A Sample of Malagasy Poetry

A couple weeks ago I was looking through a Bradt travel guide to Madagascar and I ran across a segment about “Hainteny,” traditional Malagasy poetry from the Merina tribe. The poems are generally about love: love between parents and child, between man and woman, the love of nature, the appreciation of good versus evil, and the acceptance of death. A man named Leonard Fox translated a few poems and I wanted to share one that I loved…

“Consider, children, the conditions here on earth:

The trees grow, but not unceasingly,

For if they grew unceasingly, they would reach the sky.

Not only this,

but there is a time for their growing,

a time for their becoming old,

and a time for their breaking.

So it is, too, for a man: there is a time for youth,

a time for old age,

a time for good,

a time for evil,

and a time for death”

- No author. Bradt (Madagascar) Pg. 76

Dreaming in The Silent Realm

This morning I got up at 5:30am to go diving and I realized that I work up in the middle of having my first underwater dream! When my alarm went off I remember being upside down in the water looking under a piece of Acropora Laminar coral for a Cushion Starfish while I was conducting an invertebrate survey.

To put it short, I am exhausted! I have gone diving seven consecutive days this week in the mornings and my afternoons have been filled with teaching English and listening/studying my science lectures. I am making quite a declaration here but I don’t think I’ve felt this busy and tired since I planned the Back to Pangaea benefit concert last May! Two weeks ago I passed what Reef Doctor calls their Indicator Program. After listening to presentations about the benthic, invertebrates, and fish species that can be identified in the Bay of Ranobe and taking a written exam, I went on a series of science training dives to learn how to identify the species underwater and practice surveys. When I joined Reef Doctor I had no idea what “conducting an underwater survey” actually meant. Essentially, a team of three people go diving at a particular site and lay a 25 meter section of transect tape across the reef. Each person swims along the tape, recording fish, benthic, or invertebrates on their slate. When all team members finish swimming along 25 meters recording data, they roll up the tape and repeat the process two more times for a total of three transects per survey. There is a huge difference between diving recreationally and diving for science research. I had no idea it would be so difficult to lay a transect tape across a line of coral, watch a compass to make sure you are heading in the right direction, and count and write down moving fish all at the same time. When you start throwing in time limits, currents, surge, and changing water temperature it can get really tough!

Right now there are two other volunteers: Henry from the U.K. and Sara from Portugal. We are a team and call ourselves ‘Menitzi Vaza’, which means ‘Cold Foreigner’ in Malagasy! Slowly the temperature is dropping as it approaches winter in Madagascar and we have been freezing inside out wetsuits the past couple weeks! We all finished the Indicator Program together and got to conduct four real surveys to add to the Reef Doctor database! Sara is now working towards getting her Divemaster with the instructor here so she has taken more of a back seat with the science work; however, Henry and I have spent the past 2 weeks working non-stop through the Expert Program which surveys a lot more species and requires more training. We were the first volunteers to work through expert training with Shawn Harper, the staff member who developed the program for Reef Doctor. Shawn is an ice diver and instructor who has worked on numerous projects in the arctic and in really serious diving conditions. His training was top notch and after passing all our in water science exams and written exams, Henry and I celebrated passing the expert program on Friday :D It felt so good to finally finish the program!

Today is Sunday, the day of rest (finally!) I woke up early with Henry and Sara to visit a Mangrove Restoration project about 15 km away and now I’m trying to catch up on some internet work. Tomorrow we begin another six days of diving where we’ll be completing the real expert surveys. We have 12 surveys to complete at 6 different dive sites and I’m so excited to get started! At the beginning of June there are a few new volunteers coming and I hope I will get to help them through their science training!

The photos above are from a site called Coral Garden that I took on a weekend dive. The first photo is a piece of Acropora Digitate Coral. The second photo is Shawn with his high tech camera/video equipment! The third photo is an edited picture of an Anemone. The fourth is a giant clam! And the fifth is a group of ascidians on top of massive coral!

Re-Post from Brad Stackhouse!

