just got back from a 4-day excursion to Ifotaka Spiny Forest (name appropriate, i've got the scratches to prove it) for a lemur ecology study. it was awesome. the lemurs were exciting and all - especially the tiny baby nocturnal mouse lemurs with giant creepy eyes that reflected iridescent light back from our blinding headlamps - and the leaping sifakas with their white russian hats - and the ringtails at Berenty who were so habituated to human presence that they clearly didn't give a crap that we were there - but really it was just the camping and hiking through the forest that made the experience. and i saw 2 adorable radiated tortoises. (the kind that people eat illegally, in some regions, that i might study for my ISP. maybe.) also, i am covered in a very gross and significant layer of dirt, sweat, sunscreen, and DEET. really looking forward to a shower. i hope the running water is working at my homestay.
the rest of this week is standard classes at our beachside school, and then next week is the VILLAGE STAY! ahhh!!! that'll be really interesting. i'll be sure to give a full update on that.
after that it's a few more days with the homestay family and then the entire group is off on a national park/protected area road trip from Tulear to Tana (Antananarivo, the capital), and then ISP time. (independent study project. still have no idea about the topic.) it's moving fast...
later gators.
love k-ron
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
On y go!
this is gonna be short. mainly just funny weird things that happen to me. or awesome things.
i got home one day and opened the door to my room/the house and there were three chicks chirping and running around and pooping everywhere. not totally surprising since there are chickens running around everywhere but still did not know what to do. my cousin steve came and just laughed and shooed them out and cleaned up the poo, so clearly i could have handled that but i didn't know if they were supposed to be there or how they got there or what one normally did in this situation.
another bird incident, i came home and my 16 year old bro, momo, showed me a turkey they were keeping in the house until it was to become our food. it would clank around in the pots and pans underneath the sink during the night, waking me up occasionally and confusing me until i remembered oh yes clearly there is a turkey walking around. and during the day he sat awkwardly squished between a door and the wall, facing the corner. joann if you are reading this it reminded me a lot of the zebra at the zoo.
we just got back from andoahela national park which was gorgeous, we camped for a night in a transitional forest zone; on one side of the mountain is humid and the other side is dry cause the rainclouds can't pass over the mountains. there was a gorgeous stream right next to us and i sterilized the water to drink, it tasted quite good. and we swam in a paradise-like waterfall/natural pool area and my shoulders probably got sunburned again.
i stayed for a night in a village called amboasary sud, where i saw more STARS than i have ever seen in my life. gorgeous. and i played with an itty bitty kitty named chocolat. (pictures to come... someday...)
other than that, still love love loving it here. getting more adjusted to the heat. getting a bit sick of rice. but the baby bananas, and these cookies called bolo, are making up for it. waiting for the stupid political situation to calm down so they will lift the 10pm curfew so we can actually go out at night...
voyage to berenty (lemur studies!) coming up, and marine studies at tulear!!! and the village stay. that should be interesting.
i have an idea of my ISP topic - consumption and commercialization of turtle/tortoise meat. i've got a hook-up. very excited.
gotta go. much love,
karen
Monday, February 9, 2009
Akory aby e!
Hey everyone! 'Scar update.
We moved in with our fams on Thursday, and they're pretty sweet. My house is just down the street from Ankoba Beach, like you step outside and smell the sweet ocean breeze...ahhh yes. Beauteous. There's a wooden gate that you open up to all these wooden shacks with chickens and dogs running around and a bunch of little kids and people doing their laundry - all my aunts and cousins and various extended family, I guess. Then you walk past all this and right up to my house which is pretty nice. It's a two-story house with real walls and a roof and tiled floors and all that. But it's kinda weird cause my bed is on the first floor, a.k.a. the living room/dining room and right next to the kitchen and bathroom. The rest of the fam sleeps in their own rooms upstairs.
My mom's name is Claudine, she's a midwife that is like always working, but when she's not she takes me out for a THBa lot, which is pretty great. (THB = beer, and the Malagasy are convinced that their beer is the greatest in the world. It's not.) There's 16-year-old named Momo (Clermond) and a 10-year-old named Marco. They're my bros. Marco doesn't speak any French except "où est la viande?" and Momo speaks pretty well but isn't very talkative to me. Claudine's cousin Steve (he has an uncle in Minneapolis who named him) who's 21 is really the only person that hangs out with me a bunch, he speaks French really well.
Pretty much every meal is zebu and rice. (Zebu is the cattle here.) Sometimes it's pasta that strongly resembles Ramen noodles. With zebu. But I still have baguette with fromage (La Vache Qui Rie) for petit-déjeuner.
Classes are going well, it's really easy. We go on tons of field trips, right now we're learning about the mining of titanium dioxide that this Canadian company QMM is doing in Tolagnaro (Fort Dauphin). They're destroying tons of littoral forests, but with promises to restore it...we shall see...
