Mad, mad week

What a mad mad mad week it's been. I'll be exceptionally happy when this expedition is over. I need a break. It just seems to have been one of those weeks where nothing goes right and everything that can go wrong, does.

We had a full-blown evacuation off site. Disappointingly, it was not by helicopter, but by four-by-four, but that was still pretty dramatic. Thankfully the person concerned was not seriously hurt, (she got a bump on the head after a diver fell on top of her from the boat) but she wanted to get checked out by hospital just to make sure. Unlike at home, where you can just go to A&E by taxi if you need to and return home reassured, that's just not possible here. You have to involve insurance companies ("press one to purchase a new policy, two for claims, Or 3 to speak to an operator....!!! I'm not kidding you!), who then have to involve their agents (in this case, South Africa) who then have to involve medical teams somewhere else in Madagascar (in this case, Tana) who then have to involve someone to fly a plane (in this case to our nearest airfield which is Morombe) and then a vehicle... All in all, the evacuation process took about 20 hours...

All I can say is, I'm thankful that she wasn't seriously hurt, things could have been a lot worse, and I have a fab team of staff and volunteers who all were really excellent and responded appropriately. Still, I don't really want to repeat that drama for a while. We hammer home the health & safety message a lot here on site, but nothing can guarantee that accidents won't happen...

The volunteer was doing alright in general, but was a little alarmed when three doctors, and two other people leaped out of a 4x4, put a drip in her, put her in a secure stretcher and then in the 4x4 and drove off.

Meanwhile, the diving equipment is on its last legs now - we barely have enough working equipment to send out a full set of divers. Thankfully, just in the nick of time, the freight, which has been in the country and held up in Tana until last week, finally arrived. It made it down to Tulear after having been held up in customs for two weeks, but then all the truck and 4x4 drivers refused to take it up here as it's too 'heavy'.... It's really ridiculous. It was then all taken on a taxi brousse to Morombe with one of our staff and then from there driven down to Andavadoaka on a pickup truck. Phew. It was like Christmas when it got here!

So we now have lots of brand spanking new dive kit, and my food parcel has finally arrived. :) yay! :) As it's nearing the end of the expedition, I'm going to be very restrained and try and save most of it for next year! I've already started on the garlic sticks though! :)

What else has happened? I've dived a couple of times. We had a party night. I didn't really get much of a day off, but as that was four days ago, I can't quite remember why now. A complicated camping trip was arranged. Zebu carts were ordered. cancelled. And ordered again. Then cancelled again. Zebu cart drivers needed to be placated as did the volunteer who had sustained a bruise on a zebu cart ride (though, the volunteer who had been hit on the head and later evacuated, kept apologising profusely for all the hassle she was causing us!)... some of the volunteers still doesn't seem to have grasped that this is Madagascar and things don't happen 'just so' and in the way that they would do at home.

My staff are rapidly losing patience with them. I am managing to still stay patient with people for the majority of the time - it's my job after all to answer all their questions and to reassure them, look after their needs and deal with their complaints. And actually, I think I'm reasonably good at that bit.

However, during the early part of the post-accident drama, while bags were being packed for evacuation and phone calls were still being made to insurance companies, one volunteer came to find me to let me know that "it had come to his attention" that as the injured girl was leaving site, they no longer required 3 4x4 cars to get them off site, but just needed two, and so could I also cancel one of them? I have to admit that it did take a superhuman amount of restraint to reply politely that it was not the time right then, but that I would tend to it when it was a bit more appropriate.

Oh, and Ellie, from the carbon offsetting project, arrived on site along with a few goodies for us (the Guardian from two weeks ago! and some christmas crackers. :) ) It's good to have someone from 'management' here for a while. She has now been here for almost a week, but it's been such a busy one, it feels like she's been here a month. She's really great and we've both agreed that constructing a bicycle powered generator will definitely be our project for the next year.

Anyway, Justin and I leave site on Thursday on the camion. So who knows what adventures I'll have to report next week!

Happy christmas to one and all in case I don't get to post before then.

Living with uncertainty

We've been here for over two months now and, as you can imagine, there are more than a few things that I've had to get used to. There are the obvious ones - like not having a telly, not being able to text friends, and ants in the bread and honey.

