Ten Ferries to Fort Dauphin: The Story of My Biggest Peace Corps Adventure

Author's note: this is a post that I have been wanting to write for almost 2 years. However, because some of the people involved were still serving as PCVs until now, and because we broke a few Peace Corps rules in doing this, I've been forced to wait a while to write about it. When a classmate of mine asked me 'what was the craziest thing you did in Madagascar?', the story of this adventure was my answer. It remains one of the highlights of my experience in Madagascar, and one of the most rewarding and challenging things I have ever done in my life.

I have always been entranced by maps. I lose myself just staring at them, poring over place names and imagining the adventures they hold. And so when I first learned of my Peace Corps site placement midway through Pre-Service Training, I quickly looked up Vangaindrano on the map at the training center. I pointed at my new town to one of our volunteer trainers, remarking “oh look, I won’t be that far away from Fort Dauphin” [a popular large-ish city on the island’s southeastern tip, located on a beautiful bay]. And then she proceeded to laugh hysterically. 

Map courtesy the Bradt Guide to Madagascar

You see, in Madagascar, sometimes maps lie. In this case, what the map says is a road is actually more of a “road”. It uses the term very loosely. She explained to me that not only is the Route Nationale 12A unpaved, but it’s notoriously treacherous, and just plain mind-bogglingly bad. What’s more, it includes 10 ferry crossings where inland rivers spill out into the Indian Ocean, like the teeth of a zipper. Given how terrible the road has always been, and the vast plains of emptiness that lie between Vangaindrano and Ft. Dauphin, it’s no surprise that bridges have never been built. So as a result, this 230km (143 mile) coastal stretch that should be a straight shot from Vangaindrano to Ft. Dauphin takes at least 2 days in a 4x4, more if you’re in a taxi-brousse (if you can even find one taking the trip.) The paved road heading south from Irondro, the Route Nationale 12, ends in Vangaindrano, giving my site what the Bradt guidebook calls “a frontier town feel”; any road venturing further south is just mud, rocks, and dirt. But on the map it looks like such a straight shot down Madagascar’s arrow-straight east coast. And all throughout the first year of my service, Ft. Dauphin sat on the map on my wall, taunting me, beckoning me. It was so close, yet so far away. I had to find a way to make the trip. And I decided to do it on a bicycle.

But it looks like such a straight shot!

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.

Still here!

Recently I looked at my blog and was shocked to realize that it’s been about 3 months since I last posted. I’ve tried to figure out why that is, and the only thing that comes to mind is that because I’ve now been here almost 17 months, and can count down the remainder of my service in months instead of years, I don’t feel as though I have as much to write about! I guess that because I’m pretty settled into the realities of life here, things are not quite so noteworthy-- at least in my eyes.

Now that I am sitting down to write something in order to get this blog up to date, I find myself at once having both everything and nothing to say. When I first think about it, I feel like nothing really has happened lately. But in fact, the past 3 months have been busier than ever. Right after the malaria event that I last posted about, I left site for 5 weeks, which I spent in South Africa, Botswana and Zambia (to take the GMAT exam and then have a vacation with my family), then in Tana for my Mid-Service Conference and to take care of some medical appointments. Then when I returned to site the first week of June, I jumped back into my main work project, as well as worked on preparations for the GLOW (girl’s leadership) camp that I am putting together with some other volunteers in the region. I also worked with my language tutor to develop a listing of words in the Antesaka dialect of Malagasy (the dialect spoken in my area) for inclusion in a new edition of the Malagasy-English dictionary. At the end of June, I went up to Fianar for a small Peace Corps training and to meet with my boss at the Coldis office there, then I returned south for our thrice-yearly regional volunteer meeting (VAC; it’s a boring acronym that I won’t waste your time with), which for the Sud Est was held in Sandrohy, a neighboring town of my fellow volunteer Nick’s site. We chose Sandrohy because our previous 3 regional gatherings had been held in bigger towns, and so for this one, we decided that we wanted some outdoorsy fun. Nick and Rory, our Sud Est regional leader, put together an amazing weekend of camping and hiking in the gorgeous mountains surrounding Sandrohy. We all arrived at Nick’s site on a Friday, biked 14km into the countryside where we had lunch and chilled out at a waterfall, then biked another 2km further into the countryside, imbibed some fresh coconut water, and hiked an hour through rice fields and up into the mountains to our camp site, which was breathtakingly situated on the top of a mountain with 360-degree views. (The sunrises were epic.) We camped for two nights, enjoyed lots of s’mores and ate rice and beans way more than we wanted to, and then on Sunday hiked back down the mountain, which, because it had rained the previous night, was muddy enough to make me fall slam-down on my tailbone no less than 5 times. Even though I was in pain, I still had to bike back, so I did some awkward yoga and stretching in Nick’s friend’s house, then hopped on my bike for the 16km back to Nick’s house. And then 17 of us squeezed into a taxi-brousse (with 14 bikes strapped to the top) back to Manakara, which ended up being the most entertaining brousse ride I’ve ever had.

