Leaving This Island

Self-portrait, October 15, 2012.

Written October 24, 2012

Dupont Circle, Washington, DC

    About a year ago in Fort Dauphin:

    Israel hummed to himself as he graded Seconde tests.  Harry lay stretched on Israel’s bed, dead asleep under the shroud of the yellow mosquito net.   Paul and Monica sat across the table from Israel, and I was on the couch, examining photos from the VAC meeting the night before.  Clear white sunlight poured through the windows, enhancing the pink and blue of the concrete walls.

    “You know sometimes you just think about leaving?” Paul mused.

    “What?” I said, faintly alarmed.  “You mean you’re thinking of ETing?”

    “No, not seriously,” he said.  “Just, in theory, you ask yourself, ‘If I called up Peace Corps right now, how long would it take before I got back to the States?  How long before I could go from sweating in my house in the desert, to... sitting on the couch in my parents’ house, watching football, with a big bowl of ice cream?’  Ya know?”

    How long?

    Fifty-three hours.  Two days and five hours to get from my site to Tana to Paris to Dulles and past American customs.  And then the drive home, so I guess fifty-four hours before I could technically recline in front of a TV with my dessert of choice.

    Yep, Peace Corps really pulled out the stops to get me home.  I guess it made sense for the staff to use the day as a drill in case something were seriously wrong.

    The first step was leaving on the very first flight out of Fort Dauphin.  The first person I informed was Desmond, as he was feeding the pigs at sunrise.  He was surprised, but bore the shock with typical Gasy stoicism, nodding gravely.  He went upstairs to tell the others.  I overheard them,

    “Éric’s going back to America,” Desmond said, but met only skepticism.

    “What, Desmond!  He is not!  How easy do you think we are to fool?”

    “Go ask him yourself,” Desmond said indignantly.

    But no one came until Mme Josy left for work an hour later.  I told her I was leaving and she got an expression I’ve never seen anywhere else: one of incredible somberness, colored with anger, and just sheer strength, the strength one feels when looking at a cliff face, or a gigantic cast-iron bridge.

    And I reflected on my year having known her, and it all reaffirmed my belief that she is the strongest person in all of Manambaro.

    “Mampalahelo,” she said simply.  It makes one sad.  And she was very sad, I think, but it wouldn’t be proper to let it show.

    I talked to the twins too, as they were leaving for school.

    “Don’t worry, Éric,” Fafa said.  “We’ll be back for lunch and we’ll say a proper goodbye then.”

    But we didn’t, because I left the house at 9:30.

    I stopped by the market too, to see Jeannot and his wife and Marie, who sold me greens day after day.  Jeannot wasn’t stoic about it at all, the shock spreading across his face like cracks in a frozen pond.  But then he recovered.

    “Éric, you remember you promised to send me that photo you took of me?”

    “Yes, I remember.”

    “And a TV.  Right?  A nice American TV?” he joked.

    He’s one of the few villagers who knows where the line is about asking me for stuff, how to actually kid about it.  I’ll really miss his humor, his perceptiveness, and his generosity with his wares.  The first time he gave me a free egg, just one egg, I was touched.  And the eggs and tomatoes and beans and onions and ginger continued from there.

    And then I was on the taxi brousse, a yellow one, my backpack and my camera bag stacked on my lap so I couldn’t see directly ahead.  I noticed that for some reason the driver boarded people four to a row, instead of the usual five.  A small blessing, but it makes a world of difference.  We left Manambaro at ten, which is when I started the count.

    I met Monica at the Kaleta.  She came from Mahatalaky as soon as she could to see me off.  We headed to Paul’s, which used to be Israel’s, the house in back of the lycee with the Peace Corps logo splashed seven feet wide across the doors.

    And the three of us hung out for half an hour, soaking up the sunlight and breezes of this wonderful beach town.

    Monica and I both went to the airport.  On the way the taxi had to navigate through a herd of scraggly zebu.  The afternoon was aging by the time the plane arrived from Morondava.  We hugged goodbye, and the south was behind me.

    Dodo, a Peace Corps driver, met me at Ivato Airport to get me to the office as quickly as possible.  Sheila and Chad whisked me through the formalities at the office, warmly and efficiently, and another driver took me right back to the airport.

    I had a dinner of brochettes at the airport restaurant, with a milkshake, that turned out to be a strange French concoction of fruit-flavored milk.  That’s one thing I won’t miss in the US, French interpretations of American dishes.

    Boarded the plane to Paris, and up, and over Kenya, South Sudan, Chad, Libya, and the toe of Italy.   The France I could see out the airport windows was dreary, but refreshingly familiar.  Oaks, not palms.  Nicely paved roads, tidy buildings, square fields, the spire of the Eiffel Tower somewhere out in the mist.

    And on the next flight the Americans were chatting in English and any French were silent.  The food was excellent, typical in every way of Air France.  British Airways is very good, SAS is terrific, Lufthansa is wunderbar, but I think Air France may be my favorite airline, simply because of the cuisine.  And the wine, which the flight attendants will literally dispense like water.

    Over England and Ireland, then Newfoundland, and back into American airspace.  The orange-red sky was dimming as we descended to Dulles.

    My father met me at the gate.

    Route 7 heading west was smooth as silk.

My Decision for Medical Separation

Written October 19, 2012

Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris

    I have decided to leave Madagascar.  It is not likely that I will return in my capacity as a PCV.

    I have weighed the consequences of this decision carefully.  It pains me severely to leave behind my friends, my community partners, Peace Corps staff, and especially my fellow Volunteers.  However, I do think that Medical Separation (“med-sep”) is the best option for me at this time.

    I wish all the best for Peace Corps Madagascar, especially the Volunteers in the south of the island.  My heartfelt thanks go out to Tovo for helping me with my Health duties, and also to Leif and John Reddy for running things so well, day after day.  I’d also like to thank Dr. Chad and Sheila for guiding me through the medevac process, and staying at the office long after hours to see me on my way.

