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!

ISP: Studying School In a Rural Fishing Village

ISP (independent study project) is actually here and more than halfway done!  I left from Antananarivo more than two weeks ago for the 20 hour taxi brousse ride to Tulear, which wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds (20 hours straight stopping only for pee breaks in a 16 person van caravaning across the country with 3 other vans to avoid hold-ups by road bandits).  It was a little nerve wracking because we 3 SIT students had our entire budget for the month with us in cash, and we did have some minor engine problem during the night, but arrived in Tulear just fine.  Once we got to Tulear, Peter and Elizabth headed north to their research sites, and Isaiah and I caught a cab/bus/truck/wagon/cart thing to Ankilibe, the village which is 12 km south of Tulear where I'm doing research, and 2 km north of Namekia, which is where Isaiah is staying to research mangroves.

Once I arrived in Ankilibe, Michael Johnson's (Islesboro connection!) family here greeted me with the most open arms ever!  Say (pronounced like sigh but with an sh) is the main english speaker; and though she's a good communicator, her vocabulary is mostly "going" "stop" "I like" and "I know," and her daughter Mari (6), cousin Maeva (13), cousin Mamato (5), and mother who we all just call Neni really dont have any language but Malagasy:  This generation spanning sisterhood makes up the staple of the family, but Neni had 10 KIDS including Say all of which live around Ankilibe, so there are random bothers and uncles wandering around too, and other sisters hang out with their adorable kids all the time.



Ankilibe is beautiful and hot and dry, at least 85 degrees every day and never any clouds. 90percent of the village is works as subsistence fishermen, selling some of their daily catch to buy staples like rice (of course), but there is definitely no money left over, and if there is, they use it to go drinking.  Our house is 100 yards from the beach, which is nice if you don't look too closely: the beach is the boat launch, kids play area, crab/shrimp collection area, and bathroom.  It would be very easy to do a stool survey of the entire village baed on samples collected on the beach.  It is still great for running, and the tide washes it all away (while the kids are swimming in the high water).  Everyone is really friendly and happy, and running every morning gives me a chance to smile and say hello to as many people as possible (and get laughed at by plenty). 

My second day there Say and I went back in to Tulear to get food and charge her phone (no electricity or running water in the village) and so that I could meet with Tsibara, who was supposed to be my translator for the next 2 weeks, starting November 7.  Unfortunately, this hasn't really worked as planned, and he's been disappearing and reappearing so that we've only gotten in 3 full days of interviewing so far!  Because interviewing is my primary method of data collection, this is pretty stressful because no one in the village speaks more than a few words of french or english if any at all.  Luckily Jim, our academic director, has a guardian at his house in Namekia that has been able to help me out a little and the teacher at the school speaks french, so I've been able to do a little bit without Tsibara, and he swore on his life that he'd be there this Thursday through Saturday to do lots of interviewing! 

There are about 100 bright sides to this situation though, starting with the fact that I've been able to learn lots of Malagasy with my family, pound rice out of its shells (I have blisters), do laundry with the sisters, give and get lice checks because the little girls are covered, de-scale and gut mini fish, eat miniature fried eels, take naps, etc.  Because the directrice of the school is the only one I can work with on my own, I've been able to get a lot of information from her and now we're friends, and I've gotten to sit in on classes and everything, which is really interesting.  Writing in my journal a LOT, outlining my paper, etc, but when it comes down to it I'm just not very good at being idle or sitting still and not doing things, but this is good practice and I'm catching up on sleep/storing enough to last the next 100 years.  Unfortunately idle time means more thinking time, which reminds me how much I miss everyone at home!  My Malagasy is improving, and I've played the Malagasy version of hide and seek, duck duck goos (theirs is way better than ours), a kind of London Bridges game, and some game with bottle caps that I can't really describe.  Also, if you're ever de-seeding spicy peppers, DO NOT TOUCH YOUR FACE OR EYES and especially DO NOT TRY TO WASH OFF WITH WATER!  I looked like such a baby/novice trying to tell them I was fine with tears streamig out of my eyes and my face all red.

The actual study part of the time here (now a very small fraction) is about why kids here go to school. There is one public primary school which costs the families money, the teachers are apparently lazy and terrible, and almost no one continues to secondary school because you have to move to go there because it is too far to walk every day.  I'm trying to find out why bother going at all, when you're just going to quit in a few years, why not save the money?  As soon as I get back to Fort Dauphin in a week and have my complete answer (which includes needing to learn to read, write though they don't use these skills ever again, and count, and getting general problem solving skills) I'll post it, but this sticky European keyboard is actually driving me crazy!  Pictures in a week too. 

Missing everyone bunches and bunches

Towards Modernity: the end of the road trip goes to Antananarivo

Our final national park was Ranomafana, which is a rainforest park southeast of Tana and east of Fianarantsoa.  The drive in was easy, and the boundaries of the park were, once again, pretty crystal clear, with degraded forest coming up to a straight line where the thicker forest started.  For a first rainforest ever, the experience was pretty cool!  The first evening we did a night walk to find chameleons and frogs, and as a group, we felt the most touristy we’ve felt since we arrived.  There were other groups of tourists, and we just walked right along the main road and looked in to the bushes, which didn’t feel too adventuresome, but the actual park interior is closed at night because of wood and lemur poachers.  We ended up seeing several species of chameleons and another species of mouse lemur, which was really cool even if it did have to happen right along a paved pathway.

