Manakara and Fianarantsoa cultural festival

Lately work has been pretty slow, I'm still working on the Treemad campaign however there is some information and documents that I need to complete my work that have not yet been given to me. This has, however, given me the opportunity to see some of the other aspects of the work that Feedback are doing. On Wednesday morning I accompanied my colleagues Sophie and Dadah to the Old Town in Fianarantsoa for the annual cultural festival.

The Old Town in Fianarantsoa is a UNESCO world heritage site due to the beautiful architecture of the buildings there and is on the World Monuments Fund watch list of the 100 most endangered sites due to many of the buildings needing repair work. Feedback Madagascar works in the Old Town with the local community to help restore the buildings there and to promote cultural tourism, helping to provide an income for those who live there.

The cultural festival that took place on Wednesday is a yearly event to celebrate the International days of culture (poetry, theatre, and storytelling). As we arrived there were many people dressed up waiting to take part in the festival and hundreds of local children had come to watch. The festival was around 2 hours late to start because the local authorities still hadn't turned up (I'm getting used to this over here now though!) But eventually the Head of the Fianarantsoa District and a number of other important people turned up and things could get going.

After a number of (very long) speeches were made by the different authorities, different people from the local community got up to sing songs, dance, read poems, and act out short stories. Many of the poems were in Malagasy but a couple were in French- despite the majority being in Malagasy it was still easy to see the effort that the people had put into them through the way they were presented. It was a really interesting day and I was really glad to have had the opportunity to go and see it, especially as I have been wanting to go to the Old Town for a while to see Feedback's work there.

Outside of work I travelled to the coast last weekend by train which was a very interesting experience. Before coming to Madagascar I'd heard about the Fianarantsoa-Cote-Est railway which linked Fianar with a town called Manakara on the East coast, and I'd wanted to go since I heard about it. Travel guides on Madagascar all say that the train journey is one of the most popular and best things to do whilst in Madagascar as the journey takes you from the highlands through the rainforest eventually ending up at the coast. The train also provides a major lifeline to people who live in the villages along the way as they can transport their produce to markets in either Fianar or Manakara.

So I set off at 6 in the morning on Saturday to get to the train station for 6.30, I arrived and was told that the train was going to be delayed for 2 hours... I'd been prepared for this ('Malagasy time' and also had been told that the train was being a bit unpredictable lately) so I hung around at the train station waiting for the train to be ready. 2 and a half hours later, I was told that the train would 'definitely' be ready in an hour and half. So I left the station and waited around outside. Sure enough in an hour and half, I was able to pay for my ticket and board the train, we didn't set off however for another hour and a bit, eventually leaving Fianar around 1pm (6 hours after the train was meant to leave!)

The beginning of the journey was great, the scenery was amazing as we were going through the rainforest across the mountains, however by 6pm  we weren't even halfway and it was beginning to get dark... By half 7 it was completely pitch black and without anything to see, the journey began to drag. By 9pm I was beginning to panic about how I would get to my hotel if we arrived really late as Manakara has no taxis and the hotel owners who had agreed to pick me up in a car would probably be asleep, I wanted to ring just to let them know I was on my way but because we were in the middle of nowhere there was no phone reception. Talking to a French couple who were on the train with me though, we realised we were both heading to the same hotel so I stopped panicking as atleast I wouldn't be on my own.

After many many many hours we eventually arrived at Manakara at 5 am(!!!) And got picked up and taken to our hotel and I went straight to sleep with the sun coming up... needless to say, I didn't enjoy my journey and do not plan to travel by train again! Waking up at the beach was lovely though, I was staying in a bungalow right next to the sea and the weather was beautiful. I had lunch with the French couple I had met on the train and spent the rest of the day lazing around at the beach. On Monday I met up with the French couple again to get a taxi-brousse back to Fianar (a journey which should take around 6 hours), it took us 9 hours roughly to get home due to various delays, however compared the train journey I wasn't complaining!

The 29th March in Madagascar is the anniversary of an uprising against French colonial rule in 1947 where around 40,000 Madagascans were killed, and is now a national holiday meaning I have no work tomorrow or Monday (Easter Monday) so I am hoping to visit a national park in the middle of the country. I will be back at work on Tuesday, which will be my second to last week of placement! Time has gone so fast since I've been here, its crazy to think I only have 2 weeks left, but I have learnt so much from it.
I have also extended my flights to give myself more time to travel once I have finished my placement, so on the 18th April I will fly to La Réunion for a few days, then I will come back to Madagascar for 3 weeks, after which I will spend 10 days in Uganda on my way home to visit people I met when I was there 2 years ago- something I'm very, very excited about!

Inaguration of new lycée in Ikongo!

Have just returned from visiting a village in one of the most remote areas I've ever been to! Feedback has helped finance the building of new classrooms for the lycée there and we went for the inaguration ceremony.