    I’ll miss all of you.  It’s time for me to go now.

The Peak

Felicia and Solavy hug halfway up the north slope.

The view of Fort Dauphin's northern bay from the summit of Pic Saint-Louis.

This was one of the last raspberries growing by the side of the trail.

The grasshoppers here are as luridly colored as the ones in Florida.

Wind erosion has shaped some of the mountain's rocks into unusual forms.

Christian and I try not to get blown off the top.  Photo by Felicia.

Felicia and Wes stand atopthe very highest part of the summit.

From here you can see the unpaved road, designated as a national highway, that goes north all the way to Vangaindrano.

Written October 12, 2012

Manambaro

This post is dedicated to Andy Kiser and Marion Chamberlin.

A while ago, on my father’s advice, I wrote a list of places I want to see in Madagascar before I leave here.  Most of them are in the south, since I’ll need considerable time and coin to get north of Mahatalaky or Antanimora.  Since I’ve already determined that I’m not going to be able to see the whole island, I might as well focus on getting to know my own area thoroughly.

So when Felicia, in town for a post-COS surfing extravaganza, invited me on a climb up Pic Saint-Louis, the mountain that towers above Fort Dauphin, I jumped at the chance.  It also gave me a chance to spend a few days with Wes, “guy time,” as he calls it.

For the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday we just relaxed in the Mahavoky Hotel, and watched movies while Felicia got her fill of surfing at Monseigneur Beach.  Thursday morning we got up at five or so, had a breakfast of street pastries, and met up with four Gasy guys.  One was our designated guide, Christian, only 17 or so.

It took us a while to even get out of town from the hotel.  The sun broke rosy pink over the beach.  We took the road towards Mahatalaky, approaching the mountain from the north.

We might have missed the trailhead if the Gasy guys hadn’t been so familiar with the route.  It was little more than a path that led into the sugarcane by the side of the road.  We fairly sprinted up the trail in our eagerness, despite it being pretty steep, through head-high grass, over boulders and along watercourses that had been carved into the earth.  It was easy to see how a tourist, or anyone unfamiliar with trailfinding, could get lost on this face of the mountain.

The view became more and more astounding as we climbed.  I slowed us down by stopping to take pictures.  Unfortunately, seeing the town from on high means that you get a full view of how much QMM, the titanium-mining concern, is working behind the scenes.  They have three different... settlements?  sub-divisions?  bases?... let’s call ‘em housing areas, with immaculate streets, manicured lawns, and rows of identical houses, just like you’d find in America.  Of course these areas are surrounded with trees and chain-link fences to hide them from view of the general population.  It’s just a touch sinister, how artfully they hide their business of turning mountains inside-out.

Not this mountain, though.  As we approached the top, the trees thinned out, and the wind came upon us in full force.  I had to secure my hat to my backpack so as not to lose it.  The summit itself is a bare dome of rock, with decades of climbers’ graffiti scrawled on it.  The wind was so intense we had to shout to hear each other.  But the panorama from the top is unparalleled.  You can see all the way to Saint Luce to the north, all the way to Italy Bay to the southwest, and a good ways past Manambaro to the west.

We descended the lee side of the mountain, a longer route, but not quite as steep.  The trail goes along a spine of smaller peaks and delivers you an easy distant away from the town’s streets.  We passed raspberry thickets and plenty of traveler’s palms.

Once in Fort Dauphin, we all parted ways.  Wes and Felicia were planning a luxurious lunch at one of the vazaha restaurants, and I had to get home.  After a quick meal at HK, I got on the taxi brousse and was on my way back.

There are still more than a dozen destinations on that list.  Evatra Peninsula, Faux Cap, Andoahela National Park.  How does the song go?  Climb several mountains, ford one or two streams?

NO!  EVERY MOUNTAIN, EVERY STREAM!

And now you’ll have The Sound of Music stuck in your head.

The Sea of Emmess

This board represents the opening of the combat scene from Blight World.

We had a fire a safe distance away from the Trano Be building, which has burned down twice already.

Ellen with the guinea pigs she bought in downtown Tana.

Written October 8, 2012

Manambaro

Update: This situation of not being able to post my blogs normally is driving me out of my head.  Blogger keeps telling me I can’t save or publish anything, but when I keep trying it looks like my stuff actually does get posted, but I keep getting the same error messages saying it isn’t posting...  So whatever.  I plan to e-mail all future posts to myself and then post them from an Internet cafe, instead of the Kaleta.  This may mean that posts will become less frequent.

Halfway there.

Of course I said I was halfway there when Kelsey left, and September 16 was the exact midpoint of my service, but one event concretely marks the median of Peace Corps service: Mid-Service Conference.

I flew out of Fort Dauphin on the 23rd.  Seeing my stagemates at the meva was great, as was having some decent bandwidth for a change.  Only a few people went out that night, since we had to get up early for the trip to Mantasoa.

That place doesn’t seem to change.  Same sturdy buildings, same almost-American-quality food.  Same summer camp smells of earth and pine trees and lake water.  So clean and boreal that the mosquito nets on the beds are almost an affectation.

Instead of the usual schedule of tutorial sessions, the staff introduced us to Open Space Sessions, where everyone is free to show up to the sessions that interest them.  We were free to leave at any time, and to attend as many sessions as we wanted, or none at all.  At first I dismissed the idea as a load of hippie nonsense, but it actually works quite well.  I went to sessions on fruit-drying, gender equality, behavior change theory, and raising chickens for meat.  

All of the lessons were interesting; the fruit-drying seems like it would be the most attractive to the people in Manambaro.  Every year bushels of mangoes go to waste because people simply can’t eat them all.  We could construct solar driers cheaply from wood and plastic sheeting.  Unfortunately, the mangoes need to be pre-treated with a honey mixture, and honey is expensive around here.

