Rachel had not intended to go to her banking town again so soon, but she had unexpected work there. Someone came to her house at 8 pm this week and said that the Vice-Mayor of V (who is also pastor for three villages) wanted her to go with him by bike the next day to a village 5 km away. She knew him already and thinks highly of him, so she went willingly, though she did not know why she was going.

In a letter of Sept. 27, she writes: “I was picked up in the AM by the Vice Mayor and the two of us rode bicycles to his house, where his wife brought me, for introduction and observation, to a meeting of mothers with children under 5 years of age. I was fed lunch, rice and sauce and boiled water from the rice-cooking pot with fresh coconut milk and banana for dessert—yum! Then escorted back to V by bicycle, after going for a walk on the beach with the vice mayor’s daughters. His family gave me two coconuts and bougainvillea cuttings as gifts. A lovely family! I’m so glad I’ve gotten to know them.

Every Tuesday and Thursday (the days not spent working in the rice paddies) this little women’s association meets and has a session on child nutrition, with baby weight tracking each month, pre- and post-natal care, check-ups for diseases like TB, and necessary vaccines, sanitation, etc. taught by the vice mayor’s wife. The association has 360 members under 5 years and their mothers. At every meeting, a sample balanced meal is cooked and communally eaten. While I was there, it was manioc porridge with coconut for fat and ground peanuts mixed in for protein (as opposed to plain manioc porridge). Usually there are two separate groups of women and babies. Dishes and spoons must be washed repeatedly in order for all to share a meal, since there are only a few sets of bowls and spoons. I was confronted by the vice mayor’s wife with statistics on exactly how many of what the center needs, addressed to Mademoiselle Rachelle with an official commune stamp on it, in hopes I could locate a funding source. I was very impressed by their initiative and by the center itself and women members. I’ll start writing Peace Corps Partnership papers as soon as I can get to a computer—maybe I’ll bike into M soon.” [She did bike in to M and has now written the proposal.]

At the association, Rachel was introduced to about 40 women, each with a baby or toddler. She will go back next week and teach them how to make an insulated cooking box for rice—saves on fuel and also may help kids from getting burned by the cooking fire, which apparently occasionally happens.

A Malagasy NGO supplies money for vegetables, salt, peanuts, and such for the meals. The women bring rice or manioc.

Rachel is planning to celebrate her birthday (29th) and her Malagasy counterpart’s which is around the same time. She said they will have TJ balloons, a CD of Malagasy music that she bought, using the speakers Dad sent her so all the neighbors can dance on mats in the space between the houses. And a sweet made from the coconuts. She also ordered a kilo of beef (to be brought by the yogurt boy, I think). So she will celebrate with all her close village friends. Unfortunately, none of her friends are in M right now to celebrate with her tomorrow, but she went to Aisha’s for a piece of spice cake.

She has found two places in V where she can get a bit of meat already cooked–she just can’t kill a chicken, though they tried to teach her in PC training!) There is a new “hotelyâ€? (little restaurant) and also a woman she often walks past has begun selling little brochettes of beef with marinated green mango salsa. Yummy!

She now has 46 applications for the 5 places to go on the forest trip to learn about ecology. Exciting but too bad more can’t go.

Sad but kinda funny: Rachel got woken up Sunday night by a mouse who was nibbling on some sheets of Japanese seaweed that we had sent. She chased off the mouse and carefully cut away the nibbled bits (saving them for the neighbors’ cats who LOVE Japanese seaweed!). Then she put the rest of the seaweed sheets in a stronger plastic bag and hung it from the rafters. The next night she woke to see a big, beady-eyed rat who had just managed to gnaw through the handles of the bag. Fortunately, he dropped the seaweed bag when he made his escape. Rachel is going to try putting the seaweed in a metal box! Those cats not only love Japanese seaweed, they eat raw peanuts, she said!

Some days in the Peace Corps are hard as hell and others are just too wonderful for words. Today was so rewarding, for many little reasons. I woke at 5:45 am to the sound of Marie Iodile and Mama ny Mesido pounding breakfast rice and to the clucking and scavenging sounds of the chickens, ducks, and geese that make the rounds through my garden each morning.

