The song of the indri

Here are two videos I recorded in Andasibe, a national park about 3 hours east of Tana, in October 2012. They both show the indri, a special type of lemur that is unique for its "singing", and which is only found in the Andasibe area. It uses this singing to locate its family/group members, and also to mark off its territory. This was one of the coolest things I have experienced so far in Madagascar. My fellow volunteer James lives right on the edge of this forest and hears the indris from his house every morning-- lucky guy. When my brother Tim came for a visit last fall, we spent a day in Andasibe and then a day exploring James's forest, Maromizaha. The first video shows them jumping from tree to tree, and the second one records their ethereal singing.

An Open Letter to DreamWorks

Author’s note: I know that the majority of my blog posts to date have been long-winded bouts of often overly-sentimental naval gazing, but with this post I hope to do something a little different. Along with posting this letter on my blog, I am sending it via email to as many DreamWorks contacts as I can find. If you are as angered as I am by the information I’ve presented below, I urge you to sign the petition here:

To Whom It May Concern:

First of all, let me congratulate you on the success of the most recent Madagascar movie “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted”, which, according to your most recent earnings report, has earned over $720 million at the worldwide box office. I have yet to see the newest film, but I look forward to watching it when I return to America in 2014, after my Peace Corps service is over.

It should come as no surprise to you that when I first announced to my friends and family that I would be serving my Peace Corps assignment in Madagascar, most people’s reactions had something to do with the Madagascar movies. And truth be told, when I announced my assignment on Facebook, I did so with the visual aid of a film still from the first “Madagascar” movie. Because of its massive success, your film series is responsible for many Americans’ entire perception and knowledge of the country of Madagascar.

However, once you get past that initial name recognition, most people will admit that they don’t know much about the actual country. I didn’t either, when I first got my invitation to serve here. But here is what I have learned: while Madagascar is indeed a wild and wonderful biodiversity hotspot, full of unique and colorful creatures like the lemurs and fosas shown in your films, it is also one of the most heartbreakingly, devastatingly impoverished countries in the world. According to the Malagasy government, more than 75% of people here live on less than $1 a day, an increase of 68% since the crippling political crisis of 2009, which ground local industries to a halt and caused many international donors to pull their aid funding. This is a country in which its people fight a daily battle just to survive and feed their families.

The needs here are so great yet so simple: access to clean water and reliable electricity, improved bridges and roads so that all routes are passable even during the rainy season, rehabilitation of schools so students have a proper learning environment, money to pay the teachers so that they don’t go on strike and disrupt the children’s learning, and in fact, money for children to pay the very meager school fees that they can continue to learn. These are all things that we as privileged Americans take for granted, but are veritable luxuries here in Madagascar.

And getting beyond basic human needs, there is an immense need for wildlife protection and natural resources conservation. This is a country that has already lost over 80% of its original growth forest to increasingly desperate farmers who clearcut land in order to plant food, only to exhaust the soil's nutrients within three years, forcing them to move on and clearcut even more land. Disappearing forests means the disappearance of animals that live there—lemurs, chameleons, frogs, birds, spiders, and all sorts of creatures that are found nowhere else in the world. They are dying because their forest is dying. Once they are gone from Madagascar, they will be gone from the entire world.

So as I began learning more and more about the poverty, despair, and environmental disasters that exist in this breathtakingly beautiful and unique country, I started to wonder if your company had donated any of the profits from the “Madagascar” movies to the country that they are named after. I posed the question to a State Department official here, and I was shocked to hear anecdotally from him that, aside from a token gift of around $50,000 (to which entity I am not clear), DreamWorks has not used any of the franchise profits to aid the people or the environment of Madagascar. Yet this is a franchise that, according to a June 2012 press release, has raked in over $1.1 billion worldwide. That is more than 10% of one year’s GDP of the entire country of Madagascar. Certainly the argument can be made that the success of the “Madagascar” movies increased the country’s reknown and elevated tourism revenue, but that is unfortunately not the case. (Even if a child saw the films and then begged his parents to take him to Madagascar, it’s just not economically viable as a family vacation destination when airfare from the United States costs upwards of $2,000 a person.)