Chameleon at Ranomafana

Leaf tailed gecko

In the morning we went over to the Stonybrook College (SUNY) abroad program base, which is in the national park, and came away really excited that we had picked the program we did.  They have a really cool nature experience, but are entirely based in one area without much contact with Malagasy people or culture.  They did have running water, a dining hall, and the option to get their laundry done for them, which made us a little jealous for a couple minutes, but wouldn’t trade for it in the end.  Took a hike through the rainforest and saw FOUR MORE species of lemurs, which brought our entire count up to 10 species, more than I ever thought I’d see.  These ones weren’t too photogenic because of how thick the forest is and how many zillion people there were around also trying to get pictures, so I’m sorry to report that I didn’t get any of these ones.  We did, however, see a satanic leaf tailed gecko, which had the most absurd camouflage that I had ever seen.  The guide pointed us to the general direction of the gecko, and then had us try to find it, which was so hard!  After the hike, we went into a couple villages and interviewed a few people on how the park has impacted their lives.  The villagers were not, overall, very happy with the park, which had kicked them off of their land, shown them where to live, told them to do agriculture, asked if there was anything it could provide for them, and then never filled their promises!  The woman with which I spoke cited the fact that they had asked for a school seven years ago, and still no results from the park.  The guides also said that they worked independently, rather than for the park, because the park managers were corrupt and didn’t pay them nearly as much as they should have: they make as much in two days independently as they would working for the park.  Because we had been reading about all the community based projects with protected areas and the focus on helping the people, it was really good to get a realistic view into how the park system currently works, and how much room for improvement there is in community relations.

One of the adorable kids at the
orphanage wearing Gracie's sunglasses

Left Ranomafana for the 10 hour drive to Tana on a pretty windy, but luckily well paved, road, arriving at night for the most american dinner we’d had all trip!  It was Elizabeth’s birthday, so we ate at an Italian restaurant with pizza and pasta and then had chocolate cake for dessert, which felt unreal!  It turned out that most of our Tana week has been like that: the city definitely shows signs of globalization, but luckily no health codes have come in to stop people from selling delicious street food (the best mango’s I’ve ever had for less than 10 cents each).  We had a few lectures about the economy and poverty, talking about how the huge informal sector (street vendors to farmers) of the economy hampers the overall growth of the country, but the formal sector of the economy isn’t really stable or lucrative enough for people to get one job and keep it, unless they’re all the way at the top.  Some more about medicinal plants (we all feel like experts now), but mostly just working on our papers and getting our independent study project logistics together.  We did visit an environmental, education based orphanage, which was a really great experience and the kids, who had originally come from abusive families or been exonerated from the corrupt judicial system, were all incredibly cute, friendly and smart, and now all I want to do is start an orphanage when I get back to the states!
We also got to visit Andasibe, on the way to which we went to a reptile zoo/farm thing and saw huge chameleons.  At Andasibe, which is another national park, we saw the Indri Indri lemur, which is the largest lemur left in Madagascar, some other sifaka species, and a really beautiful orange lemur.  Of course my camera was out of batteries for that!!
People started leaving for their ISPs yesterday, and the last four of us are leaving in about 5 minutes for Tulear, which is a 20 hour trip on taxi-brousse, so should be fun!  I’m staying south of Tulear and studying education and living in a fishing village, so no internet or posts for a while, but as soon as I get in to town I’ll hopefully have more to say about that!

The family road trip continues through crazy rock formations, huge lemur groups, and to the top of the second tallest peak in Madagascar

Our hike in to Isalo

The valley behind our campsite at Isalo

Oasis pool at Isalo

We’ve made it through 3 of  4 parks on our road trip!  I’m writing from Fianarantsoa (the city of good learning), which is just south of the capital and has served as a rest/clean/wash point before continuing on to the final rainforest park of Ranomafana.  The first park that we visited after Tuléar was Isalo, which is located about 5 hours drive almost directly east of Tuléar, finally on a really good paved road!  There weren’t many villages along the road, but there is really almost no forest left: the land has become mostly dry grass, with some brush coverage closer in to the coast and some random thickly forested patches which are taboo for anyone to enter or damage.  Just when we were starting to get really depressed wondering what Madagascar would have looked like with thick forests everywhere (only 10% of the original forest remains in the country, most of it having been chopped down by the French colonials for mining or agriculture in the first 30 years of colonization), we entered Isalo National Park. This is the most visited park in the country, with up to 30,000 visitors per year before the political crisis in 2009 (now down to about 3,000 but slowly rising again), and it is made up of beautiful rock formations that reminded a lot of us of the southwest of the United States, almost like Bryce Canyon. We hiked in to our campsite 3 km into the park next to a hidden natural pool, which you would never guess existed because the whole area looks so dry and rocky, but amazingly this fantastic little oasis at the bottom of the valley kept on running clear and cool.  We did a small circuit which led us through some rock formations to the next valley where we saw even more rock, as well as the damage inflicted by a huge fire that had burned the main campsite and 600,000 hectares of park.  These fires are not uncommon, especially in drier areas, and are not always caused by local people trying to burn new pastures for their zebu, though this has been an enormous problem throughout Malagasy history.  Quick swim in  the pool, where we did see several other, mostly European, tourist groups.  This was great to see because every tourist group needs a guide, therefore implying some employment for the people in the area.

