From Tana with Love
I’ll tell you right from the start: I didn’t see any lemurs this week. Chameleons too were scarce, as we only found one of the leathery fellows as he clambered up the stairs at the program center. But returning to Antananarivo (or “Tana”) doesn’t mean being removed from nature entirely. This city is very much alive.
As I write, I am sitting on the narrow balcony adjacent to my room. To my right, buses weave around large potholes on the main road, squeezing past a man walking by who carries a load of bicycle parts. Just below me is a footpath inlaid with stone steps, one of many capillaries that connect Tana’s main roads to the markets and water pumps that bustle out of reach of motorized traffic. A bright orange fody, Madagascar’s endemic version of a house sparrow flits by. It lands on a wire that supports pollen-stained spider webs. Plump arachnids sag in the wind. Beyond the webs and wires, a ramshackle house abuts a rare empty lot. This is the boule court, pretend battlefield, gossip zone, and source of how’d-your-feet-get-so-dusty reprimands for the neighborhood kids. Their chirping and laughing can always be heard on the weekends through my open window. Gene and I play boule farther down the hill, in the courtyard of a calmer family compound.
Coming home from class on a rainy day
I can say with some confidence that I recognize more of my neighbors here in Madagascar than I do in Wisconsin or Minnesota. People here are out and about all the time. The same taxis sit at the corner every day, the same vendors sit behind their neatly stacked rows of apples and pears. I see now why Gene’s host dad returned to Madagascar a few years ago, leaving a wife and children in France.
“France is not a country for old people,” he said.
While many old French people would probably disagree, I know that he missed his community. I too, have watched the physical distance grow between my friends and family: first going off to college and now halfway across the world in Madagascar. It’s what gnaws on me the most these days. Am I headed towards a future where I only see the people closest to me once or twice a year?
It helps that I am hugely proud of what my friends and family are up to wherever they are in the world, and I am proud of myself, too. I try and imagine what my twelve-year-old self would think about how I’m doing. So far, little Hugh has given this trip a huge thumbs up. It helps too that the neighborhood here in Tana is so welcoming. The other day a man on the bus from Gabon started talking to me.
“I don’t speak any Malagasy,” he told me in French, “But I am working here for nine months.”
With a look at his expensive watch, it was clear he was making that time well worth it. He was relieved to speak some French and English with me, but he left to his house before I got his name. No matter, I’m sure I’ll catch him at the bus stop another time.
A storm approaches Tana
A building taller than three stories is rare here, so on a clear day I can look out onto the mountains on the horizon. White egrets often silently fly overhead en route to nearby rice fields. This is generally a short flight, because rice fields checkerboard the valley floors right into downtown. Young boys wade up to their armpits in the water holding bamboo poles, competing with the egrets for small fish. The fields let the city breath out, and their importance is compounded because Tana features few public parks, and none that are free to access. A magnificent botanical garden was created in a public square but only in order to discourage public demonstrations. Vendors who used to set up shop in the square now cram onto the sidewalk against the black iron fence.
These mini shops shouldn’t be confused with wandering vendors, who sell a very particular set of goods. Namely, sunglasses, peanuts, koba (a peanut-rice cake), cell phone chargers, masks, pineapple slices, and thimble sized portions of ice cream. I am still trying to work out why only certain goods stay on the move. Do sunglass and ice-cream vendors try and target the sunniest parts of the city on any given day? Do pineapple vendors walk past my house because word of my insatiable appetite for the fruit has spread? At least The koba sellers have an obvious strategy. Sometimes I am sitting in class when the alarm sounds.
“Koooooooooooobaaaaaaaaaaa!”
I think if you rallied all the koba sellers in the city you could assemble a lovely choir. The remarkable thing is not that their voices travel half a mile away with perfect clarity, it’s that they hold the note perfectly, so much so that I’m able to harmonize in class.
Gene chows down on fresh koba
Not that I’m bored in class. Quite the opposite! It turns out that language classes can be fun when there’s a real incentive to learn. And our biodiversity lecturers are a rotating cast of some of the biggest names in Madagascar conservation; experts who have species named after them. Tomorrow we’re headed East to Andasibe to put our knowledge to the test. Andasibe is one of the largest National Parks in Madagascar, and we’ll be studying lemurs and ethnobotany. But where my brain is going to stretch the most is communicating with my new host family for the next two weeks. They live right on the edge of the park and don’t speak French or English.
Class with Malagasy friends
Luckily, our Malagasy friends from our last excursion are staying with us. I’m paired up again with my friend Tex, a soft-spoken grad student who loves lemurs and death metal. If the community in Andasibe is anything as welcoming as my neighborhood back in Tana, I’ll be at ease in no time. Not to mention that I’m still connected virtually with all of you through the blog. The positive support for this project over the past month and a half has been unexpected and a huge morale boost for me. Thank you for reading! And thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being part of my community.
Sunset from the boule court