Rajoelina seems to be naming new ministers to his "transition government" daily. Things were really quiet on Monday, schools and businesses were closed for a day of national mourning. But in Diego, things now seem pretty normal. Lots of restaurants closed, all the French tour operating companies have discontinued travel to Madagascar, so no tourists. At the bars where prostitutes hang out, there are lots and lots of young women, no men. A more visible police force on the streets. But fairly calm. The long term effects on development look to be devastating, however.

We're leaving here on Friday or Saturday. Going to Tana, then probably to South Africa. This is the very end of my Peace Corps service. I left things unfinished at site, and my goodbyes were rushed and confused - maybe I'll be back soon - and it seems rather surreal. Two years, and now such an abrupt close.

But from here I'll travel in South Africa, then up to visit Omondi Kasidhi in Kigali, around east Africa, out to west Africa, before returning to the US for grad school. If you'll be in Africa before August of 09, let me know - maybe we'll be in some of the same places.

A crowd of 10,000 stormed the presidential palace yesterday, Saturday, afternoon. According to www.sobika.com, 50 dead, 150 wounded

We're unsure of our status. It's been 9 days in consolidation mode now.

Also http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7876543.stm

I’m fine. I’ve been in Diego, at the Diego Meva, since...well, a while. Maybe Friday. All the Peace Corps volunteers in the country are at our “consolidation points” for emergency situations. So we’re just waiting, to see if things clear up and we can go back to our sites. Or if we will be evacuated and sent to Africa, possibly Nairobi. Up in the air. So we wait, not really doing anything. Reading books and watching movies and tv series on laptops. Drinking. Bored. Somewhat anxious.

The political situation. Every weekend for a while now there has been a rally against the president, Marc Ravalomanana in the capital. The government then shut down the opposition radio station, and the weekend before last declared the rally illegal, but it went on anyhow and was attended by an estimated 45,000 people. The mayor of Tana, Andry Rajoelina, led the rally and called for strikes the following Monday - last Monday, that is.

(At this point I was at another volunteer’s site, on my way to Tana, but when I heard about the protests I put my plans on hold and stayed on with her.)

That Monday is now being called “Black Monday” by the newspapers. There were massive protests in Tana, there was no transport, students didn’t go to school, all stores closed up, the entire city stopped. Angry mobs looted and burnt down the bulk goods depots owned by the president, and his yoghurt and drinks company’s distribution centers, not just in Tana, but all over the country. They moved on to other stores, particularly targeting stores owned by Merina, the president’s own ethnic group, or those owned by Indians. In Tana they looted the largest shopping/grocery center. In one of the Magro depots, the roof collapsed on people who are thought to have been looting, and 25 burnt bodies were later pulled from the rubble. They burnt down the national television and radio stations (in which Ravalomanana has some sort of a stake), so around the country there was no access to news, people sent texts to find out what was going on. In Antsohihy, my banking town, rows of shops were burnt, motorbikes stolen, and two people died. In Andapa, four people died in protests, supposedly middle-school students. In total, over one hundred people died all over the country.

The following days protests continued. Rajoelina declared himself president of a transition government, Ravalomanana refused to step down, the head of the gendarmerie was replaced and Rajoelina named new ministers. Most bigger towns are imposing curfews.

After a week and a half of confusion, Rajoelina withdrew his claim to the presidency. There has been less violence. Attendance at rallies and protests is diminishing. It seems some government agencies have gone back to work. The military hasn’t stepped in. These are positive signs for some sort of resolution to the situation.

However, Rajoelina says that if Ravalomanana won’t step down, he will install a new government this Saturday.

So, we wait at our consolidation points until Sunday, at least. From my friend’s site I went back to Bealanana, cleaned my house and cleared it of perishable foods, and packed two bags: one, a small emergency bag; the other, my suitcase that the Peace Corps will come get from my house and send to me in the US, in case we’re evacuated and don’t go back to site. Explaining this to neighbors was difficult – saying goodbyes to people that I may or may not see again.

There are many kinds of mangoes. There is the most common, Manga Eso or Manga Heso, which is big and green, firm, with a slightly turpentine taste. You can get a pile of three of these for 100 or 200 Ar, 6 or 12 cents. There are Manga Diego, which I like very well, they are yellow and red on the outside, shaped rather like a longish heart that curves into a slight hook at the bottom of the V. They have a very smooth texture and are not at all stringy. Manga Bory are big round mangoes, light green sometimes speckled, with a slightly green-apple taste, and no strings. Manga Lava are the worst, they’re oval-shaped and stringy. Manga Zanzibar can be very large, the size of an old-school landline telephone, with some of the turpentine taste of Manga Heso, but a perfume that makes you say Yes, this is what a mango is supposed to smell like. They are mostly found at the end of the season. Manga Paoma are named after apples, they’re round and redish, and have a robust flavour. Manga Paiso are named after peaches, they look like little purplish plums, and can be just as small. Also good is mango lasary, shredded green mangos with onion, garlic, chili, salt, pepper and vinegar. You eat it on a fat slap of fried sweet potato, or at a roadside restaurant with your rice. My favourite is rice, mango lasary, and duck.

I am standing on my balcony eating a mango (Manga Diego). It is six or six-thirty, duskish. I am watching little boys in my street play a popular game at this time of year in which participants throw themselves, feet first, over a long elastic that is held at successively higher levels. Two little boys hurl themselves over the chest-high elastic with balletic grace, then bump chests, stomp their feet, and wiggle their butts in victory. I think that I am an unnoticed observer until I hear little girls in the balcony across the street calling to me. I go back inside to finish marking tests; I want to return them tomorrow, but I’m going out for beers tonight with a Malagasy teacher and a South African cell phone worker.

