Tonga Soa a Madagascar!

Wow! What a first week it’s been in Madagascar! I arrived here on the 22^nd, after my flight on Air Madagascar out of Johannesburg was inexplicably delayed a full 13 hours. I enjoyed the extra time there, though, and managed to kill essentially the entire second day at the Apartheid Museum. I spent the next two days in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, which was less exciting, although I did venture out the first day to a small reserve housing about nine species of lemur. That trip was also my only view of the real Tana, since I was technically staying in the small town on the outskirts that contains the airport (Ivato), rather than the city proper. The areas I saw seemed surprisingly undeveloped for a capital city, even that of Madagascar, although I’m sure it’s not the only capital where children openly pick through small landfills along the road. Rice paddies and small farms spurt from between streets of shops and houses in a striking reminder of how much of the country still relies on subsistence farming and not far outside the main part of town, the roads are made of Tana’s dry red dirt.

My second day in the city was spent angstily at the Air Mad counter at the airport, since they had stated the day before that their flight to Fort Dauphin would leave at 1:45 PM, then actually had it depart at 11:15 AM, causing me to miss it. (Air Madagascar is fairly legendary for their poor service, and are banned from flying to the EU because their planes don’t meet its safety standards.) Nevertheless, I managed to make it out on the next day’s departure and wound up in the beautiful beach town of Fort Dauphin/Taolagnaro.

Taolagnaro was a French colony (Fort Dauphin) back in the day, but now almost all the Europeans are gone and Madagascar’s Independence Day (June 26^th) is the most enthusiastically celebrated holiday, with fireworks shot off the pier, a children’s parade with lanterns, and a multitude of light-up headbands, pins, and sunglasses. Laser pointers were also a popular attraction for the night, and the little red dots danced on the walls of buildings, ladies’ behinds, and the face of a poor truck driver who made the mistake of trying to get his huge vehicle up a crowded street during the fireworks show and then had to turn around with several dozen lasers unabashedly aimed straight at his eyes. Despite the enthusiasm for the independence celebrations, however, there doesn’t appear to be much anti-European sentiment, and groups of foreigners walking together will occasionally prompt clusters of roadside children to burst out into giggles and shrieks of “Salama vazaha! Salama vazaha!” (“Hello foreigners!”) Many people on the street will use the same greeting, and any man who speaks a little English will come up to me and exhaust his repertoire before ending with a suggestion that we meet again the next day.

One of the highlights of the town is the market (Tanambao), where you can buy everything from used clothing (shopping for such is called “fripping” in the local parlance), to fresh food of every variety, to baskets and mats made of mahampy reeds in the local tradition, to medicine sold in blister packs and syringe vials on the sidewalk. All of it is at prices that would seem unreal to a Westerner. Over the weekend, I purchased two handfuls of green beans, a cluster of about 8 medium-sized bananas, 6 mandarin oranges, two baguettes, three packets of laundry detergent, and a large bottle of dish soap, all for under $4. And I confirmed afterwards that I was given much higher prices than the locals for a few things, meaning that even the foreigner rip-off price for all that still brought it to less than the cost of a frappucino. Conveniently located between my house and the market is a stand where you can purchase fried bananas, which are incredibly tasty and cost less than about five cents. As a final point of comparison, the highest denomination bill here is 10,000 Ariary, the equivalent of roughly $4.25.

Tolagnaro is surrounded on three sides by beaches, which are beautiful as well as a great place to relax. Last week, I was floating in the water with a friend only to look over at the beach and see a herd of zebu (humped cattle) being herded across it. Livestock are a pretty common sight everywhere here and chickens are especially common, running freely all over the streets in a fashion that makes me question how ownership is ever determined. Late at night, cats scream in alleys, dogs bark in the courtyard, and a multitude of unseen larger animals groan and bellow, creating a surreal cacophony.

Earlier in the evening, the bar and neighbors near my house often play music, with a variety ranging from Simon & Garfunkel through American pop and on to even Bollywood. In a house with no internet and few outlets, the only other music I ever really listen to is the selection of about a dozen albums on my phone, so it’s a welcome change.

 The house itself is pretty basic, with three bedrooms (the other two will be filled by volunteers coming next month), a dining room, a living room-type area upstairs with doors onto a small veranda, a kitchen containing a sink and gas stovetop, and a basic bathroom. No hot water and also no flushing the toilet paper. Sadly, Madagascar does not have access to electric showerheads like in Galapagos. The other disappointing thing about the house is that all the windows and doors have solid wood shutters on them to keep out burglars, which have the side effect of also blocking out almost all the light and making it quite hard to wake up in the morning. It’s not bad, quality-wise, for Madagascar, where you have remarkably nice multistory concrete houses on lots next door to shacks that are little more than boards nailed together, with a similar construction for their outdoor latrines.

My route to work takes me along a sand road and past several landmarks: the bar, a trash pile that supposedly gets emptied on occasion, a homemade bacci ball court, the intersection with the road to the market and the banana stand, a grassy hill where kids often play soccer, and finally a brief bit of cobblestoned road before the office. The trash pile is commonly picked through by dogs, chickens, and children, and even though it’s supposedly contained by a low cement wall on three sides, it ends up strewn across much of the road. Yesterday, I saw a little girl blowing up a discarded condom into a balloon.

Traditional Malagasy standards of hygiene are unusual to American eyes. While they are very concerned, culturally, with cleanliness, without the science to investigate the dispersion of microbes, their notions of what is considered hygienic are different from ours. For instance, many Malagasy prefer to defecate openly outside of the home (often on special beaches reserved for this purpose) rather than contain fecal matter within their homes, and many cannot afford to install latrines anyway. Various groups have tried to change this practice by subsidizing latrines and teaching people how to maintain them, but the defecation beach in town has yet to lose its original function.

This was kind of a long one, I know, but there’s been a lot to see this first week, and I also won’t have internet access for a while after this weekend, so I figured I should get it all out now. Veloma (goodbye)!