Rosie Walters tells us why you should discover Madagascar, before everybody else does!
Rosie (top left) with friend and travel buddy Jess and a class at the youth centre.
Before last summer I knew very little about Madagascar, other than it was the name of an animated film that I hadn’t got round to seeing yet. Nevertheless, I decided to spend eight weeks of my university holidays teaching there in summer 2006 with a good friend from uni. In fact, there seem to be very few people in England who could tell you all that much about Madagascar, other than its abundance of rainforests and wildlife (some 80% of its native flora and fauna are unique to the island). Surprisingly it is the fourth largest island in the world after Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo, yet the island only attracts around one fifth of the number of tourists that visit the much smaller, neighbouring island of Mauritius each year. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world, as a UN Human Development Index in 2003 placed Madagascar at 149th out of 175 countries for achievements such as life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income (information found at http://news.mongabay.com/madagascar.php).
Nowhere is this poverty more apparent than in the capital city, Antananarivo (or Tana). My friend and I arrived, shell shocked and sleep deprived at around 6am on a Tuesday morning to find the city bustling. Tana is an unrelenting, overwhelming experience; a city that holds around 10% of the population of one of the poorest countries of the world. It seems to be never-ending. Walking around these streets is both exhilarating and exhausting, fascinating and terrifying (my friend had her bag slashed and purse removed from it without even noticing). As with any developing country, a certain degree of caution is necessary.
During our stay, we taught in two towns: Ambatolampy which is two hours south of Tana; and Tsiroanomandidy (or Tsiro), at the end of the road that runs west from the capital. Many foreigners in Madagascar choose to travel everywhere in 4by4’s with tinted windows, which seems to distance them somewhat from the local population, so no matter how uncomfortable, we always travelled in taxi brousses. These were Mazda vans that had been carved out and three or four rows of seats had been added inside. They often managed to fit fifteen or more people inside, which made for a tight squeeze. The other downside was that you had to wait until the taxi brousse was full before it would depart - sometimes this would take several hours and it meant that you could never really predict a journey time.
Perhaps one of the hardest things about staying in Madagascar is being a "vazaha" or foreigner. This involves constantly being treated differently, overcharged, stared at, laughed at, shouted at, hissed at and generally never being allowed to forget for one minute that you are different. However there are some positives to this, including the fact that as you walk through a town small children come running out of every house just to say hello. Teaching involved several hours of walking every day between lessons, which meant a lot of hellos and so after a while we got used to the constant “Bonjour vazaha” (“Hello foreigner”) and would reply “Hello Malagasy” which usually got a laugh. These calls were so frequent that replying “Bonjour” became an instinctive reaction that we would carry out without interrupting our conversation. The calls only got more frequent as we got to know and taught English to some of the people of the town.
Over the next few weeks we taught in primary schools, youth centres, churches, people’s houses, a cheese factory and many other places too. We taught a variety of different lessons to people of different age ranges and social classes, and we made some lasting friendships. Teaching varied greatly but it was always good fun. Primary school lessons were always enjoyable as you could mostly just do games and songs. There was sometimes the problem that the younger children didn’t speak much French let alone English, and as my Malagasy left a lot to be desired this made communication quite difficult. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching one-on-one lessons with adults, as this was much less daunting than large groups and people were very friendly. We had one student who was a pig farmer, training to be an international referee; another owned his own cheese factory and orchard. We were also supposed to teach a local headmistress how to use a computer that the charity we worked for had donated to the school. However, we turned up for the very first lesson and the computer exploded when we turned it on, filling the room with horrible fumes. This being Madagascar, the only place to get computer parts was in Tana, and they were seriously overpriced so we had to abandon that idea.
Once term began, I found myself with a class of 70 ten year olds to teach for an hour, which was challenging but also extremely good fun as they were eager to get involved in games and songs, and the two teams of 35 were very competitive. Lessons at the youth centre and cultural centre were very enjoyable, especially at the cultural centre where our classes were very enthusiastic and insisted on walking us home every night as there were frequent power cuts and our lessons finished after dark. Our students were also very eager to meet us outside of lessons for a game of table tennis, or to show us round the town.
Ile aux Nattes
We managed to fit in a weekend break to Ampefy, a beautiful lake town in the mountains between Tsiro and Tana, with a waterfall and natural springs. We also made time for a week of holiday at the end of our stay and we went to Ile Sainte Marie and Ile Aux Nattes, two islands on the east coast of Madagascar. We found it very bizarre at first, having spent nearly seven weeks living in small towns where we were the only foreigners, we found these two islands to be overrun as most of the people who visit Madagascar go straight to the tropical islands that surround it. We were by now used to the calls of "Bonjour Vazaha" ("Hello Foreigner") that followed us wherever we went, but they usually came from our students or people who knew us. On Ile Sainte Marie we were just two more white people, come to see the beautiful beaches and then leave. During our week we sunbathed, saw humpback whales in the wild, visited a pirate graveyard and generally relaxed. It's definitely worth visiting these islands during your stay but beware that this is not the real Madagascar. In fact, claiming to have seen Madagascar after a short stay on Ile aux Nattes is probably akin to claiming to have seen Paris after a week in EuroDisney.
The tourism market in Madagascar is very small compared to the neighbouring island of Mauritius, however this is possibly because many parts of Madagascar simply aren’t ready for tourists yet. If you are prepared to explore for yourself a bit, then this is the perfect place to visit, with rainforests and tropical beaches, and you need only to venture a small distance from the main roads to encounter some genuine Malagasy culture. It is a vast island that requires a lot of time to fully appreciate, with so many different cultures and peoples. It is inevitable that the island will soon be discovered by the rest of the world, and when it is it may well lose some of the charm that makes it so special. It may not be the most comfortable journey of your life, but my advice is to go and explore Madagascar, before everyone else gets there first!
The beautiful lake town of Ampefy.
Rosie Walters - The Dodwell Trust volunteer, summer 2006.