But there are some less obvious ones too. Ones that require that little bit of a mental shift. One of the main ones is that certain concepts, especially if they involve time, just don't seem to exist in the same way. The idea of 'immediately' just doesn't seem to exist here and expectations for WHEN things will happen have to be much much more flexible than they are at home. There's no point holding rigid expectations that if you're told something will happen on Tuesday, that it will ACTUALLY happen on Tuesday. It might. But it might just as easily happen on Wednesday, Thursday or even the following week.

I learnt quite quickly not to waste any mental energy on any expectations like that, and to be totally flexible about EVERYTHING that I've been told. Douglas Adams wrote about Indonesia in Last Chance to see "We were told that there were only two trucks on Flores and we passed three of them on the way from the airport. Everything we were told in Flores turned out not to be true. Unless we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time." It is extremely similar in Madagascar. Though, actually when I think about it, lots of what we are told IS true, because we are rarely told that something WILL happen, it's usually instead predicted somewhat vaguely with a qualifier of "it depends on which direction the wind is blowing".

Questions such as "how long does it take to get to such and such" are rarely followed by a easily quantified figure. Instead there will be a number of different caveats - the wind, the mode of transport, the time of day etc. etc. I have adjusted to all this in the only way I know how - as relaxed as possible, and with a sense of humour. I can imagine more 'Type A' personalities stressing out about this a whole lot more. Indeed, in my 'youth', I too would have found it more stressful than

funny. Now, I'm just living with it.

The freight (with my food parcel delivery) was supposed to arrive on Saturday 1st. Then Monday 3rd. Then, maybe Thursday or Friday. Now, possibly the weekend or maybe next week. I'll just be grateful if it arrives before I leave site at the end of the expedition.

My stock answer to staff going outside of Andavadoaka for work or meetings or research is not "I'll see you on Wednesday". It's more like "I'll expect you when I see you". It can be very frustrating, or it can just Be what it is. And the positive side of all this uncertainty is that whenever something DOES happen 'immediately' or 'soon', or even sometimes, AT ALL, I get extremely grateful, pleased and happy.

Like, the roof being mended on our hut a few days after the wind had blown the palm leaves off it. Or Farah (one of the managers of Coco Beach) ordering us 4x4s for the volunteers without actually even being asked to. On the other hand, I try not to get frustrated when I have to ask Farah to do something four days in a row and each time, getting told "we will do it today or tomorrow".

And when the generator died - as it did last week - and we were told that we would get the required new part the next day. Well, I simply didn't bother to believe it, nor did I get as frustrated as some of my staff did at the lack of electricity. It broke. There was nothing we could do about it, except just live without lights for a couple of evenings, have early nights and relax a bit more because there wasn't enough power to work the computers or charge things up.

Five days later, Coco Beach is now being powered by the old generator and the new part has yet to arrive. Heri (in charge of electricity on site) seems to be regularly required to hit it with things to get it going or just get all oily and dirty and fix it. But we have (mostly) regular electricity. Uncertainty, weather dictating much of our movements on site and things breaking are just part of life here. The only thing to do is to roll with it, or you'll go mad. And as I have 9 months left, I've no intention of going mad quite yet. At least, not about that aspect of life here!

Meanwhile, we're still deciding where to spend Christmas. Probably on a (different) beach somewhere near Tulear. Hopefully somewhere a bit more touristy and developed so that we can have a few luxuries - like a fan in the room, maybe a choice of food at mealtimes and possibly a tiled bathroom so that my feet don't get dirty immediately after having a shower as they do here. Meanwhile, Tristan, my neighbour in the staff huts and one of the field scientists, has returned from a local village with his christmas dinner in the form of "Stuffing" the turkey. He plans to keep it on his veranda and get someone to kill it on his behalf for Christmas.

The whole expedition is decamping to another village 20km north of here on Thursday. It will be a real adventure I think. It's only 20km away but with no roads and no cars, it'll be a real mission to get there. I'm not sure as yet if I'll be going too. But I hope so, as I have yet to actually see anything of the local area since we arrived.

Things I'm not missing this week: I'm not missing the rubbish weather in the UK. I'm not missing Christmas telly or Christmas adverts, or Christmas decadence or Christmas music on the radio. I'm not missing the dark or the grey or the rain or the cold. And, as I have had no arthritis for over a week - I'm not missing pain either.