Opened my front door and, as if on cue, Nivo and Zelika appeared (two little girls from next door) and asked if they could look at “boky kely�—the same National Geographics and other kids’ magazines they’ve been paging through for the last three months. It doesn’t seem to bother them to look at the same pictures over and over again. They’ve started pointing to little girls and animals and giving them their own names and pretending they’re a part of whatever scene is depicted. Nivo then looked at my empty water bucket and asked if she could fetch water. She knows whenever she does I reward her with a handful of peanuts or—when I’m feeling very generous—a raisin or jelly bean or two.

Full of water, the bucket is too heavy for her to carry, so she has started grabbing a little helper and a bamboo pole. Each child shoulders one end of the bamboo, the water bucket hanging between them and somehow not splashing all over.

I then grabbed a tin plate and headed a few huts down to where Mama ny I-forget-who cooks mofogasy [a sort of bread made of rice flour and baked in tins on a fire, I think t] each morning. I always buy four for 200 AR (10 cents) and she often gives me a cadeau of a 5th one.

On my way home, I pass Dady ny Jo (Dady means grandmother) and her daughter. Dady ny Jo, to my great pleasure and surprise, is wearing the pair of reading glasses I gave her before leaving for IST in Tana. Had not seen her since, but when I gave her the pair of glasses she was so pleased and in awe of them, I feared she might not wear them. This is a woman who looks 85, walks with a back bent from years of harvesting rice and forest greens, but is at most 65 years old. Before having the glasses, she squinted to read facial expressions and could not give villagers proper change when they bought edible ferns from her in the market on Saturdays.

Mom and Dad had the wonderful idea of sending me three pairs of reading glasses to give to those who really need them but could never afford to provide them for themselves in my village. It appears Dady ny Jo wears them all the time now. When we stopped to talk, she was grasping her back and hobbling down the lane with her daughter, on the way to the little hospital in Compagnie, the next village down, to get “fanafody� [medicine] for a terrible pain in her back. I felt so sad for her, but she thanked me again for the glasses. Now she can see clearly as she makes her way to the clinic.

Her daughter was carrying two hand-made baskets. When I complimented her on them, she asked if I could buy one from her. I have so many baskets already, but this was a perfect size to neatly store magazines and the toys in the cardboard kids’ box in, and she clearly needed the 1,500 AR to buy medicine for her mother (a crime—1,500 AR for a day’s work to make the basket!) so I agreed. The two women went on their way after making me promise to “mandalo� [visit] them soon.

When I got home, I enjoyed hot mofogasy with to-die-for Pennsylvania Dutch cherry preserves (sent by Dad) on them. Then Riche [ree-shay] showed up with his band of little siblings, who proceeded to eagerly raid the new toy basket, excitedly removing the stuffed chicken and dinosaur and beach ball to play with in the yard (also courtesy of Mom and Dad’s packages).

Riche said again how much he missed me and singing English songs and playing on the beach while he was away the last two months mining quartz in the forest. He boasted that he, at 12, had mined 10 kilos of optical-grade quartz. (His father later mentioned proudly that Riche had produced 8 kilos of “vato“—still impressive!) He then pulled out a pocketful of stones he had kept and carried 35 km through the forest back to Voloina to give me. A few are really lovely, with colorful mineral crystals formed inside chunks of glassy quartz.

Marie Iodile brought me a little dish of “mangahazo� (taro root) for a snack. She just returned from her “tanimboly� (garden outside the village? t) where she dug the roots up that morning. At lunchtime, I returned the dish to her full of the lentil soup I cooked last night, which she really likes. We have a nice little food-sharing system going.