I am not one to enthusiastically lobby for aid; in fact, I am serving as Peace Corps Community Economic Development volunteer because I am passionate about helping people improve their livelihoods through economic activity and business development. However, when I see something as imbalanced as a movie studio making billions of dollars using the name of one of the world’s poorest countries, I feel that there is a need for rebalancing. It’s about doing what is right. If you named a film “Haiti” and then proceeded to make millions of dollars of profit from it, surely there would be a public outcry for some portion of this revenue to be shared with the country. But because Madagascar’s poverty is not quite as visible to most westerners, the public attention is not there.

I know that DreamWorks Animation is by nature a charitable company, with a namesake foundation of your own, and that your founders Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen have also personally donated much of their wealth towards charitable causes. So what I am asking of DreamWorks is this: take some of the money you allocate for charitable giving and direct it towards an organization that is doing a lot of good work here in Madagascar, such as CARE, WWF, the United Nations World Food Programme, UNICEF, or the International Red Cross, just to name a few. Or even better, how about dedicating a portion of DreamWorks’s profits that can be attributed to “Madagascar 3”? According to your most recent earnings statement, your company posted a total of $24.4 million in profit for Q32012, an increase of 24 percent profit over the previous year. That earnings statement also noted that “Madagascar 3” accounted for 25 percent of your total Q3 revenue ($47.1 million). So how about taking a very tiny part of this small portion of the film’s total revenue, and pledging it towards good works in Madagascar? A mere 1% of the Q3 revenue would be $470,000, and this comparatively small amount of money could do such a world of good here. For example, just $20 could pay one year’s high school fees for one student. $1,500 would pay to install a water pump that would literally change the lives of the people who’d use it. Even a large-scale project such as paving an important 20 kilometer stretch of road could be achieved for under $100,000—a huge amount of money to a country as poor as this, but I am sure there are Hollywood charity benefits where reserving a table commands a more princely sum than this.

I know it will be easy enough for you to dismiss this letter and its accompanying petition as a rant from a naïve Peace Corps volunteer who doesn’t understand how the business world works. But you see, I do in fact understand a little bit. Prior to my Peace Corps service, I spent over 7 years in the business world in New York, working for fantastic companies such as Food Network and EMI Music, and now I am studying to take the GMAT in order to get my MBA when I finish my service.  I read The Economist whenever I can get my hands on a copy. And what I know now about modern business is this: in order to survive, a company cannot purely exist for profit and profit alone. A company must show that it has a commitment to serving its customers but also respecting the world in which it exists. How else to explain the rise of B Corps, or the fact that the State Department’s “21^st Century Statecraft” agenda now includes a doctrine on corporate social responsibility? I hope that DreamWorks can evolve and grow as a company just as so many others are, too. And to do so, I am asking you to please give back to the country that has lent you its name. It deserves more than to just be a line item on your earnings report.

Sincerely,

Emily Silman

Peace Corps volunteer, Community Economic Development

Vangaindrano, Madagascar

March 2012- May 2014

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READERS: if you agree with me, please take a few minutes to sign my petition at Change.org:

  

