Week 1 - Ifaty and Reef Doctor
So after two days of eating just seafood and no rice and have multiple warm showers with shower gel rather than soap I moved on to the next phase of my trip. I flew from Tana to Tolear and was met by a representative from Reef Doctor (RD), a marine NGO, and driven to Ifaty, in the Bay of Ranobe, on the South west coast of Madagascar.
This is a different coast line to Sainte Luce, the beaches aren’t as beautiful, but the sea is warmer and calmer thanks to the reef that surrounds the bay. The village of Ifaty is right next door to RD and the people here are very conservative so no bikinis on the beach or in the camp and upper thighs being covered at all times. There however is a shop in the village that doubles as a bar and the divers frequent this regularly, although usually only for a drink or so as we finish work around 5.00pm and need to be back in the camp by dusk as it is too dangerous to be out of the camp after dark.
The average age of the camp interns,staff and volunteers is around 24 so I am only a few years decades older than the guys here. All the interns have started together as well so it has made it a little more difficult to fit into the group but I am getting there slowly. Most interns and staff are from either the UK, US and South Africa and Malagasy people so it has a different feel to Sainte Luce. We also have a Japanese girl here.
The camp is probably as basic as the last place, but is closer to civilisation. The village is next door and the nearest town is 45 minutes away in a tuk-tuk. The food is more basic than Sainte Luce,it is portioned on plates for you and it is inevitably luke warm to cold by the allotted meal time. Beans and rice and vegetables and rice are staple diet although there is a bit more pasta here. Cold crepes with chocolate sauce and bread rolls with tomato, egg and onion salsa are also breakfast favourites! This time I have a brick built bungalow with a bathroom that I paid extra (£60 for the month) for, as I didn’t want to share as I thought the crowd would be younger here, with but has no running water, so I have to collect water from a well and ‘flush’ the toilet, bucket shower,wash my hands and wash my smalls and swimwear with this water. All other clothes are washed by the staff which is great.
The village of Ifaty is small (around 2,000 people) but has a state school and a private school. The private school is back to school from the holidays, but the state school doesn’t come back until 6th November. I asked how many children per class and what ages and it appears that there are around 28 per class but children in one class ranged from 12 to 16 so there is still this range of ages that we don’t see often in English schools apart from when one or two children are held back a year if they cannot keep up with the class. I will be interested to see the state school and how many children per class and age range as I think that there will be a difference…..
The Vezo fishing tribes here are some of the poorest in Madagascar and 70% live on about $1.5 a day. The Vezo cannot fish in the reef but fish outside. With the population of Madagascar doubling in 15 years and people being displaced in the countryside as their land is reclaim for mining, they move out to the coast as they think at least they can get food here, but the strain on the sea is showing and the fish are getting more scarce. The issue is that the people are not only fishing the big fish (as there are not many left now) they are fishing the small ones as well as they are starving. As I know through ‘cod wars’ in the UK if you take both large and small fish out (especially the ones that have reached sexual maturity) you haven’t got a lot left! Also the people migrating to the coast also don’t know how to fish properly and break the coral by fishing irresponsibly with mosquito nets which break the coral.
Since I have been away the Malagasy government have signed an agreement with the Chinese to allow 300 fishing trawlers into the Mozambique Channel to fish. This is the main source of Vezo’s food and only source of income (apart from catching the turtles and bringing to Reef Doctor to tag which gets them 15,000 AR or $4 per turtle). A kilo of good fish will be sold at AR 5-7 ($1-2) per kilo, most of the fish we saw in the boats were less than a kilo each. They Malagasy people eat every part of the fish including the heads, nothing goes to waste here. I cannot see any way that these people will be able to survive once the Chinese have decimated the ocean. As on land they will take everything they can out of the sea back to China and use it for some potion or other. The fisherman here have to fish with big nets and not drag long the bottom of the ocean, again the Chinese are not restricted to how they fish so the will dredge fish and drag up everything from the bottom of the ocean.
There is a starvation scale in the world which has factors of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, and the Vezo here are already at 3.