I spent this afternoon�mitsango�ing kafe (harvesting coffee) with a team of little children—the boys no older than 12 but machete-bearing nonetheless—in the forest between Voloina and Compagnie. It was wonderful! Riche and his older brother and the other little boys climbed up into the coffee plants, many robust as trees, and stripped the branches of their red, blackening, and still green berries. These were then tossed into the baskets Nivo and I held on the ground at the ready. Eventually, the boys resorted to breaking off branches laden with many berries too high to reach and tossing them down for me to run my cupped hand along, stripping the fruits from their little ant-covered bunches.

Occasionally, I was distracted from my coffee collecting when my eye caught a neat orchid growing on the coffee trees or nearby mango and avocado tree trunks. It amazes me that even though the orchids’ forest has been disturbed by farmers to make way for crops like coffee and fruit trees, they have managed to modify their host-species requirements to continue to grow and reproduce. So fascinating to me, these little plants that cling to the trees and branches everywhere you look, here. I found a few fallen on the ground, still attached to limb segments of felled or fallen trees and brought them home with me along with my basket full of coffee.

When we got back, Nivo showed me how to “mitoto� [pound in a mortar] the coffee fruits to prepare them for drying in the sun. She is only 8 but so strong! She wields the giant pestle with much more skill than I’ll ever be able to.

[Rachel said on the phone that she later roasted the coffee and pounded it again so that she can use it to make coffee when she has guests—her sister Sarah, for example.]

We also collected “ravimbazaha� or “mangahazo� [taro leaves], which Nivo and Riche and I then pounded. Riche then taught me how to cook “ravitoto� (pounded manioc/taro leaves), a first for me. I added some curry and powdered milk and onion and it almost tasted like Indian saag paneer [spinach with homemade cheese]. The rice I ate it with is the same batch I harvested, dried, and pounded myself with Marie Iodile, a few months ago.

A good day.

As I ate lunch, there was a knock on my door and Mama ny Riche came in. Riche, Richeal, Richard, and Nivo—4 of her 6 (?) kids—were already here, playing. After the usual “kabary� (formal greetings and small talk), Mama ny Riche leaned in and said something to me in a rapid, hushed, woman-to-woman tone. She talks so fast I always have trouble understanding her Malagasy. I asked her to repeat and she leaned in close, darted a guilty glance in the direction of her kids looking on. I caught one word “fonsy� and immediately understood what she was asking. “Fonsy� is Betsimisaraka [East Coast ethnic group] for “akondro� in officiale [Plateau Malagasy] which is “banana� in English. Mama ny six kiddies was asking me for “kapoty� [condoms]. I was thrilled and gladly went back into the other room and discretely gave her a few PSI (USAID and other partner-funded/subsidized) condoms.

The day before when she visited, I had taken her aside, as I’d done with a few other mothers from my village since my return from Tana, where I picked up info booklets with sample “kapoty� from PSI. I asked her if she had ever seen or used a condom for planned pregnancy and HIV prevention. She had never seen one, but told me wearily that she had tried taking a subsidized birth control pill but it hurt her stomach so badly that she had to stop taking it. She was very interested in learning about another solution. My attempts at explaining how to use a “kapoty� in Malagasy were not adequate; a demonstration was clarly required. I looked around and realized I had one “fonsy massaka� ( banana) left over from breakfast, so that’s what we used. Demonstration and talk about STIs HIV, and planned family size delivered in my baby-Malagasy, I put the banana down on my kitchen table. Richeal, her two-year-old, promptly eyed it hungrily, pointed, and said “omeo fonsy massaka� [give me the banana]! Before I thought about what the banana had just been through, I instinctively peeled and handed it to him.

I didn’t know if his mother would actually use the kapotys I gave her. She was timid about tearing open the neat little packet, much less the rest of the process. Her approach today was a little success marker for me. Hopefully, in future, she’ll buy the subsidized “protectors� herself.