Like most places I’ve traveled too, Internet is hard to come by in Madagascar. I’ve been able to check my email and messages about 1-2 times a week and I was presently surprised last Monday when I saw a blog post from Brad Stackhouse, another Gap Year Fellow from UNC.  We’ve never actually met in person but we’ve become friends after numerous Internet conversations and chats about our travel adventures and experiences away from home. In fact, now that I think about it I don’t believe we’ve even been in the same country at the same time over the past 8 months!

You might remember that after the first six months of my gap year I posted a global ice cream survey I conducted along my travels! Being addicted to ice cream, I tasted, rated, and priced the McDonald’s ice cream cones across the country. Knowing about my obsession, Brad decided to add to the research and wrote a post about ice cream that he tried on San Cristobal, one of the Galapagos islands! I was so excited when I saw his post that I want to re-post it for you to read. Thank you Brad for the effort... your research is definitely going in the official database on my computer :D Please check out the original post on his travel blog at: http://thankyouforthecoffee.wordpress.com/. I’d also like to add that I’m unhealthily jealous of Brad right now for two reasons. 1) He got to witness a chicken fight, which I have yet to see! and 2) He went to the Galapagos Islands one of the most famous diving hotspots in the world!!! Each time I leave the U.S. I come up with a list of five more places I want to visit before I die and the Galapagos are on there for sure.

As Brad says in his post, there are five Gap Year Fellows in total. Lily Clarke is currently volunteering in Thailand (http://jesuisunelephant.tumblr.com/), Maggie Armstrong is in China (http://maggielivesingansu.blogspot.com/), and last but definitely not least, Cecilia Polanco is volunteering in Australia (http://cecilia-stefany.blogspot.com/). Definitely check out all the blogs because these guys are doing some amazing work!   

Now for Brad’s post…

“As most of you know, I’m not the only Global Gap Year Fellow.  There are four (I think) other fellows that are around the world now volunteering and travelling.  One of them is Amy Dingler who is in Madagascar right now.  We keep in contact on Facebook, sharing stories and chatting about the general travelling lifestyle.  I was reading her blog the other day where she expressed a desire to see a chicken fight, which I thought was funny.  Two days later I went fishing with my host brother and we went to pick up the harpoon and snorkels from a friend of his.  When we got to his house he had us wait a minute because he had to feed the chickens first.  We went out back with him and he told us that they were roosters for fighting and he had to keep them well fed, then asked if we wanted to see.  He pulled out two of his roosters and put them on the floor of the pen.  They stared each other down for a second and then jumped at each other.  He let them go for about 2 minutes before pulling them apart and putting them back in their cages.  Sadly I didn’t have a camera with me so I didn’t get any pictures.  That’s part 1 of the post.

Part 2 is another little bit for Amy, because she loves ice cream and has been trying McDonald’s ice cream cones in every country she has gone to and comparing them to one another.  I figured I would add to the study.  However, sadly (maybe not) there is no McDonald’s on San Cristobal island.  However, I found an ice cream shop that sells ice cream cones almost identical to the cones from McDonald’s.  The machine that they use even looked similar.  Here is my rating:

The ice cream itself had a very nice french vanilla flavor, similar to that of one from McDonald’s; however, it tasted a bit watery, as though not enough of the ice cream mix had been used.  They also don’t give you as much ice cream in each cone as you get at McDonald’s, though it’s not much less.  Despite its faults, this cone was extremely satisfying.  Though this could be due to the stifling heat on the island.  The cone cost $1.25, which is a bit expensive in my opinion.  However, I haven’t found a cheaper cone in the area.  All-in-all, on a scale from 1-10, I would give this cone an 8.2.  In fact, I’ll probably get another after work today (probably chocolate though).

Hope that helps your research Amy, I’ll make sure to try one when I get back to Peru too.