If I can price all the components, construct a solar drier of my own, and some examples of the finished product, then I plan to talk to three families who sell fruit in the market.  There are many stories of Volunteers teaching everyone in their town about making and selling some new product; when it comes time to sell the product, it’s almost worthless, because everyone has already made some.  These three families should be adventurous enough to try building the driers for themselves.  From there, the knowledge should trickle outwards to other fruit merchants and other towns, like the knowledge of cake-selling that started in Ampasia.  In fact, if the three families don’t take to the mango-drying I might try to interest the women in that village.

There’s not much time, either.  Unripe mangoes are filling the markets already, for people to make a kind of salad out of.

Having our entire stage back together in Mantasoa meant that I could finally debut Blight World, the tabletop role-playing game (RPG) I designed.  I drew it up back in April, when the thunderstorms kept me inside.

So you don’t know what a tabletop is?  Think of Dungeons and Dragons.  Don’t know what D&D is?  Okay, think of it as playing pretend like you did as a child, only with rules so that everything flows smoothly.

The setting I chose is post-apocalyptic America.  The nine players role-played exiled soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Texas.  They started in Waterloo, Virginia, and decided to head south to seek favor with the Queen of Carolina.  On the way they had several treacherous river crossings, and then, outside of Lynchburg, they were ambushed by a horde of cannibals.  They escaped the savages, but Kimball’s character died covering the rear.  That was probably the most hilarious part of the game, when Private Farris was getting mauled and the others were blasting away trying to mercy-kill him, only they kept rolling the dice so badly they kept missing.  After a turn of that, he whipped out his pistol and committed suicide.  Just as well, he was losing so much blood he’d have died the next turn anyway.

After the battle we called a halt, but we picked up the next night.  The characters came to Greensboro, the Carolinian capital, and ended up foiling a plot to assassinate the queen.  Ellen came in as a non-player character (NPC) to be the assassin, and Sally provided the denouement as the gracious queen.

I had never expected that I’d get the maximum number of players, let alone that the game would go as well as it did.  So now it looks like it’s on me to make up another one for COS Conference.

Thursday afternoon we went back to Tana.  All our mandatory sessions were at the Peace Corps office there.  Along with the standard Financial and Safety and Security sessions, we had two guest speakers from the Embassy come, to inform us about the general situation in Madagascar.

In short, things ain’t good.  I’m sure I can’t go into very much detail without stepping on some State Department toes, so I’ll just leave it at that: things ain’t good in the land of rice and lemurs.  They’re not, ya know, horrible, or Peace Corps would already be gone, but still...

The weekend was pretty relaxed.  I tried to stay at the meva and not spend too much money, but I did anyway.  It’s hard to be among a group of friends like that and still live like a monk.  Saturday night we went to a Thai restaurant, and followed it with a fancy Sunday brunch at a French place.  The brunch was delicious, though.  It was worth it just for the berry smoothies.

On Monday I had my dental exam at the Seventh Day Adventist clinic in Tana.  The dentist there, Dr. Luis, is Brazilian, and one of the best dentists I’ve ever been to see.  He wasn’t patronizing when giving me teeth-cleaning advice, just matter-of-fact.  No cavities, by the way.

I could make up a poem, “Whence the Adventist Dentist?” but it’s too hot to be witty right now.

I got back to Fort Dauphin on the 2nd, and planned to head back to Manambaro immediately.  But as it had for the past few days, the need to be social got in the way.

Caveman Days

Written September 10, 2012

Manambaro

Update: Blogger appears not to be able to publish my blog posts, for some reason.  When I tried to publish my post about my vacation on Friday, it didn’t go through.  Maybe I need better bandwidth than the Kaleta’s?  Or has Blogger decided to limit blog posts to 1000 words and not tell anyone?

    All I know is, something ain’t working and I blame Google, who owns Blogger.  I already “upgraded” to yer stupid browser, that was supposed to fix the problem!  Are you just picking on me because I got my computer in 2008?  Geez, sorry I’m not some yipster* who buys a new MacBook Air every six months.

    I give you a month to get things working, or I switch to another blogging site!

*Yipster: (portmanteau “yuppie” + “hipster”) a mid-20s to early 30s working professional, typically in the software industry, who is determined to stay “on the cutting edge” of technology, even if it means purchasing a brand-new laptop at insanely frequent intervals.

    So now begins my second year in Manambaro.  I’ve resolved to make some changes in my habits, basically loosening up with my attitude towards money.  Before, I wanted to save up as much as I could for Kelsey’s visit.  And she visited, and it was fantastic.  Now it’s over, and I don’t really anything special towards which to save.

    I thought about doing a giant, months-long circuit of Madagascar’s coasts after COS, but I calculated that would take more money than I’d been able to save before.  Even bringing in my savings from the States would only bring it within the faintest reaches of practicality.  It’s like a puzzle.  Three options,

• Live comfortably at site
• Take a grand vacation post-COS
• Have money when you get back home

and you can only pick two.  Really, the second option might be a trick, what with the chance that a good 40% of the journey might be spent on hot, cramped, camions-brousse.

    The only thing on which I can really spend money down here is food.  So that means, goodbye veganity!  I’ve resolved to start drinking a glass of powdered milk per day, and eating beef on Sundays and Tuesdays, when I can be sure it’s been butchered fresh.

    I cook the meat over charcoal, with the kebab skewers my parents sent me.  I figure it’s one of the best ways to make sure it’s cooked thoroughly.  When the meat looks ampy nandoro, sufficiently burned, I just gobble the meat off the metal while the rest of my lunch is cooking.  Yeah, burned my lips a few times.