In order to earn money to buy rice at 250 AR per kapoaka, the men in the family leave the village for months at a time to “mitady vato� (literally, “find rocks�, i.e., mine optical-grade quartz from somewhere deep in the forest). It broke my heart to learn that this year Riche [pronounced ree-shay], the bright-eyed 11-year-old little boy down the lane from my little house, would be going with his father to “mitady vato� for the duration of his school vacation, because his family needed any money he could help to earn. When I returned from my last transect study in Northern Makira, Riche and his father had left. Since then I have been away in Tana, Nosy Mangabe, Tampolo, Maroantsetra, and Mananara, but Riche has still not returned to V. to show up at my door as he used to do each morning, his baby brother slung across his back, eyes and ears open to learning anything I had to teach him and always eager to help me garden, build fences in our constant war against Marie-Iodile’s destructive chickens, or go for walks about the village.

The other day, Riche’s mother came over and sighed and claimed how much she misses Riche and his papa. When I asked when they would return from their quartz quest in the forest (“anaty ala be�), she couldn’t tell me. I hope it is soon because school will begin again in early September. Also, I miss him.

Today, I have more little boys and girls showing up at my door than I know what to do with, each of them special in their own way, and many of whom I would miss terribly if they went away to live in the grown-up world prematurely, as Riche seems to have done.

Saving is a largely foreign concept in these economic conditions. This season, income generated by farmers of vanilla in my village (from the sale of their green vanilla) was spent right away on “famadihana� (turning of the bones, i.e. ancestor acknowledgement ceremonies that last days and involve feasting and drinking lots of local rum) and on purchasing meat (zebu or pork) to supplement the usual diet of rice, greens, fish, and little crawfish/shrimp obtained from the rice paddies and the nearby Bay of Antongil. Now, a month later, most of that money is gone. Because this season is between rice harvests, the price per kapoaka of rice has gone up from 200 AR to 250 AR.

The average Malagasy eats one kapoaka of rice per meal each day. For large families such as Mama ny Linda’s, where there are 7 kids, that’s a lot of rice. Many in my village manage to grow, harvest, and store enough rice to feed their families from one season to the next. Others run short around this time of year and have to buy rice. This increased demand leads to price increase per kapoaka, which makes for hard times for many in my area. Then you have families like Mama ny Riche’s where neither mother nor father’s family is from V., but from small towns some distance from my village. Mama and Papa ny Riche didn’t inherit a claim to land where they can farm rice. They farm taro and other “ro� (sauce) foods but cannot afford to lease land for growing rice to provide that staple food for the family.
[note: Mama ny Riche–pronounced ree-shay–is the mother of an 11-year-old named Riche; as soon as you have a child in Madagascar, your name becomes Mama/Papa ny [of] and the first child’s name]

The air in this entire region is perfumed with the sweet “mangitra� sent of vanilla beans lying out to dry in the sun on countless gunny sacks, woven mats, and (for those who have money enough to purchase them) heavy blankets. At this stage in the drying process, we pass men and women sitting on raffia mats in the shade, sorting through piles of vanilla done drying for the day, selecting out those beans that are ready to be removed and bundled into fat black bunches, tied together with thin “tady� and set apart from the rest.

When this is done, the remaining unready beans–still swollen, partially green and shining in the strong sun of mid-day—are bundled up into neatly rolled blankets and gunnies and left to sit in this bed of insulation a while longer. More than a few hours of direct sunlight reduces the quality of the vanilla beans as they are drying, as does scalding them for more than 1-2 minutes when the green “mantaâ€? pods are prepared for drying.

The Malagasy have the preparation process down to a science. On a walk to the beach near Imorona, I met and became friends with a vanilla buyer in town from Antalaha. He took me to “mandalo� a villager about to “cook� raw beans in preparation for drying. In front of his ravinala hut (on stilts—likely a replacement of a previous hut destroyed in the big cyclone of 2003) the man was hacking bamboo and driftwood into kindling for a giant fire, on top of which sat a rusty oil drum filled with scalding hot black water. After being offered a coconut from which to drink—very nice of him to sacrifice one to the “vazaha� stranger who had just wandered into his yard without purpose—he pointed out a giant woven basket about the depth and diameter of the oil drum. It was promptly filled with long, fat green seed pods by a few neighbor helpers. A bamboo pole was thrust through the handles of the giant sieve-like basket and the bass was dunked into the scalding water, stirred some with a strip of raffia bark bent into a large triangular prodder, and one bean quickly removed and held up to the man’s forearm skin for a temperature test. The man held the bean up to my arm next, to let me feel what just the right water temperature and length of scalding produced. The basket was promptly hoisted out of the water by the bamboo pole and immediately transferred to a large wooden box, inside which were crouching three women on layers of blankets, their hands holding open a pocket of blanket where the scalded beans were deposited and immediately covered. This process was repeated with determination and rapidity. The watere must be just the right temperature. A few degrees off will adversely affect the quality of the finished dry beans.

