Saving S17

Our last week of work in Fort Dauphin was almost a holiday. We’d ran out of compost for shit packing and made over 500 cement blocks for building the primary school latrine. Our workload lull was well timed however, because Hurricane Ivan hit the north of Madagascar in the beginning of the week. By Wednesday the after effects of heavy rain and wind had traveled down the coastal mountains to Fort Dauphin. A steady torrential rain turned dirt roads to deep mud lagoons, flooded many lakeside huts and at 4am Friday morning cancelled our departure to St. Luce.
Luckily I’d found alternative accommodation because when I returned early Friday morning my tent was floating in two inches of water – Lake Jenn! In fact much of the campsite was 6 or more inches under water. The rain stopped later that morning and the pioneers enjoyed a stolen weekend that surprisingly turned into brilliant sunshine.
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Travelling by camion in Madagascar is a unique and bone jarring experience. The word camion is actually just ‘truck’ in French but, the meaning is much more in Madagascar.
Our camion arrived six hours late due to mechanical difficulties, this is a more often than not occurrence because the 1950s engines are in constant need of TLC. The camion is a huge 10 ton diesel flatbed truck. The floor boards are wooden and often worn to the point where you can see the rocks rushing by beneath you. The ceiling is made of arched metal bars and covered with dilapidated canvas tarps. Madagascar roads are dirt and sand, full of pot holes that could swallow a small car and huge gullies worn by past downpours. The camion strains and lurches while it’s occupants (2000 trees, 10 bags of beans, 100 gallons of water and everything else we need – including the kitchen sink) are tossed about inside. After 3 hours and 6 deep river crossings we arrived in St. Luce, slightly bruised, covered in diesel fumes but happy to be there all the same.
Azafady has been working in St. Luce for many years and there is another, larger tree nursery there. The camp had a proper covered eating area, a separate kitchen, a well, concreted bucket shower stalls, and some secluded tenting areas. Bush luxery! The food situation was also much improved from Mandromandromata because we were only 3km from the ocean. Local fisherman came past the camp regularly to inquire if we wanted to buy fresh fish, crab or lobster. Enough crab for one person was about 400 Ariary (30 cents) and Romaine, our chef, cooked it beautifully. There were guava trees right in the camp and we were able to regularly buy oranges (well call them greens because they are). I can’t tell you how happy I was to discover fresh fruit after the lack of it last bush trip.
The main project in St. Luce was to plant a wind break of trees in an area that has been given to Azafady by the communtiy for a reforestation project. Two English masters students, Katie and Veronique, are working with Azafady to plan and implement the reforestation. This can be complicated work because property and usage rights are confusing and can appear arbitrary to the vahaza. Additionaly the trees species planted need to be carefully considered because some like Eucalyptus are extremely invasive and suck the soil of what little nutrients is left but, fast growing species need to be planted to save what little is left of native, littoral forest (only found in Madagascar, grows in sandy soil a short distance from the coast and is the only home to many endangered species)
Every morning at 6:30 we walked 3 km to the tree planting site (I swear I have never walked so much in my life as these last few months). We spent the morning laying out long strings with 1m markers to evenly space the trees. At first we questioned the need for this (I know my tree planting friends are apt at eyeing it) but when 60 locals with shovels arrived to dig in the afternoon we realized they were necessary. The afternoons were manic and fantastically rewarding. The men eagerly dug while the women carefully carried baskets of trees to the appropriate lines and placed them in the ground. I enjoyed unspoken interaction where a women and I shared my leatherman to cut the plastic bag around the tree, or a teenage boy conceded to my request of ranu (water), and repeatedly filled my watering can from the river, even though it is a woman’s job.
In six days the community and the pioneers planted 4500 trees! 1/3 of these species are endemic and another third of them were a species called Moringa. This fruit-bearing tree has been used in many other areas and is renowned for its medicinal and nutritional properties and is fast growing. The last third was Acacia and Eucalyptus. We planted these trees with a tinge of regret, hoping that another species can be used in the short future. They are very fast growing and in ten years can be used for firewood instead of the protected forested that is quickly diminishing.
Some of my favorite work in St. Luce was community mapping. Azafady asked us to conduct short interviews with members of the community to discover their opinion of the work Azafady has done. People welcomed us into their basic one-room homes and answered our difficult questions to the best of their ability. They always mentioned that they hoped the trees would be used by the next generation and that they had noticed the changes and loss of native forest. I was pleased to be so welcomed and that they were able to think to the future rather than only of the very pressing need to collect firewood to cook their daily meal of cassava. I was also shocked to see that 6-10 people lived in a hut the size of my tiny bedroom and saddened to see that many children were malnourished and severely asthmatic from the indoor fires. And this in a community that Azafady has been working in for years already.
It wasn’t all work in St. Luce. The beaches were absolutely stunning and the protected forests (romantically named S8, S9 and S17) were dense and thrilling. We enjoyed many beautiful walks and pirogue rides (small wooden hollowed out boat), and dined on the beach with fresh fish, oranges and other fruit from the trees. One of my favorite days was spent sitting on the edge of a gorgeous calm lagoon, looking down a disappearing stretch of wild surf beach were the jungle touched the sand (we decided this is the beach that the Zebra and the Lion were shipwrecked on in the movie). There we dined on fish and fresh oysters that we garnished with lemons from the trees, Ahh heaven!. I’ve also seen wild lemurs, bright green camelions and spiders as big as my hand in a web I would get stuck in!
I have much much more to tell you, but there is a sunny beach waiting for me and the internet connection is soooo slooow. Thank you for reading and more importantly thank you for caring. I love you guys! xo