Since getting back to site after VAC, I’ve been a busy bee working on my SSI (Sustainable Spices Initiative) project for Coldis, and biking a ton in order to get back in shape and lose the weight I put on indulging in all the good food in South Africa. The first week of July, I traveled 58km south to Manambondro to introduce the SSI project to the clove farmers there, which was the last of 3 countryside towns that I had to visit. Then I biked to Matanga (Leo’s site) to work with his counterpart on the SSI project, and also fit in an amazing 4^th of July party that included an indescribably good Southern feast of pulled pork, sweet potatoes, and pseudo-collard greens, plus a dance party featuring lots of Robyn songs and a techno remix of “America the Beautiful”. I’ve never felt so patriotic. Then, after a few days at home I left site once again to go to Manakara for the training on sustainable clove farming that I’ve been putting together, then went 160km further north (100km of it by bike!) to Mananjary for a GLOW camp meeting that weekend. After the camp meeting I got back to site, finished writing the training guide for the clove farmers, then returned to Manakara this past weekend for a going away party for my fellow volunteer Meghan, who has finished her service and is about to head home to America. Just when I think I’m going to have a quiet few months at site, all of a sudden I’m busier than ever.

Now that I’ve been at site for more than a year, I’m watching the months tick away and comparing things to how they were in 2012, when I was brand new to Vangaindrano and still figuring out how to exist here. I spent pretty much my entire first month suffering from shock (at the drastic change in living conditions from the training center) and anxiety (over the terrible rat problem in my house). It took me a full 3 months to really feel tamana (settled and at-home) in my house, and because I just didn’t feel comfortable in my town or my home, I spent a significant amount of time socializing with other volunteers in Farafangana, which is my banking town. Now, by contrast, I am hesitant to spend too many weekends away from site. As much as I enjoy socializing, I am extremely comfortable where I live, and I no longer feel like I have to escape. I have my neighborhood kids who come over to draw pictures and color, my little garden that is a never-ending project, my very comfortable backyard hammock that is a perfect reading spot, and still plenty of areas in town that I want to spend more time exploring on my bike. I’ve also become much more integrated with people in my community, which is probably the most rewarding aspect of my Peace Corps service to date. Last year on Vingt-Six (June 26; the Malagasy Independence Day), I was still fairly new to site, and was bewildered about what to do with myself, so I sort of wandered around town trying to figure out how to celebrate the holiday. But by contrast, for this year’s Vingt-Six, I wasn’t worried about what to do. I went to visit my neighbors, then went to watch the town parade with some of their kids, before inviting them over to my house to drink juice and paint our nails. (I also had an unfortunate incident where I was served a plate of potato salad by my neighbor that was covered in raw egg, and I was pretty much forced to eat it. My GI system was not especially pleased about that.) Still, even though I’m finding myself much more integrated and comfortable here than I was a year ago, some things haven’t changed. I still relish being able to close my door at the end of the day and inhabit my own little world until bedtime, free from inquisitive kids and prying neighbors who always ask where I am going, what I am doing, what did I buy at the market. And even though I am accustomed to living without western luxuries, I am still longing for the day when I will once again own a refrigerator and be able to take a hot shower.

