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)!

The Voice of the City

There were several things that I never actually posted about while I was abroad because the posts were long and involved and I just never got around to putting everything that I wanted to say into an entry. But some of them are worth sharing, and I've been thinking about some of these things lately, especially since everyone else has been posting so many Ecuador photos on Facebook, so I think I'll see about back-posting a little bit now.

Whenever people ask me what my favorite thing about Quito was, I can only ever think of one answer: the graffiti. I spent hours walking and driving around the city looking for more of it. I was captivated. Obsessed. The messages are simple, but frequently poetic and thought-provoking. Some are musings on romance, others on society. If you want to feel the discontent underlying city life and the hypocrisy of the current government, the writing is literally on the walls...

[Feel free to correct any of my translations or notes. Most of them have been discussed with Ecuadorians, but it's been a while.]

In Quito...

..."the walls are the voice of the city."

"I admit I'm just another Mahuad."

When I arrived in Quito, the upcoming elections were generating a lot of writing and Lasso (candidate for the CREO party) was a favorite target. Jamil Mahuad was Ecuador's president back in 2000, during one of Ecuador's worst economic crashes. Widely blamed for the country's problems, he narrowly managed to dollarize the economy before being deposed in a military coup less than a month later. Ecuador's continued use of the dollar even in the current climate of Correa's highly anti-American rhetoric is a testament to Mahuad's forward-thinking presidency, but his decision is often viewed as an imposition that Ecuador is now unable to free itself from rather than a move that may have saved the country. Nevertheless, Lasso's similarities to Mahuad generated a lot of support during the elections from people tired of the status quo. He also received support from many poor students in Galapagos, who hoped to see the end of the Correa policy preventing students in public universities from having free choice of study subject.

"I believe in the banking bailout."

CREO (the party name) is short for Creando Opportunidades (Creating Opportunities), but it also means "I believe."

 

"12 Oct 1492: nothing to celebrate"

I encountered this particular phrase several times around Quito. October 12, 1492 was the day Columbus first made landfall in the New World.

This may be somebody just being creative with the spelling of "que", but I believe that it was actually made by a grafitero group called K, who are notable for posting questions around the city. Their trademark is replacing the Q in question words with a K and I did see several other examples of work that was undeniably theirs around the city, although sadly, I don't have any photos of it. K is notable for being one of the older grafitero groups in the city, active at least since the 90s.

"Legal abortion now!" "Penalize the patriarchy" "Decriminalization." On the left, similar sentiments continued, although I was in a bus and couldn't photograph them all. Other abortion-related graffiti occurs frequently around the city, with phone numbers purporting to offer safe abortions being a common feature.

"The impossible just takes a little longer..."

"El Comercio
Bonfire of yesterday
Slander of today
Ash of tomorrow"

Underneath ceniza someone has written 'zorra', which means a female fox ("bitch"?), but looks like it may be a signature in this case. In any case, El Comercio is a large newspaper in Quito, and like most Ecuadorian media, it is far from uninfluenced by the party in office...

Another that I wrote down but couldn't photograph was "Si compras el Comercio, me quemas de nuevo." ("If you buy El Comercio, you are burning me again.")

"Buy art, not cocaine."

"Imperial court defending talkers" (Habladores is a weird word, but I'm assuming it refers to government officials.)

CIDH is a group set up to investigate human rights violations in the Americas. This is one of several messages around the city criticizing them.

"All [women] are beautiful"

The end of this one got cut off since it is located on one of Quito's many narrow, winding roads and my car window photography skills aren't ideal, but it does have the S and it also has three v-style bird glyphs on it, which is the signature of one of Quito's fairly productive grafiteros.

"Marx didn't exist. -God"

You know what they were going for.

"Chevron, pay! Pay already!"

This one hits a little closer to my heart. Texaco was part of the extensive oil drilling in the Amazon through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and left huge swaths of land contaminated when they left. The indigenous residents have been suing the company's current incarnation, Chevron, since 2003 in an attempt to receive $28 billion in compensation for environmental damage, crop loss, and increased health problems. Ecuadorian courts eventually awarded them $19 billion, which Chevron refused to pay, and since the company currently has essentially no assets in Ecuador, the courts were unable to force the decision. Last year, the plaintiffs took their case to Canada in an attempt to receive the compensation from one of Chevron's subsidiaries, but the action was not supported by the Hague, which later ruled in Chevron's favor on the basis of a 1995 government document absolving them of responsibility for "collective damages."

"I was born free
I will vote no"

...on Ecuador's new constitution, a product of the Correa administration. (It was ultimately approved.)

"A bulletproof democracy"

This is another sentiment echoed on several walls around the city, but naturally, the only picture I have is of the least legible version.

"Without drama" and "six"

Both of these mysterious little phrases are all over Quito, on walls, mailboxes, everywhere. I never figured out what either of them signified, though...

"Mande" is an interesting Ecuadorian cultural artifact. The phrase literally means "Order me," and it dates to the time of the Spanish rule, when it was the required response of any slave when their name was called by a Spaniard. Despite its dark origins, however, the phrase has become a staple of modern Ecuadorian life and it is still used to respond to one's name.

"Nature is life... Smoke it"

On one of the most heavily graffitied walls in downtown Quito.

"You consume: You are consuming yourself"

"Get out USAID"

It's signed by the Communist Youth of Ecuador. More of their work:

"With joy and fun, we work for revolution."

"Your collector of songs"
"Thank you for teaching me that love is necessary"
"You can't live your dreams if you don't make them reality"
"When you remember me, I want it to be with joy"

"The walls are the voice of the city"
"Then my love is still great"
"You don't have to find meaning in everything"

Along the lines of "We award a doctorate to Augusto Barrera."

I believe UDLA is the Universidad de las Américas in Mexico; Augusto Barrera is the current Mayor of Quito. I don't know what the connection is.

"Juan T.
I love you and I hate you"

"2+2=5"

"Condemned by the media
Absolved by the people"

I don't know what the significance of 305 is.

Below, in light blue: "Who in this country will dare to say that the king is naked?"


The graffiti culture in Quito is so pervasive that almost every wall features it. There's even been at least one instance of a homeowner who painted over repeated graffitis finally being defeated by the message "Sr dueño de casa: Nada personal, pero su pared tiene un no se que..." ("Mr. Landlord: Nothing personal, but your wall had nothing on it...") [You can find this story, among others, in Quito: una ciudad de grafitis, by Alex Ron.]

So what is this nice, bright wall doing in the middle of downtown Quito??

That, of course, is the wall surrounding the American ambassador's housing complex! (It is very heavily guarded.)


I do have other graffiti photos from elsewhere in Ecuador, but I've put up one or two in other posts and this one is long enough as it is. I also don't know that much about local politics outside of Quito, so I can't comment much on them. That being said, if anyone has more information about graffiti in Quito (or other Ecuadorian or Latin American cities), please pass it on to me. I have Alex Ron's anthology already, but would love to expand my knowledge and collection of examples...