The Pioneer Ladies ready for a night out at Gina's. See it wasn't all grime and work!

***okay I was planning on loading way more photos - but it won't work anymore - and now it just looks like I was paryting the whole time...grrr***

Check back for more pics next week when I get to South Africa.

Feels like luxury!

Fantastic! We’ve just been told that we can have our Saturday morning shift of shitpacking (jamming compost into plastic seedling bags) to recover from a late and debaucherous night of drinking and dancing at Gina’s (the local club). We were quite prepared to work on less than 2 hours sleep, no one complained, but Heather could see we were struggling and we have been working like oxen the last week.
We are working on building the cement blocks for another latrine, this time for a primary school that currently has no toilet. We alternate block-making shifts with teaching English at the Azafady classroom and the local high school, and shit-packing in preparation for two weeks of tree planting the week after next.
The last week here in Fort Dauphin has been pure luxury compared to Mahamdromata. Lanirano, our campground, has running water, toilets, showers, lights, a big dinning table and is across the road from an Epi-bar (essentially a hole-in-the-wall corner store with cold beer etc.). The landscape is dotted with palms, hibiscus and orchids and a fantastic mountain and rock face tower behind our tents. The campsite is busy with people working in the gardens and students who attend sustainable livelihood classes in the schoolhouse. We also have a flock of geese, numerous chickens and their chicks and a pack of dogs. Two of the camp dogs regularly accompany us to work, Gremlin – a very racist and grumpy guard dog who loves the Vahaza, and Tiny – a funny looking creature with a normal sized head and about 2 inches of leg.
Every morning we walk the 3.5 km to work along with children singing their way to school, men transporting two massive baskets on a stick over their shoulders with loads of bananas, fish or cassava and other workers heading into town. Really the work has become very monotonous and our banter has become increasingly desperate. I now know my fellow pioneers as intimately as a know some of my oldest friends. We entertain ourselves with innuendo day, opera day and rap day etc. The highlight of our town stay is food and beach! We have been treating ourselves to local restaurants and the SMAR (supermarket) has become a daily trip. We are all concerned about the return of rice and beans with our return to the bush next Friday. For me the best part of working in town is the beach. Each lunch hour we head down to Ancuba surf club and lie on some very dilapidated beach chairs or play in the perfect surf. If the mood strikes us we wander into the bar and order a crepe au chocolate or a cassis fanta. Luxury!
We estimate that we walk over 10 km a day, Fort Dauphin is actually a town of 40,000 and quite spread out. Although I speak of the amenities we are enjoying, most people here live a very basic life. Most houses are constructed of traveller’s palms and the majority of cooking is done with coal that is sold in little piles on the roadside. Most of the roads are deep sand and are littered with decades of plastic garbage. Garbage is a huge issue here. The beach I referred to before has been used as a dumpsite for so long that although the actual sand is now litter free the steep cliffs of the beach are practically made of garbage. Wind and surf erode more and more of it and I suspect it goes many metres deep. Another issue is that the beaches are used as defecation sites. Few people have toilettes and the result is that many of Fort Dauphin's beautiful beaches are unusable. Even Gina’s doesn’t have a toilet and Azafady staff jokes that building one should be our next project.
We are starting to feel more and more comfortable manoeuvring around the city though. Rich and I now regularly eat fried bananas and samosas from the market. And our basic Malagash is creating many happy smiles and greetings in return.
I feel I’ve been a bit remiss at including some of the other key people in my life here in Madagascar and Fort Dauphin. Heather is our group co-ordinater. She’s the one that fields our daily gamut of questions, rubs our back when we get sick and communicates between us the Azafady office and the construction site. She was a Pioneer last year and fell in love with more than one aspect of the country. She’s only 23 and I’m impressed how she’s mastered the balance of leader and friend. We’ve nick named her She-Ra for her stamina in the cement mixing pit and overall. We also have three guides that work as language and cultural translators, brute strength on the site, moral boosters and endless variations of the above. Lumba, Claude and Tinihy have become our close friends and we enjoy their constantly smiling faces, careful guidance and years of knowledge in bridging the gap between the Vahaza and the Malagasy culture. Frequent catch phrases are “you can do it” (I will have to repeat the exact tone when I get home), “elefa” (come on- use when you are sitting on your ass and others are working), “it’s against my culture” (often an excuse to not do something). Other group phrases are “you look lovely” (used particularity when you are covered in cement, or lamenting on the state of your body), “thought hug” (accompanied by fingers to the temples).
Tonight we are treating ourselves to a night of even more luxury. Catherine, Elsbeth, Rich and I are renting a bungalow in town to crawl back to after Gina’s. We did it last weekend and beds, hot shower, mirror and location were enough to tempt us one last time. The cost is about $9 each half what the taxi ride home would cost each of us. Well worth it.

I'm sorry but I can't cope with loading photos. It just takes waaay to long. Next blog will be a photo essay. xo