I was told that the beans would sit in the insulated, padlocked boxes overnight. In order to get those black flecks we Americans love so much in our vanilla ice cream, Malagasy farmers plant vanilla orchid vines below Glyricidia tutor trees, wrap the vines multiple times around their tutors, bringing them back to the ground to root each additional stand, then wait 2 years for the orchids to produce flowers. Sometimes transplants will produce a low yield earlier.

Each flower must be hand-pollinated the day it opens. Vines flower over the course of a 2-month or so window, meaning vanilla fields must be visited daily at this season—even Sundays, even in religious communities.

Once the pollinated flower produces its green finger-like fruits, the Malagasy government announces a date to open the vanilla season. Before this date, it is not permitted to pick and start preparing seed pods. After the green pods are scalded, the drying process takes at least a month, depending on how much—and at what time of day—it rains. Each dry bean is systematically run through the thumb and forefinger by hand and separated into quality piles: redder beans in one group, nice deep black ones in another, and split pods in yet another, lower-price fetching pile. Each pile is sorted into tied bundles by bean length. These bundles are sold to middlemen (and women) buyers, who transport their valuable cargo by boat or “specialeâ€? commissioned 4×4s to Antalaha where most larger scale buyers then arrange to commercially distribute vanilla shipments to buyers in France and elsewhere. Some of these top-level buyers are Malagasy; many are “Chinoisâ€? (I gather that means from various Asian countries.)

Farmers who sell their vanilla beans green to buyers who the prepare them to sell to middlemen transporters who then sell them to exporters who then sell to foreign distributors, do so because they do not have the means or connections to dry and market their vanilla themselves. This year, the established price Malagasy farmers earned per kilo of green vanilla was 4,000 AR (about $2 per kilo). The vanilla bean yield for a healthy, well-trained orchid “vine� is between 4 and 5 kilos in this region, meaning each plant yielded between 16,000 and 20,000 AR ($8-$10) for farmers who sold their pods green. The highest quality black, dried vanilla beans fetch about 75,000 FMG or 15,000 AR per kilo this year.

Vanilla farmers in this region are still recovering from the shock of how low the per-kilo price of green and dry vanilla has been this year and last. In 2003-4, vanilla prices skyrocketed to an artificial high, the reason for which I am unaware of. Just a few years ago, the price farmers received per kilo of green vanilla was between 200-300,000 FMG or 40,000-60,000 AR ($200 per kilo). That, for Malagasy farmers and buyers, was an unfathomably high sym and people had more money than they knew what to do with. (This is an exclusively cash economy where the largest bill is 10,000 AR ($5) and banks only exist in the country’s largest towns.

Am drenched in mud and rain and sweat. Today was a challenge, inspiring polar-opposite ranges of emotion. (Black and white ruffed lemurs are making their “Daffy Duck�-sounding guttural calls in the misty forest that surrounds me. I have yet to see one in the canopy. It’s amazing to listen to them, at any rate.) Today we were lucky enough to see a pair of birds in the parrot family that I was told are endemic to these forests of Madagascar. For a tropical rainforest, I’m amazed by how little bird species diversity you see—not at all what I expected. We also saw a spectacular tree frog with enormous webbed hands and feet for gripping tree trunks – a beautiful red body with spiked leg joints, about the size of the palm of my hand, with wonderfully expressive eyes. Looked very much like Tim Laman’s cover shot of a glider frog in Borneo from N.G. Very beautiful.

