Dadyn’i Fanja preparing vanilla beans in Voloina

Mother and daughter farming rice in the Belaoka Commune

“Libby” the adult female white-fronted brown lemur on Nosy Mangabe Special Reserve

Verreaux’s sifaka in the south of Madagascar

“AF” (Antennae Female) silky sifaka in Marojejy National Park

Ring-tailed lemur in the south of Madagascar

The golden bamboo lemur (Hapalemur aureus) Ranomafana National Park

Silky sifaka (Propithecus candidus) in Marojejy National Park

Sanzinia madagascariensis tree boa in Marojejy National Park

Pygmy Malagasy kingfisher on Nosy Mangabe Special Reserve

Vue from rainforest in Marojejy National Park, Visit: www.marojejy.com

Researcher Erik Patel with the “simpona whisperer” Nestor, our favorite sifaka tracker, Marojejy National Park

F&R with drying “painza” papyrus for weaving in the village

New baby number nine

Maman’i M pounding rice in the courtyard

Makira, our first participatory ecological monitoring team in the rainforest

Heterixalis madagascariensis endemic tree frog

Baobab in Ifotaka spiny forest with moonlight

Epiphytic orchids in Andasibe National Park, on the high plateau

Endemic frog in Andasibe National Park, on the high plateau

Indri indri, or “babakoto.” This largest of the living lemurs has fantastic vocalizations that echo through the rainforest like whalesong in the ocean deep.

Rachel with her host sisters in Sambaina, during Peace Corps training.

Rachel with the children next door in Sambaina.

Fishermen pulling in their catch on the beach at Rachel’s village, along the Bay of Antongil.

There is a link to more pictures under October posts.

In the phone conversation on April 13, Rachel told me that her Malagasy, host-family sister’s baby (about a year old) said her first word today. They were sitting at the breakfast table and the baby was on her mother’s lap, banging a spoon on the table. Suddenly she turned to Rachel and said, loud and clear, *tsara*–her first word! Everyone at the table caught it and they were all quite excited to hear the baby begin to speak–but not as excited as Rachel was at having the baby’s first word be spoken to her!

*tsara*= good

Rachel’s Malagasy, host-family sister is about 18; she lives at home, presumably with her husband, though I am not sure of that. When I lived in Madagascar, it was often viewed as not a bad thing to have a child before you married–proof that you COULD have one. The Malagasy dote on children; they are passed from lap to lap and rarely left on their own. When you marry, the traditional wish is: “May you have 7 boys and 7 girls!” That was, of course, a good thing when infant mortality was about 50% or more. The Malagasy population has exploded–just about doubled since 1968, I believe–because infant mortality has fallen thanks to better hygiene, presumably, but families are still very big. This stretches the arable land to the breaking point and leads to the slash-and-burn agriculture that our Volunteers are there to help stop.

Rachel has learned about something called “the Hungry Season”, i.e., the period when the stored food from the last harvest is all gone and the new harvest is not yet ready. (People store rice and maybe some dried beans but not much else, as I remember. Most people outside the cities live on subsistence agriculture, i.e., have no money to buy food except occasionally. What money they have is saved for clothes, shoes, and school supplies/fees.)

Rachel says that people get thin and are bad-tempered from lack of food–if I remember correctly during “Hungry Season”. I don’t think that there was a “Hungry Season” when I lived in Madagascar. There have been droughts and such in the meantime, but in my opinion, the fact that there is now a Hungry Season reflects primarily the political and economic atmosphere of the Ratsiraka years, 1975-late 90s, I think. Hopefully our Volunteers will help the Malagasy to increase eco-tourism and improve land management so that “Hungry Season” will soon be a thing of the past.

When the Volunteers were in training at Lake Mantasoa about a month ago, they got a number of vaccinations. Rachel had a bad reaction to her typhoid shot, had to be hospitalized for a day or two, and missed her flight to Maroantsetra. The plane only goes once a week, so she stayed near Tana (at Mantasoa?) and was given language lessons while the rest of the Volunteers went to their sites. (She was able to go to her site the next week.)

On one of the days in Tana (short for Antananarivo), Rachel was able to go out with her tutor and buy a cell phone that works in Madagascar. It is used with a card for outgoing calls, but incoming calls are free–as long as you have electricity to power the cell phone. At her site, she will not have electricity, but in Sambaina she does, so we have been able to call her once or twice weekly. Since she is one of the only (the only?) Volunteer who has a working cell phone, she has allowed several other Volunteers to make brief calls home to let their parents know to call Rachel’s cell phone at an arranged time when the other Volunteer with be at Rachel’s host family’s house to take the call.

A phone card costs 5000 FMG (Malagasy francs) which I believe is about $10. A 1.5 minute call the the US costs 1200 FMG (if I remember correctly). Since that is a large part of the Volunteer’s weekly “allowance”, it is not possible for the Volunteer to initiate more than the occasional call. We have worked out a plan with our long-distance carrier, IDT, to be able to call Madagascar from our home phone for about 50 cents a minute. It is also possible to use *Vonage* at a cheaper rate (google Vonage!), but you have to make a certain number of minutes of calls per month, and it seems unlikely that we will be calling that much, given the fact that Rachel has no electricity at her site and therefore will only be reachable when she is in her “banking town”, Maroantsetra.