So now here I am, with just over 8 months left in my Peace Corps service. I’m beginning to give away unneeded clothing and household items to neighbors and new volunteers, and I’m continually patching my two ratty pairs of jeans because I can’t justify buying a new pair this late in my service. Since I’ve already been here for 17 months, being here for 8 more doesn’t seem like long. But lately when I talk to friends and family, I’m hearing reactions along the lines of “you’re STILL there?”... or, “you don’t come home until May 2014? But that’s still so far away!” As I wrote about in a previous post, time passes in the Peace Corps both at a snail’s pace and at warp speed. You could be bemoaning the fact that you still have over a year left, and then all of a sudden you get busy with a project and realize that you only have a few months left. For me, the next 8 months will undoubtedly go quickly, but not until I get through the months of August, September, and October, which will be chock-full of work on my primary and secondary projects. After that, with 2014 in close range, it will really start to feel like the end.

Being in my final 1/3^rd of service has made me understand why so many PCVs extend their service for the optional third year, because I’m just now beginning to experience the fear of returning to America after working so hard to integrate and establish a life in Madagascar. For the longest time I kept thinking that I couldn’t wait to get back to my life in the US.  But just recently I had a lightbulb moment when I realized that actually, I don’t have that life anymore. I gave up my apartment and left my job, and NYC will probably be so changed by the time I get back that I’ll feel like a newcomer. Friends have moved away, and it seems like everyone I know is moving in with a significant other/getting engaged/getting married/having babies. And where does that leave me? I, too, want to grow and move further into adulthood, but I can’t—yet. I feel slightly stifled and stunted, knowing that I need to make some serious life adjustments when I get back, but unable to do anything about it from here. It’s bizarre and scary to think that I have no idea where I will be living or what I will be doing a year from now.  I’m still planning to apply to business schools, but what if I don’t get into a good school, or get enough financial aid to be able to afford it? And if I decide to go back to work instead after Peace Corps, how on earth can I look for a job all the way from Madagascar? As someone who has always thrived on looking forward and planning ahead, it’s extremely scary to legitimately have no idea where I will be this time next year.

Right now, the best thing that I can do is continue focusing on my work projects to make sure that I finish my service feeling fulfilled. I know that if I think too much about life-after-Peace Corps, I’ll go a little bit crazy, so I’m trying to balance my need to plan and prepare with the necessity of focusing on my work here and living in the present. Luckily, I have enough work projects and travel plans to keep me busy, and I’m sure that by the time my COS conference rolls around, I’ll be thinking “but I need more time! I’m not ready to leave!”

All about cloves (and what my work is here)

It’s December in Vangaindrano, which means that the lychee trees are dripping with strawberry-red bunches of fruit, piles of blushing-pink mangoes line the cobblestone market road, and the streets are richly perfumed with the scent of cloves, a crop that my town and the surrounding areas are famous for.  Right now I’m sitting in the office of my counterpart agency, COLDIS, and on the other side of the wall is there stockpile of local cloves bought recently from the countryside towns, awaiting their trip to the warehouse in Manakara. Every deep inhale brings the heady aroma of cloves, and makes it feel a little bit like Christmas, even if it is 95 degrees out.

Cloves are one of the more famous examples, along with vanilla, cocoa and coffee, of a cash crop that flourishes in Madagascar. The best cloves in the world are said to come from Madagascar and Zanzibar, although they are widely grown in Indonesia as well. My counterpart agency here in Madagascar is an organization called COLDIS, which works with collectives of smallholder farmers to purchase their spices and export them internationally. COLDIS buys pepper and ginger as well as cloves, but it’s the latter that is their primary focus. The name of the organization stands for “collect and distribute”, and when you lok at the challenges of being a smallholder farmer in rural Madagascar, you’ll understand the importance of what they are doing.