Armchair linguist

One of the most unique—and challenging—componenents of Peace Corps service is that volunteers must learn and speak the local language of where they work. This often means forgoing a country’s colonial language (often French or Spanish) and instead learning the indigenous language, which allows volunteers to work closely with people who need the most help. In Madagascar, French is the language of business and government because it was a French colony until 1960. But the majority of people here speak Malagasy on a daily basis, not French. And getting outside of larger towns and into the countryside, where fewer people have gone to lycee and almost no one has gone to university, French is rarely spoken at all. So when Peace Corps trainees arrive in Madagascar, they are given 2 months of intense Malagasy training before setting off to their sites: 1 month of learning Malagasy officiel, the standard dialect and the one that’s spoken in the highlands (the capital region), and after they learn where their site location will be, another month of either continued study of officiel, or of one of the 17 other Malgasy dialects. Each of the dialects corresponds with the tribe that has settled in a particular region of the country. In my area (Vangaindrano), most of the people are of the Antesaka tribe, so I learned the Antesaka dialect. But if you go up the road 80km north to Farafangana, you’ll be in Antefasy land, so the dialect spoken there is Antefasy. However, unlike many other African countries, the dialects are fairly similar, and most Malagasy people can understand one another, even if one person is from up north near Diego Suarez, and another person is from down south near Ft. Dauphin. My dialect (along with the other Sud Est dialects of Antefasy and Antemoro) are notable for turning all “s” sounds into “sh” sounds, a fact that some of my more northernly peers like to laugh at. (So for example, the word misy, which means “there is/there are” is pronounced “meesy” in other areas, but “meeshy” in mine.) My dialect also has a fun habit of shortening words by dropping the final syllable, especially if the word end in –na, and also boasts lots of local colloquialisms like Da ta andra? Ao ka!, which basically means “what’s up? Not much!” but would never be said anywhere outside the Vangaindrano region.

The famed naturalist Gerald Durrell writes in his book The Aye-Aye and I that “Malagasy is a fine, rackity-clackity, ringing language which sounds not unlike someone carelessly emptying a barrel of glass marbles down a stone staircase.” I don’t know if I would make that exact same colorful comparison (although Durrell certainly does have a flair for language), but I have many days when I truly do think people are rolling rocks around in their mouth. My language challenge has always been more with understanding than with speaking, and that hasn’t changed in my experience here. I’ve struggled (and continue to struggle) greatly with understanding what people are saying, and find myself frustrated on a daily basis that I can’t express myself the way that I want to.  I do have to remember, though, that I have more of an uphill battle than other volunteers, because it’s commonly remarked that language gets more difficult the further south you go, and I live in one of the most southernly towns of all the volunteers here. In the countryside towns that surround Vangaindrano, people’s accents become even thicker and their speech more rapid, which makes it incredibly difficult to understand them. Unfortunately, this is also a country that isn’t known for its dental care, so there are many people with missing or no teeth, which makes comprehension even more mind-boggling.

The Malagasy language itself is a bit of a mystery that is both a linguist’s and anthropologist’s dream: its closest relative is an Indonesian dialect spoken by one particular tribe on the island of Borneo. This gives credence to the theory that Madagascar was first settled by migrants from Indonesia, who traversed the precarious Indian Ocean on a raft for months on end. Malagasy also contains elements borrowed from Arabic, such as the days of the week and the greeting salama; this is due to the presence of Islamic traders who settled in Madagascar several hundred years ago.  And owing to the French colonial influence It also has a large number of Malagasy-fied French words. Malagasy uses no article, so words borrowed from French simply take the “le/la” and string it together with the actual word. So for example, the French for key, la clé, became lakile in Malagasy. (The alphabet does not contain the letters C, Q, U, W, and X.) La biére (beer) became labiera; la bougie (candle) became labozia. Other words are changed only slightly, such as legume, which became legioma. And a large number of French words were simply adopted wholesale, such as verre (glass), restaurant (no translation needed), and epicerie (small grocery store).

Malagasy is a comparatively easy language to learn because there are simply not that many words—one word could have 3 meanings. But this is at once both simplifying and maddening. For example, the word sahirana means “busy”, but it also means “stressed” or “worried”. So if I want to ask my counterpart if she is busy (a fairly common thing for Americans to ask in the workplace), there really isn’t a great way to do it. The all-encompassing phrase tsy mety literally means “not good”, but is also really the only way to say that someone is being rude. If I want to explain to a kid why he shouldn’t yell “vazaha!” at me, I want to be clear that it’s more than just “not ok”, it’s rude, but there literally isn’t a word for that. And the often-used word mazotoa means “good luck” or “have fun/enjoy”. But if my neighbor is on his way to take the baccalaureate exam, I don’t really want to say “enjoy the test!”—I want to wish him luck. This prevention from being specific is one of the language’s most frustrating aspects. However, my least favorite part of the language is that there is no verb “to be”. Think about how often you use some form of this verb, either in English or French, and you’ll realize how exasperating this is.