Other than that, it's still really hot... and I still haven't seen a lemur. A couple chameleons, though, and some pretty cool bugs. (mosquitos and flies not included in the "pretty cool" category.) And mango season is over, which is really really really sad. But the akondro's are still delicious, so I'll survive. Mmmm akondro/beurre à arachide/confiture d'anana sandwich... that's what my lunch was today. Yumtastic.
All right, gonna go get some a THB with a couple friends now, hope you are all doing well in the States or whatever country you might be in...
love karebear
Oh and I went to church yesterday. My family's Lutheran, and it was almost the same as any church in the States, except in Malagasy so I understood none of it. I was the only white person there, so I think the preacher/pastor/whatever you call him was looking at me the whole time like "who is this crazy vazaha" but I was towards the back so i'm not sure. Vazaha is like foreigner/white person, if I haven't clarified that yet. It's not an insult though. It's funny when tons of little kids on the street yell "Bonjour Vazaha!!!" at you like a thousand times and then run and accost you to buy their silver bracelets or shell necklaces. You just gotta say, "Aha. Azafady" (No, sorry), and then repeat it a thousand times when they are super persistent.
And I walk along the beach on my way to school. So that's pretty tight. How's the snow in Wisconsin? Haha. Just kidding I miss Beloit a lot.
Bye again!
Veloma e!
We moved in with our fams on Thursday, and they're pretty sweet. My house is just down the street from Ankoba Beach, like you step outside and smell the sweet ocean breeze...ahhh yes. Beauteous. There's a wooden gate that you open up to all these wooden shacks with chickens and dogs running around and a bunch of little kids and people doing their laundry - all my aunts and cousins and various extended family, I guess. Then you walk past all this and right up to my house which is pretty nice. It's a two-story house with real walls and a roof and tiled floors and all that. But it's kinda weird cause my bed is on the first floor, a.k.a. the living room/dining room and right next to the kitchen and bathroom. The rest of the fam sleeps in their own rooms upstairs.
My mom's name is Claudine, she's a midwife that is like always working, but when she's not she takes me out for a THBa lot, which is pretty great. (THB = beer, and the Malagasy are convinced that their beer is the greatest in the world. It's not.) There's 16-year-old named Momo (Clermond) and a 10-year-old named Marco. They're my bros. Marco doesn't speak any French except "où est la viande?" and Momo speaks pretty well but isn't very talkative to me. Claudine's cousin Steve (he has an uncle in Minneapolis who named him) who's 21 is really the only person that hangs out with me a bunch, he speaks French really well.
Pretty much every meal is zebu and rice. (Zebu is the cattle here.) Sometimes it's pasta that strongly resembles Ramen noodles. With zebu. But I still have baguette with fromage (La Vache Qui Rie) for petit-déjeuner.
Classes are going well, it's really easy. We go on tons of field trips, right now we're learning about the mining of titanium dioxide that this Canadian company QMM is doing in Tolagnaro (Fort Dauphin). They're destroying tons of littoral forests, but with promises to restore it...we shall see...
Other than that, it's still really hot... and I still haven't seen a lemur. A couple chameleons, though, and some pretty cool bugs. (mosquitos and flies not included in the "pretty cool" category.) And mango season is over, which is really really really sad. But the akondro's are still delicious, so I'll survive. Mmmm akondro/beurre à arachide/confiture d'anana sandwich... that's what my lunch was today. Yumtastic.
All right, gonna go get some a THB with a couple friends now, hope you are all doing well in the States or whatever country you might be in...
love karebear
Oh and I went to church yesterday. My family's Lutheran, and it was almost the same as any church in the States, except in Malagasy so I understood none of it. I was the only white person there, so I think the preacher/pastor/whatever you call him was looking at me the whole time like "who is this crazy vazaha" but I was towards the back so i'm not sure. Vazaha is like foreigner/white person, if I haven't clarified that yet. It's not an insult though. It's funny when tons of little kids on the street yell "Bonjour Vazaha!!!" at you like a thousand times and then run and accost you to buy their silver bracelets or shell necklaces. You just gotta say, "Aha. Azafady" (No, sorry), and then repeat it a thousand times when they are super persistent.
And I walk along the beach on my way to school. So that's pretty tight. How's the snow in Wisconsin? Haha. Just kidding I miss Beloit a lot.
Bye again!
Veloma e!
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Salama e!
bonjour, hey everyone! i'm alive and safe, sorry i probably won't say much because the keyboards here make it take forever to type anything (excuse any typos, sometimes an "a" turns into a "q") and i'm paying by the minute, but i miss all of you!
the flights were long but i was with the group and from paris to antananarivo i had three seats to myself which made for great sleeping :-)
we got to fort dauphin and the academic director met us and took us out to a countryside boarding school for three nights for orientation. pretty amazing, it was called manatantely and there's a great song and dance to go along with it that hopefully i'll record sometime. the kids were adorable and everyone was so nice and we learned a bit of malagasy:
salama e! ino vao vao? tsy mitsy... that means hi! what's up? not much... and it's about all i got down so far except the numbers and how to say sorry - azafady. and thank you very much - misaotsy betsaky.