First of all, most small-scale spice farmers in Madagascar live in rural areas and are fairly poor. They usually farm rice and other subsistence crops, in addition to growing cloves (or other spices), which are harvested once a year around October or November. Cloves do well in coastal regions, so the southeast (around Vangaindrano) and the northeast (around Fenerive Est) are where most of them are grown in Madagascar. Unfortunately, the coastal areas are also the most susceptible to cyclone damage, and therefore it’s where a lot of rural poverty is concentrated. In addition, the roads are incredibly bad when you’re going outside of a major town like Vangaindrano, and when you factor in cyclone-season rains and the fact that none of these farmers can afford to own a car, let alone the gas to run it, then you understand the infratructure challenges that exist here. So what COLDIS does is unique and helpful: they drive their trucks out to the countryside towns where the rural collectives of spice farmers are located, thereby giving market access to these farmers. They can sell their spices without having to travel very far, or spend a lot of money on taxi-brousse transport. Then, once COLDIS has collected cloves from all of the towns, they are sorted, processed, and packaged in the Manakara warehouse for distribution, via the cargo port in Tamatave, for export to clients in Europe.

Triage workers sorting cloves in Manakara

Bags of cloves bound for an export client in Rotterdam

The 4 different types of cloves: CG3, which is the "creme de la creme", baby cloves, stems, and griffes.

Although I had originally wanted to work with Madagascar vanilla, because of my food background, I was still really excited when I got my work assignment and learned that my project would involve spice farmers. It’s taken some time to figure out exactly what my work with COLDIS will be, but I’ve recently been assigned a project that I’m really excited about: I’ll be helping implement a sustainability program with the clove farmers around Vangaindrano so that the cloves from here can be marked as “sustainable”. COLDIS wants to ascribe to the standards set forth by the Sustainable Spices Intiative, which is a large-scale initiative that has been adopted by most of the major players in the spice industry-- including heavyweights like McCormick & Co. “Sustainability” is certainly a buzzword these days, but what does this actually mean, you may ask: in a nutshell, it means adopting a variety of changes that involve training the farmers on harvest techniques and environmental stewardship, finding farmers who want to plant new trees and ensuring that 15,000 new trees are planted, and working with the laborers in Manakara to ensure they’re healthy and treated fairly, among other things. These standards are a win-win for all parties because they will ensure a continued harvest for the small farmers, an equitable work environment for the Manakara laborers, and a healthy export market for COLDIS in Europe and America, where consumer demand calls for more and more food products to be certified as sustainable.

All in all, I’m excited about the possibilities that this project offers for the farmers, as well as COLDIS. I’m also thrilled to have been given the responsibility to project-manage this on the local level. Although it’s been frustrating trying to get this off the ground, I’m hopeful that once it kicks off it will keep me busy and challenged. And who knows, perhaps this will lead to a post-Peace Corps career in the global spice trade! I’ll leave you with a recipe using cloves that comes from a former volunteer, which is included in the Peace Corps Madagascar cookbook that I’m helping to edit. This makes a wonderful holiday gift or contribution to a holiday party.

Christmas Rum

1 large bottle light rum

1-2 cinnamon sticks

3 vanilla beans

Small handful whole cloves

Small piece of ginger, peeled and sliced

2-3 whole nutmeg

Open the rum and drink (or pour out!) about ¼ cup worth. Place the spices in the bottle, recap, and give it a shake. Let sit in a cool, dark place for several weeks or months, until rum is spiced and fragrant and has turned caramel in color. If giving as a gift, pour into a decorative bottle along with the spices, and add a little gift tag.

Ambani-volo adventure

A couple days ago I found myself at a crossroads, literally. I was embarking on my first “business trip”, Peace Corps-style, and was due to go out to the ambani-volo (rural countryside) town of Masianaka to work with the clove farmers. My counterpart and I made plans to take a morning taxi-brousse on Wednesday, work on Thursday, and head back on Friday. As this was to my first time working directly with the farmers, and the start of a new sustainability project that I’m rather excited about, I was nervously anticipating the trip.