Most Malagasy have several names, including at least one long Malagasy name that often says something about the conditions in which they were born, and a French or French-inspired name or two. Mastering my 250 students’ three or four names is a significant challenge. One very small boy is named Rabenandrasana Solofoniaina Joseph Erico, another Randrianomenjanahary Armand Phanöel. Also there is Rakotonomenjanahary Henrique Jeance Emmanuel. I also have a student named Williams Franck Eddy, and one whose father, a lover of English, named his son Alexanderson. Another Peace Corps Volunteer says she has students named Ronald Reagan and Hitler in the same class.

Sometimes the Malagasy names have lovely meanings. Mamizara Véronique’s Malagasy name means “a sweet share.” Tsianarana Hortense Léonida’s, more confusingly, means, “not a name.”

The Excitement of My Life: I went on a birding trip.

Maybe this sounds really boring.

It was. One morning we sat for five hours watching a nest, for the three times when the parents silently swooped in to feed their babies, which lasted perhaps six minutes total. However, in the nest were baby birds so critically endangered and protected that I'm not even allowed to tell you what kind of bird they are. And I got to hold one of these birds.

Also exciting: just outside our camp one of the Malagasy team found a new species of lemur.

I’m going to write all of the birds we saw at the bottom, in case any of you are devoted twitchers, because actually there are some pretty impressive birds on the list.

SO:

Bealanana is in a marshy valley. All year round there are fires glowing on surrounding hills and mountains at night. The fires clear the land for agriculture and cow pasture. After decades or centuries of cutting and burning, the hillsides are barren except for some scrubby guavas and a few spare stands of Eucalyptus (both non-native). The countryside is like this for as far as you can see and farther, at least 100km to the east on the road to Andapa and 100km to the southwest to Antsohihy. However, to the west there is a long pocket of undisturbed forest surrounding a handful of crater lakes, at 1750m, about 500m higher than Bealanana. It has just received temporary protected area status, due to the efforts of the Malagasy project staff of an American-based NGO, the Peregrine Fund. The Peregrine Fund has a site set up there to monitor, amongst other species, the Malagasy Pochard, an extraordinarily rare duck thought endangered since the 1960s. It was rediscovered several years ago by one of the project’s staff, Lily-Arison Rene de Roland, while he was surveying the area for another endangered bird, and it only nests in one crater lake in this forest. The most recent count puts the population at 22-24 individuals.

By chance I saw a Peregrine Fund staff I know, but hadn’t seen for months at a hotel/bar on a Wednesday night. I found out that there was a car going up to the forest at Bemanevaka that weekend with a couple of PhD students, and got myself a ride. On Saturday afternoon we left, Lily our leader, Andry the driver, Mikael the Swede, Frank the German (the last two avid birders), and me. The roads beyond Bealanana are pretty wretched, but the Peregrine Fund had a sturdy pick-up and we were lucky with weather. We got stuck for an hour on one slippery mud slope, but with some digging and heaving pushed our way out. After traveling the afternoon through bare eroding hills and peanut fields, we emerged from a pass into a band of grassy savannah lined with lush primary growth forest.

Just before sunset we reached the lip of the crater that holds the Pochards’ nesting lake, where Andry parked the truck. From above the forest slopes down to the reeds and the calm water, where we could trace the V’s the ducks made on the surface of the lake. Our first site of the rare Pochards! We carried our bags down to the site, just a short distance form the edge of the water. There are two Peregrine Fund staff who live there all year round, to monitor the birds and protect against poachers. The camp was an outdoor kitchen with a fireplace, a log table and benches, and a couple of tarps under which we set up our tents. It was dark when we arrived, and cold, and the two staff at the site hadn’t been expecting us. But they helped us set up our tents and soon we had coffee and a hot dinner of ramen with dried fish over rice.

I woke up before dawn the next morning to loud grunts outside my tent. I thought maybe there were wild boar (these are a nuisance throughout forests in Madagascar) so I got out of my tent to investigate. A band of Fulvus lemurs was prowling around our camp, maybe as many as ten or a dozen. A White-throated Rail and her four young, who lived beside the creek that wound around our site, darted about as we drank our morning coffee. We were out before seven to watch the nest of a critically endangered bird of prey. I’m not allowed to write what it is. But this is probably more interesting, anyhow, if I don’t tell you the name than if I did. We sat for five hours, watching the nest. We saw dozens of birds, which Frank, Lily, and Mikael identified by site or song, including a Madagascar Harrier Hawk, and Madagascar Harrier (a subspecies of Reunion Harrier?), some pretty Madagascar Paradise Flycatchers, and Forest Rock-thrushes. I’ve listed all the birds we identified at the bottom. The expert tree-climber on the Malagasy team put on spiked shoes and used a rope around the trunk to hoist himself up to the nest, perhaps three or four stories high. He took out one of the two young birds and lowered it to us in a backpack. Lily took it out; six weeks old it was very large, already losing its baby fluff and growing real feathers. I got to hold it for a moment while Lily examined its feathers.

When we came back for lunch one of the Malagasy team had found a nocturnal lemur sleeping at eye level on the trunk of a tree very close to our camp. We went out to look and no one could identify it. It was wooly and white or grey, with a white stripe on its thigh. Lily thought it was perhaps an albino Avahy lemur, which lives in the east and has similar characteristics, but is brown. He took lots of pictures and told the team to watch if other friends joined it at dusk. If there were more lemurs of the same coloring, it would mean it was not an albino anomaly, but likely a new, unnamed species.