    Meat good.  Good for man make fire, cook meat.  Man get strong when eat meat.  Man learn how cook meat very good, then cook meat very good when go home to woman, make woman happy.

    The first two times the meat was unseasoned, which I think of as “Stone Age style.”  You could serve it up at a French restaurant, call it “boeuf à l’âge des pierres.”

    The third time, yesterday, I tried marinating the beef for two hours in THB.  So now we’ve progressed from the Stone Age to the Copper Age, combining meat with beer, then roasting it.

    What were my ancestors doing during the Copper Age?  Probably chilling on the banks of the Upper Danube, hunting and fishing and the like.  And warring, probably, flexing their muscles to overrun everything to the west in the Bronze Age.

    Wes intrigued me with talk of a “caveman workout,” based on the idea that even in our earliest days humans had to purposely work to get stronger.  It’s perfect for Madagascar, because it mainly involves lifting rocks.  No fancy gym equipment.  He showed me the workout plan that he uses, and I’ve been following it as best I can.  Already seeing some results; I think I’m also already to the point where I have to exert myself regularly or my brain misses the endorphins and I get cranky.  The thing is definitely a two-edged sword.

    But hey, I’m already in the best shape of my life.  And Wes is starting to look like an Eighties action hero (compliment, dude!), so if I can get half as strong as him I will be thoroughly satisfied.

    My friends and I finished Lord of the Rings and followed it with Hotel Rwanda.  I wanted to show them that if anyone tells you to kill someone else because they’re a different tribe than you, put down the machete and walk away.  Fortunately I don’t think any kind of ethnic cleansing could ever happen in Madagascar.  This corner of Madagascar anyway; I’ve heard there’s a lot more tribal animosity up in the northwest.

    Side note: Hotel Rwanda is better than Schindler’s List because it’s basically the same story, but in Africa.

    We still had some battery left on my laptop after the movie ended, so I gave then the option of choosing what we’d watch next.  Dollhouse is a Joss Whedon series about programmable humans and Game of Thrones is the greatest fantasy story of the 21st century.  We watched ten minutes of each.

    Ten minutes of Eliza Dushku racing motorcycles and dancing and generally being hot versus ten minutes with a little violence and Peter Dinklage talking.

    I asked them to choose.

    “Tro-nes,” they said unanimously.  “We want the Tro-nes.”

    And the Halfman wins again.

Hell On Wheels

Trans Denis workers load baggage at the Tana station.

Dawn light breaks across a peak in the highlands near Ihosy.

The grasslands near Betroka are striped with burned patches from brushfires.

A view of the savanna south of Betroka.

Written September 6, 2012

Manambaro

    The brousse ride from Tana to Fort Dauphin is an ordeal that every Sud-region Volunteer has to go through sooner or later.  The vehicles that make the trip are huge camions-brousses, like school buses with much more heavy-duty suspensions.  Even though the transport companies respect the rule of one person, one seat, the journey is cramped, dusty, boiling and chilly by turns, and three days long.

    After leaving Kelsey at the airport I went to the Peace Corps meva for the night.  I spent the next day there relaxing and taking care of minor business.  Travis and Adam introduced me to the latest in catchy American music-- which unfortunately turned out to be the amazingly brainless pop hit “Call Me Maybe.”

    The morning of the 25th I got to the southern Tana brousse station in time to board the Trans Denis brousse.  I was in the most ideal spot, two seats behind the driver.  Minimum shock from bumps in the road.

    We drove all day through the highlands and even made it past Fianarantsoa before we stopped for the night.  When there are no hotels, you sleep right where you are on the brousse.  That was the chilly part, until they turned on some kind of heater in the brousse, which made it stiflingly hot.  When we woke up, some of the women in my seat row decided they wanted their kids to sit with them, so instead of five people in a row we had six, plus four little kids sitting on their mothers’ laps.  This arrangement squeezed me so that my legs were immobile, but faced with Malagasy mothers’ attachment to their children I was helpless to complain.

    We had breakfast in Ihosy, then turned off the paved road onto Route Nationale 13.  Long, hot, dusty.  The brousse could rarely go more then 30 miles an hour on the rocky track.  Two of the towns we passed through, smack in the middle of the desert, had paved streets and sidewalks that looked as modern as those things get in Madagascar.  Perverse relics from when the government prepared to pave RN13, right before the 2008 coup sent everything out the window.

    We stopped in Beraketa for the night.  The drivers were determined not to go any further because of bandits.  This time I got out of my seat and went to sleep on the dusty porch of a closed-up restaurant.  I was genuinely happy to have so much space to sleep in, even if it was on the ground.  That night actually turned out to be one of the highlights of the journey.

    The drivers from other brousses that had stopped joined us in a convoy through bandit territory, and we got through unmolested.  When we got to Ambovombe most of the passengers disembarked, and I had the whole row to myself.  After that it was a breezy six-hour ride over comparatively better roads to Fort Dauphin.

Sipako (My Girlfriend)

An indri peers down from the trees in Parc Mitsinjo, Andasibe.

A Parson's chameleon in Parc Mitsinjo.

Tame lemur at Vakôna Lodge: "Oh no, how did I get on top of this human?!" 

Kelsey and I relaxing in Tamatave.

The main path and palm trees at Hotel La Baleine.

The Haute Ville neighborhood in Tana, with the Rova palace.

The museum area at Hotel Sakamanga. 

Kelsey and I get ready to head to La Varangue from Alyssa's house.

Written August 28, 2012

Fort Dauphin

    When I got to the Hotel Zenith in Tana I almost wept for the hot shower.  It’d been a long trip up from Fort Dauphin.  I was hungry, filthy, sleep-deprived, and mad to boot from dealing with Tana cab drivers.

