Field Trip

Being in the field is a total trip. Beats the heck out of the office in Ambositra, hands down. First off, we get to stay at a “swanky” hotel at the beach…translation: there’s a fan in my room, electricity, and running water…most of the time (but it’s still better than what Ettien – our logistics coordinator- and two of the other employees had to do last night, which was to sleep in the cab of their truck out in the bush, hahaha, suckas!) Now that I’ve said that and laughed at Ettien tonight, our group is going to get stuck out in the bush our next trip.

Anyway, even if I can’t go swimming at the beach because of the strong current, the contamination of the water by sewage, and SHARKS, I still get to go to sleep to the sound of waves crashing :D

The second factor that makes fieldwork exciting is the unpredictability. Basically, since I don’t speak Malagasy and my French is still crappy-dappy (although getting less crappy-dappy by the day!) I never fully understand what we are doing or where we are going each day (they do, however, manage to correctly translate the buttcrack of dawn time for me to roll out of bed and meet the team in the morning).

Usually, the days consist of back-road four-wheeling 3-5 hours one way to get to a village. Then we meet with the Maire to ascertain the disaster preparedness protocol his commune has in place (to date, no one has anything…I’m pretty sure when the Maires are talking to Charly in Malagasy the first question out of their mouths are “what is this thing you call disaster management???” lol). After about a 45 min. to 1 hour meeting, we then start our 3-5 hour trek back to our HQ in Mananjary.
The roads are terrible, particularly when it rains (which it does often this time of year). So these days that we spend 8-10 hours driving, well, we are only going about 70 km one way and 70 km back. That should give you an idea how bad road conditions are.

Today was great fun though. After 2 days of Charly and I (mainly Charly, my 1 presentation on US disaster management protocol had to be translated as I spoke which I’m sure bored the heck out of everyone, so it’s best if Charly just does the bulk of the presentations!) teaching the disaster management curriculum to the Mananjary field supervisors, we got to hit the road today and head back to one of the communes we were unable to get to our last trip to Mananjary a few weeks ago because the road was so bad. The road was good today. We only got stuck twice, haha.

Let’s see, the first time we got stuck we were about 2 hours into our journey. It was quite the experience. As soon as we got stuck, about 50-60 school children came tearing down the hill out of their school, screaming like banshees, excited to watch this scene unfold: the scene being Romuald trying to drive the car with Charly yelling which way to turn the wheel, occasionally jumping on the hood of the car to redistribute the weight, and me…the weird looking white girl “vazaha” sitting on the embankment laughing and taking pictures (I’m sure the guys really appreciated that).


Romuald surveying the predicament...


Yep, definitely stuck.


The initial villagers who came to help out...


School kids hauling butt down the hill to watch us try to get unstuck.


Some of the kids who were watching us.


More observers


More school children watching us

While the children were curious about the car, they were also very curious about me. It was quite funny…and VERY endearing. Their MO was to inch closer and closer to me on the embankment while pretending to get a better view of the car. Then, even though I didn’t understand what they were saying, I knew their little minds were hatching a devious plan of some sort. And I knew by the whispers and glances my way that that plan involved me. Sure enough, one of the little boys broke free from the group, ran to me, touched my arm and yelled “vazaha” then ran screaming and laughing back to his group (basically, they had dared him to touch the foreigner and he took them up on that dare…good thing I don’t bite!). All the little kids erupted into laughter when he did this and I couldn’t stop laughing myself. Children are a crackup, no matter what the culture!

Anywho, we were stuck for an entire hour in this slop. During that time, more and more villagers came out to help and watch. Villagers were using their shovels, hoes, and other miscellaneous tools to help dig us out. They also sat on the hood, gave their advice about how to get out, got plastered with mud, and finally they were able to push the car out. We paid them for their help and were on our way.

More help arrived and we finally were able to get unstuck...after a good hour.

About 5 km later, our driver got stuck. Again. Haha! And again, I jumped out of the car (with my water bottle this time…I figured we’d be awhile), went to the embankment, sat in the shade and took pictures. This time, 3 teenage boys emerged from the bushes, literally, they came out of the bushes, I have no idea where they came from, and helped dig the car out again. Luckily we were only stuck for about 20minutes this time.

This would be the 2nd time we got stuck...


About 2 hours later, we arrived in the Vohitrandriana Commune. There was some sort of event or something going on in the commune because there were probably 600-700 people milling around the main building. We could hardly even get through the crowd to get to the Maire’s building. Once we were inside his office, which was basically a little wooden shack where we sat on wooden crate boxes for our meeting, the building was enveloped by the villagers sticking their heads in the doorway and windows to look at these strangers who came to visit the Maire. It was so odd to have several dozen pairs of eyeballs staring intently at us from outside during the meeting, but the maire acted like that was the norm, so we just continued with our meeting. It was pretty funny (and a bit disrupting) because throughout the entire meeting, the kids were pushing each other out of the way to get a good look, lol.



As we’ve grown accustomed to, we found out that the Maire had no system set up for any type of disaster preparedness or response. No early warning system. No radio. No nothing. Ahhhhhhh!!! That makes me want to pull my hair out!!! The good thing is the mayor wants to work with the program and I think there is a lot our program can do to help out his commune, not just in disaster management, but in all the other areas we cover as well: infrastructure, agriculture, health, nutrition, etc.



More pics of the kiddies in Vohitrandriana Commune

After that meeting, we turned right around and started our 4.5 hour journey back to Mananjary. We stopped halfway on our journey to eat lunch in a small village, where some of the villagers set up a mat right by our car to just sit and watch us eat and fix the car…that was odd. But I guess they don’t get a lot of visitors coming through their area often…

By the time we finally arrived back in Mananjary, I was pretty much a complete ball of dirt from mud getting flung through our windows (which we had to keep open to get SOME sort of breeze) and sitting in the dirt to eat lunch…but hey, at least we didn’t get stuck on the way back!

P.S. Sorry these pics are so grainy. I only have my camera phone to use until my new camera arrives next week, hooray!