But things, as often happens in Peace Corps, didn’t go according to plan. I was sitting on the brousse waiting for my counterpart to show up and meet me, when suddenly my phone rang: it was him, saying that he was stuck working in the office but that I should go, and that he would meet me in Masianaka the next day. So I went, and bounced along the backcountry roads for 2 hours when an idea popped into my head: if my counterpart wouldn’t be joining me until Thursday mid-morning, it would be incredibly boring to be in a small town alone for 24 hours with nothing to do. My friend Leo’s site, Matanga, is somewhat close to Masianaka, and I’ve been trying to go see his site for ages. Certainly, if I just went straight to Masianaka I’d have plenty of time to get my work done in preparation for the presentation to farmers, as well as some time to explore the area and see the ocean. But on the other hand, I’d be alone in an unfamiliar (albeit tiny) town. Perhaps it would be safer for me to spend the night in Matanga at Leo’s house? And I’d been trying to meet up with Leo to catch up for ages, and like 2 ships passing in the night, we just keep missing each other, either when he’s in my town or I’m in our banking town. Plus I happened to be carrying a letter for him that arrived at our shared PO box in Vangaindrano, so it would be good for me to deliver his mail. And so I made the split decision to go to Matanga, which marked my fifth attempt to go visit Leo—but in this case, the fifth time’s the charm!

When we got to the fork in the road where you can either go to Matanga or Masianaka, I abruptly told the brousse driver that I’d changed my plans and wanted to get off there. Somewhat bewildered, he nevertheless stopped the brousse and helped me unload my bike from the roof, which I’d brought because I was planning to bike back to Vangaindrano from Masianaka (about 35km.) So I strapped on my helmet, saddlebags, and backpack and set off on the 10km towards Matanga, with a plan that I would surprise Leo, spend the night there, and then set off for Masianaka early in the morning, which would allow me to be there in time to meet my counterpart.

Instantly I was treated with a taste of the road conditions to come: the first stretch of road was an incredibly rocky downhill slope. But then the road forked again, and although there was a sign, it didn’t say “Matanga this way”—it said something in Malagasy that I didn’t understand. I asked a passerby which way to go, and he said right, so once again, off I went, and was met by even more challenging rocky downhills. My bike was misbehaving and kept fishtailing due to the weight of my saddlebags, which made it even more of a difficult ride. I stopped to pump more air into my tires and wondered to myself, did I just make an incredibly stupid decision? Here I was biking on a bad road with no cell phone reception, going to a town with no cell phone reception, and only the brousse driver and the other passengers heard me say I was going to Matanga. But, the deed was gone, so I kept going, all the while cursing myself as I kept being faced with more and more challenging stretches of road: rock-studded uphills, incredibly rutted downhills, and just generally terrible conditions: this is officially the worst road I have ever seen in my life. Every time I was greeted with another impossible rocky hill I swore out loud and hopped off my bike to walk up it, in a bid to save my tires as well as my hips. Of course, the benefit of all those hills is that they afforded absolutely gorgeous vistas, so I did in fact stop to smell the roses. But every passing minute made me more and more angry with the ride, which was definitely longer than 10km-- although there were no route markers so I had no way of knowing, which was incredibly maddening. My head was a boiling kettle of anger and frustration, which only intensified when passersby would tell me I still wasn’t near Matanga yet.

Finally, 2 sweaty hours later, the road opened up into an actual, somewhat developed town, and when I saw the sign for a school that read “Matanga” I just about passed out from the relief. After asking a few people for directions, I found the right house, and by exclaiming “surprise!”, woke a very confused Leo up from a midafternoon nap.

After I recounted my journey and my commitment to never, ever do that bike ride again, Leo figured out what had happened. “Ohhhh you took the bad road!”, he said. Apparently it doesn’t actually need to take 2 hours to go about 14km—there is, in fact, a better road that is actually 10km to Matanga—it was the other road at the second fork. And the sign that I couldn’t understand? It says “don’t take this road unless you have a 4x4!” Um, yeah, that’s quite a warning. I was furious with myself for not taking the other route, but it made for a good story when Leo was introducing me around town. We spent the day hanging out, cooking dinner, and just generally catching up, before turning into bed early—I was planning to head out at 6:30am to do the 25km ride to Masianaka, but this time on the “good” road!

