I visited the my village commune elementary school on Thursday morning to decorate the students’ classrooms with environment-related posters and pull-outs from the Your Big Backyard and Ranger Rick magazines donated by Annandale parents and shipped to Madagascar by M&D. The teachers were very pleased to have something to put up on the otherwise barren cement, wooden and sheet metal walls of the two classrooms I visited. The kids were so excited to have posters put up in their classrooms, mostly pictures of animals that don’t live in Madagascar and which they had never seen before. As I taped the magazine pages to the walls, the students mumbled to one another about whether or not the raccoon was a kind of lemur, the hippo a big swimming pig, and the fox some kind of red hairy fosa.

As is custom, I visited with the elementary school director first, to ask permission to visit each classroom. As we talked, he said he had been meaning for some time to invite me to the mitsabora (exhumation of the bones of one’s ancestors) ceremony his family was holding that Saturday. It was an honor to be invited. I biked the 8 km along the coast to Manambia with two of the elementary school teachers who came by the house Saturday morning to fetch me. When I arrived on the school director’s compound, I joined the line of women in brightly colored lamba hoany wraps and men in woven reed hats, waiting my turn to approach the event accountant.

It is the fomba (custom) at Betsimisaraka wakes and mitsaboras (turning of the bones ceremonies, also called famadianas), for each community member present to give an offering of as much money or, in place of Ariary, as many kapokas of rice as they can afford to contribute. Each person’s exact contribution, I would soon learn, is painstakingly documented in a cahier, the names of money-givers in one notebook and those of rice-givers in another. When it was my turn to approach the little old collection man wearing crooked spectacles still bearing their little magnification label sticker, I handed him my donation in a sealed envelope, to put in the collection basket. He gave me this blank look, then proceded to tear open the envelope in front of everyone, pull out the bill inside, and ask a loud voice, “NAME?”

As I learned at the wake I attended last month for a child who died in my village, anonymity is not possible in the giving process here. The accountant wrote down “Rashelle” in his tally book under all the other names, and in the column next to it, he wrote down the sum I had placed inside the envelope. I don’t know why the Betsimisaraka do it this way, but so they do. At the end of the afternoon feast, the same accountant stood up and made a kabary (long drawn-out speech) along with several of the family elders, announcing the grand total that had been raised in honor of the ancestors that day, and that on top of this money, 458 kapoakas of rice had been contibuted.

Soon we all made our way in the merciless January summer sun to the red mud path that led to a neighboring commune, where the family burial ground was located. As the 300 odd villagers attending the exhumation portion of the mitsabora filed into the tight terrain of cross-bearing above-ground stone tombs and marked graves, the droves sought shade wherever they could. Many of the women brought umbrellas with them and their bright colorful arcs, combined with the variety of bright lamba hoanys they wore wrapped around their waists, led the crowd resemble a Serat painting, I thought, all splashes of vibrant color. Their singing, which erupted in waves, was equally impressive to behold.

Men and women participants divided themselves into gender groups and the male family members, proudly wearing custom-made gray t-shirts and black baseball caps printed: “Souvenir du 27 Janvier 2007,” each grabbed a shovel or trowel. After a series of long kabarys in which the family elders prayed, the Protestant pastor led choruses of songs about Jesosy. A public discussion followed in which the three people whose bodies were about to be exhumed were informed of all that had transpired in the world since their passing. An account was given of the recent cyclone rains, the result of the last presidential election, and a long discussion of who had been born and who had died in the community.

The men then took up the task of digging up three graves in the burial area, graves belonging to the director’s father, sister and a infant in the family who had passed away of marary kibo (stomachache), I was told, some years earlier. The father, family patriarch, I learned, had died in 2002. The two large and one tiny wooden hand-made casket were unearthed and raised painstakingly out of their trenches.