we went hiking and learned how to do laundry by hand and carry water on our heads from the stream and prepare rice. every meal here had rice plus something else. some people have found rocks in their rice, but i haven't yet. i think i don't chew my food well enough. we also learned some really fun traditional dancing that was pretty much just moving your feet in different ways and sweating so much that you look like you just jumped in the pool. and the bathroom was outhouse-style - squatting down to pee in a hole in the ground. i've gotten pretty good at that - and bucket showers. no running water in the country.
now we're at a hotel in fort dauphin and it's beautiful. the beach is right down the street and we talked with a WWF guy (the panda not the wrestling - although WWE smackdown was on TV yesterday in a restaurant. the kids here are really into it and think it's real) and now we're paired up for a "drop-off" - we got set loose in the city to find different things. first prioty was changing money and internet. next is buying a phone and then lunch with a nice cold THB (Three Horses Beer). maybe some street fruit that will make us real sick. i haven't gotten sick yet, although i do have a zillion bug bites, obviously. if anyone gets bitten, i get fives times as many bites as everyone else combined. even with bug spray and nets. just gotta keep taking my phrophylaxis... oh and i'm ridiculously sunburned on my shoulders already, too. putting on a tshirt takes like 10 minutes. but we have "running rano in the douches" - there's a little franglagasy for you - running water in the showers. and flushing toilets. incroyable.
breakfast is usually a baguette with confiture and fromage and some café with sweetened condensed milk to put in it - DELICIEUX. i love love love it. we are getting so well-fed here so far. i even had some buerre à cacahouaite avec une banane. mmmm... me and another guy were like dreaming about peanut butter and had some the next day on our hike when we pique-nique'd near a waterfall. paradise, i'm telling you.
we meet our homestay families on wednesday and move in with them on thursday. ma mère d'accueil is a sage-femme à l'hopital... i don't really know what that means, like a wise hospital woman... i think someone told me but i forgot. i hope she's like a super cool witch doctor lady. probably not though.
haven't seen any lemurs yet. sorry to disappoint. and i'll post pictures maybe if i remember to bring my USB cord with me to a cyber-café. otherwise you can wait till may :-)
à bientot!!! (veloma e!)
the flights were long but i was with the group and from paris to antananarivo i had three seats to myself which made for great sleeping :-)
we got to fort dauphin and the academic director met us and took us out to a countryside boarding school for three nights for orientation. pretty amazing, it was called manatantely and there's a great song and dance to go along with it that hopefully i'll record sometime. the kids were adorable and everyone was so nice and we learned a bit of malagasy:
salama e! ino vao vao? tsy mitsy... that means hi! what's up? not much... and it's about all i got down so far except the numbers and how to say sorry - azafady. and thank you very much - misaotsy betsaky.
we went hiking and learned how to do laundry by hand and carry water on our heads from the stream and prepare rice. every meal here had rice plus something else. some people have found rocks in their rice, but i haven't yet. i think i don't chew my food well enough. we also learned some really fun traditional dancing that was pretty much just moving your feet in different ways and sweating so much that you look like you just jumped in the pool. and the bathroom was outhouse-style - squatting down to pee in a hole in the ground. i've gotten pretty good at that - and bucket showers. no running water in the country.
now we're at a hotel in fort dauphin and it's beautiful. the beach is right down the street and we talked with a WWF guy (the panda not the wrestling - although WWE smackdown was on TV yesterday in a restaurant. the kids here are really into it and think it's real) and now we're paired up for a "drop-off" - we got set loose in the city to find different things. first prioty was changing money and internet. next is buying a phone and then lunch with a nice cold THB (Three Horses Beer). maybe some street fruit that will make us real sick. i haven't gotten sick yet, although i do have a zillion bug bites, obviously. if anyone gets bitten, i get fives times as many bites as everyone else combined. even with bug spray and nets. just gotta keep taking my phrophylaxis... oh and i'm ridiculously sunburned on my shoulders already, too. putting on a tshirt takes like 10 minutes. but we have "running rano in the douches" - there's a little franglagasy for you - running water in the showers. and flushing toilets. incroyable.
breakfast is usually a baguette with confiture and fromage and some café with sweetened condensed milk to put in it - DELICIEUX. i love love love it. we are getting so well-fed here so far. i even had some buerre à cacahouaite avec une banane. mmmm... me and another guy were like dreaming about peanut butter and had some the next day on our hike when we pique-nique'd near a waterfall. paradise, i'm telling you.
we meet our homestay families on wednesday and move in with them on thursday. ma mère d'accueil is a sage-femme à l'hopital... i don't really know what that means, like a wise hospital woman... i think someone told me but i forgot. i hope she's like a super cool witch doctor lady. probably not though.
haven't seen any lemurs yet. sorry to disappoint. and i'll post pictures maybe if i remember to bring my USB cord with me to a cyber-café. otherwise you can wait till may :-)
à bientot!!! (veloma e!)
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