We looked into getting a solar charger that charges cell phones and IPODs, however, the one we have information on does not work for Rachel’s cell phone. We will keep looking for something that does. CELL PHONES are HEAVENLY. [Teresa lived for almost 10 years in Madagascar without ever being able to hear her parents’ voices; then, as now, turn-around time on letters was about 5-6 weeks and packages could take months to arrive.]

Rachel said that the thatched hut she stayed in for about a week when she went out to visit her site (Voloina, near Maroantsetra on the east coast,) the hut her predecessor has been living in, will no longer be available for Rachel. The owner intends to take it back from Peace Corps for her family to use, so another hut will have to be found for Rachel. That means that Rachel will also have to have a *cabinety* (a toilet hole with a woven surround for privacy) built. She is not sure where she will live until a place for her in Voloina is ready. On the other hand, she has heard that she may be able to go on the WCS motorboat out to the island wildlife preserve (Nosy Mangabe may be its name; I did not catch it for sure) the day she arrives in Maroantsetra. She remarked with glee, “People come all the way to Madagascar just to go there and see the lemurs, you know!”

End of post

Rachel was not expecting to be called so she was particularly pleased to hear from home. This cell phone is MARVELOUS! She said that the Volunteers were let out of class early today (Thursday) so that they could pack their things to be shipped to Antananarivo (Tananarive) and thence to each site. They are to keep out enough clothing for 12 days—but only what will fit in one backpack. Sounds like a bit of a contradiction in terms. Rachel said that a lot of her things were dirty so she had to wash them and hang them out to dry first. Then she was hungry and her family was not home, so she went to the nearby market and bought 2 *kapoaka* of raw, unshelled peanuts. She brought them back to the house and she and the *piasa* (the young housemaid) roasted them on a charcoal brazier and shared them. She said that the *piasa* is about 16 but looks about 12; she works for Rachel’s host family because her own family can’t afford to feed her.

Rachel mentioned earlier that her host family is the only one who have servants. [I know from living in Madagascar that on the High Plateau among the Merne/Imerina people—that’s where Sambaina is located and Merne/Imerina are the majority ethnicity on the Plateau—those who are more directly descended from Africa and thus have darker skin color are called *mainty* (blacks) and are often poorer and are sometimes discriminated against. Rachel says that her host family are kind to their two *piasa*/servants.

Note: the explanations below and in other posts are added by Rachel’s mom, Teresa, who lived in Madagascar from 1968-77; they are correct to the best of her memory but may contain errors; they are added to explain Malagasy words that don’t translate easily that Rachel uses in her conversations.

*kapoaka*: in the markets in Madagascar, things that cannot not in single units (as are pieces of fruit or some vegetables, for example) are usually sold by the glassful or tin-canful; that unit of measure is called a *kapoaka*; peanuts, beans, rice, and other grains etc. are often sold by the *kapoaka*; that way, the seller does not have to have a set of hand-held scales–an expensive piece of equipment for countryfolk who sell their produce. Things that can be sold individually are usually piled up–say 5 potatoes or tomatoes or oranges, for example–and sold by the pile. If you go to the section of this website entitled PHOTOS and click on the bottom photo of the market, you can enlarge it and can see piles of carrots, cucumbers, etc. ready for sale. Eggs and loaves of French bread (also visible in the picture) are sold by the piece but not piled up! People who can afford it and live close to a baker may have French bread (maybe with butter or jam) as a change from rice gruel *vary sosoa* at breakfast. (No other form of bread was available in 1977–except maybe in Tana.)

*piasa*= worker: the verb for *to work* is *miasa*; the Malagasy word for the person who does something is formed by removing the M (which indicates the infinitive–to–form) and substituing P

*mainty*=black; the Merne (that’s the French word for the Malagasy Imerina, one of the 18 ethnicities, inhabitants of the High Plateau) are light-skinned, not very tall, usually quite slim folk with “Indonesian” features and straight black hair; other Malagasy ethnicities are of more mixed descent, often taller or more sturdy-bodied, and often have more African features and skin tone

Rachel had dinner with her Malagasy counterpart while she was visiting Voloina and staying with Maya, the volunteer Rachel is replacing. The Malagasy counterpart is a man, married with two kids and two dogs, who lives very near Maya’s (soon to be Rachel’s) thatched hut. They had rice (eaten at every meal by most Malagasy) and shrimp and some sort of cooked tree leaves or maybe some wild vegetable like clover–I did not understand clearly. The meal was sparse because the wife was ill with malaria and the Malagasy counterpart did the cooking.

The two dogs that live next door (I think the counterpart’s dogs) are a comfort to Rachel because they bark whenever anyone comes near the huts. She thinks one of them has worms and will try and give it something for that from her homeopathic kit when she returns.

While she was in Maroantsetra Rachel met a researcher from Harvard who is a student of Rachel’s professor Dan’s Harvard colleague–the professor who took over from Dan when Dan moved to Brandeis. Rachel met the professor (I think his name is Glenn) at Dan’s son’s bar-mitzvah last May and they had talked about Madagascar. She was excited to meet one of Glenn’s students and be able to talk about life in the Boston suburbs while in deepest and darkest Maroantsetra!

Then–small world!–Rachel met the professor himself along with a contingent of his students (and, I think, the researcher whom she met in Maroantsetra) at a park near Anjiro or near Maromanga (?)–a protected forest on the central East coast, anyway–where Rachel spent several days at the end of March with the other volunteers. The PC volunteers arrived a little early and the Harvard professor and students were a bit late in leaving the park, otherwise they would not have crossed paths!

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!