en route to Majunga

Written en route to Majunga, the first time in quite some time that I’ve had the occasion to actually write on a keyboard. My journal has been sorely abused as the receptacle of thoughts and notes, progressions of personal emotions and ideologies. But there is much to cover.

I posted briefly in the hours before my Tana homestay; my family came and picked me up from a little reception we had at the SIT classroom. My family was obviously excited to meet me and incredibly encouraging from the first interactions I had with them. My adrenaline kicked in and mysteriously my French ability leaped forward in bounds; we drove about together to their home and disembarked in a very crowded neighborhood, wandering through a very muddy side street lined with market stalls of fresh meat hanging from hooks, vegetables, clothes, dozens of varieties of rice, and endless signs for the Malagasy beer THB. These types of markets are the main way people sustain themselves here in Mada, whether in the capital city of Tana (3 million) or the rural villages like Andasbe (3,000). I followed my host mother, who, holding my hand, made a sharp left turn down an otherwise imperceptible alleyway through the narrow spaces between homes, announcing happily “Nous sommes ici! Chez nous!”

My Tana home was something to behold in its plethora of contradictions. Three stories plus a roof with a sweeping view of the city, it is unfinished with a rather parking-garage like feel of bare concrete. Part of the unfinished half of the house includes the indoor washroom and toilet, as I was to discover later that night when I was led outside to the very rudimentary latrine by the light of a candle. There are a lot of things like that: obvious indicators of poverty thrown for a loop compared to signs of wealth, like a beautiful Nikon digital SLR owned by my semi-professional photographer host brother, or their two computers, or their hired help. Yet they have little electricity, no running water and cook their meals over a charcoal fire to the side of the house. Behold Madagascar, land of contradictions.

My Tana family is amazing, an intelligent, loud and affectionate bunch who love to sing and joke around. As they led me in procession into my little room shared with my littlest sister Kanto, they shouted for photos of my life in America, then for a song (upon hearing that I like to sing; I chose “Do you want to know a secret” by the Beatles), then Tojo, my oldest brother who is a chef-in-training as well as a photographer, brought in a an absurdly large pineapple coconut cake he had baked me for the occasion. My mother then handed me an absurdly long knife with which to parcel out the cake to all members of the family. Heeding my lessons I had learned prior to coming, I followed the family hierarchy and served myself last.

I saw their photo albums with family excursions and first communions. They are Catholic with a Buddhist bent (apparently religious syncretism is huge in Madagascar), and my host mom strongly believes in the power of prayer and positivity. I could hardly sleep that night for excitement and lack of alone time.

Then all that gave way to Saturday, when I began to feel tired and a little sick—my French dropped off suddenly and severely. I stayed indoors other than a trip to the market for the better half of the morning, going to a little prayer session to counter the violence expected at the demonstration in Central Tana that afternoon with my host mother, brother and sister.

It was there I learned that violence had begun in Tana, in the neighborhood I had wandered about in the day before, the neighborhood of my classroom. We received instructions via text from our director to stay indoors so we headed home immediately. My homestay was very close to the centers of demonstration, and as I went to the roof to receive a call from my director I could hear the gunfire.

We went indoors and turned on the news; here in Madagascar there are issues with freedom of speech against the government but no mode of censorship of images that make it to the news; I saw the most horrific images in my life come across the screen, made all the more real because their backdrop was one of my only familiar views of the city itself.

Other people in my program experienced it differently. I was one of four who heard the violence, but we all witnessed the aftermath on TV and my friend Marit’s host father was at the demonstration as a journalist, a colleague of the Malagasy journalist who was killed. The gravity of the situation and its volatility, for all the talk of democratic processes and peaceful demonstrations, became shockingly clear. It was decided to cut our homestay short in favor of returning to the Relais du Rova out in the country in anticipation of future demonstrations that week. Sunday then was a somber morning for me: my mother decided it was best for all of our spirits that we leave Tana and head “à la campagne”—to the country—until I needed to meet up with the rest of the group.