However, despite the annoyances, Malagasy does have some amusing quirks and features. I’ve written before that perhaps my favorite word in the language is mitsangatsangana, which means to take a walk for pleasure. It wasn’t until I’d spent a couple months studying Malagasy that I learned the utility behind this word, which is fairly fun. Malagasy employs a pattern whereby if you repeat the second half of a verb, it weakens it. So in the case of mitsangatsangana, it means “to sort of amble around”, whereas its parent, so to speak, is simply mitsangana, "to stand" (I guess if you're not really standing, that means walking around.) Same for the verb “to go”, mandeha, which becomes mandehadeha when you’re talking about just kind of meandering along. And one of my most frequent jokes is when people remark with surprise that I can speak Malagasy, by saying mahay miteny ‘Gasy enao!, I self-deprecatingly respond with ehhhh…. mahayhay fotsiny iaho (I can only sort of speak it), and this unfailingly causes a round of chuckles. This repetition/weaking utility is also employed with some nouns, most notably colors: the word manga mean “blue”, but mangamanga means “light blue”.

In all my struggles with the language, I try to remind myself that I’m lucky that I didn’t have to learn a new alphabet, or one of those notorious African languages with clicks and other unwritable sounds. And when I get depressed about my lack of language skills, it’s important to remember that I’ve only been studying and speaking Malagasy for a year—I spent 10 years becoming fluent in French. But above all, I’m proud to be able to (sort of) speak Malagasy because it sets me (and other PCVs) apart from your average French-speaking foreign aid worker or European tourist. It allows us to gain the trust and respect of the people of Madagascar, and well, let’s be honest: being able to blow someone’s mind by being a white person who speaks Malagasy will never get old.

Mariazy

During my first 7 months of being at site, I made great strides in my language skills as well as my level of integration within the community, but I still felt like I something was missing-- that my neighbors still didn't consider me to really be living there. Other volunteers from my stage had regaled me with stories of being invited to weddings, circumcision parties, and famadihanas (the "turning of the bones" ceremony that honors a family's dead ancestors), and I felt envious of their invitations, because I hadn't received an invitation to anything. It was beginning to weigh heavily on my conception of how well I was truly integrated.

In early December I had a language learning session with my neighbor and Malagasy tutor, Madame Titine, and she mentioned that another one of our neighbors, Madame Priscaline, was getting married in town in a few weeks. I'm close with many members of Priscaline's family and talk with them on a daily basis, but none of them had mentioned the wedding. Later that day I stopped by the epicerie that Priscaline's mother, Madame Marcelline, runs, and I mentioned hearing about her daughter's upcoming mariazy (wedding). She clapped her hands with delight as a smile lit up her face, and invited me to come. And just like that, I finally had an invitation to my first Malagasy cultural event!

The wedding was a big deal for the people of Ampasy, my neighborhood in Vaingaindrano, and on the morning of Saturday December 15th, people were up and about getting ready. My teenage neighbor Sonia wanted to braid my hair for the event, so she came over at lunchtime and gave me a beautiful set of braids that, if I wasn't quite so white, would have made me fit right in with the other women in my town. My 8-year-old friend Marinah, sister of the bride, came over afterwards and we did our nails together. And then I put on a nice dress that I rarely wear and headed out to the main road to meet the rest of my community before walking to the church. The sense of joy and excitement was palpable, with little girls giddily dressed up in their finest dresses just for the occasion, wearing swipes of lipstick courtesy of Sonia, our glamour goddess. I brought my camera out and took lots of pictures of everyone dressed in their best, which made it truly feel like a special occasion. About a half-hour later, we all walked to the FLM (Lutheran) Betesda church and stood outside while we awaited the arrival of the bride and groom. I passed the time by taking more pictures of everyone-- an activity that never fails to entertain, and about a half-hour later a silver Peugeot decorated with flowers pulled up in front of the church. Here comes the bride!

