On March 22, 06, Teresa called Rachel and got her (with a not so good connection) just as she was about to go to bed in Maroantsetra. Her flight back to Tana had been cancelled, so she got an extra day in Maroantsetra, she said. (I had been expecting to find her back in Sambaina already.)

She talked non-stop for about 45 minutes. She began by telling me a bit about the butterfly (moth?) project that Maya, the young woman Rachel is replacing in the rainforest village, began. If I understood correctly, it has two goals: encourage pollinators for the Malagasy and provide moths that can be exported (I did not understand where).

Rachel said that Maya has gotten permission to stay on an extra 2 months in Maroantsetra, so she will still be there when Rachel goes to the site to live. She will be working on getting grants for projects she has begun or wanted to begin that Rachel will continue with. More about them later.

Rachel told me then and repeated again on March 26 that while she is in the rainforest village (Voinina?) she will also be working with villagers in other places. The most exciting project will be working with four villages deep in the rainforest where there are no schools or infrastructure. So Rachel will be hiring a cook, porters, and a guide and going on several week long treks out to those villages. There, she will train “animateurs�, i.e., local young people who will then function as educators in conservation and ecology.

One of the main thrusts of the whole project is to convince villagers that it is possible to grow crops repeatedly on the same land if they use composting techniques which unfortunately have never been developed in Madagascar. That way, there will perhaps be an end to the slash-and-burn mentality that is destroying rainforests to provide arable land for villagers. See National Geographic articles on Madagascar in the past couple of years for more details and pictures of this effort. Rachel will hopefully have her own photos later. She did not bring her really good digital camera since she has neither electricity nor a computer to save pictures, just the less expensive digital camera she used to make the photos that are presently on this site. She also brought an excellent film camera loaned to her by Dan, her Brandeis professor, so better pictures should be forthcoming at some point, though they may have to be scanned in.)

To be continued.

Phone conversations on March 25/26, 06
We had great connections both days. Rachel told us lots of things but let’s start with the 8-year-old twin girls. She said they are from an impoverished family (they are really badly dressed, I think she said) who live and attend school on her way to her training. So she has been walking them to school every day. Rachel’s dad got her a “bouncy ball” at some point before she left (he sometimes wishes she were still the age for that) and it happened to be in one of her pockets when we left her in Philadelphia. So she and the girls either hold hands (one girl on each side of her) or play with the ball on their walks.

On Saturday afternoon, she came upon one of the little girls sitting by an irrigation ditch (small ditches that thread among the rice fields bring water to flood the fields) with her thumb in the water, crying. She said she had been cutting grass for the family’s animals and had cut a deep slash in the thumb. Rachel brought her back home (to Rachel’s family’s house) and showed her how to wash the cut with lots of soap and clean water. Because the cut had been in the irrigation ditch water, Rachel also put antibiotic cream on it and bound it up. Then she gave the little girl a piece of candy and brought the her along to the field where the PCVs were getting together to play Frisbee. The other twin was there and so they all played Frisbee with the girls.

Rachel saw the one with the bandage again on Sunday. She was taking very good care of it and showing it off to everyone!