Poo beach

I may have mentioned before that the village of Andavadoaka does not have any sanitation and that the main spot for toilet visits tends to be the spiny forest. In fact, one volunteer on an earlier expedition (hi Ellie) said that she went for a walk in the spiny forest one day and came across a man doing a poo (was he actually doing it while you walked past him?) while reading a magazine or similar!
Most of the children however don't bother with the forest and just poo on the beach instead. There are many many many children in Andava. Consequently, there is much poo on the beach. Doesn't sound like paradise any more really does it, when you put it like that?
Justin and I walked up to a beach north of the village the other week and had to dodge all the poo. Some volunteers counted..... When they were out the other week.
So... Where am I going with this? Well, last week Andavadoaka was visited by the deputy environment minister of Madagascar in order to present the village with the Equator Prize trophy which it won with Blue Ventures last year for developing community run protected areas.
Although the village won last year, it's taken ages and ages (because this is madagascar of course) for the prize-giving to take place and for the VIPs to come and make it down here. In fact, most of us doubted that it would ever happen.
The night before the prestigious event took place, the village had a meeting and got together to clean up the rubbish from the sandy passageways/streets and the poo from the beach. A guard was even placed on the beach apparently to stop people from going down and pooing on it.
So... The big event took place on Saturday just outside the primary school. The
women's association sung the dignatories in, and there were many speeches.
Club Alo Alo - the environmental club that Blue Ventures run with some of the children of the village - sang their song and the women's association performed. Half the village, lots of the Blue Ventures staff, and (as usual) hundreds of children watched in the mid-day heat. The dignatories were presented with gifts from the village - a model pirogue, a carved baobab tree, some blue ventures Velondriake t-shirts (no photo of the minister wearing one I'm afraid Richard) and four huge stinky dried fish (I know they were stinky because I made the mistake of standing next to them while they were drying and nearly fell over from the strength of the smell).
After this, for the Important People there were cocktails (coca cola, beer, rum or fizzy orange) and some schmoozing. I was one of the few women in the room.
Schmoozing in English is okay, I quite enjoy it most of the time, but schmoozing in french is just a bit beyond my capabitilities I think. And then it was all over. The dignatories, Important People and Army guys all drove off in their 4x4s for a slap up meal at Coco Beach (as far as slap up meals are possible at Coco Beach) and then drove off sometime in the afternoon.
What else has occupied me this week? Well, we had some poor visiblity days last week, but things have improved substantially again and we're back in the water so I've really enjoyed doing some fish point-outs and tests with some volunteers. We all watched a film (in two stages) called Kontroll - set in the Budapest underground system - which I'd really recommend and we had a fantastic 'cross-dressing' party where everyone dressed as someone else (of the opposite sex) from the expedition. As always with these things, the men dressing as women were much, much more entertaining. Kyle (tall, 19 year old Californian) came as me and painted some tattoos on his belly and arms. :) most fun.
Justin and I have started to do some yoga together in the mornings :) and we had quite a scare on Saturday evening as one volunteer went swimming at dusk and did not come back with his buddy, but carried on swimming on his own. We had to get the boats out to search for him as night fell pretty quickly and I had nightmare visions of pulling a half-dead volunteer out of the water.
He was absolutely fine, had not got into trouble at all, and just wilfully ignored common sense, his buddy asking him to swim back, and other people warning him that it would be dark soon and was just all-round arrogant and stupid. Thankfully, I didn't have to tackle that one alone as Al, our wonderful new dive manager, joined me in dealing with the aftermath, the debriefing and disciplining of the volunteer.
Oh... And I wrote my first song! It's a very very cheesy folky ballad, but I figure that as it's the first song I've ever written from scratch, I can afford to be at least a little bit cheesy. Have not played it to anyone other than Justin as yet.
And as for the poo on the beach? Well, I'm sorry to report that it seems that the beach was far too long and far too big for one guard to tackle alone. Say no more.