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.

Decisions, Decisions

Written July 23, 2012, 20:00

Manambaro

    “You were really good at magnosying, Éric, I saw you.”

    I was at Clotilde’s stand buying bananas.  The price was high, but I’d waited til late in the afternoon, and she was the only one with bananas left to sell.  Golden-orange light threw shadows over the twos and threes of people standing by the road, relaxing away the last of the daylight.

    “So you know how to magnosy, and you also know how to harvest rice.  And planting rice is even easier.  You should become a farmer!” she announced happily.  “Marry a Gasy girl and live in Manambaro!”

    Tempting.  No credit card bills, no student loan payments.  No contrived scandals-of-the-week from Fox News.  And the peasants here are no more ignorant (proportionally, all factors considered) than the rednecks in Berryville.

    It would be like doing Peace Corps for the rest of my life.  I wouldn’t forget how to live healthily, and I could be a shining example to the whole town.  Wash your hands, cook your food well, don’t make your wife do all the work.  Plan your family so’s ya don’t wind up with fourteen squalling urchins and no way ta feed ‘em all.

    But then... I’d probably have to give up video games.

    And I rather like video games.

    So no deal.

Fanambadiana dra Mpanjaka ny Piratra (A Wedding and Lord of the Rings)

Written July 23, 2012, 10:00

Manambaro

    Back in October I got the idea to show movies to my friends on my laptop.  I thought it could be a constructive activity to teach them English by going over vocabulary words that they probably wouldn’t have encountered in school: “princess,” “sword,” “poison,” “swamp,” “miracle.”

    The first film was The Princess Bride.  The closest I could come to translating “Rodents of Unusual Size was voalavo lehibe hafahafa: “crazy big rats.”

    Afterwards came Princess Mononoke, 28 Days Later, District 9, Avatar, Kung Fu Panda, a Season 4 episode of True Blood, and all the episodes of Firefly.  The English lessons got swept away as I realized that none of my friends had no desire to mix school with this heretofore unrivaled level of entertainment.  We watched one just about every week.

    But nothing prepared them for Lord of the Rings.  Twelve hours of hobbits, heroes, monsters, battles, walking trees... all set in the impossibly grand landscapes of New Zealand.  My laptop only holds charge for an hour, so that means the trilogy runs almost as long as the fourteen Firefly installments.

Right now we’re right before the Battle of Helm’s Deep, where the old man fires the first arrow.  It’s interesting to see what rural Malagasy teenagers make of historically accurate medieval European weapons and armor.  Throughout Madagascar’s history the Antanosy have prided themselves on being a peaceful tribe.  Their cousins, the Antandroy, were much more warlike, but as far as I can tell they never fought with armor or even shields.

    But then, it’s not like the Madagascan school system is a stellar example for teaching history.

Watching the soldiers prepare for Helm’s Deep, Desmot asked, “Why don’t they have any guns?”

    Of course the movies are in English, with no subtitles.  So it falls to me to explain the finer points of the story, like how Faramir is Boromir’s younger brother.  The rest of the action is more or less self-explanatory, to a point.  That doesn’t stop my friend from interpreting the films in their own way:

    The orcs are biby, “animals,” just like the zombies in 28 Days Later and the aliens in District 9.  The Uruk-hai are “the Rasta guys” because of their long hair.  The elves are “the really white people.”  Gimli is ny boribory, “the round one.”  Gandalf is “the old man.”  And Gollum is ny zaza ratsy, “the bad child.”

    I tried to explain the differences between the races, to little avail.

    “The ugly ones are orcs.”

    “Wucks.”

    “And the pretty ones are elves.”

    “Evvs.”

    And then they went back to calling them biby and olo tena fotsy.  But a certain dichotomy did not escape Rodin:

    “So the blackish guys are evil and violent.  And the white ones are good and generous?”

    Yes.  You are not the first to comment on this aspect of Tolkien’s work.  Not a very unifying message coming from a Peace Corps Volunteer.

    They’ve enjoyed all my movies, but Lord of the Rings has reached a whole new level.  I promised I would charge my computer on Friday so we could conclude The Two Towers.  I was biking into Fort Dauphin to check for a package at the post office.

    That was before the twins’ grandfather, Dadabé, invited me to a wedding in town on the same day.  The wedding would leave me too little time to do any Internet, so I left my laptop at home.