A woman in the host family began busily distributing drapes, bright lamba hoanys, and table cloths to the men and women about to open each casket, to be used as makeshift screens around each exhumation area. A special guest of the director, I was allowed to stand close to the bone cleaners and observe the process if I so wished. After the coffin lids were pried open, the bodies inside, wrapped in lambas, the cloth clinging loosely to their skeletal forms, were unwrapped. Ready to faint from dehydration and the oppressive midday heat, I crouched in the shade next to one of the drapes. I watched through a gap in the screen as designated family members meticulously cleaned each bone of residual flesh and hair with a tiny brush, then laid out each bone on a white lamba for re-wrapping. From my seat in the shade, through a hole in the cloth, I watched a femur bone, then several ribs, then a skull, hair still clinging to it, get carefully arranged on the white lamba. When the bones had been cleaned to the satisfaction of the exhumers, the bones were wrapped, cradled in the arms of one family member, and then brought over into the shade for dressing.

A great crowd of men surrounded the dressing of the bones of the family patriarch. One woman came scuttling foreward bearing a pair of new trousers and a collared white dress shirt and handed them to the man closest the body. These clothes were obviously very expensive by Malagasy standards, and much nicer than any worn by the ceremony attendants. The trousers were unbuttoned and fitted around the base of the wrapped bones, then buttoned up again. A heated debate ensued over whether or not the dress pant legs should be left to hang where no legs remained to fill them, or be folded up neatly into the pants waist. The waist-folding proponents eventually won the argument, and then continued to search for a button-up white dress shirt.

The designated shirt was unbuttoned and then fitted to the upper half of the bundle of bones so that the wrapped skull protruded from its neck opening. “Where is his hat?” exclaimed one man, concern welling in his voice. The question rippled through the crowd as the worry that they had forgotten to bring a hat to place on the body consumed each family member. Finally, one woman came running through the sea of people waving a woven reed sun hat over her head and crying with an air of importance, “here it is! I have the hat! I have the hat!” The body was talked to for a time, then offered sweet tea to drink from an orange plastic kettle and a tin cup.

After his bones had been dressed, offered beverage and conversed with, the family males carried their patriarch to his above-ground stone tomb. The old wooden casket was reburied in the body’s former grave, along with his old tattered clothes. At this point, one woman emerged from the crowd and began wailing, screaming and clawing at the air.
Her body seemed to convulse in grief as she muttered wild sobs, collapsing on the shoulder of the woman next to her. None of the party interfered with her display or forced her to leave the otherwise festive circle. The school director motioned me to come over to him, then told me with a bewildered scoff, “she’s drunk!”

I had all the while been aware of the absence of something at this mitsabora, but could not quite put my finger on what it could be. With the director’s comment, it dawned on me that only this woman, out of the 300 odd attendants, was intoxicated from betsa betsa, the home-made sugar cane rum so popular in this region of Madagascar. At large ceremonies it is customary to drink massive quantities of betsa betsa, especially at mitsaboras. The sugar cane rum releases inhibitions and lets ceremony participants collectively express emotions that would otherwise be too extreme for public display.

As I rode my bicycle home after the feast, my stomach full from the rice and zebu meat we all ate off of communal ravinala leaves stretched out on the ground, I asked the young male teacher who biked back with me why there had been no betsa betsa at this mitsabora. The teacher said to me, “oh, Monsieur Directeur is a devout Protestant. He does not allow betsa betsa at any of his family’s ceremonies. The church would not approve if people were drunk as they dug up the graves of their ancestors.” I smiled at his sound reasoning.

As we continued to bike the lovely 8 km home to Voloina along the Bay of Antongil, the teacher asked me, “what are mitsaboras like where you come from? France, is it?” “Etats Unis,” I corrected him. “Where? Oh ‘Amerika’, right,” he said. “Where I come from we do not have the same fombas. We don’t hold mitsabora ceremonies,” I told him. He looked surprised. “But what do you do when you are sad about losing a family member? Don’t you want to spend time with them again?” I explained to him that the Betsimisaraka tradition of turning the bones is, in my mind, a wonderful custom, but that where I come from we are afraid of death and it is fady (taboo) to dig up the bodies of people who have died. “When a family member dies we come together and hold a ceremony to celebrate his or her life,” I said in Betsimisaraka, “we even gather afterwards and eat a feast, sort of the way the Malagasy do. But once we place a body in the ground it must stay there.”