We quickly ate lunch and followed one of the team to a radio-tagged female Madagascar Red Owl. These birds were also thought extinct until rediscovered in 1993. We waded through the muck at the edge of the lake to get to the palm where the bird was sleeping. Madagascar Red Owls have pale faces and red-tinged bodies, and are very beautiful birds, similar in appearance to the much more common cosmopolitan Barn Owl. I suppose much has already been made of how owls’ flat faces make them seem eerily human, but I hadn’t previously actually spent much time staring at one.

We left the owl and went to a raised platform above the marsh grasses that provided an observatory over the smallish lake. We spent a couple of hours sitting there, watching the Pochards, Madagascar Little Greebs, Meller’s Ducks (both also endangered) and White-faced Whistling Ducks. At one point, four Pochards were swimming together, and Frank pointed out that that was nearly a fifth of the world’s population. The ducks nest only in the one lake, but there are several other crater lakes nearby in which they sometimes feed. So one or a pair would occasionally take flight, make a few circles around the lake as another two or three joined, and leave for another lake. Frank and Mikael were very polite and frequently pushed their binoculars on me. I at first couldn’t distinguish the varieties of ducks, but eventually got quite good at it and could tell them apart even without the binoculars.

The first Madagascar Red Owl that we saw was a female, but on our way back towards camp we stopped to find the male, which was also radio-tagged. It was sleeping in another palm in the marshes. Our goal was to watch it wake up, so that Mikael could get a photo of it with open eyes. We spent two hours with wet feet, as it got colder and darker, under the tree, staring up at the owl. I picked up one of its feathers off the ground and put it in my pocket. Twice, it gagged and coughed up pellets. This is actually quite funny to watch. Eventually, it shifted, stretched a bit, scratched its face, and opened its eyes from long diagonal slits to reveal impressively large black orbs.

It was already quite dark, and we walked a distance from the owl so that we could hear its “whoosh” of a call as it left its territory. A little farther, we heard other hoots, different than the call of the Red Owl, two birds responding to each other. I saw one of the birds in the top of a tree, but it was so dark we couldn’t make it out. Lily thought perhaps it was a juvenile Long-Eared Owl. It took off, and we followed, stumbling through the undergrowth. One of the team came from the campsite to look for us, and had brought flashlights with. After some searching, we were able to make out one, and then the other, white owls with black masks around their eyes – unmistakably, juvenile Long-Eareds, as Lily had thought. We spent some time following them, though I was slightly less enthusiastic than my birding companions to be out on a dark cold night with wet feet, eaten by bugs as it got later and later and we had not yet had dinner. However, I caught a gleam of something on a branch high up, and spotted the bright orange eyes of a mouse lemur reflecting in the flashlight. It ran off and we could see its silhouette quite well.

Lily, Frank, and Mikael finally got enough hooting, for a bit, and we came back to camp. We ate vary lava, tiny dried fish, for dinner, and they helped me list all the names of the birds. Lily also agreed to write a segment about the Peregrine Fund and the site for the environment radio program that I do in Bealanana with high school students. At a meeting with various community officials regarding making the forest at Bemanevaka a protected area, the adjoint mayor for Bealanana said, “Peregrine Fund, go home. We don’t want you here.” The forest is profitably exploited for wood and for coffee plantations, and how to divide the land between protected areas and those for community use is a difficult issue. There is very little awareness about the Pochard or the other endangered species in the forest, so hopefully getting students talking about it and putting it on the radio will advance the conversation.

I went to bed late, with my spongy wet feet, bitten up and exhausted. I wished that I could live there. In the night, lemurs rooted around the camp and knocked sticks onto our tarps from the trees above. That evening and the next morning, we heard more hootings, from the juvenile Long-Eared Owls, and also from a Scops Owl. Frank went out to make recordings to share with other birders.

We got up early the next morning, had our coffee and dried prawns over rice, and at a little past six we returned to the lake observatory. The ducks didn’t do so much diving early in the morning as they had the previous afternoon, but paddled around on the surface and occasionally flew laps around the lake. A Pochard came up quite close to our observatory post, only maybe ten or fifteen feet away. We were all very excited to have such an opportunity to see the duck so close, Lily said on previous trips sometimes they have to be satisfied with looking at the ducks with binoculars across the lake.

From there, we walked toward the crest of the crater into the forest. Several hard-to spot species of forest birds have been seen or heard there, so we spent several hours watching and listening. We saw lots of birds, including the Souimanga Sunbirds, Africa’s response to the hummingbird, and which I think are very pretty, and a nest of the Common Sunbird-asity (which is actually not so common). Unfortunately, the species that Frank and Mikael had really been hoping for we didn’t spot. However, one of the Malagasy team saw a lemur sleeping up in one of the trees, and I saw another. These lemurs were like the one we had seen the previous day, grey with a white strip on the thigh. So the first one couldn’t have been an albino – they were certainly likely, then, to be a new species. And I found the third one!

The sky had started to darken, and it was clear that rain was coming in. We would all have liked to stay for another night, but Lily recommended that we really should get to Bealanana, otherwise the rain might make the roads impassable for several days or longer. So after lunch we left the forest, and it started raining just as we reached the pick-up. For a while it didn’t rain too heavily, but as it came in hard, the road became treacherously slick. We would dig out tracks for the tires over a slippery crest of the road that was eroding down one side into a deep ravine, push the truck over the top, and then downhill the truck would slip and slide and fishtail to the bottom. The rain stopped eventually, but the road remained sticky. We were devoured by flies as we got out to push the car through hilly cow pastures, and we were all covered in mud. But we made it back to Bealanana eventually, and just as we arrived in down the downpour truly hit. Lily had made a good decision to get us out that afternoon – if we had stayed another few hours, we would certainly been stuck for several days, or would have ruined the Peregrine Fund truck (or worse) trying to get back.