After I finished my errands in town I biked to the Ivorano neighborhood, in a depression near the northern salt marsh.  I had no address for the wedding, so I just wandered around until I met Fafa on the main stone-paved road.  He led me up a dirt road to a cluster of houses where dozens of people were gathered, packed tightly into what must have served as a yard.  I had a change of clothes in my backpack, but Fafa and Dadafara ushered me to a seat before I had time to protest.  I spent the whole ceremony in the tank top and shorts I rode in in.

    The families sat under awnings, facing each other with a space in between.  Every so often the bride’s father would ask for music or more drinks, and the groom’s father would grant the request beneficently, in a ritualized way.  I stuck to Three Horses Beer, but they had several 20-liter jugs full of toaka gasy, unspeakably foul moonshine.

    Of course they killed a zebu, right behind where the bride and groom were sitting.  The beast was silent as they cut its throat, and the butchering process continued unobtrusively as the guests laughed and danced just feet away.  Every so often someone would come away holding an armful of viscera or other organs.  A child carried away the intact head by the horns, still dripping gore.  They chopped the bones apart with wood axes, no easy task.

    Unfortunately, the butchering took time.  I had to get back to Manambaro before dark, so I begged my leave with utmost politeness,

    “Look!  The vazaha is leaving!”

    and had a late lunch at HK, the halal restaurant Israel showed me right before he left.  It’s fast food, in the sense that one hardly has to wait for the 75¢ plates to arrive.  It’s straightforward Gasy fare, usually beans or greens over rice, but it’s not bad at all.  They’ve even started putting some cumin in the beans, a very daring move in a normally bland cuisine.

    There was no Lord of the Rings that night, because of the wedding.  But now that I’ve written this blog post we’ll have charge.

    Let the saga continue!

Magnosying

Written July 18, 2012

Manambaro

    “Éric, do you already know how to magnosy?” Brigitte asked.

    I was buying a coffee and some breakfast cakes at her stand by the road, about to leave for Fort Dauphin for the weekend.

    “Of course, it’s not that hard,” I replied cockily.

    At least, I imagined it wouldn’t be that hard.  I hadn’t actually done any yet.

    Magnosy is the Malagasy verb for tilling a rice paddy by driving a team of zebu through it. Their hooves churn up the mud, stamping old rice stalks down and aerating the ground for new ones.  One can also do it by hand with a hoe, but it takes about five times longer.

    Someone must have heard my overheard my boast; when I got back to Manambaro, one of the farmers, Gilbert, came to my house to ask for my help.  We agreed on seven on Tuesday, but I couldn’t work long because I had to be at the CSB at eight for my weekly health talk.

    So I woke up early on Tuesday and went to find Gilbert at his field near the main road.  People were already beginning to filter in for the Tuesday market; they must have started walking before dawn to make the four miles from Karamena.  The air was chilly, but still pleasant enough.  Gilbert and another guy in yellow shorts were already working with a herd of ten zebu.

    I left my jacket, shirt, and boots on the bank and climbed down into the mud.  Several of the market-goers stopped.

    “What’s that vazaha doing?  Is he going to magnosy?”

    Yes, I am.  Got my cow-beatin’ stick, my ragged fieldwork shorts, and a hat to keep my head warm.      Completely barefoot.  Time to out-peasant alla you peasants.

    The object of magnosying is to get the cows to stay together, and to keep them moving, round and round the field, all morning.  At first I kept a distance from the cows, whacking them with my stick to get them to move.  But then I realized, they’re just cows.  Sure, they got hooves and sharp horns, but they’re so stupid and docile, you can pretty much bully them any way you want.

    Gilbert and Yellow Shorts weren’t afraid in the least.  They’d shove any cow who stopped with all their strength, yanking their tails forward too.  Mud was splashing everywhere.  Yellow Shorts was more intense about the work, more likely to tackle a cow bodily and wrestle it forward.  Several times I actually saw him bite the zebu on their humps, gnawing like a leopard.  Human teeth can’t pierce cowhide, though.

    As a side note, in western Madagascar they actually practice zebu-wrestling as a sport.  You can drive the cow wherever you want, but can you pin it to the ground?

    After a while I started shoving ‘em too.  Much more satisfying than smackin’ ‘em with a stick.

“Ya!  Git!”