He looked puzzled and again asked what ‘Amerikans’ do when they are sad years after losing someone, if they do not unearth the bones of their fathers, sisters and children, and talk with them. I thought about it for a moment and then gave him the only answer I could think of, “Well, we sit at home alone and we cry”. I could tell he disapproved of our method of grieving. “Fetes (celebrations) are much better,” he said, as I nodded in approval.

Puppy is an only dog no longer . Rachel has now been adopted by a second, younger dog, appropriately named Doggie. She wonders whether the children in her village are all dyslexic, because they have been calling Puppy’s new sidekick “Goddie”.

(Both the dogs actually belong to other families, so when Rachel leaves the village to go to M, as she did yesterday, she lets the families know that she will be away and will not be feeding the dogs.)

Rachel is presently in M writing up something on the WCS computer. When that is done, she is scheduled to go to Tana for two days, then to another M near Tana to participate in the training of the new crop of volunteers for a while.

She and a friend were able to watch a DVD of a program on Ankarana (northwestern Madagascar) and crocodiles that go into caves. Her dad had recorded it from a PBS show and sent it to her in case she should have computer access again. [There used to be a naturalist in M who had a computer on which it was possible to watch DVDs sent from home. He’s now gone but sometimes an occasion arises, particularly in Tana.]

Her Solio [solar charger] is still working out great so she has had plenty of power for her cell phone, but reception has been very spotty in and around the village, unfortunately. Her grandpa got to talk to her once in early February, but mostly calls have not been going through.

Rachel took off last week to ride her bike 8 km round-trip to visit someone about work. As she was just leaving her village, she happened to look back, and there was Puppy, trotting along behind her. She stopped and informed Puppy that she was going a long way and he should go home, but he was not inclined to do so. When she got back on the bike, he followed and when she rode fast, he broke into a quick trot, tongue hanging out because it was a very warm, sunny day. (Half-way to her destination, Rachel stopped and gave Puppy the water she had brought for herself.)

When they reached their destination, Rachel went into the house and Puppy, accustomed to going into Rachel’s house (something Malagasy dogs do NOT usually do), came right behind her. The daughter of the house immediately screamed at him and whacked him, so Puppy had to go back out into the sun while Rachel conducted her business. Poor Puppy!

Rachel reported that she taught Puppy to sit and beg and maybe also “down”, as she has taught our dogs in the past. Puppy learned very quickly, but only when she uses Malagasy commands. He evidently doesn’t speak English!

Right after she came back from her holidays, a neighbor brought over a hen in a basket as a Bonne Annee present [New Year’s gift, the equivalent of a Christmas gift in the US]. Normally such a present is meant to be served up on a plate, but Rachel is, as we know from her Peace Corp training experience, not into killing chickens. So what to do with this chicken? Today Rachel reported that the chicken has learned to eat out of her hand. We’re not sure how it spends its days [presumably pecking outside like other chickens], but it appears quite content to spend its nights in the woven cage, hanging from Rachel’s rafters–lest it be seriously bothered by the ROUSE!

Her neighbors had said that she should make a cut in its foot so that it could be identified as hers. That was of course not an option, so she settled for banding its leg with a stetchy hair elastic. At first the chicken tried to get the elastic off, but now it appears to have gotten used to it. Rachel is very glad to be home alone no more–in the daytime she is always in the company of neighbors and neighbors’ children, but nights tended to be lonely. Now Puppy and Chicken are sleeping in her kitchen, providing company if not rousting the ROUSE.

Her ducks [obtained with a view to having their eggs to eat; they are the European kind, not the strange Madagascar variety with a horn on their heads] are doing well but not providing eggs best she can tell. She hopes to get a Madagascar male in M at some point.

