motherly, beautiful presence to have around.  We decided to make a visit out there because Tsibara left on the 20th once our interviews were done, and I really wanted to see all of them before I left on the 25th.  Took a taxi in to Tulear to buy some food and rohandalana (sp?), or road gifts, to bring out to them, and then one of the little taxis for an hour or so slightly inland through some valley to a little village.  Found out why the taxis have to stop for every single gendarme/police hut-they pay them a toll every time! Mostly people are just randomly stopped to check papers, but because the taxi trucks are so overloaded all the time (the maximum capacity of a taxi-brousse in Madagascar is always one more than what you have), they do a little pay-off system.  Walked from the village through the rice fields, where it felt so

The family in the rice fields

great to recognize people working-seeing Neni was actually very comforting like seeing safe and taking-care-or-you-family, which is maybe one of the only people I can say that about in Madagascar besides the SIT staff.  Spent the afternoon on a mat under a tree, watched Neni make one cup of coffee from the raw coffee bean stage-roasting them, grinding them with a mortar/pestle type thing, and then straining the hot water through the grounds, sifting through rice, rebraiding a cousin’s hair, and listening to Malagasy.  At night we slept on the same mat, and Neni very kindly put up a mosquito net to protect my delicate vazaha skin, but it is very obvious that mosquito nets are a symbol, and they don’t actually understand how to use them: she strung it up between two posts and let it hang (think two dimensional).  I still obviously thanked her profusely, but was so shocked to see something that seems so obvious to us be done so wrong!  Got to bathe in the freshwater river the next morning before going back to some drama in Ankilibe.
The day we returned, Mari, Say’s daughter, was playing on someone’s pirogue and it broke, which meant that Say would have to pay the 20,000 Ariary ($10 US) to fix it.  I had never seen a parent physically punish a child (no lasting damage or blood or anything), but it was still a very shocking experience, especially because I didn’t know what had happened for Say to do that to Mari because no one explained it to me until later that evening.  This isn’t anything out of the ordinary and has nothing to do with Say’s character-in a rural village like this the phrase “it was just an accident, it is just money,” doesn’t exist.  Higher stress levels around money and survival definitely change the dynamic about how much physicality plays in to punishment and power.

Maeva and Franco, two of the
most adorable people on the planet!

On top of that, Say’s brother’s wife’s brother who is about 30 came banging down the doors of the house looking to sleep with Maeva, the beautiful 13 year old cousin who does Say’s cooking and cleaning when she’s not going to school, because his girlfriend just had a miscarriage and he needed a girl young enough that she was capable of having his children.  Luckily Rouely, Say’s brother, was sleeping in the room that the guy was banging down the doors of to enter, and both were surprised enough to see the other that the guy left.  He came back the next day on Raouely’s orders and Say told him that if he ever tried that again she would go to the President of the Fokotany and he would be locked up.  It led to conversations that let me in on the knowledge that that sort of thing isn’t completely uncommon, especially older Malagasy men looking for very young girls to have their kids, because everyone wants a million kids here.  Seriously, a million. The most frequent number of siblings that I have in my data is 7.  Meaning that while there are plenty of families with 5 kids, there are also plenty with 10.  YIKES!  Again, not a reflection on Say’s family or all Malagasy men, but still the search for young, fertile women is much more out in the open, and much more frequent than in the states.  People aren’t exactly popping birth control pills and unwrapping condoms around here (for anything other then creating a waterproof casing for their flashlights so that they can go night fishing), kind of the opposite of in the United States, where it can be seen as the young girl’s “fault” by her partner if she gets pregnant out of wedlock, like it is a problem that she created.  Absolutely unheard of here!

The last few days calmed down though, and we spent them blissfully playing more London-bridges games and

The ocean gives crazy food sometimes!

I got partway through teaching Mari how to write her name, which was really adorable.  My last night there, we had a fantastically luxurious dinner of fish AND beans and rice, because there had been one of those freak/random days of good fishing that keep the people in the business, and there were fish everywhere!  That of course meant that there was a little more loud drunk singing that night (and the next morning starting around 6) than usual, but everyone was happy.  My last morning I went down to take pictures of the fishing boats in the morning light, having wanted to save flashing my camera around on the beach until the day I was leaving.  While I was taking pictures of one boat, one of the men on it invited me to Sarondrano with them,

off in pirogues in the morning

and then another guy shouted, “hey, hey vazaha,” and I said that my name was NOT “vazaha” but Katherine, which set the women on the beach off laughing, and then he asked if I wanted to take a walk, which I also laughed and said no to, but realized midway through the interaction that I understood.  This made me SO happy, even if it was just a couple words and the gist of it was pretty obvious anyways with the tone of voice and everything, but it was a great note to leave on.

Jim picked me up, and he and Isaiah and I headed in to Tulear one last time to get some presents for the Ankilibe family and have one last lunch with Michael to say goodbye to Islesboro in Madagascar.  Also met up with Elizabeth and Peter who had been in Ifaty with the NGO Reef Doctor doing their ISPs, and found out that we had gotten lucky-Peter had bacterial dysentery with a fever of 104.6 and went to the hospital to have 3 drips put in, and later Elizabeth had to go to the hospital with mysterious symptoms and is now on horse-sized antibiotic pills! They were all well and happy by the time we saw them though, and we all got to spend one last night in Namekia enjoying that beautiful area and swimming in the mangroves before heading out Thursday morning to Fort Dauphin.
We were all SO jealous of everyone’s dinner last night in the United States (Thanksgiving), but the Malagasy couldn’t understand how you could have a huge celebration meal without rice, like that wasn’t a correctly planned menu or something.  It was definitely the first time I had had rice on Thanksgiving, and passed the dinner of the 3rd Thursday of November without any extra fanfare.  On the bright side, litchi fruit is in season, and it tastes delicious (kind of like those Japanese mini jello snack things you used to have at your house, Lisa, if you’re reading this), and we’ll be home in time for the Christmas food and family and friends in less than 2 weeks!