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!

Nice weather for ducks

The first half of our trip to Beandry is ticked off! The school is almost done and is looking really smart compared to the before picture. It’s such a satisfying feeling to see something tangible rise out of many days of sweaty hard work. The work itself has been fairly uneventful (lots of chiselling, sawing, hammering and hand mixing cement) but there’s always other random things going on in Madagascar.

Before

After. Ta da!

On one of our days off we headed to the market in the nearby village of Tsanoriha. A lot of fruit and veg, bling bling imitation American gear and woven goods. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more white in my life. You get stared at in town (Fort Dauphin) and are greeted by a constant stream of “Bonjour Vazaha” (hello white person) from passers by which can make you feel a little but like an exhibit in a zoo. However, with the QMM mining project bringing in a large number of vazahas from South Africa and
Canada, Fort Dauphin is less vazaha wary than it used to be (although the delightful “bogeyman” story that vazahas steal and eat vital organs, particularly the liver and the heart, is still believed by a scarily large number of people). The developments brought in through QMM haven’t reached into the bush and I think it’s fair to say that for the vast majority of people, the vazaha is a strange and relatively unknown beast. Especially when they drink from tubes which come out from a pouch on their back.

Pictures: On the way to market.

View of the eastern coastal plains and the mountains near Beandry.

Tsanoriha market. Do you think we stuck out much?!

Anybody for a custard apple? Sweet and appley and very cheap.

Wild pineapple (not good to eat) and lychees (very good to eat)

It was stupidly hot and humid when we visited Tsanoriha, we had warm cokes in a shack next to a policeman nursing some form of heavy firearm (very surreal), I fell into a rice paddy on the walk back, we found a black widow spider in one of the long drops (I think it’s now dead) and then it started to pour with rain.

Sheltering from the rain at the newly watertight school.

It’s been a fairly soggy episode in Beandry (more unseasonal weather I’m told, aren’t we the lucky ones?!). So soggy in fact that the tarp ceiling to our “dining room” (i.e., the tarp on the floor) split with the volume of water which collected in it over night. Construction work in the rain just isn’t fun. Trying to stay motivated and smiley when you want to whinge and gripe as much as everybody else is hard but it’s what I’m paid to do. So I thought back to the end of Day 1 of the OMM last year, realised that at least I didn’t have to run for 8 hours in this foulsome weather and ploughed on through. But enough of the weather. Brits are capable of talking about more than just weather.

In sad news, my tent is dead. A sound like ripping Velcro coming from your tent is always going to be a disconcerting noise. Especially when in the midst of a heavy tropical storm! One of my poles had snapped and ripped a huge hole in my fly sheet in the process. A bit of begging from somebody’s tent repair kit and inventive use of gaffa tape and my tent has happily been bodged back together to fight another day but I’m hoping I can purloin another tent from somewhere because I don’t fancy my tent’s chances in round two with the weather!

A really fun part of this trip to Beandry was interviewing some local kids about how they feel about the school being built. We found the cheekiest chappies in all of Beandry and asked them age, names etc and what they do in the day. One very shy and snotty seven year old said that he works in the paddy fields with his family all day. I felt my stomach drop when he said that. It’s back breaking work and the poor rice growing conditions around the village means that you don’t get much food for the energy you put in. The fact that everybody is incredibly physically fit is one thing that you really notice here. I swear the Malagasy must have bred with ants at some point because they can carry about 5 times their body weight as soon as they can walk! All you can do is watch on with a mixed feeling of inadequacy and amazement as a 10 year old child digs a 1m deep hole in the time it took you to dig 20 cm. It really does make you feel like a big fat lazy vazaha, these people are hard as nails.

The day before we were due to leave guess what?! It rained again! I think these photos say far more about the trip back than I can. Suffice to say that 4 hours when you’re wet through to your skin in an open sided camion is not really much fun. But going through the villages on the way back to town and seeing the kiddies running to the side of the road to wave and cheer at the vazahas in the plastic coats definitely helps to keep morale up.

Left: On the way back from the bush. Erika (one of the Azafady guides) and Nadira sporting bush chic. Right: Welcome party in a village we passed through on the way back to town. Inventive use of woven goods by the lad!

So here I am in town for a few days before we ship off to the bush again on Tuesday (4th November). It’s really good to be back in town but I know that after 5 days in town I’ll be itching to get back out into the bush. I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into the fuel efficient stove building, seed collecting for rare palms, teaching kids about hand washing and more grubbing about in the bush.

There’s something really calming about bush life. The routine isn’t very rock n roll (up at 5, work, eat, work some more, bed at 8 and repeat x 20) but the simplicity of it is really relaxing (when everything goes to plan). The long drops are foul beyond description (we can now smell them from 50m away), you wash out of a bucket, there’s no shade, everybody looks like a tramp and no matter how hard you try you are NEVER clean.

The team queuing for the "showers" (sheltered areas made of traveller's palm)

However, even though everybody lists their food cravings of the moment at hourly intervals (mine is currently mashed potatoes with peas sausages and gravy if you’re reading Ovy!), when you get back to town and the first sugar hit has been had, you’re wanting to head straight back out to your soggy tent in the arse end of nowhere. It’s such a great atmosphere. There’s the camaraderie of living in really basic conditions and working with awesome people who have to live like that every day and are probably more content with their lot in life than most Brits.