After a wash-up and a rest, we had dinner and beers together, and Lily dictated the radio program to me. I would translate it into English, and students would read it in both languages. Frank and Mikael would leave the next morning for the Masoala peninsula, a rainforested area on the east coast, before returning to their PhD studies back home. Lily and his team, however, would come back in February to identify various species in the area. I’m hoping to be able to join them for two or three weeks at the site.

Birds we saw

Madagascar Little Greeb (Threatened, Vulnerable)

White-faced Whistling Duck

Malagasy Pochard (22-24) (Critically Endangered)

Meller’s Duck (Endangered)

Malagasy Serpent Eagle (Critically Endangered)

Madagascar Harrier Hawk (Endangered)

Madagascar Harrier (I can’t get these two straight; maybe the Madagascar subspecies of the Reunion Harrier? Endangered)

Madagascar Buzzard

Madagascar Kestrel

Common Quail

White-throated Rail

Common Moorhen

Madagascar Turtle Dove

Maddagascar Blue Pigeon

Greater Vasa Parrot

Lesser Vasa Parrot

Madagascar Lesser Cuckoo

Red-capped Coua

Blue Coua

Madagascar Coucal

Madagascar Red Owl (Critically Endangered)

Madagascar Scops Owl

Madagascar Long-eared Owl

Scaly Ground-roller (Threatened, Vulnerable)

Pita-like Ground-roller (Near-threatened)

Cuckoo-Roller

Common Sunbird-asity

Ashy Cuckoo-shrike

Spectacled Greenbul

Chabert’s Vanga

Forest Rock Thrush (Near-threatened)

Madagascar Magpie-Robin

Common Stonechat

Madagascar Swamp Warbler (poetic name, no?)

Dark Newtonia

Green Jery

Stripe-throated Jery

Madagascar Paradise Flycatcher (both red and white phase)

Souimanga Sunbird

Madagascar Mannikin

Madagascar Red Fody

Crested Drongo

Pied crow

I’ve suddenly gotten really busy. Students and teachers are back for school so Bealanana is much more lively, and we’re starting new projects this school year. I’m building a tree nursery with the high school environment club so that we can do a big tree-planting project with the school on one of the eroding hills surrounding the town. Also at the high school, my site-partner Guy, who’s an English teacher, and I are doing a short weekly radio program with students. We haven’t started broadcasting yet, but we’re helping the students through writing their own scripts in English, and they’re pretty enthused about it. I am too. Guy and I are writing a funding request for a school trip of environment club/English students to go to Diego over Easter vacation in April. I’m really excited about this trip, as are the other teachers and students. We’ll visit a national park (Montagne d’Ambre, it’s a gorgeous mountain rainforest with lemurs and the smallest chameleons in the world), talk with guides, tour the national university campus there and meet with profs, tour some businesses, and have sort of a career expo.

I’m also working with a community 32k from Bealanana to build latrines. It’s a good project: because of water-level problems, people don’t build latrines there, they just shit in the fields. So I’m working with a church and the town government to build some public ones on slightly higher ground, and hopefully get some public health messages out with this. But it’s kind of a headache, getting to the town is a four hour bike ride through the mountains, and it’s a bit last-minute getting the grant request in. I really hope it goes through.

On top of this, I just started teaching twelve hours a week of English at the local Catholic school. Their English teacher is pregnant, so they were in a pinch, and it’s only supposed to be for a few months. But at least for now I’m half education-volunteer.

Late September I took about a week away from Bealanana to bike with my friend Hannah and a couple of Malagasy friends from Bealanana to Andapa. I had vague ideas about distance, somewhere upwards of 150k, and though I knew it would be mountains and rough roads, I usually bike in the mountains on rough roads, so I figured we could do it in a push at two days. My naïveté became apparent on the first day of fording rivers and struggling through rice paddies, and the ride turned out to be more than 200k. At the end of the third day, during which we had spent more time off our bikes pushing them up incredibly steep hills through muddy ruts than actually on them, we finally reached the Andapa basin, and arrived in the dark, in the rain, nearly delirious, at another PCV’s house. Andapa, though isolated on the northeast of the island, is rainy and fertile, flush with green rice paddies and vanilla cash. The roads are paved, we stayed in a hotel with hot water, and the street food is impressively varied (mashed taro and onion balls deep fried, hot soy milk, banana rice bread wrapped in fragrant wild-ginger leaves). From Andapa we continued to Sambava, on the coast, where we met up with other PCVs, ate coconut shrimp and drank rank palm wine, and spent a night on the town with their vanilla lord friends. The next morning we recovered on a beach bordering verdant mountains and, though it’s late in the season, saw whales on the horizon. Hannah and I took the taxi brousse back on a long dirt road known as the “Trail of Tears,” but didn’t suffer overly much as it’s dry season, and even made fairly good time. I went on to Diego, my favourite city in Madagascar and also the closest place with reliable internet (two to three days by bus from my site), for a marathon session of writing grad school applications. I managed to find time on the way back to eat fried breadfruit, one of my favourites, and try two new kinds of mangoes. The trip was an unqualified success.

I’m glad to be getting these projects going, there was a long period when students and teachers weren’t back, Bealanana was wretchedly depressingly dry and dusty, nothing was growing, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I started cooking with my neighbor and read a fairly impressive amount, even for a Peace Corps volunteer. There are some low points. I have fungus on my back, I’m pretty sure I have pinworms, and I’ve gone through fleas and some of the burrowing foot parasites. I’m kind of tired of hauling in buckets on my head all of my water that anyhow is dirty and when I purify it, stains my water bottles dark brown (This isn’t normal. Peace Corps med can’t tell me why it happens, but they say I should just keep on drinking it anyhow). But this is what I wanted to do, and what I still want to be doing, and even when I bitch about these things, I know I’m lucky that I don’t have to go through some of these things every day for the rest of my life. Madagascar is really nice, but so is potable water at a tap.