She plans to be in M on the evening of Sunday 28th and Monday 29th and can be reached by phone, with luck on Monday evening her time. The number is in the Contact section of this blog.
Don’t forget photo link [no new ones for the moment] under October posts.

Rachel got one of her neighbors to build her an outhouse on higher ground. She didn’t know how it would turn out, but lo! she is able to stand up in it, the foot rests are sturdy and the hole deep, and she can lock the door–if she manages to find a padlock for it. At Rachel’s behest, the neighbor even made a cover with a handle to fit over the hole so that the flies can’t get in.

The building supplies (those that could not be reused from the old outhouse or scrounged in the environment like the ravinala leaves that make the roof) cost 5,500 ariary (about $5) and Rachel paid the neighbor $10 for his labor–considerably more than he had asked for since the work was so good. So for $15 she has a great new kabonety, and if Peace Corps doesn’t manage to repay her for it, no big problem.

One of the kids whom Rachel has grown particularly fond of, an 11-year-old boy, has a mother who is a hereditary (fortunately not mean and nasty, but…) alcoholic–and also about 4 months pregnant. Rachel tries to tell her that the drinking will harm the unborn baby, but the point is very hard to get across.

The son [whose name T has not been able to understand] has taken to staying later than the other kids in the evening. The others will get called home to dinner, but this little guy doesn’t get called… One night this week Rachel had cooked rice and marinated fish to fry for herself. When she was ready to eat, the little guy was still sitting there, avoiding eye contact but obviously hoping that she would share some of her food. When she put a big bowl of rice and a piece of fish in front of him, he dug right in. By the time he had finished, another kid, Nivo, was there, having a share as well. Rachel asked the 11-year-old whether he would like more rice or more fish. He didn’t look up, but Nivo answered for him, “He wants some more fish!” Rachel gave him more and it disappeared rapidly.

The next evening Rachel made soup for her dinner. The two kids were there when she was ready to eat and in Malagasy tradition, you can’t possibly sit down and eat in front of someone. So she dished up a quarter of her soup for each kid. Before she could sit down to the rest, M-I came over and said, “Is it ready to eat?” Clear indication that she wanted some, so Rachel resignedly divided what was left into two bowls and sat down with M-I to eat. [Rachel is VERY fond of M-I at this point.] Rachel had a piece of bread and as she was about to bite into it, she realized that M-I was eyeing it, clearly expecting Rachel to share that as well. Nothing for it but to tear the bread in half. After a spoonful or two, M-I observed a bit querulously, “Rachel doesn’t like salt!” Rachel got up, plunked her plastic bag of salt on the table and set to eating the quarter of the soup that was left. Even though she was still really hungry, she didn’t have anything else to eat, so went to bed.

At 2 am Rachel woke up hungry. She would have liked to call home, but there was no reception. Not wanting to try and cook anything at that time of night, Rachel suddenly thought of a little box of Fruit Loops that Sarah had brought as a Christmas treat. So Rachel sat in bed and ate the cereal and read Clan of the Cave Bear until she was able to fall back to sleep.

Rachel said that her dear neighbor and friend Marie-Iodile asked her recently what the collar was on Puppy’s neck. Rachel explained that it keeps the fleas away. M-I said, “Oh, do you mean he’s a clean dog?” And since then, she has been a bit more kindly toward Puppy. [People tend to shoo dogs away or even kick them in an environment where everyday life is so difficult for humans and dogs are so full of parasites and thus unclean.] Rachel has also treated Puppy for worms. He now sleeps in her kitchen every night, though still ignoring the visits of the ROUSE (Rat/mouse) unfortunately. [Rachel described the ROUSE, saying that it is between rat and mouse size but with a rat’s long tail.]

She reported that the neighboring kids had been playing with Puppy, having him chase after one of the stuffed animals sent from the US that they had attached to a string. It is the first time that she has ever seen kids interact kindly with dogs. [Malagasy kids tend to work a lot but not to play very much, unfortunately.]

