Week 28

Since I last wrote, we've had a full diving week, two party nights and two days off. I've read two books, done four dives and taken a zebu cart ride to another village.
The biggest excitement came when I was out diving on Thursday morning as, on the way to the dive site, we spotted a small pod of dolphins. There were only 8 of them, including a tiny baby and they were relatively close to the boat. We stopped the engine and were all excited and watched them swim past. It's the first time I've seen dolphins out here and the first time that Bic, our Malagasy divemaster, has seen them in over a year. He was the most excited one amongst us.
Another highlight this week has been leading two dives in order to start collecting data for my own research project. I'm going to be taking table coral measurements on all of our regular divesites. As table corals grow at a similar rate, it will be able to tell us about the age of some of these reefs, and which ones of them were likely to have withstood the coral bleaching of 1998 and 2001, which are resilient and which are recovering. It's a relatively straightforward one to get data for and as there isn't any data about table corals on these reefs, anything we get will be new.
So, we went to one of our relatively healthy reefs and we did two dives on there trying to measure as many table corals as possible, without measuring any of them twice. It's not as easy as you might think. I hope to be able to gather as much data as possible in the next two expeditions and be able to do some data analysis before I leave in August, but we'll see whether that's too ambitious or not. Clearly, I'm not actually a marine biologist so there's also much reading to be done before I'm in a position to actually know what any of the data is likely to mean.
Richard (MD of Blue Ventures) is out here at the moment and both of us went to see the Mayor of Befandefa on Wednesday. Befandefa is the administrative centre of the 'commune' (region of villages) that Andavadoaka belongs to and the mayor had asked to see someone from Blue Ventures to talk to us.
So, on Wednesday morning, Richard, Gildas (to translate) and I took the only method of transport available to go down to Befandefa. As the village is not directly on the coast, we couldn't take a pirogue there, and as there are no buses and very few cars, the only method of transport that was available was a zebu cart. Zebus, in case I haven't mentioned them before, are the cows of Madagascar. They are prized as currency, meat and also work bloody hard pulling carts along in rural areas such as this one. They have weird humps on their backs, a bit like camels, but I don't know exactly what they're for (the humps that is, I know what the zebus are for).
Anyway, so, the zebu pull the cart along, much like horses and carriages. Only, the cart is just a tiny wooden box on wheels with no comforts at all. However, as Vivienne (the woman from the village who collects all of our clothes to distribute amongst the village to wash for us) was hitching a ride with us, she had lent us a mattress. So, there were four of us on the back of this tiny wooden cart.
As I've mentioned before, you can't be in a hurry if you're travelling in Madagascar. At least pirogues can reach quite a speed if the wind is in the right direction. Zebu carts, on the other hand, can only go as fast as a zebu can go. Which apparently, according to this journey is about 10 kilometres an hour. As Befandefa is 15 kilometres south of Andavadoaka, it took us just over an hour and a half through the spectacular spiny forest, past baobabs and salt-pans. It wasn't a particularly peaceful or relaxing journey as the cart is quite squeaky, and the 'road' pretty bumpy. The zebus also make lots of ploppy noises whenever they poo. And they seemed to poo an awful lot during a 90 minute journey. Luckily, I just about managed to escape getting covered in zebu poo flying out of their bottoms.
However, the most noisy thing about the journey is the zebu cart driver whose job it is to get these leisurely cows to move at something approaching an enthusiastic pace. To do this, (look away now vegetarians and animal lovers) he has a ring on the middle finger of each hand, which has a spike on the underneath for pressing down on the poor animals' necks. There is also a whip, and if all this abuse doesn't convince the animals to keep
moving or to hurry up, he hurls insults at them too. The most common insult on this journey was apparently "dead pig" or "dead mother", but mostly "dead pig". I don't know much about the zebu's culture and their relation to pigs, but going by their galloping reaction to the hissing of "dead pig" by the zebu driver, they don't like them much.
We got to Befandefa at 10am, and then, as our meeting was at 10am Malagasy time, we hung around in the shade for just over an hour before the mayor was ready to see us.
Waiting around is an important part of Malagasy life. Time, is most definitely NOT money in this country. Everything is preceeded by a lot of waiting around for no other purpose it seems than just waiting. It breeds a kind of patience that I don't think we're used to back home. Even after a few weeks here, our volunteers still constantly ask "what's going
on? What are we waiting FOR?" when things start late. I've got used to it now and am pretty impervious to it and rarely get annoyed. It's just nice to have time to chill out I always think!
Anyway, the meeting was 2 hours long, seemed to be extremely verbose, when really, all the mayor wanted us to do was to pay a tax for our volunteers, some money towards paying the gendarmes to patrol in the villages and to teach him (and people from other villages other than Andavadoaka) some English. Afterwards, we had lunch with Madame Angeline (whose children are named, Angela, Angelina, Angeles and some other variation of her name!) who is a secretary to the mayor. She cooked us chille con carne with tinned corned beef (I didn't eat that), lentils and rice which was served with fresh cucumber and tomato salad. We washed it all down with rice water which is hot water from the rice pan, after the rice has been burnt on the bottom. It's surprisingly delicious. We followed it with a fresh watermelon (grown in Befandefa itself).
Madame Angeline's home was tiny - there was just about enough room for five of us sat on the floor and her doorway was so small, even I had to bend down to walk through. She had a double bed, a table, three wooden chairs and lots and lots of photos on her wall. It's the first time I've actually eaten in a Malagasy house. I keep thinking about how little space I have in our one-room bungalow at Coco Beach compared to my house in Manchester, and yet even here, Justin and I still have three times the space of Madame Angeline.
Anyway, after that, it was back onto the cart for our bumpy, noisy and very smelly journey home.
So, that's been my week. The only thing I'm missing out right now is the less positive stuff about how this evening, I have to go off and tell some more volunteers off for breaking the curfew. There are a lot of rules here, and unfortunately, it's my job to enforce them all with both volunteers and staff. Mostly, they abide by them, it's true, but telling people off, disciplining them and punishing them is still necessary (especially when it relates to drunken behaviour and breaking curfews) and my least favourite part of the job. We're pretty laid back most of the time, but apparently that doesn't prevent people from misbehaving. Perhaps we could learn some lessons in discipline from the zebu cart driver. I wonder how much those spiky rings cost......