My parents came to visit for most of a month, only a couple of days after Laura left. We traveled to the western coast and then flew up to Diego on the northern tip of the island. The north has a different feel; Sakalava ladies paint their faces for beauty and sun protection; the street food includes fish samosas with green mango salad; in the market you can find cumin, coriander, cardamom, and there are excessive numbers of vanilla hawkers anywhere you go. Diego is warm and breezy, the streets are wide and open. This was a great break from crowded, cramped, and cold Tana.

In Diego we took a trip to Montagne d’Ambre national park, which is a small rainforest. We saw more lemurs and chameleons, including the Brookesia, the world’s smallest chameleon. It’s about the size of a pinkie fingernail. It’s totally awesome.

After another day of beach and sun, we said our goodbyes and I took a taxi brousse back to site. It’s not that far from Diego to Bealanana, as the crow flies, but it takes two days of taxi-broussing. The first brousse I was on had thirty people packed into what should have been a 15-seater, in the second brousse there were only seven of us in a vehicle of the same size – a much more uncommon occurrence.

It’s the dry and windy season right now in Bealanana, which means all the dust in roads gets kicked up and coats everything: tall, formerly green papaya trees are completely red. My house, after a month of not being inhabited, was no exception. I’m also having a bit of a mouse problem, and every surface, as well as between my blanket and my sheets, was covered in mouse turds.

When I arrived in town off the brousse, everyone said, “You’re late for the party!” Apparently a three-day craft and product festival had begun the day before. It’s something like a country fair for the entire Sofia region and rotates location each year, so this year people from all over came pack Bealanana’s streets. Brochette, composé, and beer sellers set up in every available space. I still had plenty of time to check out the products, see the sites, and get grabbed and pinched by drunk men. In my first round of the grounds my friend told me I had to pay 200 Ariary to go in and see one of the stands; behind a closed curtain was a man about three feet tall who had been dressed up in a wig and a hair necklace. People asked questions about him to his handler (He’s 34, he’s from Befandriana, he isn’t married but would like to be someday…if any of you are takers!), and he was also made to dance. Thre were also 3 smallish crocodiles in a very small wooden cage. They looked pretty miserable.

Being back in Bealanana was a nice return to regular routines, and I was glad to see a lot of people I knew. However, after a couple of days I packed up again to return to Tana. I’ll have a few days of meetings (I’m the volunteer representative for the Majunga province, for what is basically Peace Corps student council) and I’m training on environmental education at a conference for the new environment volunteers. It’s odd that they’ve already been in country for six months now, and are having their first conference. Everyone keeps telling me that the next nine months will go really fast. I don’t doubt this.

Laura Matter came to visit for over a month in May-June. She helped me realize my strong feelings about the bald eagle, and provided excellent guidance on tattooing and party-planning. I think it was a mutually beneficial visit, however, as she returned to the US with a gloriously fluorescent fruit poster.

My parents are here now, we just returned to Tana from a one-week vacation in Morondava, on the western coast. Morondava is deliciously hot. Tana is frigid. Vacation in Morondava was lovely, lots of sun and swimming. We went to the Avenue of the Baobabs, and I was surprised at how truly impressive and weird baobabs continue to be. We went partially so I could run the Vositse Marathon, an event initiated by a Peace Corps volunteer, at the end of the week. It started late so involved a lot of running in the suddenly less delicious mid-day heat. An international tour-group of 45 came to Madagascar for the marathon, so upped the numbers, but the Malagasy dudes absolutely dominated the race. No Malagasy women ran the full marathon, but amongst the foreign women I came in second, which was actually quite exciting, and I received a very large golden trophy. My parents and Matt and Andy Tibbs, who came along to Morondava to train for surfing competitions, were without doubt the best support team at the event.

Friday May 25, 2008

It’s early afternoon on a Friday. Everyone is home because all the shops close and people retreat from the mid-day sun from noon until two or three. Bory and George are downstairs playing and because the power is running today, I can hear the news from Tananarive on one of my neighbor’s televisions, and a local epi-bar is blasting Mariah Carey, competing with the soaring organ of gospel music from down the road and the children, chickens, and dogs making various noises in the street. However, this is a relatively peaceful quiet, as the two rice-hulling machines, one across the street and one a little farther, have paused in their whirring and chuffing and I am still waking up, blurry-eyed, from an afternoon nap. The first time someone stopped by my house in the early afternoon and asked if I was sleeping, I protested defensively, thinking perhaps my they thought I was lazy or didn’t have any work to do. Now if someone ever stops by between noon and two, I make no efforts to mask my grogginess or confusion at such an oddly timed visit. The women who stay at the market through the afternoon stretch out on their lambas amid the tomatoes and onions for “la sieste,” people in their rice fields sprawl out under a shady tree after lunch, and the drivers and handlers at the taxi station do the same.

And as I’m writing this, a visitor did stop by to return a book, a student in his final year at the lycée, and the president of the environment club. To graduate from high school and be eligible to go on to university, lycée students must pass the baccalaureate exam, or bac. The exam is quite difficult, especially for students who attend rural schools and are often weak at reading and writing in official Malagasy, never mind French. Tombonson, at 22, probably would not return to study for another year if he doesn’t pass, and of course I wish him well on his exam this June. But I will be sorry to see him go. He has provided the driving initiative and motivation for our environment club this year. The last time I was in Tana I bought 100 Vintsy magazines, a student-targeted WWF publication, provided to environment clubs at a reduced cost for resale. A couple weeks later only a dozen are left, and Tombonson is pushing me to find a way to get more sent to Bealanana. When I returned from Tana, he had organized the club to distribute invitations and publicity for our environment film showing we had planned for Earth Day, April 22, and he’d scheduled a plug on the local radio station. He stopped by my house at six the evening of the 21st, and we went with four other students who had prepared a script for a mock interview, touching on the work of our environment club, the environmental problems in Bealanana, and of course advertising our film the next day. The radio station is a two-room affair, one room doubles as a cheap DVD shop, the other the owner’s adjoining bedroom. The students were nervous and jumpy, but carried out the interviews with impressive grace.