Mahamdromata - Building Latrine for local hospital

Well I’m back in one piece. Thrilled to bits at the prospect of a meal that does not consist of rice and beans, and the ability to have a cold drink when I want, but also super proud of my team and the completion of our Hospital latrine building project in Mahamdromata.
The small Fukuntani (village) that we were working in was only 17 kilometers away from Fort Dauphin but it took over an hour to get there as the roads were so full of pot holes and the vehicles are so old. Our camp was desolate at best. The only shade was provided by two heavy, holey canvas tarps that did nothing to keep out the furnace-like wind and little to protect us from the driving tropical rain. We fondly refered to home-sweet-home as ‘the Sahara’. The one good thing was that the Sahara also doubled as a football pitch (can you tell I’ve been with Brits for the last 4 weeks) so almost every evening we were treated to a fantastic game of footy (soccer) by a troop of men that, Rich correctly pointed out, could all be featured on the cover of Men’s Health. The games were a nice evening distraction from the evening meals of Kidney beans, Bullet Beans, Butter beans, White beans, lentils, Black eyed beans ect. (you get the point).
Every morning we would get up at 5:30. Now this sounds early, but seriously I never used an alarm, or really even groaned at getting up. It’s not easy to sleep in when the rooster has been crowing since 3am, the children are staring from the other side of the rope that designates our personal space, and calling Salama Vahaza (Good morning white person) and the sun is quickly turning your slumber into a personal sauna. We all eagerly elected to start work at 6:30 rather than 7am because the sun was scorching and the sweat running by the time breakfast was finished.
Work was hard. The tools were crap when they were first used two years ago. They are now far beyond what we would consider garbage. I quickly realized that we are called Pioneers (the name of the groups that volunteer with Azafady) because we do things like pioneers in the 1600s in North America did. Cutting wood for a building with hand saws, making cement slap reinforcement but cutting rebar by hand and tying it together with wire, and chiseling eucalyptus wood with a wooden hammer to slot the pieces together for the frame of the building. There are three reasons for the simplicity of the tools. One: No power (none for cold beer after work either). Two: No money, even Azafady is poor by NGO standards. Three: Even if there was the money, the tools, even decent paint and certain colours, are simply not available here. There are no Home Depots.
We worked until 10:30 every morning unless the work was time sensitive. As in another load of cement needed to go down or it would dry. By the way: Has anyone ever mixed cement with shovels? Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of it, until you can’t lift your arms? Insane! And then we actually made the cinder blocks ourselves, with molds. And often your carefully turned out block would crumble at your feet and you would have to scoop it all up with your hands and go back to the pit and pack it all again! We did a lot of cement mixing the first two weeks to frame the walls of the sewers. Then we made the metal rebars for the floor and then we built the hut for the latrine at the top. I tell you I’ve never been so proud of a shitter in my life. And Dad you are so going to have a picture of it framed on your bathroom wall! From 10:30 until 2pm we had a Malagash lesson, ate rice and beans, and hid as best we could from the mid-day sun. We also went the river (don’t get excited, it was pretty stagnant and smelly) to collect water for our evening bucket showers. The afternoon work continued until around 4:30. At that time we crawled back to camp and enjoyed a few hours of cool and clean, watched an amazing sunset, and gazed at the billions and billions of stars!