Rachel is very happy to be back in her village. She found almost everything in her house in good order due to the careful supervision of her neighbor. (A house in a neighboring village was broken into while Rachel was away and the neighbor was doubly watchful.)

Rachel did find two little problems. The first and most immediate was that a mouse/rat had built a nest and given birth to 8 young on Rachel’s bed, which happened also to be the raised spot where Rachel had put her things to keep them safe from the high water. The mother mouse/rat ran away but Rachel, very upset at the invasion, called in the cat next door to take care of the babies. The cat scooped all eight up in her mouth and made off with the feast! Rachel is now baiting her American-made mouse traps to catch the mother.

A second problem is that the kabonety (outhouse beside Rachel’s house) silted in due to the high water and can’t be used any more. Rachel is in the process of discussing having a new one dug into higher ground on a property across from her house, where it could be deeper and perhaps more lasting. Her neighbors unfortunately just go down to the beach to take care of pooping and pee in the fields, presumably, as has been done for millennia. That might have been acceptable when the population was low, but… really bad hygiene with a growing population. Needs to be remedied in some way, but that’s beyond the scope of what Rachel can do, except by setting a good example.

Good news was that Puppy (aka Merry Puppins and Hush-puppy, but known to Rachel’s neighbors now as just plain Puppy because the longer names are too difficult to pronounce) came skittering across Rachel’s veranda to welcome her back. He appears to have grown by half. He spent the night on a mat in Rachel’s “kitchen”. Bad news: he slept soundly through the forays of the latest mouse/rat attack!

Rachel was at the beach with “her kids” when she called and reception was really poor, but we are glad to know that she is happily back in her village. She said she will plan to go to M on the 28th for a day or two. There she will have phone reception and can be called. She has a new phone number: 261 324 508268 but the old one may also still work part of the time.

Rachel’s brother found a phone card that is useable for Madagascar at 20 cents a minute and has no connect charge. If friends want to give her a call, they can perhaps find a similar phone card and call on the 28th or 29th, remembering that right now Madagascar is 8 hours ahead of EST!

Rachel sends love to all! t

Rachel, still in the capital for a day or two, waiting for a plane back to her banking town, just sent this email:

Hi Mom & Dad,

Sorry I missed talking to Mom yesterday. [Mom was going out just as Rachel called and had to leave much as she would have liked to hear Rachel’s voice.] Reception cut out on Dad and I didn’t get the messages he left until this morning.

Yes, here on the plateau I have been saying a lot of tratry ny taona [Happy New Year in Malagasy]. In my region everyone Betsimisaraka just says “bonne annee“. On the plateau I have come to learn that when people say “aiza ny bonne annee” they are not kindly asking me where I spent my New Year’s. Instead, it means “where’s my New Year’s cadeau, huh?” [T explains: a sort of tip, ensuring good treatment during the coming year]

Trying to talk my friend into going to Blanche Neige for ice cream when we’re done in Analakely. [Analakely is the market area at one end of the main street of Tananarive. Blanche Neige is an ice cream parlor at the other end, near the train station; has been there for about 40 years. Rachel’s dad took her big sister and brother, then 8 and 6, there for vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce in early 1977. It was a truly momentous treat since they had never, ever had a sundae, nor been in an ice cream parlor in Madagascar, though they had had Baskin and Robbins’ cones in the US on visits.]

Just got back from the WWF headquarters in Tana and picked up Vintsy magazines in French and Malagasy for my students, to go with your donations [20 issues each of the three magazines published by National Wildlife Federation, which NWF kindly donated to Rachel, to be sent out to her soon to use as texts in teaching conservation in schools around V]. Tomorrow will visit the education coordinator at Wildlife Conservation Society [for whom Rachel works part time] Tana office.

Much love,
Rachel

Dear friends,

Mbolatsara [still well!] and GREETINGS FROM MADAGASCAR! I hope this letter finds you all well!