Mama and baby lemur...taken without zoom!!

We continued on Route Nationale 7 to Anja (AN-za), a community managed park 4 hours east of Isalo.  This park, more than Isalo, seemed like a small island of protected area in a sea of rice paddies and sweet potato and corn fields, but it is famous for the large ringtail lemur groups which live inside its boundaries.  Having arrived late in the day we had to wait to do our little tour of the park, but we all used that time to finish writing up our first Independent Study Project proposals (YIKES!), because in just over one week we’ll all be heading off in different directions to independently study some aspect of Madagascar’s environment, people, culture, etc.  I’m thinking that I’ll be studying the relationship (if there is one at all) between formal schooling and the lifestyle of the fishing people in the Vezo village where Michael Johnson (who I made up that his last name was Mitchell, super strange, but its actually Johnson) lives just south of Tuléar, interviewing kids and adults of varying levels of education on why they went to school, what they want to be when the grow up, etc, and hopefully sitting in on some classes in the local school.  It seems like a crazy amount of logistics to do in a week and a half, but our academic director doesn’t seem too worried that I don’t have a translator or a solid housing plan yet (and neither do a lot of the students).  Real school isn’t as interesting as lemurs, though, so I’m skipping forward and I’m sure I’ll bore you all to tears with the ins and outs of social science studies with my November blog entries, if I have internet access at some point.
Our tour through Anja started out pretty normally, with nice trees and cool looking plants, but we are starting to get used to crazy looking plants and it’s getting to be harder to impress us, which is terrible.  We rounded a corner in the path, and one of our guides pointed up into a tree pretty far away where a ringtail lemur was sitting.  We all kind of oohed and ahhed, but we had seen ringtails before at Berenty which were closer to us and seemed more photogenic than this one individual.  After some people took a couple pictures we kept walking up the path, and all of a sudden the lemurs were everywhere!  There were at least 20 individuals in the trees, on the ground, in bushes, all around us, with a few babies that were just starting to test out their running climbing skills and some groups grooming each other.  We must have sat and tiptoed around the group for at least half an hour (with the guides, who really are habituated to the lemurs, looking more bored by the second) taking a million pictures and having some lemurs throw fruits at us from the trees.  Because they have never been hunted in this area, the lemurs were fearless and some came within 5 or 6 feet of me!  There are about 400 individuals living in groups of between 10 and 20 in the forest, and because it is baby season, there were little guys everywhere.  We eventually had to leave the lemur group to continue on the trail, which led us to a “belle vue” on a rock, but this supposed gorgeous panorama really just showed how small the park really was.  The whole mountain behind us was protected, but the rocky cliffs aren’t really desirable farming areas anyways: the flat, fertile valley ground had almost no forest remaining.  Hiked down as fast as we could to start on the long route to Andringitra National Park, where Peak Boby (Imarivolanitra, almost-touching-the-sky in Malagasy), the second tallest mountain in Madagascar is located.

The view of the mountains and
river/pool next to our campsite
at Andringitra

Americans at the top of Pic Boby

Coolest grasshopper EVER
that we saw on the hike down from
Pic Boby

We had to deviate from the main road for this trip, but the 3 hours on the bumpy road were completely worth it.  We parked the bus at the foot of the mountains, which were really like steps, in that they went up one level, then there was a flat valley, then another level with another flat valley area, and finally up to the peaks.  We were camping in the first valley, so we hiked 3 or 4 km almost straight up the steep first step, passing 2 gorgeous waterfalls and some amazing views until we came to our campsite.  Our tents were set up next to another natural pool in the river, but because we were at such a high altitude it was actually cold (ish) and more alpine, which made me miss Northern California a lot!  The next step of mountains was really huge granite cliffs that could have inspired rock climbers anywhere, but climbing isn’t allowed because they are supposedly too brittle. Slept through a fantastic thunder and lightening storm, and then under beautiful stars, before an early wake up call to climb to the top.  The whole hike took about 5 hours round trip, with plenty of breaks along the way (a few too many breaks for my impatient self), but we were allowed to run up the last bit without the guide, which was awesome.  The views were, once again, mostly all foreign, almost martian looking rock, but we really were almost scraping the sky.  A picture’s worth a thousand words (probably at least 100,000 of my words) so I’ll leave it to the pictures for the rest.  More thunderstorms that evening, and even hail (!), but Mamy (our Malagasy logistics director who is the nicest man in the whole world) surprised us with s’mores ingredients, which was amazing!  The marshmellows were a little funny and kind of tasted like sweet cough medicine, but buttery sugar cookies might out-do graham crackers on the deliciousness scale for s’mores.  We woke up in puddles but to another beautiful sunrise and even fuller waterfalls for our hike out of the park.  Drove to Fianarantsoa, where we’re taking our break before our last bit of family adventure continues in Ranomafana.