And so the next day, after some mofo balls and coffee, I took off in the cool morning air. My first challenge was the “bridge” (or should I say, lack thereof) just outside of town. Leo surmised that the kid giving me directions probably told me to go the way he did because the bridge on the “good” road is broken, and is only passable by walking a bike over it. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but followed Leo’s instructions to dismount, walk my bags across, and then come back for my bike. As I carried my bags over walking on a single plank, my fear of heights resurfaced, and I was terrified at the thought of both having to cross over it again, as well as carry my bike across it and cross it one more time. Thankfully, a nice man saw me struggling and carried my bike across in a 5 second trip, making me feel quite untalented. And so once again, I set off, and although there were definitely some rocky hills that I needed to walk up, I made much better time: it took me about an hour to do the 10km to the fork in the road, and then another hour to ride the 13km south to Masianaka. The second section of road was mostly blissfully flat, and a few kilometers south of the fork it becomes the town of Nosy Omby (“Cow Island”, though it’s more of an inlet than an island) with gorgeous views in the distance of the Indian Ocean, sun twinkling off the water in all its glory.

I arrived in Masianaka mid-morning and found a place to rent a bungalow for the night. Masianaka is a very small town, and most of its reason for being is the fact that it’s home to a ferry crossing that anyone driving south to Ft. Dauphin needs to take. With only a few hotelys and one epicerie, there isn’t much going on. There’s no electricity, no cell phone reception, and no water pumps anywhere in town. And so when I asked the proprietress if there was anywhere I could take a bucket bath, she said there was a place “over there” and pointed off in the distance. Her daughter offered to take me, and off we went along with 2 other girls. What I thought might be a quick trip ended up being a 20-minute walk through the tanam-bary (rice fields) and towards the ocean: the “place to bathe” is actually a natural freshwater pool on the beach. It was a beautiful walk and I was thrilled to be standing on the beach, but I declined to bathe there after seeing two of the girls pull down their pants and pee directly in the water.

I went back to my tiny little hut and managed to clean enough of the biking grime off of me using baby wipes that I’d luckily brought (thanks to Bridget and Shelly for sending them—you have no idea how useful they were!), and after changing into “work” clothes, I finished writing notes for the talk I wantd to give the farmers. And then I set about waiting for my counterpart. And waiting. And waiting. I luckily had a book with me, and spent the better part of a day sitting around outside reading and looking at any arriving car or taxi-brousse to see if he was on it. Sadly, he never showed. I was ready to give up and get a ride back to Vangaindrano when it started to get dark, and I actually saw a car with 2 of my TIAVO coworkers pass through town. When I told them what happened they offered to give me a ride home, but when I said that I had a bike with me, they realized they had no way to strap it to the car. Damn. So night fell and after eating another rice-and-fish meal, I went back to my bungalow to turn in for the night, praying that it was not a place that rats liked to frequent. 

I fell asleep listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the beach, and luckily didn’t hear any rat activity. I woke up early today and after downing 6 small bananas, set off on the road to Vangaindrano. It was a pleasant ride, probably the more so because I was so happy to be getting home, and I covered about 34km (on a fairly bad road) in approximately 2 hours and 45 minutes. The best part of the ride was the fact that I beat the pickup truck that was leaving Masianaka around the same time and had offered me a ride, which I declined because a) I fixed the issue with my bike, and b) the driver was being an condescending, misogynistic d-bag by implying that I couldn’t possible know what to do with a bike because I was a girl. (The best feeling was when I zoomed past him and gave him a big “eff you” smile in the process.)