Also, if you’d like to see the rest of the ice cream research or just read about another Gap Year Fellow’s adventures, check out Amy’s blog, ajsloft.blogspot.com

TYFTC”

Sue and the Seagrass

Once upon a time there was this awesome girl named Sue who studies at NYU, is a vegetarian, has a vocabulary that exudes intelligence, and somehow ended up in Madagascar at the same time as me. Sue is quite a character and has been described as sun-like. Wherever she goes she brings with her positive vibrations mixed in with funny wit that puts a smile on everyone in the vicinity. Her demeanor encourages trust and when you talk to her she is one of those rare individuals who makes you feel like you are important in the world and add value to the lives of others. At the core she is simply a good person who cares about the people and the environment of those around her.

Sue was at Reef Doctor for three weeks to conduct a research project on seagrass. She chose four areas along the shore (two in front of villages and two outside the villages) to collect her data. She studied the species variation and population of seagrass to see what effect the local villages and fisheries have on the growth and diversity of species along the bay. Everyday I usually finish diving by 2pm, so in the afternoons I would help Sue collect data in the four selected areas. I now have a lot of respect for scientists who work in the field because it is some serious backbreaking work. For multiple days I trudged (I mean that as literally as possible) through muddy/sandy seagrass with Sue and a few other volunteers during low tide and the hottest time of the day. For anywhere from 3-4 hours we would lay transects in the seagrass and identify species and population in quadrates along the tape. I learned that the slight difference between Halodule Wrightii and Halodule Uninervis seagrass is that one has a “u” shaped end on the new growth stem and one has a “w” shaped end! When the tide goes out along the Mozambique Channel it sweeps at least 400 meters away from shore. One of the science officers here described it as the flushing toilet of Africa. When the tide goes out all of the nutrients are flushed out and rushed back in. In a sense the tide keeps the bay really clean : ) I have never lived near a beach, but from the few times I’ve been to Florida I’ve never noticed such drastic changes in the tides. Here if you are on a boat diving and the tide goes out you literally cannot get back to shore for many hours. However, when the tide is high you can go swimming in about 4 feet of water. If you look at the seagrass pictures from two blogposts back you can see how far away we are from the beach at low tide. Three hours after that photo the water was at back at waist level!

Sue always dreamed of being a scientist and I feel privileged to have worked aside her on her first project doing field work. Now she’s moved on to have more adventures across Madagascar but I can’t wait to hear about the results of the project and hopefully see her in New York one day! I never imagined I would wind up bending over transects with her in Madagascar searching and examining seagrass! It was an experience along many volunteer adventures that I won’t easily forget.

Diving in the Mozambique Channel

About five years ago my mom bought me and all my siblings dream journals for Christmas.  Inside a dream journal you record all your current dreams, visions, and goals that you have. They can be unrealistic like flying to the moon or very mundane like running a mile. I love flipping through my past dreams and looking at how I’ve changed over the years and adapted my dreams to fit my current passions. If I go to the second page of the journal, written at the very top is scuba diving. It’s been on the list of dreams since the very beginning and I finally get to check it off!

Today marks the 15^th day I’ve been at Reef Doctor and after logging 12 dives I am one deep dive away from getting my Advanced Open Water Certification! When I first wrote down scuba diving in my dream journal I imagined that it was a hardcore sport for the daring and venturesome. In reality diving is more like yoga. Under the water you focus on staying buoyant and continuously breathing and you usually feel very relaxed. In a world where there are so many languages, cultures, religions, and politics, there is something appealing about escaping underwater. It’s a new world completely different from terrestrial life and it’s a place where the only thing that matters is nature. Poverty is irrelevant, politics are nonexistent, and the only language is silence. What you see is what you get and it’s beautiful.