Less beautiful are my feet right now. They have been stuffed into “waterproof� hiking boots for seven days running now, completely soaked for a stretch of 11 hours straight every day. The toes on my left foot are burning and stinging from a colony of athlete’s foot fungus that has taken over there. Forget about blister and sore spots, the wetness is the worst. The athlete’s foot spreads a little more each day, and the antifungal cream I apply in our wet tent each night has no chance to take effect.

Also, today was a particularly strenuous one. Our transect—hah! just killed a mosquito!—ran directly over the rock face of a cliff. Without repelling gear there was no way for us to follow it down the side of the mountain, so we had to search an alternate route around the cliff face and return to meet the transect at its base. This involved half a day of hiking to relocate the transect, and then 2 hours’ hike back to camp. Lost a lot of time that should have been dedicated to doing study plots. It poured most of the while also. It’s so hard to stay positive under conditions like these, but I’m trying.

The rainforest has a completely different character when it’s raining and when it’s dry. When the weather is fine, it is fascinating to be here. Heard the haunting whale-song-like call of babakoty (Indri indri) off in the distance today. I get chills every time I hear them. Indri are one thing Makira has that Masoala does not. Glad I got to see them so close at Andasibe so that I now recognize their vocalizations. Also passed through a good deal of degraded forest today as we struggled to find a traversable route back to the transect. This was not human-induced, but a remnant of the powerful cyclone that hit this region in April of 2003 and devastated entire areas with tree falls and flooding. Felicien, one of the mission tree specialists, told me that 7 people died from his village when the cyclone hit and most lost that season’s rice crop, creating a mini-depression in Marovovonana and elsewhere.

We were not able to talk for quite a while. Several days there was no phone reception at all, but today Rachel is in the banking town and reception was excellent. She biked there for meetings with WCS.

The night of the 13th, Rachel had made herself some miso soup with Japanese seaweed (from our packages) and fresh Malagasy greens. Mesido and Stella, 5 and 8, were still there, although the other kids had already gone home. Rachel didn’t want to eat in front of them, so she let them try the soup, thinking they would probably not like it. They thought it was delicious, complimented her cooking skill, and the three of them ate dinner by candlelight.

Rachel says she is always astonished how these village children “find pleasure in little things�. She says that she uses an occasional Trader Joe’s balloon to reward a child who has helped her. She realized that when she does, she puts the balloon in one hand behind her back, then holds out both closed fists and lets the child pick. If they pick the empty hand, she shuffles the balloon around and they get to try again till they get the balloon. She remembers her dad doing that when he would bring home a treat for her when she was little. The kids love it.

On her way to the town this morning, Rachel stopped to buy a cup of manioc cooked with coconut milk and honey or sugar—warm and delicious. The woman who was selling it had a one-year-old named Bellarussia (almost like the former Soviet state). Kids seem often to have Russian or Italian names, she says.

Rachel visited a village about 100 km south of her area where two PCVs have a grant for reforestation and vanilla. While her PC hosts were busy, she went for a walk to the beach and, asking directions, met a vanilla buyer from Antalaha. He brought her to a home where they were just beginning to “cookâ€? their green vanilla. They put the seed pods in a basket sieve to dip into water boiling in a big barrel over a fire. After a minute or so they put the blanched vanilla into boxes on blankets, covered by other blankets. The pods are left there for one night, at which point the beans are black but not dry. They are left out to dry several hours each day, then the dry “beansâ€? are flattened by hand and sorted, with broken ones being set aside to sell cheaper. Most people have to sell their vanilla pods green to middlemen who pay the growers very little, but thanks to the PC program, these villagers are able to sell directly to a chocolate company in San Francisco. [see Rachel’s longer account of vanilla received by letter and posted on September 23, 06]

Near this village is Aye-Aye Island—a nature preserve (?). Rachel did not get to visit it, but a hotel owner showed her a video documentary on it—almost like watching Discovery Channel, she said. Her counterpart at WCS was featured in the documentary—small world!

Rachel mentioned that most of the volunteers in her group have some internet access in their banking towns, though it is very slow.