It was hard, but it was so rewarding. The group is fantastic. Rachel is a darling, so innocent and lovely. Nina is just 18 and very intelligent and opinionated. She will learn a lot about the way of the world from us older ones in the group. Elsbeth is freaking hilarious, super sarcastic and always making us laugh (she is with the lemur in the bottom picture). She and Rich decided they were going to be a trailer trash couple ‘Britney and BillyBob’ and it was a running joke for days and we all talked in trailer trash accents. “Oh Billybob, I love the way you hammer that nail.” Kathrine is also great fun and she has some fantastic stories from her days of working at FHM! Rich is more than we could ask for in a token American man. He’s enthusiastic, loves to laugh, never grumpy, totally cool with all the girl talk , and quite anti Bush. I’ve got friends for life here.
The children were enthralled with us and dozens of them followed us everywhere, imitating our actions and learning our names and calling them every time we passed. (the picture below is all the kids watching while we set up our tents) One afternoon we performed a thoroughly embarrassing play about pooing near your water source and getting bacteria in the water and getting sick with diarrhea. Then we sang a song in Malagash about washing your hands before you ate and after you pooed. They really loved it and I hope it will stick in there minds long after we leave.
We have had a few fantastic days off here too, and one crazy night out! We went to a nature reserve and got to visit with some very friendly lemurs and tortoises, as well as quietly drift down a tropical river in a small boat. The day was also more hilarious than normal, because we were quite hungover! The last two Sundays we have traveled two beautiful beaches, and I must say my tan is coming along fantastically. The surf is great too, although so far I’ve only been on a boogie board.
I was asked by my roommate just before I left what I really though I could do to help in Africa. He meant what can you do for them that they can’t or shouldn’t do for themselves? I said I would get back to him and now I can. The first is, of course, the money. These people are so very very poor. I saw this quite heart achingly as we were leaving camp yesterday and all our carefully collected garbage was dumped in a shallow hole. Before we had a chance to cover it up dozens of children and some adults were digging through. A foot of rope could be untwined to make three feet of rope. A discarded pamphlet makes good toilet paper. A tic-tac container holds small items, a tin can will be flattened to patch a roof..ect. But also, simply by being here, by showing the effort and taking the time to come all the way from our respective countries to build a latrine for the community and the sick people in hospital they appreciate the importance of what we are doing and the heart that is behind it. The work we did will especially resonate with children, most of whom, for the rest of there lives, will remember those weeks when the Vahaza came to town and built that loo.