Well, this week has seen two new staff members arrive on site.
Well, one staff member, and a student who has a placement here for two
months. Both are Malagasy and neither of them speak any English at all.
Our Malagasy is still somewhat limited. My own current vocabulary
extends to the following words: delicious. News? (Malagasy greeting)
No news (standard response). None. Hot. Water. Hot water. Large. Little.
Bread. How are you? And "No problem". 
These words are not really sufficient to create a proper conversation or
to deal with more complex matters like expenses and other logistics.
Consequently, we've got to speak to them in the only other available
language - French. Now, the problem with French is that I haven't really
spoken it much since O level (21 years ago). My grammar is particularly
awful, though my vocabulary is actually pleasingly large. It's certainly a
lot more extensive than my Malagasy one anyway. Justin, on the other
hand, remembers his grammar pretty well, but his vocabulary isn't quite
as extensive. My accent is terrible. His is pretty impressive. I understand
quite a lot of what I'm being told, but have some problems constructing a
sentence or a response (mainly due to the grammar thing and word
blocks over vocab). Justin, on the other hand, is really good at conversing,
but seems to understand very little. Between us, we almost add up to a
person who speaks not quite fluent French. 
We're both trying to improve on this situation by listening to some French
lessons on MP3. I didn't quite feel the urgency before as many of the
local Malagasy don't speak any French at all, but suddenly, with Larissa
and Dany's arrival, it seems all the more important to get better at the
whole French thing. I have been making myself use it more with the Coco
Beach hotel staff (usually I make Justin do the talking) and that's helping
too.  
Other news; I (finally!) passed fish tests on the computer and in-water.
Hoorah. Am particularly proud of the in-water test as, while volunteers
only have to get 27 out of 30 right, new staff members have to get 49 out
 of 50. I got all 50 correct (and then identified to myself another 10!) As
none of them were guesses either, I'm particularly proud of myself. I was
initially pretty worried about my ability to pass this test - given that I'd
already failed it twice, but I'm now glad that we made it stricter for staff
as I did loads of work to learn the fish and now am a lot more confident
of them than I would have been had I passed on the past, more lenient
system of 27 out of 30. 
I still need to demonstrate that I can do the 'fish belts' (the scientific fish
monitoring method that we use) before I can be let loose to do the science,
but even if I don't get the time to do those this expedition, I can still do fish
point outs for the next lot of volunteers that come through. :) 
The main challenge this week has been the fact that the Coco Beach
generator keeps packing up. This means that we can't always recharge
our batteries (which we need for essential equipment like the hand held
radios that we take out on the dive boats), or keep our computer batteries
charged up (so we can't always work). Last night it packed up at about
8pm and that was that. So we all had a very early night! I hope it's mended
today. 
The volunteers who were staying for three weeks also left site on Saturday,
along with Garth (reluctantly going back to Tulear to do some errands) and
the passport of one of our (more scatty) volunteers who had managed to
come on a six week trip with a four week (extendable) visa. She hadn't quite
grasped the whole "we're really remote thing" but doing things like renewing
a visa is not as straightforward as just popping into an office somewhere, or
even putting it in the post by registered delivery. Instead, we had to send it
with one of the people who were leaving early (luckily really) so that she
could, in a two hour window at the airport in Tana, pass it onto BV's
representative in Tana who can renew it on her behalf. Phew. 
It should return to site in time for the end of the expedition - hopefully with
our freight, which we are eagerly awaiting. It has a whole lot of equipment
goodies for us (new dive equipment, some computer hardware) and my
own little parcel of food. It was rumoured to arrive this weekend, but the
inevitable Malagasy delays mean that we might get it by the next email I
send. Fingers crossed. 
Food cravings update: Last night I dreamed about making an avocado and
toasted pine-nut sandwich. I don't think I actually got to taste it  though! So,
I'm not even getting to eat 'nice' food in my dreams either!!!! Actually, the
food has been pretty good this week. We've had stuffed aubergines once
(yay), a few salady things, and fish kebabs with sauteed potatoes.  
Wildlife update: there are more birds around than there was when I arrived.
The mina birds are a new addition, and there are a few more sunbirds
(tiny birds with a hooked beak), and some very pretty doves which have
a red wing. Funny how, every week, I think that I haven't got much to write
on my blog, and then I always manage to find something.