It’s also incredibly liberating to be somewhere completely out of the clutches of western ideals. No adverts trying to sell you crap you don’t need, no horrific magazines screaming at you to be prettier, or thinner, or richer and everybody’s always looking out for each other with a huge smile on their face. It’s a great opportunity to really think about what’s important but I have to confess, when you think about what’s important, it does make you miss it a whole lot more!

Talking of getting stuck into the wilderness, last weekend deserves a mention (my Mum’s favourite weekend of the year, the OMM weekend!). Gaz and Duncan were in 3rd position in A class of the OMM (Original Mountain Marathon, what was once known as the Karrimor) before the event was cancelled. Go team! Dad was told the event was cancelled an hour from the finish and went back to base to spend the night in the car. I think everybody was frustrated that they couldn’t finish (only 4 hours in apocalyptic rain and winds just isn’t enough for some people, strange folk). The event made the national headlines and was made to sound quite scary but I’m assured by all concerned that yes it was bad, but not so bad that they won’t be back. Hopefully I’ll be joining them in 2009, come on Chris, you know you want to!

And continuing with the good news from home both Gaz and Chris got jobs! Gaz is now the Senior Research Assistant at Abernethy Reserve where he will now officially hug trees, deer grass, blaeberry, pine martins (and if he’s lucky, maybe a stray reindeer) for a living. Good to know that one of us is getting some money in, nice one Marshall! One step closer to living the dream! And my not-so-little brother has bagged a job with the county council as a waste and recycling officer, he’s a real life Captain Planet taking pollution down to zero (I’ve got photos to prove it), go Chris!

Lastly – Gremlin, the legendary stray who has adopted the Azafady centre at Lanrirano as her home is a Mum! I’ve got dibs on the brown little guy, he’s a fighter!

Beandry and the curse of the ant.

Due to an ant taking an unexpected fancy to my left ear whilst I was happily reading under a tree hiding from the midday sun, I’ve found myself on an unscheduled trip back to Fort Dauphin. The remains of the curious ant have been siphoned from my ear canal and I’ve been given the all clear by the doc but there’s no transport back out to Beandry for a while so I thought I’d fill you guys in on all the news since my last update. My camera battery ran out half way through this blogging effort so I'll add more photos later.

So, what’s been going on since I last wrote? The pioneers arrived and the group’s getting on really well and working incredibly hard. Before the start of our first project in the bush there was a week’s orientation in Fort Dauphin and a trip to Nahampoana lemur reserve to give everybody their lemur fix. It’s a great time of year to see the lemurs because they’ve just had their babies! Ring tailed lemurs, brown lemurs and This one's for you Gaz - check out the granite! my personal favourite, the dancing Sifaka were scampering over all of us trying to grab bits of banana.

Me feeding a Sifaka. Ther hands are like little human hands and very soft!

Mum and baby ring-tailed lemur

Giant bamboo

After much oohing and aaaahing we headed off by camion* to the hamlet of Beandry. The roads were typically Malagasy, we had one minor break down (the guys only had to get out to push start us once) and we only had to get out and walk over one dodgy bridge. A promising start!

*A camion is like a converted lorry and travelling in one is about as comfortable as you imagine 4 hours in a converted lorry over horrific roads would be.

Dodgy bridge. Everybody out!

Beandry, population approximately 1000, is in a stunning setting nestled at the foot of the mountains where the hills turn into the eastern coastal plains. It’s surrounded by paddy fields, coffee trees, wild pineapple plants, zebu cattle and lychee trees. Families are generally pretty big and live in houses 2m x 3m which are made out of traveller’s palm (the Malagasy national plant). It’s very rural, very remote and very basic but everybody has been incredible at making us feel welcome. We were given a welcome gift of sugar cane and two chickens by the Chief de Quartier (chief of the village) folowed by some form of Malagasy ice breaker exercise similar to Simon Says where the unlucky people who were "out" had to stand up and dance in front of the whole village. Thankfully I managed to stay "in".

Me and Kyle introducing tea and dinner to each other

People from Beandry find Kyle's trumpet. How do people fit this into a 20kg allowance?!

Rosy Periwinkle which has anticarcinogenic properties which are used to combat childhood leukaemia. Also a puncturer of ground sheets.

The kids are adorable if they’re not scared of you! A toddler took one look at me, screamed, burst into tears and ran into his house. I was probably the first white person he’d ever seen. However, a smile and “salama” from a vazaha is normally enough to send a group of kids into fits of hysterics. It’s tragic to think that 1 in 5 of those kids won’t make it to their 5th birthday. We’re in Beandry to build a school and a closed system well. Both of these things will hopefully go a long way to reducing the infant mortality rate in Beandry and giving the kids an education which will make so many more opportunities available to them.