I too was a little nervous the next day that no one would pay to watch an environment movie at three on a Tuesday afternoon, but at five minutes to, people started to trickle in, paying 200 Ariary (about twelve cents) for students and 1000 Ariary for teachers (who got personalized invitations and choice seating in the front rows). By three-twenty the hall was crowded and by three-thirty there was barely room to stand. We first showed a really good short film in Malagasy, with a focus on conservation and a spot with Marc Ravalomanana, the president. For the feature film, the students had brought Mon ami Joe, which I had wrongly understood was a French environmental documentary. Actually, it was the French dubbing of Mighty Joe Young, which does, however, have an environmental protection theme, and it was very well received by the students. Sitting in the back of a hall packed with Malagasy students on a hot afternoon and barely able to see the screen or hear the dialogue, I was nearly brought to tears in that deeply moving moment after Joe falls off the Ferris wheel. All in all, the club made 60,000 Ariary, a lot of money. They’re going to use it to fund a three-day excursion in June to a forest reserve in the far north of the district.

I’m coming up on my one-year date at site. On May 13, 2007, I spent my first night alone in my new house, and then spent a week, terrified, primarily eating ramen. I’ve lived here now for longer than I’ve lived anywhere since my senior year of high school. People say that the first year of the Peace Corps is hard and slow and unproductive, and the second year flies by. The first year was, at many points, hard and slow and unproductive, but things seem more and more to be coming together. My Malagasy gets me a lot further than it did my first couple of months at site. I’m planning environmental projects for a weeklong regional Boy Scout camp that I’ll be attending in May. I’m figuring out details with Guy, my education sector site partner, to get our own weekly radio show. I’m finally making connections with some NGOs in Tana to get some cooperation and guidance on how to get environmental education to work in Malagasy schools. And I’ve eaten tons of zucchini from my garden over the past couple of months. I think the next year will go quickly; the grandes vacances for July through August I already have filled with plans and travel (Laura Matter is visiting and then my parents, I want to do a marathon in July, I’m doing an in-service training session for the new environment volunteers in Tana in August), and then next school year will already have started. I already have to think about grad schools, and plans for the future.

Wednesday, 1/16

I’ve been back at site for about a week now. I’m working on the update by candlelight, to be typed-up next time I’m in Tana.

Holiday vacation in the north with Jeff was great. After a killer 24+ hour bus ride and a quick visit to Bealanana, we spent Christmas in Ambanja, a chilled out northern town with a beautiful tree-lined avenue and great mangoes and samosas. From there we took a speedboat for an overnight trip to Nosy Be, Madagascar’s big resort island. Nosy Be does have great beaches and a good spice market, but it’s chock full of anxious and stressed out looking tourists, and prices are set for foreigner’s wallets. We went to the Ankarana Special Reserve, a deciduous forest where we dodged lemurs on our hike and saw spectacular fields of limestone pinnacle formations. We also spent a while in Diego, a port town that is the capital of the far north, and where we celebrated New Years with other PCVs from the region. While in Diego we took a charted boat day-trip to a deserted island in the incredibly aptly named Emerald Sea. A deserted island. In the Emerald Sea.

After Jeff flew out of Diego and set out on the very long series of flights back to Chicago, I began my own return trip to Bealanana. I ended up spending three days of riding taxi-brousses for about 300 miles of road, but this allowed me to pick up a last load of Ambanja’s terrific mangoes to bring back as gifts for friends in Bealanana. I was somewhat anxious about returning to site, because I left in December with a lot of frustrations. More than half the time when I showed up at schools I would find classes cancelled, and getting some projects off the ground has been a challenge. So things have been coming along more slowly than I might have hoped.

But now that I’m back, things feel different. I’m not sure what it is exactly: my first class to build an energy-efficient cookstove was cancelled at the last minute. The CEG’s tree nursery was completely destroyed by heavy rains (we’d already rebuilt it twice last semester, once after it was mercilessly ravaged by a marauding pig) and it’s really too late to start over. And just a couple of days ago, my tree nursery at the school district offices was broken into and my baobab seedlings there were stolen.

Maybe the difference is that I know that there will probably be similar frustrations for the duration of my two years of service, but I am still glad to come back to site. People missed me, and there are people I’m really glad to see again. And while there may be setbacks now, I’m also excited about plans for the future. When the gardener at the school district offices found out about the stolen baobabs, he said, “Ok, here’s what we’ll do. Next September I’ll build a modern fence around the nursery, with a lock, and only you and I will have a key and no one else can get in.” I was really glad that he was figuring on me being around, and was making plans for that far into the future. When I first arrived at site, people would ask me frequently, “Don’t you want to go home? Isn’t abroad so much nicer than here? Here it’s quiet, there’s nothing to do, we’re not developed.” I’m glad that now, people are expecting me to be here for longer.

The start of the rainy season means that heavy afternoon storms probably won’t help the regularity of my classes, but it also means that there is a lot to be done. Hundreds of trees that we’ve been growing are ready to be planted out, and it’s rice farming season, so I’m working with my neighbor on trying out an improved rice-farming technique that’s had a lot of success in other parts of Madagascar, but isn’t really used in Bealanana. My garden, which was dry and weak when Jeff and I stopped through in December, has now exploded into a jungle that I am really struggling to keep line. I’m building myself a clay fuel-saving cookstove, and I’m going to be doing demonstrations with fuel-efficient cookstoves and homemade solar-ovens at a scout camp in March.

