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Experiences of past volunteers
"Madagascar doesn’t stop being surprising"
Rosie Powell-Tuck
Madagascar is an alarmingly eclectic country. Buildings are painted with colourful ‘Laughing Cow’ and ‘Coca-Cola’ murals. Taxi brousses: mini-buses loaded with rice, chickens, baskets and babies, trundle along the verges of roads avoiding the deep sandy pot-holes. The bed slats run longitudinally along the bed frames. The Malagasy people never stop singing. They dance to their synthesised music by vibrating their bottoms astonishingly quickly. The women carry everything balanced on their heads, be it fish, wood or a big stack of hats. Car owners regularly jump-start their cars or don’t bother starting them at all, simply rolling them down hills. Some Malagasy that I met even believed whole-heartedly in mermaids and fairies. Nevermind, after a few weeks adjustment all these day to day oddities stop being surprising.
Except then you dip for the briefest of moments into any natural history book and it keeps mentioning ‘Madagascar’ every other sentence… and the truth becomes evident: Madagascar doesn’t stop being surprising. Madagascar’s whole geological and biological history has been wacky.
Madagascar separated from Africa and the ancient super-continent Gondwanaland, around 150 million years ago, whilst still attached to India. About 60 million years later it separated from India and was left as an isolated land mass. According to my Bradt travel guide, this makes Madagascar the oldest island in the world. (You would have thought that in all that time they could have got their bed slats the right way round). The ‘flora and fauna’ that has evolved as a result of this isolation is remarkable: the birds, bees, lemurs and trees; the chameleons with their shifty eyes, the insects, the tenrecs and the mammoth black spotty butterflies that motor about the sky. A phenomenal percentage, around 90%, of all this breathtaking biodiversity is found only in Madagascar. And yet enormous amounts of the fauna is endangered, for example the mysterious, nocturnal aye-aye with its long middle finger and its satellite-dish ears. Enormous amounts of the flora too, has been slashed and burned for low profits, so that land previously forested is reduced to great expanses of empty, grass wasteland. This devastation is the newest surprise. And it doesn’t stop on land. Underwater, coral reef ecosystems have experienced and are experiencing a similar amount of damage from mankind.
ReefDoctor is a small non government organisation based in Ifaty in the dry and spiny southwest of Madagascar. Arriving at their house next to the beach, I was eager to start my 7 week volunteering stint to help them carry out the “Conservation, Research and Education” proclaimed on their banner. ReefDoctor carries out scientific research such as underwater surveying, water sampling and sedimentation studies to gather information about the marine environment on which the local Vezo fishermen are dependent. They monitor the daily catch of fish and also that of endangered animals like turtles. They then advise the village how the dwindling fish stocks in the bay can be sustained. ReefDoctor also try to develop alternative livelihoods to relieve some of the huge fishing pressure from the reef.
Fundamental to the success of these initiatives, is the education they conduct, of both locals and of tourists, about marine conservation issues. When I was not diving in the bay learning the different species of algae for surveys, I spent much time making posters and other educational resources for the little tourist museum ReefDoctor runs and for the school.
About a year ago, ReefDoctor successfully set up a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the bay where no fishing is allowed and it is hoped the coral reef ecosystem will regenerate. I helped to survey new sites suggested by locals where another MPA could be set up and also sites that had been proposed as octopus ‘no-take zones’.
ReefDoctor is heavily involved in all aspects of the village and its future. Did you know that as this goes to press, Ifaty villagers don’t have any toilets? They poo on the idyllic white sandy beach. Tourists arriving in hotels expecting the glorious sight of sand, sea and spiny forest with associated bulbous, apparently-upside-down baobab trees, get rather more than they bargained for. Soon, with ReefDoctor’s help, the beach could become a whole lot cleaner.
It is small changes like these which could increase tourism to the area and so provide incentives for the protection of unique and important ecosystems. I hope that the organisation will continue its good work into the future and that more NGOs follow the little by little, inclusive approach to conservation which ReefDoctor has adopted. It is also encouraging to note that the Madagascan government has a successful National Park scheme running to protect some major areas of interest around Madagascar. The work of the government and of NGOs like ReefDoctor, although not entirely devoid of flaws, provides hope for the continued existence of Madagascar’s biodiversity.
But wouldn’t it be nice if all the plastic bags scattering the sides of the roads were cleaned up too? What if the great green expanses of mangrove trees were still visible, harbouring their baby tropical fish? Imagine if the taxi brousses trundled through thick lemur-filled forests so that you could hear the wails of teddy-bear-like indri (much louder than the contented babies in the taxi brousses), instead of grassy wastelands. Or the crystalline sea was still filled to bursting with flowery corals, anemones, dolphins, turtles and tropical fish. Much more undoubtedly needs to be done to protect Madagascar’s wonderful biodiversity. It would be lovely, were one to return in twenty years time, to receive another surprise: a surprise that would probably demand magic to drag it into the realms of possibility. What if Madagascar had beed allowed to flourish and regenerate and it was found displaying some of its former beauty? That would be fantastic: surely the best surprise that Madagascar could offer. Maybe the fairies will play a part.