    And the Malagasy, “Huh!  Heyeh!  Hujuh!”

    And once Yellow Shorts leaned down close to one and roared, “HO’EZAAA??”  (“WHERE YOU GOIN’??”)

    We must have walked two miles in half an hour through that mud.  Sure gives your thighs a workout.

    At 7:50 I took my leave.  And I had a plan.  You see, I haven’t been satisfied with the number of women at the CSB who actually pay attention to my Tuesday health talks.  I thought I might affect a change in this trend, with some help from the Saul Alinsky playbook.

    Back during my senior year of high school I read Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals.  I thought I might be able to get my classmates to start caring that President Bush was... well, emulating Warren Harding more than FDR.  That plan did not go so well.  

    But one of the few things I remember from the book was, Don’t be afraid to use unorthodox methods for community organizing. To think outside the box, in more modern terms.  As an example, Alinsky wrote about how he met with a hundred or so Latino leaders in Chicago at a banquet.  He teased them for serving overly traditional dishes, that no one actually eats outside of such ceremonies.  The community leaders took it well, pleasantly surprised at this insight into their culture.  Alinsky admitted he’d taken a risk with this tactic.

    They haven’t been listening to me dressed nicely.  What happens if I show up shirtless, barefoot, and covered in mud?

    But first I had to get to the CSB.  So I had to walk through the now-crowded marketplace.

    “It’s the vazaha who was magnosying!”

    “Éric, were you magnosying?”

    “Éric, I saw you out there, you magnosy well!”

    Yeah, y’all go on and be amazed.

    Dorée, the midwife at the CSB, was shocked at my appearance, but Dr. Jean-Claude just chuckled.  He saw exactly what I was trying to do.

    I talked about family planning, using pictures to illustrate the concept that having a child every single year is bad for the mother’s health and also for the family’s financial standing.  Too many mouths to feed equals not enough money.  Not enough money means not sending kids to school, which virtually guarantees that the cycle of poverty will continue unto the next generation.

    At the end of the presentation, though, nothing felt different.  Same number of women who listened, same number who stared off into space.  Nobody asked questions.

    Well, at least I didn’t have a negative impact.

    This outcome suggests that the women of this area don’t care about appearances at all.  Even covered in mud, I’m still an outsider delivering a wildly new message in clumsy Gasy.

    But the thing I’ve learned about Peace Corps is that if you spend too much time worrying about whether you’re making a difference, that anxiety will just drag you down.  Better to make sure you have fun in the process of it all.

    And chasing those cows was fun.

The Anti-Vacation

The blue line represents the 2012 rate of malaria in Androy compared to 2011, in red, and 2010, in green.

Alyssa reviews patient registers with the midwife in Andalatanosy.

The midwife and her husband, the Chef CSB, invited us for lunch.

A cluster of houses in Bekopiky Sud.

Laura and Hermann conduct a verbal autopsy with Bekopiky Sud villagers.

Hermann delivers new medical stocks of medicine to a CSB outside Bekily.

Many of the rural Antandroy still wield traditional weapons, like hatchets, javelins, and zebu-hide slings.

Alyssa enters data during a power failure in Bekily.

Hermann and Perlinot examine the plant samples from the ombiasa.

A street view of the hospital in Bekily.

A Verreaux's sifaka peers down from a neem tree at Berenty Reserve.

Written July 9, 2012

Manambaro

To make better sense of the geography in this post, it might help to look up south-central Madagascar on Google Maps.

For more photos from the mission, go to www.oxanddolphin.blogspot.com

    I wanted a change from Manambaro.  I got it.  Two weeks of nonstop work researching a deadly pathogen in the harshest landscapes this island has to offer.  A thoroughly satisfying experience.

    First, a bit of background on this mission: in late January the Malagasy Ministry of Health (MOH) began getting reports of many more malaria cases than normal around Bekily.  The malady spread southward to Andalatanosy, Tsiombe, and Ambovombe.  To have any more than a scattering of malaria in the Androy region was alarming-- mosquitoes tend not to flourish in the desert.  Yet now it appeared to be enveloped in a full-scale malaria epidemic.

    In cases like this, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sends a team to verify whether the on-the-ground data really does indicate an epidemic.  If so, the team gathers further information to help other US government agencies, like USAID and Peace Corps, prepare a counterattack.