The first couple of days here were taken up with presentations of Madagascar, RD, the Vezo and the reef here. I also have to do some lessons on identifying fish, invertebrates and benthic (which I found out is coral, rock, rubble sand and silt). We have to go out and complete a census on different reefs each month to see what the state of the reef is compare to the previous census. I will have to pass all three identifier exams so that I an take part in the census.
This is a different coast line to Sainte Luce, the beaches aren’t as beautiful, but the sea is warmer and calmer thanks to the reef that surrounds the bay. The village of Ifaty is right next door to RD and the people here are very conservative so no bikinis on the beach or in the camp and upper thighs being covered at all times. There however is a shop in the village that doubles as a bar and the divers frequent this regularly, although usually only for a drink or so as we finish work around 5.00pm and need to be back in the camp by dusk as it is too dangerous to be out of the camp after dark.
The average age of the camp interns,staff and volunteers is around 24 so I am only a few years decades older than the guys here. All the interns have started together as well so it has made it a little more difficult to fit into the group but I am getting there slowly. Most interns and staff are from either the UK, US and South Africa and Malagasy people so it has a different feel to Sainte Luce. We also have a Japanese girl here.
The camp is probably as basic as the last place, but is closer to civilisation. The village is next door and the nearest town is 45 minutes away in a tuk-tuk. The food is more basic than Sainte Luce,it is portioned on plates for you and it is inevitably luke warm to cold by the allotted meal time. Beans and rice and vegetables and rice are staple diet although there is a bit more pasta here. Cold crepes with chocolate sauce and bread rolls with tomato, egg and onion salsa are also breakfast favourites! This time I have a brick built bungalow with a bathroom that I paid extra (£60 for the month) for, as I didn’t want to share as I thought the crowd would be younger here, with but has no running water, so I have to collect water from a well and ‘flush’ the toilet, bucket shower,wash my hands and wash my smalls and swimwear with this water. All other clothes are washed by the staff which is great.
The village of Ifaty is small (around 2,000 people) but has a state school and a private school. The private school is back to school from the holidays, but the state school doesn’t come back until 6th November. I asked how many children per class and what ages and it appears that there are around 28 per class but children in one class ranged from 12 to 16 so there is still this range of ages that we don’t see often in English schools apart from when one or two children are held back a year if they cannot keep up with the class. I will be interested to see the state school and how many children per class and age range as I think that there will be a difference…..
The Vezo fishing tribes here are some of the poorest in Madagascar and 70% live on about $1.5 a day. The Vezo cannot fish in the reef but fish outside. With the population of Madagascar doubling in 15 years and people being displaced in the countryside as their land is reclaim for mining, they move out to the coast as they think at least they can get food here, but the strain on the sea is showing and the fish are getting more scarce. The issue is that the people are not only fishing the big fish (as there are not many left now) they are fishing the small ones as well as they are starving. As I know through ‘cod wars’ in the UK if you take both large and small fish out (especially the ones that have reached sexual maturity) you haven’t got a lot left! Also the people migrating to the coast also don’t know how to fish properly and break the coral by fishing irresponsibly with mosquito nets which break the coral.
Since I have been away the Malagasy government have signed an agreement with the Chinese to allow 300 fishing trawlers into the Mozambique Channel to fish. This is the main source of Vezo’s food and only source of income (apart from catching the turtles and bringing to Reef Doctor to tag which gets them 15,000 AR or $4 per turtle). A kilo of good fish will be sold at AR 5-7 ($1-2) per kilo, most of the fish we saw in the boats were less than a kilo each. They Malagasy people eat every part of the fish including the heads, nothing goes to waste here. I cannot see any way that these people will be able to survive once the Chinese have decimated the ocean. As on land they will take everything they can out of the sea back to China and use it for some potion or other. The fisherman here have to fish with big nets and not drag long the bottom of the ocean, again the Chinese are not restricted to how they fish so the will dredge fish and drag up everything from the bottom of the ocean.
