65th day, Toliara - Team Panda

It's the last day of the national basketball championship here in Toliara. Again, we are there to show our photo exhibition about the aerial surveillance project. It's early in the afternoon, still a few hours to go until the final, but a handful of people have already taken seats in the gym. Toliara's women's handicap team will play the opening match of the day. But there is a small problem: the ladies only have jerseys in one colour! It's hard to know what to do, and the president of the basketball league, in his desperation, asks if we can't spear a few WWF t-shirts. After a short phone call to ask permission from the logo police, we hand over a set of t-shirts for half of the team, and the Panda wheelchair team is off to its match!

64th day, Toliara - Bridges and other people's shoes

Of course most of the people that start talking to you in the streets do so because they want money or your phone number. But it's worth the effort bypassing that first barrier every now and then. Once you have either bought that bracelet/bag of oranges/bottle of baobab honey/mentioned your boyfriend (or, even better, husband), or else made clear that you are not interested, I find most malagasies to be open for a chat. If you even dig out a couple words of malagasy (and it's always the same 5 words that you will need, so there is no excuse for not remembering them after a few weeks), chances are your counterpart's perception of you will change from somebody who merely has "money" written all over his white body, to an actual person.

While there are days when I am tired of all the whistles and "Bonjour madame"s, I am very aware that they are due to the fact that I really am unimaginably rich as compared to 90% of the people here. While I would not want to swich with, for example, a pousse-pousse (rickshaw) puller for even a day, not trying to shake them off like irritating inscets allows me to build tiny bridges over this huge gap between our worlds, at least on one or the other occasion.

57th day, Toliara - Little favours

Sometimes the impact of your actions is indirect.

We have an exhibition of large posters with photos, telling the story of “hatsake” (slash-and-burn deforestation), its destructive consequences and WWF’s work with the aerial surveillance. Toliara is the site of the national basketball championship for a week, and we showed the exhibition outside of the gym. As the people came to watch the games, not to be educated about nature conservation, and as they were not allowed to leave the gym during the breaks without paying again upon re-entry, we had a rather limited audience.

However, the championship is being organized by the court of Toliara. Cooperating with them (and sponsoring the sound system for the championship) is also in the hope that, next time we deliver a case of someone who has burned the forest to the police, the court will make an effort to make sure the person gets punished – which, so far, has rarely ever happened, even though it means simply applying the law, which makes “hatsake” illegal anywhere in Madagascar. But in a country where the entire government is “interim” and non-elected, and corruption is the shaping force of all politics, little favours count more than papers and law books.

About the Aerial Surveillance of Protected Areas project 

54th day, Manorofify - Communities = best custodians of their environment?

Is "community managed" equivalent to "community exploited"?

After returning from a patrol mission in Amoron'ni Onilahy Community Managed Protected Area, this is the impression I take home. The forest is extremely degraded, and, even though members of the COBA (communauté de base), which manages the area, accompany us on the patrol and promise to do their utmost to identify the owners of the clearings we find, my WWF colleague tells me that it is most often the COBA members themselves that have cut and burned the forest. And with a virtually non-existing law enforcement system, extreme poverty and lack of alternatives - can they really be blamed?!

Yes, poverty is not an excuse for everything, and nature needs a strong agent here in Madagascar. However, I am not convinced yet that WWF is doing enough to provide alternative incomes for communities when it establishes a protected area - even some of my colleagues here are not convinced of that. Of course, saying "alternative livelihoods" is easy; coming up with viable solutions, against all customs and traditions, is not quite as evident, and in the Onilahy region for example, they really are trying, by helping people establish vegetable and rice plantations and selling their products in the market of Toliara.
The question is also to which extent an NGO can be taken into responsibility to be a universal problem solver, when the state is largely failing to protect nature and secure people's livelihoods.

52nd day, Toliara - Blood, fear and violence

The malagasy taste in movies oddly clashes with their commonly peaceful and jolly nature: If you look at the selection of pirated DVDs for sale in the market, the proportions are about 50% action and war movies, 30 % horror, 10 % children and 10 % romantic/ comedy.

Tombs that feature a painting of Jean Claude van Damme are not uncommon.

Matthieu, who is responsible for the selection of films shown at the "Cinéma Tropic" in Toliara, was joking that the keywords he enters when browsing the internet for new films - "violence", "horror", "bombing", ... - have probably already gotten the secret service to keep an eye on him.

47th day, Toliara – Je peut être ton héro, cherie

Yes, I am actually translating an Enrique Iglesias song from English into French. But there is a logical explanation for everything, and I have a few words to say in my defense.

With some people I met recently and who work at the NGO Bel Avenir, I spend the holiday at the Toliara beach (Which, contrary to popular belief, does exist, but it’s a 1-hour walk from the city center). Bel Avenir’s work focuses on education and supporting children and teens from disadvantaged families. For the beach day, they take about 40 teenage girls and 2 blind boys. The kids come from the poor families of the saline area, where children are mainly born to help with work and girls commonly have to prostitute themselves from the moment they grow breasts. 

We play soccer at the beach, and, in spite of my more than doubtful expertise in this field, I am pretty impressed with the skills of some of the girls. They train 2 or 3 times a week, and I can’t help but think of the movie “Bend it like Beckham”, evaluating the likeliness of a talent scout coming to their quarter and turning one of them into a star. I wouldn’t bet on it.

As we head home in the afternoon, I walk with 18-year old Malala, who brought a small stereo. She is ambitious and determined to learn English, so she makes me translate one song after the other, pausing the music after every line. Before we part, I promise to have a written translation of her favourite song ready by Friday for her to pick it up at WWF. So here I am, honouring my commitment.

About Bel Avenir (French)