I started my science diving training at the beginning of this week and I have been spending a lot of my free time studying benthic, invertebrates, and fish species. Tomorrow I go on my second point-ID dive where I go down with a member of staff and they basically quiz me on identifying the species to make sure I know the information. They will point to a species and I have to write down its name on my slate. Soon after my point-ID dives I go on a couple mimic survey dives and practice laying out transects and recording data to practice. THEN after passing a written exam to make sure I really, really know my species and can differentiate between similar fish I will start gathering real data from my surveys to enter in the database they have collected over the years! The database is used to measure changes in the reef systems. For example, if they record more algae this year compared to last year there might be a decline in the population of herbivores and certain algae eating invertebrates. This could be indicative of an unhealthy reef system and/or overfishing in local areas. Reef Doctor uses the information they gather to monitor reefs all along the Bay of Ranobe and bring awareness of the current marine threats and issues to the villages along the coast. They work in affiliation with a Malagasy organization, Fimihara, to encourage the Vezo (Malagasy fisherman) in the villages to use safe fishing practices and monitor the catch of certain species. Reef Doctor also does regular coral bleaching and seagrass surveys throughout the year to help with regulating the effects of global warming and yearly changes.

So far the diving has been phenomenal and I’m excited to get more involved in the science work during the weeks to come. This past Sunday I went snorkeling at a site called “Rose Garden” where we normally conduct surveys and because it was a day off for volunteers I decided to bring my underwater camera along and take my first experimental photos. In hindsight I don’t know if it was a good idea or a bad idea because I had my extremely buoyant wetsuit on and I was really struggling with my belt and camera equipment to find a weight balance that would let me swim down to catch photos but not sink at the surface. I think I swallowed about a gallon of salt water between trying to adjust camera settings at the surface of the water and continuously floating up when I finally got the right angle on a shot. Oh, and my snorkel was leaking….  In the end I got a really good workout for two hours and some okay shots. The photos above are some of the final results from the escapade! The fourth one is a Feather Duster and the purple one is a Mushroom Coral. The two disk-like fish are Redfin Butterflys, and the large black and yellow one is a Moorish Idol! I still have a lot to learn about underwater photography but I feel a sense of accomplishment because there was a lot of swimming, holding my breath, and chasing involved in capturing these photos!

Volunteering with Reef Doctor

If you have talked to me about my gap year then you probably already know that I didn’t pick the places, the places picked me. When I started planning my year I focused on the type of volunteer work I wanted to do globally. I had the world at my fingertips and unlimited possibilities of projects I could help with. People always ask me, “Why India?” or “Why Hungary?” But I didn’t look-up a list of places that are interesting to visit, I focused on researching the type of work I wanted to do overseas. For example, I knew I wanted to volunteer with the Missionaries of Charity (Mother Teresa’s organization) when I decided to take a gap year. No matter where they were located I would have gone there, and it just so happened they were in India. The only place I chose for the sake of visiting was Venice. I wanted to see my best friend Elise, so I went to her home in France. I wanted to volunteer with D.I.A. so I went to Hungary. The same thing happened with Madagascar – the country picked me.

In the summer before I left I knew that I wanted to volunteer somewhere I could scuba dive and volunteer simultaneously. ARt first I was going to work with an organization called Blue Ventures in Belize but that fell through because they gave away my spot on the expedition to a group of college undergrads. Grrr… After that plan fell through I was on the lookout for a new project, and one day I ran across a website (http://goneawol.net) written by a couple who left their normal lives and traveled through India, Madagascar, and other parts of Africa and Asia for two years. Their website/blog is incredible and when I was looking at their portion on Madagascar I started reading about their experience volunteering three months with an organization called Reef Doctor.

Reef Doctor is a small UK based non-profit organization that conducts coral reef research, implementing marine resource management principles, community awareness and school education and social development work with the local fishing communities living off the coral reef system of the Bay of Ranobe in Madagascar. (Yes, I took that sentence straight off their website). It’s difficult to explain what they do in a short blog post but essentially they collect scientific data to help the local communities and regulate the coral reefs along the bay. They use their research to see how the growing population has an effect on the reef system along the southwest coast of Madagascar (it’s the third largest in the world!) and they are part of a network along the bay that provides the small and impoverished fishing villages information to conserve the reefs and prevent overfishing. The villages along the bay rely on the fishing industry and curio trade for their livelihood. If the declination in reef life doesn’t stop then all the villages are at risk…. Reef Doctor is trying to help in whatever way they can.