There is a starvation scale in the world which has factors of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, and the Vezo here are already at 3.
The first couple of days here were taken up with presentations of Madagascar, RD, the Vezo and the reef here. I also have to do some lessons on identifying fish, invertebrates and benthic (which I found out is coral, rock, rubble sand and silt). We have to go out and complete a census on different reefs each month to see what the state of the reef is compare to the previous census. I will have to pass all three identifier exams so that I an take part in the census.
I have dived only once this week doing my refresher dive and to look around one of the reefs as the weather hasn’t been great and the little boats that we go out on don’t do well in rough weather which I am glad about as neither do I!
Other things we did in the week was:
Go to the mangrove farm to find sea based mangrove seeds (compared to the river based ones in Sainte Luce) and replant them. This was good for me to see the difference in what these guys do. There are 8 different types of mangrove in Madagascar and this place has seven of them so is rich is mangrove diversity.
Went to complete a fisheries exercise. This entails waiting for the fishing boats (pirogues not actual boats) to come back into shore and then we identify, measure, weigh the fish and note the method of fishing (spear/net/hook/harpoon/line) writing down all the information for each individual fish. This gives us an idea of whether the fisherman are fishing sustainably through the type of fishing they do and the size of the fish and we can gauge fish depletion. Reef Doctor give each fisherman coming back from fishing a card where they can get a coffee and some food as an acknowledgement of them ‘doing the right thing in the sea’ and allowing us to see their catch. We did our thing with 12 boats over the course of three hours, sitting waiting for the boats to come in and seeing some boats without a catch for the day made us realise just how hard live is here. It was very humbling being part of this lifestyle and makes me appreciate how lucky I am to experience this, but more how lucky I was to be born in England. I don’t think I will ever complain about hard work, thirst, hunger, not having anything to wear again (well hard work maybe…)
Leaving the camp and going to town, the mangroves and fisheries areas means getting in a tuk-tuk or taxi-brousse with the Malagasy people which is great fun but dangerously overcrowded, you share the vehicle with people, their provisions and any livestock they are bringing home to kill and eat - it is certainly an experience I will never forget!
I also joined the English lessons (not for me) for the Malagasy children in the area. We are teaching them the basics such as: body parts (but not head or anything on a head as this is Fady), colours, family, shapes etc. The age ranges of the people that turn up are from 6-26 and some of the adults are illiterate in Malagasy let alone English! It was great fun working with them and watching their faces beam when they got it right!
We get two days off a for weekends here, some who are here for 6 months go away the weekends but as I only have four weeks I am going off to the local hotels for lunch and using wifi and staying in the camp at night. When Stew joins me I am visiting a lot of the places that these guys are going to so don’t want to spoil our holiday by going there first.
I am also relearning Malagasy - everything (well quite a lot) that I learnt in Sainte Luce is different here as each area speaks different dialects, and I was doing so well! I can still make myself understood generally but I have caused quite a bit of confusion and hilarity!
My first weekend off was after two days of being here, I spent the first day going to town to get provisions and phone credit for emergencies and the second I spent having lunch at the nearest hotel to me - calamari salad never tasted so good! Tolear town is busy (as is all Malagasy towns) and the shops range from tiny stalls selling just one fruit to ‘big’ electrical stores. People are very friendly and always stop to chat and love a photograph.
There are animals here which are deemed pets almost. We have two cats Mofo and Miso, Mofo being the cutest and three dogs, Nala, Panda (who is fat enough to be one)and Puppy - yes that’s his name who is very sweet and happy but doesn’t have much between his ears bless him. The Malagasy people here eat cats so we try to keep them being too rounded or from leaving the camp as they will end up in a pot, two have disappeared in the month before I got here one leaving three new born kittens which they have re homed.
The first week has been good, I am learning so much about the oceans, it has put a whole different slant on diving which is what I was hoping for!
Other things we did in the week was:
Go to the mangrove farm to find sea based mangrove seeds (compared to the river based ones in Sainte Luce) and replant them. This was good for me to see the difference in what these guys do. There are 8 different types of mangrove in Madagascar and this place has seven of them so is rich is mangrove diversity.