So off we went in the family van to the countryside, to visit the family parcels of land and picnic by a river. Another seemingly inherent contradiction: they live in a dirty, claustrophobic area of Tana but own acres upon acres of lovely hilly farmland 35 kilometers outside the city where they grow all sorts of things, from rice to manioc to green beans to corn to coffee to peaches to guava. There were wild watermelons growing among the green beans. We climbed their ancestral hill farm to see old ruins that are at the top, wandering through the forests in search of this particular plant or that particular rock. At the end of the tour we drove to a river nestled in with the rice paddies to picnic, wade in the water, and wash the family car. Full of sunshine and finally at peace with the scenes I had witnessed the day before, we headed back into Tana to regroup.

So the demonstrations have continued in Tana and across the island to other cities where news of the violence has traveled fast, though the subsequent demonstrations have been generally peaceful. Still, it’s difficult to determine how the next weeks and even days will play out. We had stayed close on the outskirts of Tana, but chose to remove ourselves completely from the situation by heading to nature reserves on both coasts, trips that had been planned for the semester but were moved up and placed back-to-back in light of need for benign activities.

We went to Moramanga, a small town and home of the national school of the gendamerie, to learn about another political movement against colonialism in 1947 that ended in a massacre not unlike we saw that Saturday. We went to the school of the gendarmes and were told hilarious anecdotes by the gendarme in charge who single handedly humanized the Malagasy military and police forces, giving us a good context for what we saw on the televisions that weekend.

We continued on to Andasibe, a national park known for the largest and smallest lemurs in the world, and to Andasibe town on the edge of the park to understand more of the relationship between the villagers and the environment, tourism and basic needs. Each of these experiences was fantastic, good to see and relaxing to experience.

Indeed it’s true that when one wanders about the rainforest with lemurs swinging and calling overhead it becomes difficult to keep tabs on a developing situation in the far-off city. We had particularly good fortune with lemurs and other animal species that seemed to offset our particularly bad fortune in the political arena. In one day we managed to see seven different species of lemurs. Not just see, mind you, bur chase after them with our guides through the forest as they called for and reunited with family members, gathering together in bunches of as many as three species around a cluster of fruit trees. In all the time my director has lived in Madagascar and run this program, he said he has never seen anything like it.

Andasibe is the rainforest reserve on the east coast of Madagascar, and it is by far one of the best kept national treasures. We had no other tourist competition (finally a plus to the political crisis) and were able to go on a long hike in and around the forest and then a night walk to see the nocturnal species. I discovered I have a special talent I never knew I had, namely lemur-spotting. I was walking in the back of the group, behind both guides just looking about and talking with Roland when hark! My headlamp revealed two faint reflective corneas. I grabbed Roland’s flashlight and lo, it was the eastern woolly lemur in the tree right next to the road. Later I helped the guide locate a mouse lemur which she had lost in the thicket. It was thrilling.

And on we went, back for a night at the Relais before our mammoth 11-hour drive in the Tata to Ankarafansika, a dry deciduous forest on the western side of the island. This national park also contains more than its fair share of fantastic wildlife, allowing us to see three more species of lemur, plenty of iguanas, chameleons, and brightly colored birds. We camped outside the forest and awoke this morning to wild pigs snorting around our tent. The stars and moonlight here are a thing to behold—the sunrise brings curious sifaka lemurs into the campground to swing around from tree to tree.

These days driving basically across the width of the island I’ve had the good fortune to sit next to a window the majority of the time, most often sticking my entire body out the window to breathe in deeply, calling “Manhaona” or “Salama” to those I pass on the road. I watched the countryside changing from rainforest on one side, climbing up to rolling hills and rice paddies in the highland region, coming down to vast expanses of diseased land, supporting only brush after decades upon decades of deforestation that killed the soil. The deciduous, drier forests emerge and give way periodically to desert-like conditions, vast flowing rivers full of crocodiles, and spiky aloe plants everywhere you look on the side of the road.

Even from the superficial outsider perspective I feel as if these days, frustrating as they are in the more high-school trip like setting than a college study abroad due to the security measures keeping us moving en masse because of the crisis, have given me a glimpse into the incredible variety of Malagasy life. The contradictions that seem to run rampant in this county begin to make sense not in their logic but in their relation to one another, a relationship I am sure will take more solid form as I am able to form deeper connections to the eager, loving Malagasy people I will begin to know once able to develop roots in a single place for some time.

For that I am excited to go to Majunga, knowing tonight I will have another family and the beginning of more stories, insights, burning questions that stick like thorns in my side.