All things bright and beautiful...

all creatures great and small.

Pitcher plants. Reminded me a lot of being in Sabah.

And how abundant! Wow! Alongside finishing off all the projects in the bush, I have been giddily scrambling around looking at all these crazy creatures which keep turning up these last few weeks. I fear I might be turning into an entomologist.

Horrific looking spider which I almost head butted

Pill Millipede before it got scared

Scared pill millipede. They form a perfect sphere like a conker. Amazing. I wanted to take him with me in my pocket but I didn't.

Where to start, so much has happened since my last update but I’ll keep it restricted to the best bits.

Sunset over the rainforest at St Luce

Playing with a gecko

After the last break in town, we went to the village of St Luce. It’s a collection of 3 coastal hamlets which is surrounded by extremely rare and ever dwindling fragments of pristine, littoral rainforest. Some of these fragments are protected (i.e. nothing is meant to be removed from them) and some are not. Unfortunately, in some of the unprotected fragments, there are some of the last remaining specimens of the Dypsis stlucei, a palm which is endemic to the St Luce area alone. The Azafady campsite there is gorgeous, situated in a clearing in the forest and surrounded by lots of interesting bugs. Our tasks there were seed collection from the rainforest to supply the Azafady tree nursery, community mapping interviews (to establish the attitudes of the local people towards conservation and the protected areas of forest) and tree nursery work. The tree nursery is a really exciting initiative. Azafady are collecting seeds from the endangered Dypsis (raising their numbers from 50 left in the wild to at least 300 growing in the nursery) whilst also growing alternative fuel sources so that there’s less pressure put on the remaining fragments of forest.

Rainforest

Sadly it rained almost continuously for the five days that we were there. So bad that emergency trenches had to be dug around tents. Fortunately, we only lost one tent to the rain (and it wasn't mine! hurrah!) and we were leaving the next day so it could’ve been worse. The toilets were fairly bad in St Luce and the water is a really off-putting brown colour, and smells of eggs. All in all, the team were pleased to get back to Beandry!

Kids in St Luce on the way back from collecting firewood. Hopefully not from one of the protected forests.

Kids in Beandry getting less scared of my pasty face.

Beandry now has a beautiful school (even though the wrong colour green was ordered so that the school looks more like a giant mint humbug/ice cream parlour), 40 lovingly crafted school benches and a well. Not bad for 5 weeks work in a blazing tropical sun!
What a pretty school! The night after the party. Look at the size of the speakers!


Well complete with white picket fence.

To celebrate on our last night, we hired a sound system from a neighbouring hamlet and I think everybody from all the villages within a 15km radius was outside the Beandry school on our last night! It was a really surreal night, jigging about with village elders and children while the Vengaboys was blasted out into the wee hours. When I got up to pack up my tent the next morning at 6 the sound system was still on and people were still dancing. I think a few people got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and ended up back at the party dancing away in their pyjamas, awesome.

Hands up if you love the Vengaboys!

Chef de Quartier of Beandry having a wild time with the moonshine.

It felt really sad to be leaving Beandry. We’d been there for 5 weeks in total and really got to know a lot of people. We taught one little boy, Kanesy (the cheekiest chappy in all of Beandry) how to write his name. He practiced over and over on this little piece of paper which he always kept in his shirt pocket. He was so proud of that piece of paper, he went round showing it to everybody. I can’t wait to go back in 6 month’s time and see Kanesy in his school uniform with his backpack (which will be bigger than he is!).

Kanesy (back) with his brother Nesta.

Me and Kanesy tripping the light fantastic

Our next port of call was Emagnevy where we were going to do some health and sanitation education with the local schools (hand washing song and a play on good hand hygiene) and build some fuel efficient stoves. Doing the fuel efficient stoves is one of my favourite things. It only takes a morning to build a stove. The family who’s requested the stove get really involved so that they can go on and train others how to build fuel efficient stoves, and the stoves themselves are awesome. They use a lot less wood and burn a lot hotter than an unprotected fire. You can use a lot less wood (less wood means women don’t need to spend so much time searching for wood and have more time to do other things and the fact that they use less wood is a great way of reducing the pressure on the forest), cooking times are a lot quicker and the stoves are a lot safer than the open fires which are traditionally used in the wooden houses.

Sadly, the stoves are made from a mixture of clay, sand and fresh zebu shit. These ingredients have to be mixed by hand. The smell stays on your hands for hours no matter how many times your scrub and, at the end of the day, you’ve had your hands in soggy poo all day. There were always an emotional few minutes before the first stove of the day was done. You have to properly psyche yourself up for putting your hands into the poo mixture but you just have to pretend you’re mixing crumble topping or something and chat a lot so that you forget what it is that your hands are really doing.

Mmm. Poo stove.

Mixing the awful stuff together. Happy faces.

And then we arrive at yesterday, our last day in the bush. A new camion driver meant that it took the best part of 6 hours to get back to Fort Dauphin from Emagnevy and we had to get out and push start the camion twice. But hungry and stinking, we arrived back in one piece.

One thing which has really touched me on this scheme is the immense generosity of the communities which we’ve worked in. Without exception, we’ve received daily gifts of lychees, chickens, rice, sugar cane and moonshine (which mysteriously went missing, I blame the Chef) from incredibly poverty stricken people. Everybody is genuinely so grateful for the work that Azafady has done and it’s really humbling when you get given these gifts which are worth several weeks wages. Especially when you consider that over 80% of the population are living on less than $2 a day.

So now it’s only 2 weeks til I’m back in the UK! I’m starting to allow myself to get really excited because time in town always goes quickly. In no time at all I’ll be swaddled up in thermal layers before a roaring fire (in Aviemore or at home) supping mulled wine and eating mince pies. I can’t wait! It’s been great to get so excited about Christmas without all of the usual build up. You just get really excited for seeing everybody and having a good time which, cheesy and naff as it may sound, is what Christmas is all about after all!

In some ways it's very strange to imagine the easy life that awaits at home. A life where electricity continually buzzes into our homes and water, hot and cold, can pour into our homes through tubes 24 hours a day. I know, I know, all very self righteous. But I'm wondering if my turkey dinner and all the frivolities will seem like too much of a stark contrast to the past 3 months. It is quite literally like leaping to a feast from famine. Having said all that, it is exhasuting living in rural Madagascar for weeks at a time. It'll be so nice to go home and become vaguely feminine and not have to be responsible for anybody for a few weeks!