Miss you guys so much, and I’m thinking about everyone every day.  Hope your Halloween costumes are ready and your clocks are starting to fall back at the right pace…I’ll try to bring some Madagascar summer back with

Family Field Trip

We’ve started on our quick tour of Madagascar which includes marine studies in Tuléar on the west coast, and then a road trip on Route Nationale 7 (the only really good road in the country), stopping at several national parks on the way.  I’m currently writing from Tuléar, where we’ve just finished the marine studies week, which was AWESOME!  We spent 3 days 2 km south of Ankily-be (the place with lots of Kily, or Tamarind, trees), where our academic/program director, Jim, shares a vacation house with his friend and fellow conservation ecologist, Mark Fenn.  We camped behind the house which is right on the beach which is completely lined with mangroves, so we could swim around through the mangroves at high tide, which happened to be at early morning and just before dinner under the stars.

One of the solar stoves promoted by IHSM

Using Jim’s house as a base, we took a couple trips, one into Tulear to the Institute Halieutique et Sciences Marines (IHSM, and I’m pretty sure that’s what the acronym stands for), where we met the director who was kind of a random inventor (think Belle’s dad in Beauty and the Beast) of alternative cooking implements that didn’t use charcoal.  There were some cool solar ovens which concentrated the sun’s rays, and one which reflected them into a black box, and both worked really well.  The IHSM and local NGOs are trying to get the people in the area to use these solar ovens because charcoal production is destroying forests at a terrifyingly fast rate, and only about 1% of the energy of the original tree is actually transferred into cooking the food, after the insanely inefficient process of making charcoal and the also ridiculously inefficient stoves that the people use are taken into account.  Mr. Daniel is also a business man who has a Spiruline cultivating farm, which grows and dries algae which apparently is a miracle food (according to the man himself) which has practically every vitamin ever, can sustain you over long periods of time, tastes great, makes you lose weight if you need to, gain weight if you need to, helps women after childbirth replenish lost vitamins, etc.  Mom, if you want to buy some, it’s a lot cheaper here so let me know, maybe you won’t ever have to take vitamins again if you just eat this magic stuff. And it looks exactly like the green stuff you drink in the morning that Will makes the funny face at.

The traditional pirogue, or Malagasy fishing boat.
They almost all have an outrigger component
on their starboard sides to stabilize them (click on the
picture to make it bigger)

Sunset on a mountain
overlooking the Tulear region

The next day was possibly one of the best days of my life.  We met Michael Mitchell, the guy from Islesboro who is living in Ankily-be and Tulear and working on building the fishermen’s pirogues more efficiently and also working on a business with a Japanese guy on interesting-animal-preservation-through exportation (I think, I didn’t quite get what they were doing, but it wasn’t harming species but it hopefully will be a good business in the future and spark interest in the cool species of fish in the area).  It was so amazing that we were actually working with Michael, and that he’s Jim’s friend, AND that he knows everyone on the island!  We had a chance to catch up about Islesboro, which was so funny and great and ridiculous to be doing in Madagascar-what a small world!  That was great, but it wasn’t the #1 reason why that was the best day of my life, because we WENT SAILING IN MADAGASCAR ON FISHERMEN’S BOATS!!  We paddled out to a sand-bar where the tide was going down, and basically just sat on the sand bar while the fishermen collected their fish (we found out later that they were supposed to let us help, but it was beautiful and sunny and the water was warm so it really didn’t matter).  They had to wait for the tide to go down enough for their nets to trap the fish, at which point they dove into the area which their nets encompassed and swam around catching the fish by hand.  Apparently the previous day they had gotten a lot of fish from that area, so they were trying it again.  The area in which the Vezo (one of 3 ethnic groups in the region, characterized by their fishing skills) fish is massively over-fished, and at the end of 3 hours, our fishermen had about 50 fish, none of which were larger than my forearm (and only about 3 came close to that size).  The fish were mostly dead by the time they untangled the last ones from the nets, and any that weren’t good for eating were thrown back, but there was no catch and release of juveniles or mothers with eggs, because every fish they catch is considered a gift from God, so why would they throw it back?  After they had sorted out their nets on the sand bar, we SAILED BACK! They have two sort of masts, which they stick into a little mast-step like indent in the bottom of the boat, and a square sail made of burlap bags is flown before the masts.  There wasn’t a whole lot of sail trimming and adjustment going on, but we were on a run and there wasn’t any need to jibe or head up, so that didn’t really matter.  I saw a few boats on closer reaches, but they seem to prefer to paddle when they need to go upwind.  We were missing a burlap sack section, but we still flew through the water, and Michael said that the boats are really easy to steer: they just use one of the paddling oars as a rudder, but without attaching it to the boat at any point, just holding it straight into the water.  I actually couldn’t stop smiling, sailing again felt so great!

