My New Home

I have been in my new home for a week now! Maroantsetra is at the edge of a big bay (or what I refer to as the “nook” of Madagascar). The town is big enough to have a tiny airport, two open air markets, more than one school, a post office, police station, bank, and a collection of little restaurants called “hotelys”. It has big, wide sandy roads, but there are only about 15 cars in the whole town because the road that follows the coast to the south is slow and tedious most months of the year due to a number of river systems that you have to cross by ferry (raft). There are no drivable roads into the forest to the north or the west. The river system that runs through the town serves as a highway for transportation into the forest, and a port for the businesses before it dumps into the ocean. A narrow sand spit between the river and the ocean separates Maroantsetra from the saltwater bay. The ocean is gorgeous. Forested, rolling hills surround the bay and gently drop down to meet white, sandy beaches. You can see miles and miles of gently curving sand beachfront without any man-made structure besides a couple of dugout canoes for fishing. There are also two mountainous islands in the middle of the bay with uninterrupted forest.

I live and work at a small NGO called SEPALI. In short, SEPALI is a Malagasy NGO that works with farmers in villages surrounding the Makira and Masoala protected areas (two extensive areas of rainforest near Maroantsetra).  The NGO attempts to marry conservation and development by providing supplemental income generating activities for farmers who have been economically displaced from the protected areas. 

The traditional way for farmer’s to acquire farmland is to burn a section of the forest and plant it. It is not the legal way, but it is recognized by the communities. The land is then subdivided between the children and the children’s children until the land is too small and the process starts over again by burning a new piece of forest. SEPALI works to limit this process by increasing each famer’s capacity to make a living with the land they already have. The project that SEPALI is currently working on is the production of wild silk. SEPALI provides training and resources to farmers to plant native trees that the silk worms eat, raise the silk worms, and harvest the cocoons (silk). There is also a counterpart American organization called CPALI which provides a stable market for the silk by purchasing the silk that each farmer produces and securing a market for the finished products.

The SEPALI “compound” is a beautiful little piece of property by the river that consists of two houses and 300 hundred small trees for our silk worms. A fence made of palm leaves surrounds the whole property (about a half acre all together). The NGO office is also the house that my counterpart lives in, and I live in two rooms of our silk worm breeding house.

The whole SEPALI team consists of about 7 people: the director of the NGO (my counterpart), his wife, two trainers who also serve as watchmen for the compound, a technician who runs our other demonstration site, a development volunteer from Ireland, and me. My counterpart is amazing. He has a couple of masters degrees in agriculture and entomology and he is basically fluent in English (which is really helpful although we speak Malagasy together most of the time).Also, his name is pronounced “mommy” which makes me really happy in a childish way.

So basically, if you haven’t already guessed, I’m really happy.