Went to complete a fisheries exercise. This entails waiting for the fishing boats (pirogues not actual boats) to come back into shore and then we identify, measure, weigh the fish and note the method of fishing (spear/net/hook/harpoon/line) writing down all the information for each individual fish. This gives us an idea of whether the fisherman are fishing sustainably through the type of fishing they do and the size of the fish and we can gauge fish depletion. Reef Doctor give each fisherman coming back from fishing a card where they can get a coffee and some food as an acknowledgement of them ‘doing the right thing in the sea’ and allowing us to see their catch. We did our thing with 12 boats over the course of three hours, sitting waiting for the boats to come in and seeing some boats without a catch for the day made us realise just how hard live is here. It was very humbling being part of this lifestyle and makes me appreciate how lucky I am to experience this, but more how lucky I was to be born in England. I don’t think I will ever complain about hard work, thirst, hunger, not having anything to wear again (well hard work maybe…)
Leaving the camp and going to town, the mangroves and fisheries areas means getting in a tuk-tuk or taxi-brousse with the Malagasy people which is great fun but dangerously overcrowded, you share the vehicle with people, their provisions and any livestock they are bringing home to kill and eat - it is certainly an experience I will never forget!
I also joined the English lessons (not for me) for the Malagasy children in the area. We are teaching them the basics such as: body parts (but not head or anything on a head as this is Fady), colours, family, shapes etc. The age ranges of the people that turn up are from 6-26 and some of the adults are illiterate in Malagasy let alone English! It was great fun working with them and watching their faces beam when they got it right!
We get two days off a for weekends here, some who are here for 6 months go away the weekends but as I only have four weeks I am going off to the local hotels for lunch and using wifi and staying in the camp at night. When Stew joins me I am visiting a lot of the places that these guys are going to so don’t want to spoil our holiday by going there first.
I am also relearning Malagasy - everything (well quite a lot) that I learnt in Sainte Luce is different here as each area speaks different dialects, and I was doing so well! I can still make myself understood generally but I have caused quite a bit of confusion and hilarity!
My first weekend off was after two days of being here, I spent the first day going to town to get provisions and phone credit for emergencies and the second I spent having lunch at the nearest hotel to me - calamari salad never tasted so good! Tolear town is busy (as is all Malagasy towns) and the shops range from tiny stalls selling just one fruit to ‘big’ electrical stores. People are very friendly and always stop to chat and love a photograph.
There are animals here which are deemed pets almost. We have two cats Mofo and Miso, Mofo being the cutest and three dogs, Nala, Panda (who is fat enough to be one)and Puppy - yes that’s his name who is very sweet and happy but doesn’t have much between his ears bless him. The Malagasy people here eat cats so we try to keep them being too rounded or from leaving the camp as they will end up in a pot, two have disappeared in the month before I got here one leaving three new born kittens which they have re homed.
The first week has been good, I am learning so much about the oceans, it has put a whole different slant on diving which is what I was hoping for!
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| children laying in the village |
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| mangrove swamp |
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| taxis in town |
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| local greengrocers - my dad would be proud of them! |
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| grandmother and child hanging out |
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| mangrove planting team |
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| taking the boat out to sea is a family buisness |
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| taxi-brusse |
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| weighing fish on the fisheries experience |
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| a view from the tower at the mangrove centre |
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| dive team before the dive |
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| local shop - they start young here |
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| coming back from the dive |
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| sunset at RD |
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| my bungalow |
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| street vendors |
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| fishermen at work |
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| the fishermen's style house |
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| view of the village from RD |
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| RD offices |
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| My mate Mofo |
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| inside my bungalow |
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| boy collecting water in town |
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| dive boat for 6 - where are the steps??!! |
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| tuk-tuk for 5 people |
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| the water delivery cart |
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| teaching colours in English |
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| the well for the water |
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| my bungalow |
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| RD school room |
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