The first thing I did when I got to Vangaindrano was stop at the office to find my counterpart and ask, essentially, why the hell did he leave me out there alone? He said that instead of going to Masianaka on Thursday morning as he’d said on the phone, he ended up going Wednesday afternoon. And when he got there and asked around, people told him that I’d gone to Matanga, so he assumed I wasn’t coming and went to a different town to do work. He said he passed through Masianaka on Thursday and people said I wasn’t there, but that doesn’t make sense to me because I was there from 9am onwards. (I could have been misunderstanding him though, because I’m still working with a language barrier.) When I got home, I was a heady mix of emotions: happiness and relief to be back at my house, anger and frustration at the fact that I had wasted 3 days and a lot of money, disappointment that I went all the way out there for nothing, but also pride in the fact that I conquered that road by bike. I’m not sure when I’m go back out to Masianaka, but it’ll probably have to be soon because the project needs to get started. Whenever it is, though, next time I am not going alone!

Broken bridges

Sometimes you find yourself having days in Peace Corps where things feel just too easy, and then along comes something to remind you that you're living in a developing country with poor infrastructure. My latest example: two weekends ago I was in Manakara visiting some other volunteers before spending time working in my counterpart agency's office there. Two of my Manakara-dwelling fellow PCVs had just moved into an amazing new house that stands in stark contrast to most Peace Corps Madagascar houses: running water, a real kitchen, a giant living/dining area, 3 big bedrooms, plus a bathroom with a bathtub and hot water heater. I had a lovely, relaxing weekend and was generally just enjoying having some western-style amenities. It was one of those times where I almost forgot that I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer. On Monday morning I worked in the COLDIS office, which is located across the Canal des Pangalanes in an area called Manakara Be, then biked back across the bridge to meet my friends for lunch. However, when I tried to return at 2:00, I found that I couldn't. The main road leading to the bridge was crowded with motorcycles, pedestrians, trucks, and pousse-pousses (rickshaws). I was frustrated and confused by all the congestion, and fought my way through the crowd with some aggressive biking. But finally I figured out why there was so much going on: the bridge had collapsed, and half of it was lying in the river.

Oh.

I have always hated this bridge for its poor design and annoying "bike lane" that is too narrow and full of broken pilings that are guaranteed to pop your tires. In fact, I was cursing it just as I was riding over it on my way to lunch. But never did I expect it to actually break! A large truck carrying salt was apparently the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, and my boss told me that although no humans were hurt, 3 cows died as the bridge went crashing into the river. I feel incredibly fortunate that neither myself nor any other volunteers were crossing the bridge when it broke. Had I gone to lunch just an hour later, who knows what might have happened.

This section of the bridge is not supposed to be here.

Unfortunately, because this is a developing country, no one is holding their breath waiting for a replacement bridge to be built-- it will without a doubt take months, if not year. But Manakara Be is a vital part of town: not only is the COLDIS office and warehouse located there, but so are 2 of the city's 3 banks, plus the post office and the offices of the chef de region and many municipal ministries. (Plus, the town's beautiful beach is located in Manakara Be... let's not forget that.) And so in the meantime, people have found ways to get around the lack of a bridge. Many people take the somewhat risky path climbing up the broken section of the bridge and walking over by foot. And the lakana (canoe) operators who live by the canal have started doing brisk business ferrying people, bicycles, and goods across the canal, for 200 Ariary a ride. (Imagine owning an epicerie in Manakara Be and having to transport all your goods via canoe after buying them in town.) In fact, as an economic development volunteer, it's been quite intriguing to see all the little businesses that are cropping up in response to the crash. There is one guy who just started a service watching people's bikes for 200 Ariary, so they can bike to the bridge and then leave their bikes when they cross over.

View from a canoe.

It remains to be seen how the bridge collapse will affect COLDIS's business operations, but it's unfortunate because there really isn't any other bridge crossing that would allow them to transport goods by truck. And although they just sent several trucks worth of cloves to Rotterdam (via container ship at the port in Tamatave), there are still several tons remaining in the warehouse. And pretty soon it will be the clove harvest and clove buying season, when this season's crop will start coming in.

People say that Peace Corps service is about adapting to new and different obstacles, and this is definitely one of them. I probably would not be dealing with this type of infrastructure challenge if I were working in America, so this is certainly another way that my business experience is being tested and expanded.

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!