Baobabs in the spiny forest

To continue the marine studies, we moved up to Ifaty, a fishing village north of Tuléar, where we walked through another new protected area, saw a turtle rescue area, went snorkeling, and took a tour of a mangrove park.  The new protected area was really cool spiny forest, different in some ways than the spiny forest we’d seen before, mostly because there were so many more baobabs.  I never thought that seeing a baobab would be old news, but we’ve seen so many I’m actually getting used to them!  The new protected area has over 70 species of reptiles which live there, and about a billion species of plants and insects, but a lot of the hardwood is gone because people have logged it for charcoal and construction wood, and we saw a charcoal burning site inside the new protected area boundaries.  The problem with creating so many community managed new protected areas in Madagascar so quickly has been that people don’t really manage the areas at all, and they are really just protected areas on paper.
The “Village des Tortues” or turtle rescue area, was really like a turtle farm/zoo where they bring turtles that were being illegally trafficked out of the country (authorities sometimes catch people doing this at border ports in HUGE numbers because they are sold as pets and for their meat).  They have the capacity to hold 5000 turtles, which they then release back into the wild after rehabilitating them and letting them grow a little more.  There were only 1500 turtles there when we visited, which was still about 1499 turtles more than I had ever seen in one place!

A chameleon in the turtle village!

We went to Reef Doctor, a British NGO based in the village of Ifaty, to do our snorkeling trip.  They have a small (400 m x 400 m) area set up on the reef with a Malagasy guardian, where hotels and other guides can pay to take people snorkeling.  They call the area “Rose Garden” because of this really beautiful coral which looks like huge roses in the water, but there have been quite a few bleaching events and lots of sedimentation resulting from terrestrial logging and logging of mangroves, which allows the rivers to deposit more sediment into the ocean and onto the reefs, which chokes them.  The fish were still pretty cool and colorful and friendly (I was swimming with a school of them for a while), we saw some lobster and really crazy sea urchins, and we got to sail back in the pirogues again!
The mangrove park which we visited is part of an NGO run by a vazaha couple who are trying to replant and preserve existing mangroves about halfway between Ifaty and Tuléar.  A huge percentage of the mangroves were cut down for charcoal when people arrived in the area a little more than 100 years ago-apparently it used to be “like midnight” in the forest, because the coverage from mangroves was so thick, but we needed to put on extra sunscreen to protect from exposure during our walk (lots of mangroves lost).  There were still plenty of crab species, baby fish and shrimp, and mudskippers present, but not as many as there had been previously.  Their project includes replanting, which has been successful in most areas except a charcoal burn site which still exists within their boundaries, because the charcoal makes the soil toxic to the mangroves trying to grow there.  We also passed by some salt flats, which the guides vaguely explained as a money-maker for the local community but the project and salt production has stopped since the political crisis in 2009 because some politician was involved and he had to flee the area.
We have a day now in Tuléar before we start our week long tour of national parks, which should be really amazing because it will include alpine forest, rainforest, more dry spiny forest, and lots of cool plants and animals (fingers crossed of course).  Just broke the 1000 picture mark, so don’t worry (Mom) about documentation-it’s been pretty thorough.  Hard to believe we’re almost halfway done with the semester!

Don’t judge a man’s wealth on the size of his house but on the size of his zebu herd

The ridiculously idyllic beach at Faux Cap Center

Zebu at the weekly market

Americans wearing lambas

Disclaimer: This is a RIDICULOUSLY long blog, so if you get bored reading and just look through pictures I won't even know and definitely won't be offended

We just returned from our week long stay in the commune of Faux Cap, located on another idyllic beach about 100 km south-west of Ft Dauphin. The bus ride took the typical 10 hours on the crazy roads, but we were in a big “TATA” bus which seemed to be able to take on any potholes of any size, even though I was sure that something would break at some point, an axle or at least a flat tire!  The Centre d’Écologie à Lebanon (CEL) students, who are basically the equivalent of Malagasy university aged students, came with us on the trip to act as translators, because Faux Cap is located in an extremely rural part of the Androy region of Madagascar, where the people speak a different dialect than that of Ft Dauphin, and no one speaks more than a few words of French.  We arrived in Faux Cap center, which is the center village of the Faux Cap commune, where there are 14 other villages in which SIT and CEL students would be scattered to spend the week with families there.

