Velondriake Post Number Two

Coco Beach Blue Ventures is based at the Coco Beach Hotel in Andavadoaka, a scattered arrangement of huts on a point jutting out into the ocean on the south-west end of the town. The volunteer huts are on the top of a dune overlooking Half Moon Beach, which is sheltered from the incredible winds that shake the staff huts and the restaurant on the other side of the hotel compound. When we come together for meals on the restaurant porch the volunteers all look like they live on a tropical island and the staff are all in jeans and fleeces and hats. I’m sharing a hut with Sabrina (a dive volunteer from Manhattan), Vicki (an independent researcher (of OCTOPUS!) from London), and Jess (on a medical student elective from a school in England).

The volunteer huts

The view from our hut

The village of Andavadoaka

My Project I spent my first week in Andava reading a bunch of materials about WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), lots of stuff about PHE programs, and ‘Tales of Shit’ which is about CLTS (community-led total sanitation), an approach to stopping open defecation that involves “triggering” the community to be totally grossed out by their own shit being everywhere (a key point is using the local equivalent of the word ‘shit’ to avoid euphemisms/sugar-coating anything, etc) and realizing that it must be getting into their food and water. I will not be doing anything like that while I’m here, but it was an interesting read – or at least as interesting as 200 pages of development-speak can be. On Monday the directrice of the school was finally back in town so I got to meet with her about working with the school and Wednesday I led my first lesson about WASH. It went really well and the kids were totally interactive which was quite a relief since my biggest fear was that they would be too shy to talk or just give me vacant stares because they don’t understand my Gasy at all.

My "office"

The view from that window

A poster I made about diarrhea

The "Aja Filako" - a bottle baby to demonstrate how diarrhea causes dehydration

Other cool stuff Last Friday I went by motorized pirogue with Issy, Vicki, Vicki’s Malagasy assistant Dany, and one of the CBD supervisors Balbine to Tampolove, a smaller town south of Andavadoaka. We helped out with the Depo-Provera clinic that BV runs in Tampolove every two weeks, and then Issy and I stayed on for the weekend to help Vicki with her octopus surveys. Friday night was a full moon and low tide was at 10:30 pm so we went out with some BV aquaculture people to count and weigh sea cucumbers. We walked way out into the middle of the bay where there are about 10 sea cucumber pens, each belonging to a different household from Tampolove. The pens are completely submerged during high tide but at low tide you can see the fences sticking up out of the water, which was about up to my knees while we were walking around. Again, pictures are really the best way to describe the experience, but the sea cucumbers were all between 200 and 400 grams and, well, they’re kind of gross. They’re bumpy and hard when you pick them up and then suddenly they squirt a stream of … sea water?... out of their butt and go limp in your hand (what? why are you looking at me funny?). So we waded around in the pens for a couple hours shining our headlamps on the sea floor and collecting all the sea cucumbers we could find into a basin that we floated along next to us. The Gasy women from Tampolove that came with us all carried big bright lanterns that made an eerie whooshing noise and looked really picturesque scattered across the dark bay. It was a totally surreal experience: standing out in the middle of the sea at midnight, under a full moon, in Madagascar, weighing sea cucumbers.

The sea cucumber pens at low tide during the day, and the watchtower to prevent sea cucumber theft.

The sea cucumber pens at low tide

A sea cucumber!

Walking out to the pens at night.

Bleh, little sea cucumbers...

Angelo and Gaetan weighing the sea cucumbers

On the sailing pirogue to Lamboara

The clinic in Tampolove

On Saturday morning we waited around for low tide and then went out into the bay again, this time to do transects with Vicki. We waded out too early at first and the force of the tide going out was so strong that we had to go back to the beach and eat roasted peanuts for another half an hour before it was low enough and steady enough to do our transects without being dragged out to sea. Vicki’s research involves laying out a 30 meter tape measure on the sea floor and then writing down what material is on the ground at 20 cm intervals. My job was to write down the codes she called out: “SA (sand)... SA … RB (rubble) … SA… RB… TA (turf algae)…URC (urchin)…SA…etc.” While we were doing that two Gasy women were walking on either side of the transect with fishing spears, looking for octopus dens. I saw them spear one small fish and a squid, but no octopus. (We did, coincidentally, have octopus for lunch that day though).

On Sunday we sailed across the bay to Lamboara and did more transects, a kilometre out into the ocean (we had to be in the octopus reserves) where the ground was all really sharp uneven coral with loads of sea urchins that was exhausting and painful to walk over, even wearing thick dive booties. When we finished up and went back to town the wind was coming from the north so we couldn’t sail back to Andava and had to spend the night in Lamboara, sleeping three to a bed in the president’s house. The next morning we got up at six to sail to the mainland (Lamboara is an island) where a zebu cart (ox-cart) was waiting to take us on a bumpy but beautiful two-hour ride back to Andava, through spiny forest and only a handful of meters from the ocean for much of it.

Waiting for the tide to be low enough to do transects.

Vicky with a ... sea creature of some sort.

A Few More Random Things • Matt asked me to take over the volunteers’ Malagasy lessons for this expedition so now I am officially a Malagasy teacher. I taught my first lesson on Tuesday and I have another one this afternoon. It seems a bit silly to have a vazaha teach Gasy when we’re surrounded by native speakers, but I guess sometimes it’s easier at first to learn from someone who speaks English too and had to learn the language recently. Or maybe they just don’t want to pay a Malagasy teacher. Anyway, it’s exhausting but fun.
• On Monday I went swimming at Half Moon Beach at low tide and stuck my hand on a sea urchin. I barely grazed it but it hurt like crazy – my whole hand was throbbing – and left about 6 blackish-purple dots on my hand that Issy and I couldn’t figure out whether they were just puncture marks or if there was spine in them. I soaked my hand in non-scalding hot water for half an hour until it turned all pruny and then Issy was going to try to pick out a couple so she shot some local anaesthetic into my finger near one of them which really hurt (Issy afterwards: “normally I would have used a smaller needle but we didn’t have one”) and then we decided that actually they were all really tiny and would probably dissolve or come out on their own. The upshot of all of this is that while I was soaking my hand I read a BV guide about marine stings/envenomation and now I actually remember which things you’re supposed to wash with fresh water versus salt water or vinegar for – unlike when we got a long powerpoint presentation on them in Wilderness Medicine. They have some actually relevance now because I hear the other volunteers talking about fire coral and lion fish when they get back from dives.
• On Tuesday I saw a whale!