    The team in this case were Doctors Alyssa and Laura.  Laura had just finished a fellowship with EIS, the Epidemiological Information Service, while Alyssa was a CDC veteran.  They had asked for a Peace Corps assistant in order to have a translator and extra set of hands.  Sammy, our driver, is a Tana man, and so my Antanosy would be closer to the Antandroy dialect than his Official.

    We started west from Fort Dauphin on the 22nd, stopping to pick up some fruit in Manambaro.  We made it through Amboasary unmolested and were in Ambovombe by mid-afternoon.  We rendezvoused at the hospital with the three Gasy doctors from Institut Pasteur who would be helping us, Hermann, Perliont, and Marcel.

    After collecting all the data we could in Ambovombe, we set off immediately the next day for Antanimora, going further away from the coast and into the parched savanna.  In the early mornings the desert around Ambovombe creates fog in the low places; when the sun hits the mist it looks like a huge, shimmering lake.

    Our work in Antanimora dealt with the cases of malaria in Vohitsova, a smaller village outside of town.  Rocky ground, bristly grass, and cactus everywhere.  At night we slept on the floor of the Antanimora CSB.  I learned quickly that our schedule was going to be like that on board the USS Iwo Jima: rise at five, work all day, and go to sleep at eleven.  Eight hours of sleep?  Whatta you, a convalescent?  You’ll take six hours and be thankful for it.

    On the other hand, I think there was more food on the Iwo Jima.  Yummy MREs, 3000 calories all to myself...  Even if our schedule had allowed us time for a sit-down lunch, we were out in the bush.  The one time we relied on a local to make us rice we ended up waiting two sweaty and nerve-fraying hours.

    From Antanimora we continued north to Andalatanosy, the kind of town that must have once existed in the American West.  Ramshackle buildings on either side of a dusty street running out to either horizon.  Gigantic trucks trundled past, taking the place of wagon trains.

    We arrived in the middle of the Vingt-Six ceremonies.  June 26 is Madagascar’s Independence Day, the biggest holiday of the year. We tracked down the CSB midwife at the mayor’s house, where the various chefs fokontany (headmen of smaller villages) were gathered.  The mayor received us warmly.

    The men turned to walk to the town square, hurrying us along, too.  We passed through a thick crowd of schoolchildren and into the speakers’ pavilion, draped with red, white, and green.  A man was already in the middle of a speech, but he finished quickly to allow the mayor to make his.  The mayor hardly mentioned us, the “foreign visitors.” (“vahiny avy andafy”)  Several officials came after the mayor, each taking the opportunity to remark on how auspicious it was that foreigners had shown up for the Vingt-Six celebration.

    Finally, a health official took the podium and made a speech.

    “We all know that fever is a problem in this town.  But when someone falls sick in the family, too many people do the wrong thing!  They go to the church to pray, or they go to the witch doctor!  Neither of these things will help!  You need doctors, not witch doctors!”

    I was impressed, specifically about the mention of the church.  The Gasy are usually a lot more delicate about Christianity.  I guess this guy was just fed up with so few people seeking help at the clinics.

    He motioned for us to stand up as he introduced us: “Éric,” “Law-ra,” and “Alish.”

    After the ceremony, Alyssa and I did some house-to-house work in the village of Bekopiky Sud, seeing how many households had mosquito nets, and what shape these nets were in.  Most villagers don’t sew the holes in their nets, either because they don’t know they should or they’re too poor to afford a needle and thread.  Laura and Hermann did a verbal autopsy on a child who had died weeks before, asking a series of detailed questions to see if the cause had been from malaria.

    From Andalatanosy we continued on to Bekily, which presented something of an enigma to me.  It is literally in the middle of the desert, yet it’s noticeably larger than the other desert towns.  There’s a river, but it’s too shallow for boat traffic.  It’s not on RN13, the north-south road.  I don’t know how old the town is, but maybe it was once so far away from anything else that it served as a refuge in war.

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) chose Bekily for their Madagascar headquarters, specifically because it’s so isolated and in need of help.  The French doctors founded a hospital and brought in Gasy counterparts.  

    When we first arrived, the MSF team invited us to their living compound for dinner.  The doctors were Delphine, Valérie, Kévin, Caroline, Cecile, Élizabeth, and Milton.  Milton was the sole Canadian.  He was whip-thin from a recent bout of schistosomiasis.  From him, Laura realized something.  If malaria was rising in the region, why not other other water-borne parasites like schisto or Leptospirosis?  The latter can even cause symptoms easily mistaken for malaria.