Me driving the zebu-pulled cart with Parfait

    Monday morning we woke early, and I was so excited to go for a run on a real road instead of on the beach because sand is so hard to run in, but it turns out that rural roads by the beach are sand, so it was definitely a struggle, but I was, once again, running entertainment to all the local people walking on the road who smiled or laughed, and in some cases imitated me running for a while.  I just keep telling myself that it’s the sight of a blonde vasa (stranger, foreigner, feels like my second name) running for apparently no reason other than to run that’s so hilarious, not my tomato red face or how much of a struggle I look like I’m going through.  We got to swim in this beautiful sort of harbor sheltered by a reef, which was, once again, a place where I could just picture cruising sailboats stopping in for the night providing a little extra to the economy here, but it obviously doesn’t happen because of the political crisis.  After breakfast, we went to the market and split into our groups for the week with the Malagasy students to get to know them, to buy lambas (lambahwane, the large piece of colorful cloth that women wear as skirts or dresses and use to carry babies, and older village men sometimes drape over their shoulders).  I was working with Sylvio and Odassio for the week, two guys who had been there before, stayed in villages, and were very patient teachers, translators, and fellow researchers.  At the market I had my first taste of bagheda, which is their name for the species of sweet potato that grows in the region, and is SO GOOD!  They don’t eat much rice here, which is so bizarre for Madagascar, but it just won’t grow in the region because  of how dry it is.  Odassio had stayed in the village where the weekly market was held, and his host mother from the last semester invited us into their house and gave us steamed baghedas and curdled zebu milk, which I found out later that we weren’t supposed to eat because it might not be prepared well for the weak vasa stomach, but fingers crossed, I haven’t gotten amoebic dysentery or anything yet.  After the market, we returned to the main area to swim, eat lunch, and await the arrival of our families who were to pick us up sometime in the afternoon.  My uncle, Parfait, (the exact family relations are always a little sketchy, so I just mostly go by generation) arrived with a little cousin in a very rickety zebu-pulled cart to pick us up.  The 5 km ride to our village over the terrible road which really was terrible in the zebu cart, mostly because the zebu were working so hard, made me realize that no one has any fear about their cars breaking in potholes because these barely-strapped-together zebu carts sway and creak over the same roads and make it out just fine.  We arrived in our village, which consisted of 8 hut houses, some central tamarind trees, baobabs, a zebu corral, and LOTS of animals (chickens, turkeys, zebu, sheep, goats, and dogs all of all ages), and immediately knelt by the older men in the village and presented ourselves.  Actually, Sylvio, who had stayed in a nearby village before, presented us, and I said thank you and nice to meet you, which were just about the only words of Malagasy I knew.  We presented the woman who was our mother for the week with the provisions we had brought (we couldn’t possibly just show up without bringing food for ourselves + some extra and expect them to be able to feed us), put some flea powder down on the ground, and set up our tents.  All of our meals were held in our mother’s house, which was about 25 square feet and had a bed, all of the valuable things in the village in suitcases, a table, and a chair.  We all ate from our laps, the men on the bed, and Sylvio, Odassio, and I on the char and a little bench.  No women, including the mother whose house it was and who prepared the food, ever ate with us, only entering to bring in the food and take away the dishes.  It made me wonder a little if things would have been different had I been with two female Malagasy students, or if the identityt of visitor/guest elevates you to the male eating status automatically.  Sylvio and Odassio (translating for me) spoke with the men briefly about education in the area, which we had decided would be one of our themes for the week, with the promise to cover more information later, and then, because there was no electricity (or running water, of course), and it was dark, we all went to sleep. 
    Tuesday morning I woke early and did sprints with Parfait, who turned out to be a really sweet man who is very close to legally blind (he can’t really see at night at all, and has to have his meals dished out for him and handed to him) but also an avid student of French, despite having spent only 3 years in formal school from the time he was 8-11.  He has acquired two notebooks, one left from his years in French class as a young boy, and over the years of SIT students visiting, has built up a very crude Malagasy/French dictionary on top of his French lessons.  Throughout my entire visit, he was constantly asking us to write words down in his book so that he had the Malagasy, French, and English equivalents, and our addresses and phone numbers.  In looking at his older book, I found the addresses and names of old SIT students with which he was hoping to keep contact, along with a plethora of phone numbers of old CEL students, a Peace Corps worker, and assorted foreigners that he’d been able to come into contact with.  This was the first in my continuing lesson that one person having a significant impact in these communities is so easy and so important to the local people.