    After a long shower, a shave, and a nap, I went out to find some food.  The lack of restaurants around the Zenith means street food.  I explored the back alleys until I found a group of men clustered around a food stall where a cook was slinging rice, greens, and pork onto plates.    For 800 a plate (40¢), I was happy to ignore the risk of food-borne pathogens.

    Feeling pretty good, I walked to the BNI bank on the Avenue de l’Independence to write a check and withdraw enough cash to get Kelsey and me to Tamatave.  The bank teller, a well-dressed Chinese-Malagasy, seemed to have trouble believing that I was a law-abiding resident of Fort Dauphin, not a fraud-hungry stereotype of a foreigner.  The copy of my passport wasn’t enough for him, and I hadn’t brought any other ID.  After giving another sample of my signature, I wound up essentially bullying him to give me the money.  Luckily, that tactic worked.

    ...And left me walking through the most pickpocket-infested neighborhood in Madagascar with 550,000 in my breast pocket.  I kept my hand over the cylinder of bills and walked quickly, and made it back to the hotel without incident.

    Matt Sims, a Volunteer from Manakara, was staying in the room next to me.  Earlier we’d found out our girlfriends were on the same Air France flight.  He’d gotten to Tana the day before.  We got a taxi to Ivato Airport, figuring we could save money by going before dark.  Of course, the downside to that plan was that it left us with five hours with nothing to do but watch the Olympics in the airport restaurant.

    Women’s Lightweight Tae Kwon Do: a blonde Frenchwoman handily beats her Egyptian opponent, only to be demolished by a stone-faced Chinese.

    As 10:00 came and went, I stared through the windows of the restaurant onto the tarmac, while Matt jostled with the crowd around the Arrivées gate.  About 10:45, just as I was turning to leave, the Air France plane whooshed in.  Giddily I ran to join Matt.

    His girlfriend Angie came through the gate promptly, but it was midnight by the time Kelsey appeared.  I didn’t see her come through the doors and she didn’t see me either.  She appeared behind me, radiant in a white sweater and pink pants, with two rolling suitcases in tow.

    Some time later, for the first time in over a year, I drifted to sleep with my girlfriend in my arms.

    We woke with the sun streaming in from the windows.  Time to brave the streets of this rat’s nest of a city.

    We went for brunch at Cookie Shop, an “American Bakery” owned by a Malagasy woman who lived for a number of years in DC.  The food is heavy, but that can be a nice change from feather-light French pastries.

    Kelsey mentioned she’d like to withdraw some money of her own, so I led us toward the BNI bank.  Very bad decision, putting someone on her first day in Africa through the chaos of downtown Tana.  Surging crowds, beggars, traffic, exhaust fumes, broken sidewalks, gabbling merchants everywhere.  And most of all the pickpockets.

    About halfway to the bank, a woman stopped Kelsey and pointed to her purse.  A clean slice marred the gray nylon.  Her iPhone was gone.  We raced back to the safety of the hotel.

Luckily the thief had left her passport and wallet.  Kelsey called Sprint over Skype and was able to place a restriction on the phone.

    That evening we met up with some Volunteers and went to Country Director John Reddy’s house for a reception.  The food was spectacular: mini-hamburgers, kebabs, spring rolls, cakes, pies.  Everyone was excited to meet Kelsey.  Until I introduced her, many just assumed she was another Volunteer they hadn’t met before.  A dozen of us sat in the living room and watched more Olympics on John’s flatscreen.  I tended the fire in the brick corner fireplace, the perfect thing to ward off the cold of a highland evening.

    Men’s 200-m Kayaking: Netherlands takes first, Russia second, Germany third, Senegal a woeful dead last.

   We headed east, over the insular divide and onto the eastern slope of Madagascar’s mountains.  It was my first time taking a Zone Nationale taxi brousse, one that goes directly between major cities instead of stopping at every village.  It was surprisingly pleasant, even luxurious.  Probably because the drivers observe the rule of one person, one seat, instead of cramming five or six people into one row.  They’re also noticeably cleaner than the regional brousses.

    The trip took us past clusters of European-style houses perched on the steep hills above emerald green terraced rice paddies.  Bare cliffs of red earth loomed where villagers mined clay.  Towns that were little more than two rows of buildings either side of the road whizzed past.

    At Moramanga, we transferred to a regional brousse to Andasibe, where we checked into Hotel Feo’ny Ala.  There are a few buildings with standard hotel rooms, but most of the hotel’s space is individual bungalows.  Feo’ny Ala means “song of the forest,” and the name is accurate.  Depending on the time of day, you can hear the indri calling loud and clear.  Indri are the largest species of lemur, and are known for their echoing, otherworldly cries.

    A light but demoralizing rain started, so we stayed in our bungalow the rest of the day, resting up and watching Game of Thrones.

    We walked into Andasibe ville the next day, and spent a few hours walking the town’s unpaved streets in the drizzle.  I observed that this must be what medieval England looked like: the mud, the pigs, the clapboard buildings, significantly more churches than schools.  Lest you think that I look down on Madagascar for being like this, it’s more that I despise its highlands for being so cold and rainy.

    In the afternoon we stepped over to the Parc Mitsinjo to see some wild lemurs.  An English-speaking guide, Milo, was already about to begin a circuit with Alex, a Swedish tourist, as his only guest.  Alex must have been at least six-foot-six, and carried a Nikon with a similarly imposing Sigma telephoto lens.  Milo began by showing us a few chameleons perched in the trees around the park entrance.  

He also explained how teams of foresters work hard to keep the park free of eucalyptus.  The French brought the tree over from Australia during colonization.  Since it sprouts and grows so much faster than native trees, it’s highly invasive.  And that explains why, in many areas all over the highlands, it’s the only tree you can see for miles.

    The colonists also imported pines from Europe, but these are relatively benign.  Some types of lemurs have even adopted pine shoots as their favorite food.  In fact, these were the kind we saw first, gray-fronted brown lemurs, gamboling around the evergreen branches like fluffy, super-dextrous cats.