I shouldn't have been surprised at this, but my eyes began to water just like they normally would at a wedding back home. I am a serial wedding-crier, and I can't help it. This was at the same time both a regular wedding like you'd see in a America, but also not normal at all, because an occasion like this is truly special. These are people who hard incredibly hard and don't often have the chance to dress up in nice clothes and celebrate a special occasion. So when I saw beautiful Priscaline step out of the car, resplendent in a gorgeous white dress and veil, tears began to stream down my cheek because not only was this a wedding, but it was her wedding, her special day, and I was so happy that she got to experience a day of joyfulness of her own.

Her fiance, Ralahady, followed next, walking arm-in-arm with his regal-looking mother. At first I wondered to myself who this young man in a white suit was, but then it hit me that it was, in fact, the grooom. (Is this a sign of my advancing age?) And then the cute little groomsmen/ring bearers tromped in behind them-- little 5-year-old Totona, my neighbor, as well as another boy who I presume was Ralahady's relative. After the rest of the family entered the church the guests streamed in and took our seats. I sat with some of the children from my neighborhood and kept us cool in the sweltering church by using my paper fan. The wedding ceremony processed pretty much as it would in America, albeit in Malagasy instead of English, with one exception: the FLM Betesda church choir sang two beautiful hymns, which is something I've never seen before in a wedding. It was lovely and so fitting to this wedding, where it truly felt like the entire community was there to bless the union of Priscaline and Ralahady.

After the vows were taken and kisses were exchanged, the bride and groom walked out of the church, followed by their families, and formed a receiving line outside the exit. The main difference between an American and Malagasy receiving line is that here you do the customary one-two-three cheek kiss on every person on the line, so it takes a while to go through. Afterwards I met up with Madame Titine and we walked to the nearby Tropic Hotel for the reception.

I wasn't expecting much for the reception because these are not wealthy people, but I was duly impressed by the care that the hotel proprietor had taken to make this a special event. A large white tarp was draped over the open area south of the hotel building, forming a sort of tent, and underneath it were about 20 tables (borrowed from the middle school across the road), each bestowed with a tablecloth, bottles of soft drinks, and bowls of snacks. It took about an hour for the wedding party to finally arrive at the reception, at which point an emcee took to the microphone to make some speeches about the couple that I couldn't understand. Titine, our tablemates, and I all ate sambos and kaka pigeon while the speeches were being made, and then lined up to give our gifts to the couple and receive a piece of wedding cake. Malagasy tradition dictates that you give an envelope of cash as a wedding gift, and I silently worried that I hoped I'd included the right amount of money-- I didn't want to give too much and look ostentatious or wealthy, but I didn't want to give too little and look like a miser.

After giving our gifts and receiving cake, Titine and I walked home because it was getting late. It had been a 5-hour event and the sky was darkening. I was happy to be getting home, but I was also curious if there were other wedding events. There was no dancing and no alcohol served (probably the biggest difference from American weddings), though I'm not sure if that was indicative of all Malagasy weddings or just this particular family. But I walked home with a big smile on my face because I was so thrilled and so honored to be included in Priscaline and Ralahady's special day. Unlike American weddings where people gather from all over the country (or the globe), this felt more like the coming together of an entire community than a collection of various friends and relatives who don't know each other. Indeed, it really felt like everyone from Ampasy was there, and my inclusion was a watershed moment for me in terms of feeling like a true member of the community. I wasn't there as a special guest or token white person; rather I was included because I'm just a friendly person living in the neighborhood. And one of the main things I strive for in my Peace Corps service is to be seen as just that.