Gathering baghedas in the morning

    After breakfast, we went with a few aunts and Parfait and some little girl cousins to collect grains which they sell at the market to be turned into essential oils, and then dug up baghedas.  For anyone who saw my ridiculous excitement about digging up our potatoes this summer, think of that times a whole acre!!  At first I wasn’t very good at it, because you have to dig into the ground with a shovel that’s way to long for your purpose without breaking the bagheda, and then dig around it until it comes out without breaking, which can be hard because they’re so long and skinny and their skins are so thin.  It wasn’t a tragedy if they broke, you can still eat them, and they showed me how to find which plants had baghedas that were ready underneath them, and eventually told me I was mahay (good, competent) at farming.  We also picked some bagheda leaves which they prepare kind of like boiled/steamed spinach, and went back to the village.  Ate lunch, which included several baghedas, which was awesome and also developed into a theme for the week, at least 5-7 baghedas a day per person.  In the afternoon, we danced, which is a huge part of Androy culture, not to mention that at the party for our departure at the end of the week every village does a kind of dance off, so they had to teach their ignorant vasa guests how to dance FAST.  The women weren’t shy about grabbing my hands and wrists and showing me where to go, they had a few homemade guitars and whistles (think athletic trainer cueing sprints or push-ups: that’s how they keep rhythm), and they told me towards the end that I was mahay, which was great to hear even if it wasn’t true.  Dinner, then spoke with the men in more detail about education in the area.
    Formal schooling didn’t start here until the huge famine in 1986, when region was really starving and the country, and international aid community, paid attention to the poverty and illiteracy of the area for the first time.  A primary school exists in all of the 14 villages in the commune, and they were all renovated in 2010 by the World Hunger Prevention program and WWF, but are still just one or two room school houses for 150 + kids in each school.  Primary education is paid for by the state, but the secondary school and high school require money of the families, and there is only one secondary school for the entire commune, located much to far away for some people to reach on a daily basis.  That and the price (10,000 Ariary per year plus notebooks, which are about 700 Ar each, totaling less than $10 US) means that there are less than 700 kids in the secondary school out of the whole commune (about 200 kids per primary school times 14=not enough going to secondary school).  Of each graduating class from the secondary school, about 75%, according to our host father, have the grades to go to the high school in Tsihombe, 30 km away, but that is also expensive, and to go there you need to stay in Tsihombe, which often requires renting a house.  This means that less than 30% of kids in the region get a high school education, and hardly any go to university.  This is not for lack of want: we verified with the men that they wanted their children to go to school, and not stay and work in the field, and they said that it depended on the wishes of the child, but they would like to have as many children as they could afford go to school.  Our father, who was the Fokotany of the village (administrative leader), had a high school education, but at the price of his younger brother’s education, because the parents could only afford to send one child to school.  They mentioned that a Peace Corps worker had come to teach at the school and done amazing work for the community and wanted me to ask the Peace Corps to send another worker for them, and that they had put in a request with the government to build another secondary school, but that had been thus far ignored.  All of this information about the lack of availability of education made me frustrated, but at the same time almost relieved, because it would be so easy to improve the situation in the region!  Obviously not something you could do in an afternoon, but the people want the schools, and now all they need are the resources to build them and teachers to fill them, which isn’t insane rocket science last time I checked.  We don’t have to go changing cultural values or uprooting traditions or building crazy engineered machines or anything, just build a school and provide the people with a way to educate themselves.  They are all so smart, there’s so much potential, and so many resources could be saved and things operated more efficiently and language barriers broken down and people’s curiosity satisfied with just a measly building and a few willing teachers. 
    Wednesday morning we milked the zebu, which, in this region and maybe in Madagascar in general, is the man’s job, so I just got to tickle it’s butt to encourage milk to come out.  They tie the hind legs together but the mother isn’t put in any special pen or anything, so the calf is also trying to nurse, so a child is present with a stick swatting the calf away as it tries to get at the teats as well, which was pretty shocking and violent seeming for the three of us foreigners who hadn’t seen that before.  We continued with our interviews about education, and were midway through when the mother came sprinting up talking really fast and spitting and spewing words out in Malagasy telling us that there was a marriage ceremony passing and we should go see it fast!  The women were all in a line carrying party implements (mats, suitcases full of marriage things, pots and pans) on their heads, and they even insisted that I join the lineup for a couple hundred yards, which was really funny.  Marriages aren’t nearly as big of a deal as funerals though, so they weren’t dancing their way to the groom’s house or anything. 

The hospital for the Faux Cap region

    Just as we were about to continue our interview, Mamy, our SIT logistics coordinator burst in saying that he had two other groups that were going to the hospital to check it out and interview the doctor, and maybe we should join them.  The hospital was a two room operation, one room for consultations/doctors office/prescription storage, and the other room had two beds for sick people, and to give birth on.  There is one doctor and no nurses, and for any sort of surgery the people have to go to Ambovombe, which is 90 km away, in a car sent for by the Ambovombe hospital.  We did find out that they gave birth control shots, but there were rumors in the villages that the women who got them would get sick or possessed or would never be able to have children again, so family planning wasn’t too wide spread.  At least the guy didn’t look at us like we were crazy people when we said the words “family planning.” 
    Wednesday afternoon was more dancing, and they started trying to teach me some songs, which is ridiculously hard in Malagasy because they run their words together and fit syllables in crazy places, but they assured me we had some more time to learn songs before the dance off.  Sylvio and Odassio also started trying to teach me a song that all the Malagasy students knew, less typical of the region, which was really pretty but they definitely had to write down the lyrics and I had to look at them every time we played the song. 