A little further on, a troop of indri began calling.

    “EEUUUUUUU, EEUUUUUUURRIP, EEUUUUUUUURIP, EEEUUUUUUUUU...”

    We ventured off the main trail towards them, picking our way through thick trees and vines.  And then, up in the canopy, we spotted them looking down at us, like black and white teddy bears with too-small heads.  When they moved, however, they seemed more powerful than cute.  They’re the size of dogs, a little smaller than my family’s husky, Anya.  They leap from tree to tree as easily as a human walking on level ground; most of the trees are too spindly to support their weight, so they only light on them an instant before bounding to the next one.

    The rain picked up, preventing us from getting more shots of the indri.  I turned to Milo.

    “Should we be concerned about leeches?”  I’d read that during showers forest leeches will appear, and crawl up hikers’ legs.

    He looked at me with surprise.  “Of course!”

    But thankfully there were no leeches when we checked ourselves back at the bungalow.  That evening we sampled brochettes, small cuts of beef roasted on a skewer, from a street vendor.  I thought the meat would have been safe, having been sufficiently cooked over a charcoal fire.  But some lingering microbes must have gotten to Kelsey, and kept her in bed the next day.

    While she rested, I asked around for a driver to take us to Vakôna Lodge, an isolated, super-fancy forest resort that has a tame lemur sanctuary.  I found a local man, and he agreed to take us at three.  Kelsey recovered enough by then, so we went.

    Once at the lodge, a tidy place built on an artificial lake, it took us a while to find the lemurs.  A ways downhill from the resort and the lake dam is a marsh, where, instead of in cages, they keep the lemurs on an island.  Hence the unofficial name of the place, Lemur Island.

    The crossing to the island is maybe twenty feet by canoe.  You get in the canoe, and one paddle stroke later, you’re there.  You could probably wade across if you had to.  Lemurs must really hate water.  

    Yet a short distance away from the boat landing were four balls of black and white fur, smaller than the indri, but bigger than many terriers.  Ruffed lemurs, named for the fringe of fur around their heads.  They sat on a low fence, apparently so accustomed to humans that they didn’t even look up when visitors stroked them.

    There were two other types of lemurs, identical but for one kind’s black face mask.  They seemed ambivalent towards us, hopping through the trees and play-fighting on the ground, but always keeping a small distance.  Their long bushy tails glowed in the afternoon light.

    Then one of the guides approached and began offering bits of banana.  It was as if a switch had been flipped; they seemed to stop viewing us as fellow animals and start viewing us as ambulatory trees, ones that they had no trouble climbing on to get to the fruit.  And once they had the fruit, they were happy to hang around on our heads.  One planted itself on my shoulder and started licking my backpack strap intently, sensing some residual sugar or salt.

    I was hesitant about the whole excursion at first, until I found out that the residents of Lemur Island have been rescued from illegal captivity, and were unfit to be released into the wild.  The chance to see lemurs up that close guilt-free puts Vakôna Lodge at the top of my list of things to do in Madagascar.

    From Andasibe we took another Zone Nationale brousse to Tamatave.  The last time I went down that serpentine mountain road I had to blindfold myself to keep from getting sick.  This time, though, we had dramamine.  Unfortunately, that also meant we were operating in a fog of drowsiness.  We checked into the Lionel Hotel, a low-key backpacker’s place, and took it easy until the stuff was out of our systems.

    How to describe Tamatave?  I got a better look around this time than when I was there during Tech Trip.  It reminds me of what a town in south Florida would look like if a lot more of the buildings were made of cheap concrete, and a lot of those were crumbling.

    The weather was certainly Floridian.  A perfectly sunny sky would cloud over, and then a driving storm would commence, all in less than an hour.  These cloudbursts came several times a day and left the streets awash, like an African Venice.

    We killed some time at the beach, and took a long walk around some of the back streets.  But really, the city wasn’t much more than a stopping point before we continued to Île Sainte Marie.

Île Sainte Marie is a small island northeast of Tamatave.  It’s widely considered to be the most beautiful spot in all Madagascar.  It’s a major tourist hotspot, attracting beachgoers, hikers, scuba divers, equestrians, and fans of pirate history.  In August, scores of humpback whales pass the island on their migration south, attracting even more visitors.

    To get there we booked with Cap Sainte Marie, a company that does bus and ferry transfers from Tamatave to the island.  The bus picked us up at five in the morning from the hotel, along with a quintet of French girls with stereotypically shiny new backpacks, and a distinctly unweathered look about them.  The bus’s shocks were ill-suited to the rough road to the ferry crossing at Soanierana-Ivongo.  The area through which we drove was rich with history, filled with forts and battlefields where the Merina monarchs had striven to quell the unruly Betsimesaraka tribe in the nineteenth century.  Not that we could see any of these sites from the road.

    After a hassle of presenting our passports to the Soanierana gendarmes (yeah, maybe if you write down our information often enough it’ll seem like you’re actually policing this country), we boarded the ferry.  The wide-bottomed craft puttered out of the harbor canal and into the ocean surf, pitching up and down, spray covering the windows.  We felt so safe, though, it was almost boring.  The crossing took an hour and a half and we napped for part of that.

    At the harbor in Ambodifotatra, the island’s main town, we looked for a taxi to Hotel La Baleine (“the whale” in French).  Fortunately, we ran into the hotel’s owner first, who was offering free transfers in his pickup.  He led us through the hotel’s restaurant to another bungalow, perched atop a small hill.  Luxuriant palm trees shaded the path.  

