Little sky, lots of mud

I’ve decided that July and August in Madagascar are akin to April and May in America—they’re our “spring”. Last month, I started seeing scores of baby chicks toddling around, ducklings learning how to waddle, and zebu calves carefully following their mothers on spindly little legs. July was when the “other” annual rainy season occurred—in which it rains but the weather is cool-- and all the roads turned to muck. Navigating the mud pit of the Vangaindrano market made me extremely glad that I brought a pair of rubber boots. The grand vacances (school vacation similar to our summer vacation in America) began at the end of July, and will last until early October. While the majority of students are enjoying their time off, the terminale (senior year) students at the lycee (high school) are busy studying to take the baccalaureate exam, which is being held on Monday. Those who aren’t studying have taken to the sports field, as the vacation soccer leagues have started up. When I work in the Coldis office, the sounds of the referee whistle and kids cheering at the terrain a few hundred meters away are my ever-present audio backdrop.

The vacation also means that there’s an influx of new people in my town who have come to spend their break here, usually visiting relatives. This can be extremely irritating, because all these visitors haven’t seen me before, and so I have to be subject to the kind of staring and ‘eoooooo vazaha!’ comments that I got when I first arrived here. But, it can also be a nice chance to meet some new people, which is the case with my neighbors’ family members who have come to visit. Sweet little Sophie, from Tamatave, is visiting my neighbor Marcelline along with her dad, who has come to buy cloves and coffee. She already knows my name and loves to come over and visit. And my other neighbor’s daughter (whose name I still don’t know), visiting from Ranomena, is so kind and lovely. Her two sons give me big toothy smiles whenever I wave and say hello, and they’ve become star junior gardeners helping me with my yardwork and gardening projects.

For me, however, it isn’t vacation time—it’s the busiest I have ever been during my Peace Corps service. My work on the SSI project is in full swing, and I’ve accomplished more on it in the last 2 months than I did in the previous eight. In mid-July I organized a training on sustainable clove cultivation and harvest for myself and four Coldis co-workers. The training was held in Manakara and was conducted by Christophe, an agriculture technician with MBG (and also my friend Leo’s counterpart). After receiving that training, we were able to set up the trainings with the actual farmers, so last week the five of us spent 4 days in the countryside towns of Masianaka, Matanga, and Manambondro. We trained a total of 58 farmers, most of whom were presidents of their farmer groups. (Coldis organizes their farmers into collectives with 10 farmers in each.) And despite the remote locations, I also MacGyver-baked a gingerbread cake for each of the trainings to share with the farmers, because most of them have never even tasted food with cloves before. I explained that it was a traditional Christmas cookie (or cake) in America, but that all the spices for it are actually grown in Madagascar: cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. I think it was a nice addition to the training, and judging by the lack of crumbs left in the pan, I’m pretty sure the farmers enjoyed it.

Farmers in Masianaka enjoying some cake after the training.

Each of the farmers received booklets about sustainable clove farming (which I sweated and stressed over for months, but finally finished compiling at the end of July), and they are supposed to share these guides with their other farmers and train them on what they learned. Farmers that receive the training are then eligible to receive free zana-kazo jirofo (young clove trees) to plant, of which we are supposed to distribute 15,000 each year. Recently I realized that simply finding 15,000 clove trees to buy would be a project in and of itself... not to mention getting them out to these farmers. So that’s my next hurdle.

The product of my blood, sweat, and tears.

The last time I was out in this area was when I visited Manambondro around July 1^st to meet the farmers there and give them an introduction to the SSI project, and already then the clove trees were beginning to blossom. But what a difference a month makes: driving around these countryside roads, in an area which is essentially “clove central”, I saw hundreds upon hundreds of trees just exploding with buds. It’s also quite different from a year ago, because cloves are an every-other-year crop—meaning that one year they’ll be abundant, while the next year, the harvest will be minimal. So because 2012 was a low year, 2013 should be an abundant harvest. We passed by kids harvesting the cloves using ingenious homemade bamboo ladders; we also passed by kids harvesting them the quicker but extremely destructive way, by just cutting off the branches. Teaching the farmers why this is not a good long-term harvest strategy (because it reduces the number of cloves the following year) is one of the tenets of the sustainability training we’re giving.

Introducing the project to the farmers in Matanga. We held the training at the local elementary school.

Although Coldis encourages their farmers to leave the cloves on the tree as long as possible to let them grow to maximum  size (and thus be able to sell them for the best price), many other farmers are already going ahead and harvesting their trees, probably because they’re in serious need of the money. Right now cloves are selling for about 14,000 Ariary a kilo—approximately $7, which is a lifeline for a hungry family. But, the price per kilo should go up later in the buying season, so many farmers are also holding on to their cloves as long as they can. The roads in the southeast are now lined with tsihy (woven straw mats) spread with cloves drying in the sun. The ‘raw’ buds are pale green with pink tips, but after three days in the hot Madagascar sun, they’ll dry to a rich brown color. Driving or biking past these mats of cloves tickles your nose with their sweet and spicy aroma.

Scheduling and conducting these training sessions was one of the biggest accomplishments of my Peace Corps service, and something that I was extremely relieved to have behind me (although I now know we’ll have to schedule more.) After our final session was over, I drove back to Vangaindrano with my coworkers feeling relieved and content, and thrilled to be getting back to my house after four days without electricity or cell phone reception. My coworker Titus drove us in his car for these trainings, and on the way back we gave a ride to a local Manambondro woman who was going to Vangaindrano for the week. Funnily enough, her name turned out to be Emilie—the first namesake I’d met in Madagascar, which is surprising to me given how many people here have French names.  As we navigated the muddiest part of the road leading out of Manambondro (during which we got stuck 3 times), we passed through an area called Kidilanitra where a lot of the Manambondro farmers live. In the dialect of Malagasy spoken in my area, kidy mean “little”, and lanitra means “sky”, so we asked Emilie why it was named this. She said that it’s because there are so many trees there that when you look up, the sky is small. Looking out the window at the rows and rows of pink-tipped clove trees, ravinala palms with their leaves spread like an open hand, banana trees with their purple-wrapped bunches of fruit hanging like a necklace, and majestic two-stories-tall lychee and mango trees, I thought about how much I love being surrounded by all of this green. And it suddenly hit me that with only about 8 months left in my service, I want to soak it all in as much as possible. So until April, I’m trying to enjoy and explore as much of my area as possible. I’ve lived here long enough that sometimes I forget what a special and beautiful country Madagascar is, and as much as I love New York, when I’m back there I know I’ll be pining for afternoons spent in my backyard hammock, lazily reading while a tropical breeze sweeps over me and into the rice fields below. If I could bottle that feeling, I would.