Let the journey begin

I heart Manakara.

I’m currently sitting on the porch of my fellow volunteer Matt’s house, adjacent to a spice warehouse in Manakara, overlooking the canal. The air is heady with the scent of cloves being packed up for export to Rotterdam, and the hot afternoon sun is tempered by soft breezes blowing in from the Indian Ocean, just a stone’s throw away. Today I am on day #5 of a monthlong journey away from site, and already it’s a bizarre yet wonderful experience to be immersing myself in new slices of Madagascar after nearly 3 months spent only at my site (Vangaindrano) and my banking town (Farafangana.)

The actual reason for me leaving site is to attend In-Service Training in Antananarivo/Mantasoa during the week of August 6^th. However, because my town is a 3-day journey away from Tana, I made arrangements to bookend the trip with some business and personal travel to take advantage of the time and money investment of getting up to Tana.  So, my original plan was to slowly make my way up northwest to Tana, and spend some time working with Matt in Manakara, before heading to Fianar and then Tana. However, because this is Peace Corps and because this is Madagascar, the best laid plans usually change, and I received a text on Monday morning saying I was needed for a meeting in Fianar on Wednesday—a whole 10 hours from my site, and nearly a week before I had actually planned to go there. At that time I was still in Farafangana waiting to go to the bank, so I had to scramble and run home (2 hours away) that afternoon in order to get to Fianar in time for the meeting. Because I had already planned to leave for Manakara on Thursday, it didn’t make sense to go back home after Fianar. So, as soon as I got home on Monday I rushed to pack up a month’s worth of stuff, find a neighbor to take care of my cat, track down my supervisor to get the travel form approved, and make it back to Farafangana on Tuesday in time to get a taxi-brousse going to Fianar. This, all on top of having a nasty cold and delirium-inducing fever. But I had been waiting to have this meeting for a long time, so there was no way I was going to miss it.

The meeting in Fianar was with COLDIS, my counterpart agency, because their national headquarters are there. I had been feeling really unsure of what my projects were going to be, but this meeting was great, and I sat down with the director of COLDIS, plus Matt and another volunteer who works with them, to divide up ownership of the projects they want their PC volunteers to help with. So as it stands now, I will be helping them explore clove export opportunities to the US (they currently only export to Europe and Asia), plus researching potential value-added activities such as packaging cloves for consumers, plus assisting the director of the COLDIS office in my town develop a business plan, as well as helping them revamp their website to build English and French versions that are tailored to their target audience (wholesale bulk customers.) So now, all of a sudden I have a lot to do! But I am really excited about this, because the work aspect of my Peace Corps experience was stressing me out. Now I feel like I have some direction, and I am excited to dive into these projects when I am back after IST/vacation. COLDIS’s warehouse is in Manakara, and there is wi-fi at the office here, so it sounds like I will be coming here for work quite a bit-- maybe once a month. But I’m happy about that because I really like this town, and it’s also great to get to work a bit with another volunteer.

I spent yesterday morning at the COLDIS office and warehouse with Matt, learning about the operations and observing cloves from last year’s harvest being sorted and packed for export. A truck just left this afternoon to bring them to the port at Tamatave (about a 2 day drive), where they’ll be packed on a container ship bound for Rotterdam. I’ve learned so much about the operations just in the last 2 days, and I’ll write a separate blog post another time all about cloves (for all my fellow food nerds!) Then yesterday afternoon Matt and I (plus 2 other volunteers who were in town) biked out of town about 5k to find vanilla to buy. Matt had been there before but couldn’t quite remember where it was. He said we’d know it was the right place by the scent. Sure enough, right about where he said it would be, the air was suddenly redolent with the sweet perfume of vanilla. The farmer welcomed us into his home and all of a sudden my jaw dropped: there were stacks and stacks vanilla beans on shelves that absolutely filled the house. “How do you say ‘heaven’ in Malagasy?”, I asked my friends, but none of us could remember. I bought some vanilla for myself (I’m curious to compare it to the vanilla from my town), as well as some to send my friend Alexis in the US, who was promised me a care package of American goodies in exchange!

The next leg of my trip begins on Monday when I leave Manakara to head up to the Tana region. But before I actually go to the capital, I’m heading to visit my friend Eric in Arivonimamo—about an hour outside of Tana. He’s been working with a fruit drying cooperative, and I’m really interested in replicating that in my town, because there is such an abundance of fruit and a lot of it rots before it is ever eaten. Being able to set people up with fruit dryers would help provide income (for selling the fruit) as well as food security (to have healthy food that will keep for a long time.) Then finally, I head to Tana on Thursday to spend a few days there taking care of Peace Corps business and medical appointments before In-Service Training. I can’t wait to see all my friends from my stage during IST—most of them I won’t have seen since May! After IST I’m hoping to take a little vacation in-country, but at this point I’m not sure where I’m going yet. Mahajunga, maybe? A bunch of us have talked about taking a vacation together after IST and I think we’ll get it sorted out then. And so that will put me back at site by the third week of August: just about one month after leaving. It’s crazy that I will be gone so long, but I am excited to see a bit more of Madagascar and have a little bit of a break from site!