As a volunteer I start with normal dive training and science dive training. After training I will be conducting underwater fish, benthic, and invertebrate surveys in different reefs in the area and laying transect lines to record specific information to add to the research database. Volunteers go through training because science diving is very different from recreational diving and can be dangerous if proper procedures aren’t followed. It’s also impossible to talk underwater so you have to know all the species so you can accurately identify and record prevalent data. By the end of my 12 weeks I will have my Rescue Diver certification and I will have completed the expert science diver program. (I’m hoping that I can even train some of the future volunteers in June on laying transect lines and collecting data).

I’ve been here two weeks and I will talk more about my experiences in the next blog post, but aside from diving I have been helping a temporary volunteer on a study she is doing with sea grass along the bay and I am teaching English twice a week to a group of teachers from the village who are interested in learning! My first class starts tomorrow so wish me luck! It’s really beautiful here and it’s hard to have a bad day when I get to see breathtaking sunrises and sunsets on the beach. After traveling over so many oceans and seeing them from the inside of a plane, it’s great to finally dip my toes in one!

**The first photo is a picture of a Vezo from the village on his pirogue! The next few are photos of the wildlife that I've seen on the beach, and the last photo is from the sea grass species identification project.

The Mnmlist Way of Thinking

About a year and a half ago I became a follower of the Zen Blog. It’s basically a blog about ways you can simplify your life and be happy with what you have. On a bad day I find that the posts are really empowering and put a lot of complications into realistic perspective. The author of the Zen Blog, Leo Babauta, made another website about a concept called Mnmlist, which offers advice on dealing with the current culture of consumption. Here is a post I want to share that recently inspired me from the the website. I give Leo full credit and a shout out for a great blog entry that pushed me to inner reflect and challenge the pessimistic voice in my head that, despite my efforts to control, sometimes emerges.


"We strive to improve our lives, often because we are dissatisfied with how things are. I know this, because I’ve lived it.

I don’t like the way I look, so I try to improve myself. I don’t like my house, so I work to get a better one. I want everyone around me to improve too, so I push them to change, and get frustrated when they won’t.

This striving never ends. When we are unsatisfied with how things are, including ourselves, we make changes, but then what? We are still unsatisfied, because the root cause of this problem isn’t the things around us (or how we look, etc.), but our expectations. We expect things to be different.

This means we are always unhappy in some way. Things don’t meet our expectations. We try to correct this problem by changing the world around us, trying to get others to change, trying to change ourselves. Our compulsion to spend, to consume, to buy more stuff … it’s rooted in this as well. And so minimalism is an attempt to fix the compulsion, but that can really only be done once we address the root problem: our expectations.

Sit for a minute and look at the things around you. Are you happy with them, or would you like things to change? Think about what you do each day, and ask if you’re happy with your daily life, or if you’d like change. Think about the people in your life, and ask if you’re happy with them, or if you’d like them to change. Think about yourself, and see if there are things you’re dissatisfied with, if you’d like to change yourself.

Now, for each thing you think needs change, try sitting for a minute and see if you can simply accept each one, as they are right now. See if you can accept each person in your life for who they are, exactly as they are. See if you can accept your body for what it is, without the need for change. It takes practice, so if you aren’t good at it at first (and I’m still not a master at it myself), practice. It’s an enlightening process, to be sure.

This doesn’t mean we’ll never change anything. We can develop healthy habits and make our bodies healthier over time, but we can do that while also being happy with who we already are. Change is inevitable, but it doesn’t necessarily require that we not accept things as they are, that we not be happy with things as they already are.

Once we become happy with things, people, and ourselves … as they are … we can become whole, without the need to spend money to fill a hole in our lives. Then minimalism becomes a possibility, because once we are OK with things as they are, we can simply strip away the unnecessary, and be content with little."

(All Credit goes to Leo and if you want to read more in the Mnmlist website here's the link: http://mnmlist.com/)