Maybe the difference is that card playing with Bory, my 8-year old downstairs neighbor, has made a serious advance in level of sophistication. On one rainy afternoon, when she came home early from school, and my school-gardening plans were put off due to the weather, we went from playing the old standard of Go Fish, to full on Egyptian Ratscrew. I’m even pretty sure through my rocky explanations of the rules in Malagasy, Bory got it all – she even beat me to some of the slaps on doubles.

By the time I’ve posted this, I’ll be in Tana again. The new environment sector PCVs will be arriving in country in February, and I’ll be making a couple of trips into the capital to help train them. On February 18, I’ll be celebrating my 25th birthday and a full year since I left Oshkosh, Wisconsin. A few days later, when the new stage arrives, will mark a full year here in Madagascar.

This week, I made sort-of pesto sauce with the basil from my garden. My neighbors fried up some cassava, and we all stood around outside on the upstairs porch, eating cassava with pesto sauce.

Tuesday, December 4

I meant to write my newest blog update piece by piece in the months that went by since I was last in Tana in August. School started, my garden expanded, and I never really got around to reflecting on life in Bealanana. Now I am staring at my laptop, two days before I leave site for my next trip to Tana, and I don’t really know how to write about life here.

I learned how to cook crabs and roast coffee properly. My neighbor kids helped me set up a little garden on our balcony. I’m raising green pepper and eggplant seedlings. In my big garden by the river, zucchini plants are swallowing everything, and the lychees and peaches there are almost ripe. The beginning of the rainy season means new fruits and vegetables show up every week at the market, red bananas, weird shaped green peppers, eggplants, lots of mangoes and dinosaur-skinned jackfruits.

In letters I think I’ve written about frustrations regarding the slowness in starting projects.

Classes get cancelled a lot, if it’s raining, or the teacher assigned to help me doesn’t show up, or there’s going to be a festival next week that they need to prepare for. One week, five classes at four different schools were cancelled, none of which I found out about until I showed up at the schools with my supplies, or at most half an hour beforehand. That same week, my supervisor couldn’t make it on his scheduled visit, which I’d been planning for well in advance, because the bridge was still under construction and the road to Bealanana was cut. This was an especially low point, but it’s part of why sometimes I feel isolated and ineffective.

However, things are, bit by bit, getting off the ground. I’m working with several schools starting environment programs, focused on ecology or outdoor projects, including several tree nurseries. One of the nurseries got gored by a pig, some of the seed beds in others have been scratched to death by chickens or neglected to wither in thirst, but trees are coming up, and we rebuilt perhaps better in the wake of the pig’s destruction. With the environment club at the Lycée we planted a bunch of trees from the nursery I started over the long vacation in July or August. The rainy season is starting just now, so once it really sets in, in January or February, we’ll plant out all of the trees.

Jeff Mok is coming to visit for a few weeks starting December 15. For Christmas and New Years, I’m taking a vacation to go to the beaches in the north, even out my farmer’s tan, and take a few showers. When I get back to site in January, classes will start up again, and I’ll be doing some experimental rice farming with my neighbor.

I’m in Tana right now for a training conference, the first time I’ve been out of my region since installation in May. This is the first time I’ve seen any of my stage-mates since we’ve been at site, as well as the first time that I’ve had access to internet since then, so posting is coming all at once.

I now have a cell phone, and Bealanana just got service. My number is 032 425 22 96. I don’t know the country code.

I’ve been at site for a little over three months. Malagasy internet cafes too slow to reasonably upload photos, so my parents very kindly posted pictures from a CD I sent to them to my Yahoo (now flicker?) photo site (thanks Mom and Dad). Many of the photos from training are from other people’s cameras (which is why there are so many pictures of me) so I will try to give proper credit when I am able.

When I go back to site after this visit, I will be accompanying my new site-partner, an English teacher in the education sector. I met him during his site visit to Bealanana in early August, and he seems earnest and enthusiastic about working in Bealanana (are you reading this, Guy?). I will be very glad to have a fellow American at site.

Below are summaries of the main topics.

Site: Bealanana. The Sofia region is called the Black Hole with reason. Bealanana is high up in the mountains, cool for Madagascar, and a fairly remote site. I am a 6 or 7 hour taxi-brousse ride from Antsohihy, my banking town. When I was installed, on the Bealanana-Antsohihy leg a bridge was still out from the last big cyclone, so we had to switch vehicles mid-way, teeter across some temporary logs put down, and all my luggage was carried across by porters. Bealanana should be a fly-site out of Tana to Antsohihy, but currently flights out of Antsohihy are so infrequent (two this month) that I haven’t been able to swing one yet. So a long taxi-brousse ride for this trip to Tana.

For all that, Bealanana is really a decent-sized town. I have a second-story one-room apartment in what might be called the down-town (but isn’t really), and a garden a 15-minute walk away next to the river. I have sporadic electricity. I haul my water from a well down the street. I am a stone’s throw from a daily market. The market varies seasonally, but Bealanana is a fertile farming region so there is always a good variety of fruits and vegetables.

Work: Long school vacation started pretty much as soon as I got here, so most of the teachers who are from central Madagascar went home to visit their families, students went away on vacation, and I was left with a pretty open schedule. I squeezed a couple of English classes in at a primary school in a village 7 km away before the school year ended. I started a demonstration tree-nursery at the school district offices, as I will likely be doing tree-nursery projects with local schools. I’m also teaching some informal English classes for neighborhood kids in my apartment a few times a week, and working on studying Malagasy. Other than that, I’ve been working at cultivating my garden, with mixed success. I am making compost. And growing a perhaps unreasonable number of tomato plants.