    The dinner was a savory fish stew served over potatoes.  The French have many flaws, but their cooking is ever superb.

    They even let us use their guest house, more comfortable by far than any other place we’d stayed.  It was much like a Scandinavian summer home, with a high roof and lofts for sleeping.  No decorations or chairs, but there were soft beds and running water.  In the mornings we met with Élizabeth for strong French coffee and tartines.

    Other doctors joined our team: Solo and Entsoa were also working for CDC, and Andry was with the Ministry of Health.  We covered a fair number of villages around Bekily: Tsikolaky, Anjata, Antsakoamara, and others.  More verbal autopsies and house-to-house net inspections.  But these villages held a secret.

    Especially in Anjata, we found that traditional medicine holds sway over modern methods.  When stricken with malaria, villagers almost always go to the witch-doctor, the ombiasa, before they travel to the nearest CSB.  On one level, it makes sense; to get to the CSB takes hours by plodding cow cart over miserable, rutted dirt tracks.  Every village has an ombiasa, or at least someone who claims to be able to heal with herbs.

    The health official in Andalatanosy talked about the ombiasa in his speech.  The difference here was that the ombiasa around Bekily take a more sinister approach than merely administering cures.  The ombiasa tell the villagers that Western medicine means death: “If you take pills, you’ll die!”  “If you get a shot, you’ll die!”

    And the villagers, never having set foot inside a classroom, believe them.  Magic is a part of life in these settlements.  In Anjata we found women wearing charms around their necks, and smearing their children’s heads with clay.  One house had an amulet of carved sticks above the door, while other houses were painted with a ring of gray mud.  All these rituals are to fend off malevolent spirits.

    Since they know that outsiders frown on what they do, no ombiasa would reveal himself to a white person.  Luckily, while Alyssa and I were busy elsewhere, Perlinot was able to persuade one to point out which plants he uses to treat malaria.  He produced two bunches of herbs and a length of root.  When crushed and boiled, the plants give a bright yellow potion.   In the wrong dose this mixture is fatally toxic.  We took samples of the plants for analysis, to see if they really do counteract malaria.

    On the last day in Bekily I came down with diarrhea and chills.  Alyssa and Laura, being doctors, insisted that I rest and hydrate.  They wouldn’t hear of me getting up to help them.  Thankfully I mostly recovered by evening.

    The next day we pulled into Ambovombe.  While Alyssa and Laura collected fresh statistics, I went to find some souvenirs.  

    Heading back to Fort Dauphin Sammy asked us, “You want to see some lemurs?”

    He turned onto the dirt road that led to the Réserve Privée de Berenty, a very expensive wildlife park and resort.  This is the kind of place that’s designed to isolate foreign tourists from the fact that they’re in a developing country: hot baths, graded walking trails, gourmet food, and lots of tame lemurs.  A van runs between the park and the Hotel Kaleta in Fort Dauphin.

    At the gate was a scowling guard carrying a big black machete.  I’d wager the management told him to carry that machete specifically to scare the tourists:

    “Ohmigod, you guys, is he gonna, like, chop our hands off or something?  I’m, like, freaking out, you guys, this is just like Blood Diamond.”

    ‘Swhat I’d do if I ran a resort in Africa.

    Sammy knew that while the van from Fort Dauphin costs €200, admission for day visitors is free.  We stopped there for only half an hour, but that was all we needed to see a troop of Verreaux’s sifakas in the treetops.

    We crossed the mountains, the barrier between desert and greenery.  After miles and miles of savanna the valley looked incredibly lush and inviting.  

    We returned to Fort Dauphin with a few hours to spare before Alyssa and Laura’s flight back to Tana.  We set up in the lobby of the Kaleta, and made use of the time to enter more data, preparing the presentation that would go before USAID.

    Around three o’clock, after stepping outside for fresh air, Alyssa came back in grinning.

    “It’s breathtakingly beautiful outside.”

    Laura went to see the view over the bay in the golden afternoon light.  Sapphire water, snowy beaches, and the majestic mountains as a backdrop.

    “Yeah, you’re never going to be able to leave a place like this,” she told me.

    “Probably not,” I agreed.