We left Fianar at 6am on Sunday to begin the long and bumpy journey (Ikongo isn't that far from Fianar but there is no direct road so you even though it is south east of here you have to first drive north east through the mountains to then drive south along the rainforest corridor). We drove for about an hour and half on a tarmac road past Ranomafana where I had been the weekend before until we turned south and the rest of the 90km was on a very very bumpy dirt track. It took us around 4 hours to drive halfway along the dirt track to a village called Tolongoina where we stopped to have lunch. The area that we were driving through is a lower altitude than Fianar so the weather was absolutely sweltering! We realised during our lunch stopover though that the car's break fluid was leaking so we had to call for the local mechanic to fix it... we ended up waiting around in Tolongoina for 7 hours(!!) While we waited for our driver and the mechanic to travel by motorbike to neighbouring villages trying to find the parts we needed. We eventually got going again around half 7 int he evening and it took us another 3 and a half hours to get to Ikongo at 11 at night- the road was so so bad and after a very hot, sweaty and bumpy 17 hour journey there was just time for a quick shower and then sleep!

The next day was as boiling hot as the day before but we walked through the village to the lycée to check it out and see if there were any finishing touches that needed doing before the opening ceremony the next day. There were a few little jobs to be done and the plaque still needed to be put up so we spent the morning sorting everything. Apparently the Madagascan government had given 20 million ariary to pay for desks and materials for the school however much of the money has disappeared as it went through the mayor's office and the desks and materials that have been bought are of a really bad quality- just shows the corruption that is really common over here, and even though it is very obvious the perptrators are often not prosecuted but just end up resigning without having to pay the money back...

As I was waiting around at the lycée for the work to be finished a few of the boy students came up to me to practice their english and eventually I ended up in a classroom surrounded by about 50 students all listening to me speaking to one of the students who had a pretty good knowledge of english! I was quite shocked at how much the kids wanted to practice their english (so different to the majority of students in the UK learning a foreign language), I was also met with endless questions of 'how old are you' which after me saying I was 20 the next question was always 'are you married?' It's really common over here, especially in the villages, for girls to get married around 13/14 so its quite shocking/strange for people when I tell them that I'm not married, one boy even asked me if that meant I was a spinster...
Many of the kids who go to the lycée live in surrounding villages that have no road access, one of them told me that his family home is a 24 mile walk from the school meaning that he must stay in Ikongo. Children here pay for school and pay for teacher's salaries on top of that so only those who's parents can afford it can attend school, and even once they have finished it is still very difficult to go to university as it is expensive and they must move to a town (Fianar is the closest town with a university and then next is the capital) which involves living costs, so for many after finishing school they return to their villages to farm.

In the afternoon we went back to the lycée as a man from the military who lives in a village further on had donated 6 computers and 2 solar panels to the school and there was a thanking ceremony taking place- apparently though the man's wife is a politician and as their are elections coming up in May the gift of the computers was mainly for political reasons... There is some question as well as to whether the 2 solar panels will be able to support all 6 computers but hopefully it will! (The village only has electricity for a few hours in the evening as it is too expensive to run full time).

On tuesday it was the day of the inauguration and in true malagasy tradition the ceremony that was supposed to start at half 8 didn't start until half 11! The ceremony took place on the school's playing field and as me and Sam were walking up to the stand we were met by 2 students who shook our hands and gave us both a traditional malagasy hat to wear. The ceremony began with a number of speeches being made by all the important people including the mayor, the head teacher, the head of the district, head of education for the district and from Sam as the representative for Feedback Madagascar. All of the speeches were in Malagasy and they were all pretty long so the ceremony dragged a little for me! It was still really interesting to see the way in which the ceremony was carried out though. The kids from the school did a couple of dances for us which was really cool, I got a very nice standing ovation when the head of the district introduced me to everyone (no idea what he said though!), and the head of education for the district gave a small speech in english about the importance of education and how grateful the community was that Feedback Madagascar had helped with the construction of the school.
After the speech ceremony we walked to the lycée to cut the ribbon and officially open it!
It was then time for lunch for the 'important' people back at the hotel that we were staying at where I got to eat lunch sitting opposite the King of the region!

In the evening it was time for a party (the mayors way of making some money as he'd overspent on the lunch)! As we got there it was packed and looked as though the entire village had turned up! Everyone was dancing and seemed to be having a really good time, a table had been reserved for Feedback Madagascar at the end of the room so we had a great view of all the dancers. Everytime a slow song came on though a different village elder or 'important' person came up and asked me to dance ahaha. It was a really good night though and by the looks of it the mayor made his money back! (We didn't have to pay though as they said we'd already paid for a school which was a bonus!) Ending up heading back to our room around 2 to wake up a few hours later to start the long journey home... managed to do the entire journey in 9 hours which, compared to the 17 hours on the way there, wasn't too bad!

Am back in the office now today trying to get back to my work on the Treemad campaign although I'm still waiting for some documents to be sent to me from the office up north! Also just found out that it's International Women's Day tomorrow so all women get the day off! (Yay) looks like I'm gonna try and get down to the coast (a 7 hour bus journey) to make the most of my long weekend!