Come next month I will have lived in Madagascar one year complete. It’s hard to believe it has been so long. I miss you all more than ever and hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday. I just had a great visit from my sister, Sarah, and am now preparing to go back to my village and pick up teaching environmental ed, forest inventorying for the Wildlife Conservation Society, and rice harvesting where I left off in V after the Lemur Festival last month.

To those of you who have been keeping an eye on weather patterns in my hemisphere, we are in the cyclone season and have had some severe storms lately in my part of the island, but nothing to worry about. Sarah and I were evacuated from my village during her visit because of heavy rains and flooding (the water was at shin level outside my door when we were picked up by an ANGAP 4×4). None of my friends in the village were terribly concerned; all had been through such storms before. My house is on stilts and all possessions were piled on my bed and kitchen table before I left, so I expect to find little damage when I get back. My concern during Sarah’s visit was potential election violence, but all went relatively smoothly and Marc Ravalomanana was reelected President.

I think I’ll take advantage of this rare opportunity of computer and internet access in Antananarivo to write you all a little update on what I did this week, if you care to read on. Here goes, a week in the life of a Peace Corps environment volunteer in Madagascar:

After broussing [taking public transport] 9 ½ hours from Antananarivo and getting some sleep at the Peace Corps transit house in banking-town-A, I took a morning bush taxi to my PCV friend A’s site, a small town, also called A.

Small-town-A is nestled in the once rain-forested but now barren hills that line eastern Lac Alaotra, the largest freshwater body in Madagascar. (I have trouble calling it a “lake”, seeing that it’s so shallow that flat-bottomed dugout canoes used by fishermen often scrape the silty bottom even at considerable distances from shore.) Each year more and more of the marshland is claimed by farmers for rice farming, water surface is taken over by invasive aquatic plant growth, and the lake fills in as soils are deposited by heavy rains falling on the eroding hills that surround Lake Alaotra. The lake and its neighboring forest corridor are critical conservation hotspots on the island.

All around small-town-A (whose name implies the town has a train station, but which has not since the days of [former President] Ratsiraka) are rice paddies and zebu and trodden red mud. Houses are made from red earth bricks covered in a layer of dirt, ash, and cow manure and have roofs of thatched reeds or dried matted grass. Very different from the ravinala [palm frond] stilt huts of my coastal region. The town has a small fruit and vegetable market complete with a butcher (something my village does not have,) and there is a small convent of Italian nuns in town who run a medicine dispensary. Rumor has it the Italian masoers love to eat pasta. No rice, only pasta! Just imagine. Scandalous!

My friend A is working on training a small group of guides to take ecotourists out on the lake to see its highly endangered, endemic wildlife. Remaining marshland around Lac Alaotra is critical habitat for a number of rare waterbirds and home to an adorable subspecies of the rainforest-dwelling bamboo lemur, the “bandro” Hapalemur griseus alaotrensis. This subspecies is only found in the diminishing marshes of Lac Alaotra and is thus critically endangered. I had the great good fortune to see five bandro at very close range in the two ridiculously early mornings A and I spent out on the lake with her Malagasy counterpart, a fishermen, and some of her guides in training.

Bandro are most active early in the morning, when they feed on zozoro (Cyperus madagascariensis) reeds, and can be seen crossing reed bridges between clumps of vegetation in their respective territories.

On our first day, we climbed into dugout canoes in the early morning light, shivering in the rain and passing equally cold-looking fishermen whose canoes were laden with hand-woven fishing baskets despite this being a no-take season. To see my first bandro, I climbed carefully out of the tippy, cracked, wooden canoe, camera shielded from the rain by plastic bags, onto the mat of vegetation where a lemur was conspicuously disturbing the papyrus-like zozoro heads as it foraged.

I soon heard the fisherman steering our canoe, who had climbed out before me, thrashing around in the reeds, trying to chase out the bandro so that I could get a clear picture of it. My protests in Betsimisaraka (not the dialect of this region) were either not heard or not understood, and the poor frightened little lemur’s head and beady eyes soon emerged from the tips of the zozoro, a second bandro clutching the reed stalk just below him. Got some nice views of the two of them, but unfortunately with my short, fogged lens my photos just don’t do the little guys justice.