    An inviting white beach presented itself in the mornings, but in the afternoons the tide would rise to cover the sand and lap at the very foot of the hotel’s patio.  A dock extended about two hundred feet from shore, apparently having been cobbled together after the last one had been annihilated in a cyclone.  The water was shallow, only about six feet deep at the end of the dock at mid-tide.  Israel said the underwater shelf extends for half a mile, lush with coral and schools of fish, then drops off sharply.  When he and Steph went snorkeling past the edge, he said he had a sensation like falling, panicked, and dashed back to the shallows.

    We hardly went swimming, just enough to cool off from the sun.  We could have gone whale-watching, kayaking, or done any number of such activities, but we were content to just hang around the hotel and relax on the beach.

    Even with such liesse our three days on the island flew by.  On the ferry ride back to Soanierana I glimpsed a whale on the horizon.  The black curve of the back made it look more like a sea serpent than a mammal, then there was a club-shaped plume of spray and it dove again.

    Cap Sainte Marie had overbooked the bus back to Tamatave, and for some reason they had chosen Kelsey and me to take a taxi brousse.  God forbid any French tourists get their perfectly moisturized hands dirty taking local transport.  So the ride was cramped and miserable, like most regional brousse rides.

    What really ticked me off was how Cap Sainte Marie refused to give us even a partial refund.  When I criticized them for not coordinating between their two offices, the woman in charge made excuses, then got huffy.  I’ve encountered this problem before in Madagascar.  If you admonish businesspeople for not working in a professional manner, they get indignant, all but asking, “How dare you hold us to the rest of the world’s standards?”

    Our second time in Tamatave we checked into the Hotel Génération, just across the street from Lionel Hotel, but twice as fancy.  The receptionist recommended the Hotel Océan d’Or for dinner, so we decided to check it out.  The hotel was evidently Chinese-run from the red characters adorning the roof.  At first glance the restaurant was quite fancy.

    But you don’t usually find televisions in fancy places.  They had just one, but it was playing the movie Splice.  And Frankenstein-inspired horror films do not make the best dinner entertainment.  A Malagasy family sitting behind us was entranced, however, while a cluster of Chinese businessmen were too deep in their conversation to pay attention.

    Then our food arrived.  My shrimp hadn’t been shelled, and Kelsey’s chicken was mostly bone.  We picked our way through the meal anyway, but as Splice ended and started playing again, I asked them to put something else on.  So we got music videos of Miley Cyrus, and a French girl who must be the Gallic counterpart to Miley Cyrus.

    Back at the hotel we used the WiFi to watch HBO’s Girls, a series I highly recommend.

    The next day was the long brousse ride all the way back to Tana.  Our vehicle kept stalling, and every time it did the driver would fix something just enough to get it running again.  On a back street in Tana, however, the engine finally died.

    We got a taxi to the Hotel Sakamanga, supposedly the coolest hotel in the city.  And it lives up to that promise and then some.  The building is a refurbished French mansion that somehow clung to life in downtown Tana while all others like it were being torn down.  The halls are decorated with traditional farm tools and weapons, along with tapestries and vintage posters.  There’s even a small museum area downstairs, with framed French periodicals about the conquest of Madagascar.  Everything is vibrant and artsy, without ever being overdone.

    The hotel’s restaurant, speakeasy-like behind a plain brown door, was equally impressive.  We had a fantastic meal of eel and salad, with Chilean wine and chocolate fondu for dessert.  When I insisted on dipping the mint garnish into the fondu, Kelsey sighed.

    “I can’t take you anywhere.”

    We were so full we fell asleep almost immediately after getting back to the room.

    After a buffet breakfast with too much sugar and too little protein, we checked out.  Alyssa, the CDC doctor I worked with on the Androy mission, had invited us to stay at her place in the Ivandry neighborhood, just a block away from Peace Corps HQ.

    Alyssa’s husband Ryan let us in, and gave us a brief tour of the place.  We dropped our luggage and went out to do some sightseeing.  We bought some souvenirs at the Analakely covered market.  It was early enough in the day that the place wasn’t too crowded, and this time we weren’t carrying anything worth stealing.

    That evening Ryan showed us how to play darts in the garage as we waited for Alyssa to get back from work.  We had a wonderful dinner of chicken, broccoli, and quinoa.  It was great to see Alyssa again, and to finally meet Ryan.

    For Kelsey’s last day we went up to the Rova, the Merina royal place at the highest point in the city.  Both the palace and its museum were closed.  Museums always seem to be closed in Madagascar.  Nevertheless, guides were hanging around the entrance, looking for tourists they could show around the neighborhood.  One, Elia (wait, like the princess of Dorne?), cornered us and talked our ears off about how the Chinese and the French were ruining the country.  We finally got away and had lunch at the Grille du Rova restaurant.  When we came out, Elia was waiting for us, and we practically had to run to get away from him.

    We wanted to go to La Varangue for dinner, the fanciest restaurant in the city.  Their head chef is ranked the fifth-best in the world, or at least she was back in 2008.  We had enough cash to afford their menu, so we figured, why not?

    Because neither of you know how really fancy places work, that’s why not!  Despite our having dressed up as nice as we could, the concierge turned us away.  What we could see of the restaurant was small, just a waiting area with couches.  A staircase led up to what must have been the dining area.  The place had the same vibe as many around Virginia, the kind with pretensions at English gentility.  It must have been reservation-only.

    Instead we went to Café de la Gâre, a restaurant in Tana’s now-defunct colonial-era train station.  Much more low-key, and the only place I’ve found in Madagascar that knows how to cook a decent American-style cheeseburger.

    We got to the airport without any trouble and checked Kelsey’s luggage.  We sat together in an out-of-the-way area near the restaurant until it was finally time for her to leave.  We said goodbye.  I wish I could say I watched until I lost sight of her in the crowd, but something must have distracted me.  She was just gone.

    Right.

    Now for the rest of this Peace Corps thing.

Roll in my sweet baby’s arms

Roll in my sweet baby’s a-a-arms

Well, I’ll lay ‘round the track till the mail train comes back

And I’ll roll in my sweet baby’s arms.