Life: So far I’m mostly just settling into the community, meeting people, studying Malagasy. I left site to celebrate Malagasy Independence Day (June 26) and an early Fourth of July with other volunteers in the region. I started getting, on a regular basis, parasitic insects that burrowed into my feet to lay their egg sacs and die. While definitely gross, when I first started getting them, I felt a kind of self-satisfaction in my first non-intestinal parasites, bragging rights living in rural Madagascar. And I thought, Bring it on Madagascar, I can take it. That weekend I got fleas.

I feel that the postings thus far have been pretty dry. I will work on developing startling dramas in my life for the next posting, I promise.

Wish list: Burned copies of your favorite CDs and DVDs (Especially if you have Ys or The Unicorns. Or any new music.). Granola bars. Dried fruit.

I wrote two posts in advance, and then left my cord to hook up my memory card to the computer in the Tana Peace Corps flophouse, Meva. This may be my last internet for a while, so I'll do what I can.

We left our host families in Anjozoro about a week ago to wrap up training in Tana. Anjozoro will be significantly quieter without thirty trainees.

Yesterday Ron Tschetter, Peace Corps' Washinton Director, attended our swearing-in ceremony, and now we're officially volunteers. We had lunch at the ambassador's, spent a last night together in Tana, and most of the people in my stage left this morning for installation. I leave tomorrow via taxi-brusse with Emily, an education volunteer who will be my site-partner in Bealanana for the next couple of months.

I will settle into my house in Bealanana, and start working on environmental ed at the local Lycee. I am super excited to get to site.

Thursday 3/16

I am at an internet cafe in Tana, struggling with a french keyboard. My site visit, scheduled for tomorrow, is postponed due to a cyclone, but I will probably leave the next day. The closest airport to Bealanana is closed, so I will be traveling by Peace Corps vehicle for a couple of days to visit my site and the current environmental volunteer whom I will be replacing. I will stay for a couple of days, then spend another couple of days in transit to Tana, and then Mantasoa. I have been able to charge up my laptop once a week at the Peace Corps training centre on Lake Mantasoa, so I will be able to type entries in advance.

Tana is exciting.

Sunday 3/11

I am working at carrying water on my head. 15 litres on my head, 10 in my hand. Booyah.

It is a point of pride that Peace Corps Volunteers in Madagascar speak Malagasy, the local language, not French, the primary colonial language, so we study Malagasy in training. There are eighteen dialects of Malagasy, though “Malagasy Oficial” is the most widely spoken and is understood throughout the island. I am the only volunteer in my dialect group, so during language classes I receive some amount of individual tutoring, and do some independent study.

We have been exposed to very little of Madagascar as of yet. This Thursday or Friday we will make short visits to our sites and meet our host-country counterparts, people from our respective communities who will be working with us at site. We are all very excited to venture beyond our training site community, and see what our placements will be like.

3/1

These first few weeks are overwhelming. For the first two and a half months, all 31 volunteers in my stage (now 30 as I write this, one woman went home) are living in a small village in the central highlands, several hours east of Antananarivo – Tana – the capital. We live with host families, and each day walk to class at the training center. The training is fairly intense and is aimed more towards breadth than depth – we have tech classes on tree nurseries, animal husbandry, composting, and fence-building, health sessions on diarrhea and malaria, and small-group language classes. I am overwhelmed and exhausted every day, and come home to struggle through conversations with my host family. Outside of class, we are expected to mange our own garden plots mirroring the group demonstration plot; we participate in activities with out host families like learning to wash clothes in the river, crush peanuts, roast coffee, and k

ill a chicken; and we have language homework and presentations to prepare at night.

Madagascar, or what I’ve seen of it, is very beautiful. Bright green rice paddies, muddy red dirt roads, quick intense rain showers. Even though it is rainy season, the weather is fantastic. However, the island is huge and the climates are very diverse. In the south is the spiny desert, in the east the rainforest corridor. The center is highlands. The west, dry, the north, hot.

After several anxious days, we were finally given our site assignments. I will be in Bealanana in the north. This is a fly-in site, which means I will fly to Diego, in the far north, then take a taxi bus several hundred kilometers (I think) south to my site. I am in what is referred to as the “Black Hole” of Madagascar, because it is remote and contact is, I think, difficult. I am excited and anxious to see my post. I know very little about it.

Two more days in Oshkosh, then two nights in DC. One night in Johannesburg, and arrival in Madagascar on the 21st.

For the first two and a half months, I will be in Peace Corps Training classes, living with a host family, studying Malagasy. All of the volunteers in my group will be in Anjozoro Mantasoa, near Lake Mantasoa, a few hours from the capital, Antananarivo. After May 2nd, I will be at my permanent placement, which is still unknown, on Environmental Education assignment.

I'm not sure how much access I will have to the internet, but I will try to update soon after arriving in Madagascar.

I will leave for Madagascar on February 20, after a few days in DC with the other PC Volunteers in my group. What I know about Madagascar is: it's the fourth largest island in the world, after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo. The island is overgrown with vanilla plants, and overrun with lemurs.

I can't fully imagine southern hemisphere summer right now; the temperature in Oshkosh, WI is 2ºF. It should get down to -9º by tomorrow.

My mailing address in Madagascar, for my first three months of training, will be:

Molly Offer-Westort, PCV

BUREAU DU CORPS DE LA PAIX

B.P. 12091

POSTE ZOOM ANKORONDRANO

ANTANANARIVO 101

MADAGASCAR