Very welcome inpromptu stall

When I left Beandry the wooden super structure of the school was up, they were due to start on the floor and foundations and it was looking pretty good! The kids had kindly set up a refreshment stall near the construction site selling fresh pineapple and cokes which were pretty welcome after doing hard labour in the obscene tropical heat.

<--- Working hard!

The heat is one of the things I’m having big issues with at the moment. There aren’t any thermometers but it gets so hot that you can’t stay in your tent between 7 – 4. No chance of a lie in! Even sitting still in the shade you're pouring sweat. I’m assured that it’s unseasonably hot for this early on in the summer which is good to know because I can’t imagine it can get much hotter!

As a treat for all their hard work we had a bush party for the pioneers. We ate a ridiculous amount of food: chips, cassava fritters, salad, zebu, chicken, eggs, fruit salad and banoffee pie bush style (heated up condensed milk caramelizes to make a great toffee substitute!). A group of dancers from the next village came to our campsite, and along with the whole of Beandry, the rum fuelled (Bush Mechanics) vazahas jigged about and learned the steps from the local kids as best they could to the crazy fast rhythms kicking up dust clouds in the twilight. Nobody was allowed to sit it out, everybody was filthy, sweaty and drunk, all very memorable, great fun and all by the light of a single light bulb run off our bodged generator. Who needs a telly.

Go vazahas go!

Tonga Soa Fort Dauphin

I can’t believe I’ve been here for over a week. Landing a week ago and all the things that have gone on since then already seems like a long time ago. Madagascar does a weird thing to time. On the one hand, time goes incredibly fast. But whenever you go back home, it feels like you’ve been living in a parallel universe for the past few months and time stood still while you were away!

Fort Dauphin/Tolagnaro by air. The last photo my poor camera took before being abandoned.

The week didn’t get off to a good start with me leaving my camera on the plane. I was so excited to get out and explore that I left my camera on my seat, what a fool. However, proof if ever it was needed that the Malagasy are heroes, they found it and kept it for me! They did insist that I had my photo taken with the guy who found my camera though. It’s a great photo I’m sure you’ll agree.

This week I’ve mainly been exploring my old haunts in Fort Dauphin, getting to know my neighbourhood, Bazarikely (little market) and getting to grips with every day living here. It’s really different living here to being a pioneer. Trying to figure out what to do about food is the biggest thing. Nowhere does sandwiches, it’s too hot for soup and I’m scared the salad will rot my insides. Crisps and doughnuts it is then!

The crash-pad aka the stables.

I’m living in the Azafady “crash pad” where the long term volunteers are staying which is about a 5 minute walk from the Azafady office and literally a stone’s throw from Matt’s place. Good bathroom (with a shower and a throne toilet! Yahoo!), big kitchen and a huge lounge/dining room area. Electricity and water supplies are sporadic but big buckets are kept full and candles are there in case of emergency! I’m living there with Katie (Lemur Venture Coordinator), Mel (Lemur Venture Assistant Coordinator) and Diana (English teacher from the states). It’s a bit like living in student halls, people always coming and going and always somebody to talk to which is really cool. Especially when they have very similar mind sets to you and their boyfriends are also on a different continent.

View from my window.

On Monday we had a torrential tropical storm. I wish I had had my camera with me and it wasn’t sat in the airport so I could show just how dramatic it all was. There were HUGE hail stones the size of marbles, the rain came down in stair rods and within 5 minutes the roads had been converted to frothy rivers. The water was lapping at our doorstep in no time and we had to shout in our kitchen to hear ourselves over the noise of the rain on the tin roof. I think some modifications will be necessary before the rainy season, that or inflatable furniture.

The rest of the week has been less dramatic but no less exciting. I’ve been exploring the beaches, sussing out where to eat and where to buy food etc and chilling out before my first load of Pioneers arrive on the 4th October.

<---Libanona Beach

I was a bit apprehensive about market day. My Malagasy is next to non-existent and my maths isn’t fab either. However, I came out with a goodie bag of locally grown tomatoes, green beans, onions, pasta, a big wooden spoon, a new sarong, some rice and a marginally improved understanding of Malagasy. Go team!

So far highlights have been going out for THB and rum when I first arrived at Escale and Las Vegas followed by escaping the clutches of local men at Gina’s (the local nightclub), “family Sunday dinner” at Chez Perline (a great place to eat which looks like an outhouse but does an amazing zebu spag bol), eating brochettes for the first time in over 2 years (they are just as good as you remember!), going back out to Lanirano where the Pioneer campsite is (note to old pioneers, it has changed so much! So many new buildings. But good news, Gremlin is still there and it looks like she is pregnant!), chilling out at Libonona beach, catching up with Brett, Matt, Claude Yvon, Harey, Dino, Jimmy and meeting a whole new bunch of friendly faces who have been great at taking me under their wing, answering my hundreds of questions and showing me the ropes.

Big bug

It’s pretty much been one long party! Nights out, meals out, hanging out on a tropical beach, sweating and getting excited for the start of work! Bugs in the water tried their best to ruin the week and my birthday but I still managed to go out for a tasty meal at Filao and stuff down a twix and some cake whilst watching Bridget Jones’ diary. Who said being sick can’t be fun?!

View of the back of the office from my annexe