-- The Acoustic Burgoo

Admin Update

Written August 23, 2012
Tana

    Hey, y'all.  I know my posts stopped coming back in July, but I've still been writing them.  I've posted the five that I've had backlogged.  Google, who runs Blogger, stopped supporting Firefox as a browser, forcing users to upgrade to Chrome.  I'm not happy about it, but such is progress.  Y'all see if I don't start a social movement to freeze all technology at 2007 levels, in the manner of the Amish.
    So a post about Kelsey's and my vacation will be up soon.  Thanks for reading; I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

The Case for Voluntary Extinction

A woodcutter walks ahead of me on the road to Marovato, north of Manambaro.

Written August 2, 2012

Manambaro

    One week, half a day, and about an hour until Kelsey’s Air France flight lands at Ivato in Tana.  Can Peace Corps blame me if my mind’s not really on Health right now?

    Despite this monumental distraction, I’ve been making some good progress in Manambaro.  My malaria awareness project is off the ground; even though much fewer people attend the meetings than I’d hoped, those who do come seem pretty enthusiastic about learning the workings of this disease.  I’ve switched the topic of my usual CSB health talks to family planning, provoking slightly more interest from the women who show up there.  I’ve started up an English club, which I’m calling the Secret English Club, because I’m trying to keep it as small as possible.  And I’ve drawn up  a plan to bike around to the outlying villages to give specifically tailored health talks once a week.

    And I’ve also been waging a sort of cold war with a certain group of children.  Cold on my end, hotter and hotter on theirs.  Now that schools are on vacation, kids have taken to playing soccer in the open area near the road reserved for the cattle market on Tuesdays.  The older ones, young teenagers, form teams in the dust, while about two-score littler kids sit on the walls and watch.

    Not content with watching the game, some of the latter have remembered the fact that I dislike being called vazaha, and I flat out hate it when someone asks me for money.  As I walked past one day five little boys started calling, “Omeo vola, vazaha!”-- “Give me money, vazaha!”-- to my back, of course.  Big mistake to turn around and glare at them; even though I only glowered, it confirmed that they could get a rise out of me.

    And the crowning touch on their little game is that I already lost my cool with a fourteen-year-old.  I had to appeal to local government officials to try to counteract the fallout from that incident.  How much worse would it look if I laid hands on an eight-year-old.  The kids know this, they know that I know this, and they know there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

    “Oh, Eric, you’re overreacting.  They’re just kids, they just want to amuse themselves.  They don’t realize how much the word ‘vazaha’ irritates you.”

    On the contrary.  I’ve never held with the “oh, they’re just kids” viewpoint on these matters.  Are children not people, with minds?  Can they not draw conclusions based on previous observation?  Do they not give in to the baser instincts that afflict the rest of us?  They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it out of sadism.

    Fortunately, I have gained the upper hand.  I have been ignoring them, and getting better at it.  Dealing with these kids is like the aphorism about nuclear warfare: “The only way to win is not to play.”

    Some of the kids have gotten the message, but not their leader.  I don’t know who this boy is, but it’s always the same one, yelling, “O-ME-O VO-LA VA-ZAHA,” as loudly and clearly as he can.  Every time I walk past without acknowledging him only makes him more determined.  What did I ever do to this kid?  Was it his brother whom I attacked before?  More likely he’s just a bored, ignorant, ill-behaved worm who sees me as a target, a big person whom he can bring down to make himself seem bigger in front of the other urchins.

    Well, he should forget about me while I’m on vacation.  And if he doesn’t, he still can’t keep up the taunts forever.  And if he can, well, I won’t be in this town forever.

    So ha, kid.

    I went into Fort Dauphin on the 27th to pick up  a package, and see Tatum and Wes.  Tatum had just brought a load of books back from her site, so I got some new reading material.  My choices were a quartet of Stephen King short stories, a Barbara Kingsolver novel, a collection of short stories from a Nigerian author, a memoir of an American living in Rome, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver.

    I picked up the last three and opened Kevin.

    Ten hours later I was wishing I’d selected Stephen King instead.  That way maybe I would have gotten more sleep that night.

    It’s one of the most unnervingly scary books I’ve ever read.  The narrator is Eva, the titular Kevin’s mother.  So what looks on the cover like a long mope about the drudgery of raising a son actually reads like a masterfully crafted horror novel.  Many books and movies have taken the “child of Satan” premise literally, but Shriver takes an entirely down-to-earth look at the question, “What if you had a child who was, simply and without exaggeration, evil?”

    Answer: people would probably die, sooner or later.  No, Kevin doesn’t kill people as an infant.  He works his way up the ladder of malicious teasing and reckless endangerment, until at fifteen he commits mass murder at his high school.  What’s chilling is how he plans the act to the last detail, studying previous school shooters’ fumbles.  And throughout the book I was amazed at the amount of brainpower the character uses to harm others and deftly avoid getting caught.  In fact, I would venture to say that Kevin Khatchadourian is one of the best-conceived diabolical geniuses of modern fiction.

    Shriver also brings up some cutting points about the very concept of childbirth.  If we in the developed world (y’all in the developed world, reading this) don’t need children to help us farm or take care of us when we get old, why are we still having them?  Contraception and self-sterilization have become some of the easiest processes in medicine.  Children are expensive and time-consuming.  And considering how destructive and ravenous we are as a species, isn’t it possible the planet would be cleaner and more peaceful with fewer humans in it?

    Korea, Japan, and Brazil know what I’m talking about.  But America’s birthrate still remains at 2.1, according to National Geographic.  Let’s get on this, people!  Only we can phase ourselves out of existence, thus ensuring that the world will be a better place... for the legions of Nigeriens and Malagasy who will show up to fill the vacuum.