“ Tany andro, fasika, ranomasina” – these are the words for sun, sand and sea in the Northern dialect, words that I had to learn anew after leaving the Tanosy region of the south in Forth Dauphin for my three weeks on the island of Nosy Be. I’ve made some progress in my Malagasy during my independent study, mostly due to my cooking helper, Bmaona. We traded English and Malagasy words as well as mangos and litchis every night while I did my cooking; as I STILL can’t light a charcoal stove, it is thanks to her that I survived to type this.
One day she asked Millan to bring her camera outside, and we thought she wanted to take some pictures with us, but she started leading us up a “path” (a trail of wet leaves marked by flags in the trees) straight up the hill. We continued that way for several minutes, sliding up the hill, unsure what we were going to photograph, when at the top she pointed at a hole in a tree and said “maki comique”- silly lemur! There was a lepilemur looking out at us from the hollow tree.
She is also the reason I made other friends on Nosy Be: my friend-making strategy consisted of finding people collecting mangos along the road, asking them if they knew where Bmaona was when I needed to cook, and waiting for them to invite me to play sports. That’s how I met Denis, who brought me to play soccer with the local guys on Saturdays and showed me around the local bars and the discotheque!
There was also a naval base about 50 feet from my room, and one morning the marine, Tegan, who I met using the technique described above, invited me to play basketball with them. Imagine the bizarre situation of a small crew of Malagasy military men jogging down the road to the basketball court in town with a little white vazaha in tow… despite my terrible basketball skills, it was a great experience! Now I just need to refine my friendship method for Minnesota, where there is an unfortunate lack of mango trees to drop fruit into the road.
I did have a couple animal “friends” too – this little kitten started climbing in the ventilation holes in my room and keeping me company (notable during dinner time…). It was all fun and games until I realised it was sticking around because it used the floor under my bed as its litterbox.
A lot of fun friends were found in my bathroom; we had a complete ecosystem, including cockroaches, spiders, geckos, and once, a snake!
I’m back in Tana (the biggest city in Madagascar) now, and my one regret from my time in the north is that my camera is afraid of water, and I couldn’t bring it with me for the most amazing part of my trip: the coral reefs. Forget Madagascar the animated picture, most of the time I felt like I was swimming in water straight out of a scene from the Little Mermaid! The one big exception was the snorkelling station that was so full of baby jellyfish that it reminded me more of Finding Nemo when Marlin and Dory race through the jellyfish-infested waters…luckily, I am bigger than a reef fish, and the jellyfish stings are more of an annoyance than anything, but they still hurt! Despite being able to feel my back getting sunburned over the 4-5 hours spent collecting research during snorkeling days, I was literally unable to tear my eyes away from the scenery beneath me to float on the other side for a few minutes. Luckily, after all of the work snorkeling, my research team had afternoons free to eat a picnic lunch, lay on the beach, and sleep in the shade until the tide was high enough to get back to the dock. As you can see…sun, sand and sea were a big part of my adventure there!
Even better, I am going back to more of the same in Fort Dauphin now, as well as fianakaviako (my family) and namako (my friends) that live there. I feel bittersweet about it, the same way I do whenever voyaging across the country here: sad to leave, but happy to go.
Emmadagascar 