My reason for visiting the Lac Alaotra region included hiking out to the surrounding rainforest corridor National Park of Zahamena, to take pictures for use in a new Madagascar Wildlife Conservation (small local NGO) guide that Amy is writing for the region. We spent two mornings and one afternoon out on the lake, then got our packs and tents ready the following day to head for [yet another!] A, a village a half a day’s hike from the entrance of Zahamena National Park. After locating a fantastic ANGAP guide and porter/cook, we bought supplies for our two days in the forest (10 kapoaka of rice, 4 kapoaka of beans, some rock salt, and a few onions…that’s right, rice and the occasional bean, three meals a day!) and made for the hills.

The half-day hike to the forest corridor was sobering to say the least. The sparsely vegetated dry grassland of the hills leading to the Park, a product of Madagascar’s destructive tradition of slash and burn agriculture, reminded me of the desert scrub landscapes of Arizona or New Mexico. Less than 200 years ago, most of those hills were covered in rainforest. Now, little pockets of trees remain in the gullies between hills where water run-off collects, small reminders of a very different landscape of not so long ago. As we walked, I made up new lyrics to Malagasy pop songs with our porter, mainly singing tunes along the lines of aiza ny kakazo? (”where are the trees?”). I’m realizing how remarkable it is that in my region of the northeast much of the rainforest is still intact.

As if on cue, when we reached the forest boundary, a group of brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvis) began grunting in the trees just ahead of us. The ANGAP agent and I crept closer and started mimicking their grunts to see if any of the members would approach us. Several lemurs got very excited and leaped down to branches closer to our level, peering down at us inquisitively, grunting back at us and straining their necks for a better view. It was incredible how curious they were about us and how close they allowed us to come to them. Making eye contact with one male, I struggled to bend my mind around how many eons of evolution lie between us.

Exhausted, we made camp and cooked a big pot of steaming rice. I gave our Malagasy guides their first taste of beef jerky (which our porter suggested we reconstitute in hot water like they do dried fish, to make loca / ro to eat with our rice). We then hiked up to a magnificent 100+ meter waterfall and basked in its spray for some time, dipping our blistered feet into the cool pool that collected at its base.

We awoke the next morning to the calls of babakoto Indri indri, a haunting, indescribable wailing in the forest that sounds like something between underwater recordings of whale song, air being let slowly out of a balloon, and fog horns. Not a bad early morning wake-up call.

Later that day, at one of the mountain summits, A stopped on the trail and pointed at something in the trees with a gasp. There, staring back at us in alarm with icy clear eyes in stark contrast with its black coat, was a male Indri, the largest of the lemurs. My jaw dropped at the sight. There’s something about the babakoto that just takes my breath away.

After a few minutes of observation, I decided to see what would happen if I mimicked the calls we awoke to that morning. The babakoto burst into a fit of crazed confusion, shifting back and forth on the tree trunk, listening keenly, staring at me. Finally he reared back with his great head, opened his mouth to display teeth and a very red tongue, and let out a long series of deafening, howling replies. I couldn’t stop laughing and gasping. Such a moment! The Indri leaped directly over our heads, hopping to a tree to our left, and then we repeated the exchange. Eventually he caught on that I was not of his kind and moved on down the mountain, disappearing into the canopy.

Our trip out of the forest and back to the village was slow going in the rain along the slippery red mud paths. We stopped to eat rice, boiled eggs, and bananas with a lovely family at the base of the mountain. Then we made our way along the final 3 ½ hour hike back to viallge-A in the dusk and eventual darkness. We arrived covered in a thick layer of mud, feet swollen and muscles aching, but in high spirits after a wonderful few days in the forest. The next morning we headed back to small-town-A and later broussed to banking-town-A.

I love this country.

And that was this week! Would adore to hear how each of you has been if you can find the time to respond. I have three days of internet access left before I fly back to isolated M and then head back to my village. Do keep in touch!

My best to all,
Rachel