The family dancing to the funeral

Some of the village women before
walking in the second time

Sylvio, Me, and Odassio

    Thursday we woke and the men told us that we were going to a funeral!  We first went and my cousin picked coconuts, we saw the cornfield, watermelons, and Malagasy version of scarecrows, which is just sisal fibers strung together in a crude rope suspended over the field.  We had another snack of more baghedas and curdled zebu milk which I couldn’t eat even though it tasted so good because we would need our energy for the funeral.  The village and some surrounding villages which also contained family members started to gather around 10 am, and we began our 3 km walk to the village of the dead man with two zebu, several guitars, whistles, and homemade drums in tow.  When we were about 1 km away from the site, the dancing began, which really meant that we were doing sort of rhythmic jogging and chanting and guitar playing and, of course, whistling.  We made our grand entrance into what could be considered the foyer of the funeral, which was a little side village where we sat for a few minutes and some of the men took swigs of home-distilled cane sugar alcohol before we continued on to the main village, leaving some of the babies and older grandmothers behind.  The main village was about 400 m away, and we of course danced the whole way there, and then danced our way to the center of the village in front of a huge crowd of women and children to the left, and then older men seated underneath an awning-type structure, and then around the house of the dead man, and back to our foyer village, having picked up some bottles of soda, beer, and more cane sugar alcohol from the hosts of the funeral.  I thought that was it, but it turns out that was just our presentation of the village as guests!  Everyone drank a small offering of liquid out of the same cup, orange soda for the women and children, and cane alcohol for the men (Sylvio and Odassio insisted later that it didn’t taste as bad as they made it look).  Next, I went back into the funeral village with two young women who had a lamba folded into a narrow banner with a 10,000 Ar note pinned to it with cactus spines held between them, and three young men who had guitars and whistles.  We did a more structured march/dance to the group of old men under the shade and presented the 10,000 Ar note in exchange for some more beverages, and danced our way out.  I think they got some extra credit for having a vasa with them, I definitely heard “vasa” and some laughing with their exchange with the elders.  Back in the foyer village, everyone prepared for our final entrance into the funeral village by pinning a 100 Ar note to every woman’s right shoulder (again with the cactus spines which work really well as clothing pins), and the men took down some more of the cane alcohol.  This time the men danced in ahead of the women, while we walked in a single file line behind them, so that once we arrived at the funeral village one of the hosting mothers/sisters/aunts/cousins could unpin and collect the 100 Ar note from our shoulders.  At this point we were free to watch other villages dance their way in, and I found out that this party is really the pre-party to the funeral, including only the immediate family, which means about 500 people.  All of these guests bring a zebu and or money, and the hosting family provides food for everyone well into the night.  The next day, the zebu would be sacrificed and the house of the dead man burned and turned into a sacred spot in the village, and several months later, when all the family could gather from around Madagascar, the actual burial ceremony would be held, along with another huge party. 
    My host mother at the village had insisted that we return for lunch, because the people at the funeral didn’t know how to prepare food for my weak vasa stomach, so Sylvio and Odassio and I walked back to our village, leaving most of the family there to dance, eat, and drink.  Our mother had prepared a meal, after which Sylvio and Odassio returned to the funeral and I stayed to take some pictures of the village in the setting sunlight without having everyone there insisting that I take 32497389 pictures with them and their babies.  There were only 5 or six women and children left, and one of the women let me carry her baby on my back, Malagasy style!!  Definitely an efficient way to carry a baby when you have to use your hands and if you’re on a low budget as far as baby carriers are concerned.  People started coming back from the party and I took a bunch of pictures of everyone, who passed around one baby who is now officially the most photographed child in Madagascar, and some cute ones of the little kids.  Luckily we didn’t have to wait up after dinner for the men to come home from the party-they stayed until at least 2 am, which is really saying something in a place where there’s no electricity, that’s a lot of party time awake in the dark!

Baby on my back!!!

Village children under one of the baobabs

Princess Leah hairdo by Mom

    Friday was the day to dance back to Faux Cap with the village, so we packed up our tents, did one final interview on medicinal plants, which they use for fevers, diarrhea, muscle soreness, on open wounds, and as re-energizers, but go to the hospital for the flu, broken bones, and birth so that the babies can be vaccinated.  Mamy came from Faux Cap with the truck to pick up our bags so that we could dance our way there unencumbered, and we gave our host mother the rest of the presents that we had brought for the village, including notebooks, pens, a blanket, our remaining (ineffective in my case) flea powder, my Frisbee, my bandanas, and one of my Maine hats.  Seeing “Vacationland” and a moose on the head of a Malagasy villager was really something.  The village insisted that they were going to do something about my hair, make it into an Androy style hairdo, so my host mom carefully combed my hair and braided it into a style that looks good on the women in the region but made me look like an indigenous Princess Leah.  It felt really nice to have such sure, careful hands playing with my hair, though, and they were all so pleased with the result that I really started to think I was looking good.  Took a last family photo, and hit the road with the usual guitars, drums, whistles, and crowd, dancing and walking on and off all the way to Faux Cap center, and I got to carry the baby for more than half the way, which was amazing, as usual.  Danced marched chanted our way up to where Jim (our program director) and our teachers and drivers were sitting on the hill by the “hotel” where they were staying in the same sort of presentation dance style as the funeral, and then we were free to swim and be with our families on the beach until the last villages arrived. 
    Laying on the beach having sand brushed off my face by a little cousin, my braids fixed by my mom, and given a little massage by one of my aunts just felt so great and at home and comforted that I didn’t want to leave them.  They drew a sun symbol on my forehead with eyeliner (one of the other girls on the program had hers drawn in permanent marker, so I got lucky!), and we had the final dance-off, where I semi-successfully sang the songs with my village and we did the traditional dance as well, and after that we offered them sodas and watched the other students and their villages do their performances.  Once the final dances were done, the SIT and CEL student groups each presented our families with a live sheep as a final thank you gift, and we could say goodbye.  Parfait gave me his bronze ring with a zebu carved roughly in the middle as a present, and another of my aunts gave me one of their bowls and a spoon, which was so incredibly generous considering how little they had already.  I promised to write and send them the pictures, and they dance/marched their way home with the goat. 
    This village stay was so special in that no matter how little I knew about their language or culture they were there to teach and get excited about my baby steps of learning, and that they willingly offered to be interviewed and researched.  I wish that I didn’t love and miss everyone at home so much that I could send in my application to the Peace Corps tomorrow without a second thought!

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.