Thriller

As you may have suspected if you’re a loyal facebook fan, LEMURRRRS! This week was incredible. We camped for a few days near a village called Ifotaka, which is in the spiny forest. The name is quite applicable. There are scorpions, prickly pear, and these plants that look like giant coral covered in spines. But this is where sifaka (fluffy white dancey lemurs) live, so I’m cool with it. We did several studies of the sifaka in the area, which was so exciting because they’re not habituated so they’re really just wild lemurs chilling on these spiky trees. I followed one for an hour and a half through the forest, which resulted in some scratched-up legs but also a pretty long and adorable lemur nap that I witnessed. On a night hike, we saw tiny mouse lemurs peering out from the trees in the most impossibly adorable way. (When I told my host family about it today, they said “And you weren’t afraid?!” Just when I think we are starting to understand each other...) We also got to sit under a tree and chat (with one of our professors translating French/Malagasy) with a few men from the village about their beliefs and Tandroy culture, which is the people of this desert-y spiny Southern region. Their tombs involve the horns of as many zebu as the family can afford to kill during the funeral, but no less than three, because each serves a purpose in the passage to the afterlife. My host dad said to me, “The problem with the Tandroy is that all they ever do is buy zebu. If they spent money on other things maybe they wouldn’t be so poor.” I guess this is one way of looking at it—they are definitely a people who prepares a lot for the afterlife. They also have to burn down their house after someone dies. In Iftoka, we also saw some little girls bringing giant mosquito nets (donated by some NGO for the original purpose of, you know, preventing malaria) full of shrimp from the river. It’s tough for people to sleep in nets when they don’t really have beds (kids mostly sleep on the floor of the home), but they’re awesome for fishing.

Back at the camp site I had some adventures as well, most notably my slaughter of a chicken for our lunch. This was something that, as a meat-eater, I’ve sort of been wanting to do for awhile, but in the U.S. you can’t exactly buy a chicken for a few thousand Ariary, carry it on the back of your 4 by 4 for 7 hours, and then bust out the knife. After watching two friends do it, I almost wimped out (not going to make the obvious pun), but I’m glad I went for it. If you’re upset by this kind of thing, then just skip the rest of this paragraph as I describe. The first step is to place one foot on the chicken’s feet, and the other foot on the wings. Then you hold the head back with one hand while plucking a few feathers out of the neck where you’re going to cut—this makes it faster, though ironically I felt the worst about that since my chicken clucked a little bit and it seemed mean. Then, you pull the neck back taut, take the knife, and cut as fast as you can. It feels like forever, maybe 10 or 15 seconds, but you can’t stop because that’s cruel. I felt weirdly detached from the whole process until I had actually cut off the head, which fell into the sand. But while I held down the body, which continued to move a little bit, I felt really tender and gentle. A man from the village who was helping us kept telling me in French to hold it until it stopped moving completely. Even though it was violent, I felt better being aware of and connected to this violence. I knew it wasn't feeling pain without a head also. I felt more like a predator (even though some Malagasy family had raised these chickens, one of my professors had bought them, and someone else handed me a sharpened knife...) than like a murderer. That said, I was completely horrified and will now need therapy after my attempt to take an afternoon nap on my sleeping pad in the sun outside my tent was interrupted by the screams of our goat being sacrificed 10 yards away from me. I know it’s illogical for me to pontificate about the beautiful connection I had with my chicken and then cringe at the sound of another animal dying in the same way, but I can’t help my mammal-centrism. It was so fluffy!

After our big goat roast and hours of exhausting dancing with the villagers of Ifotaka, including some really impressive booty-shakers no older than 8 years old, we woke up early on Wednesday to go to Berenty. Though it’s super touristy (or because of it), this was in many ways so much cooler than seeing wild lemurs, because the ring-tails were brazen thieves of leftover food and nearly touched many of us trying to get at it. I had some awesome moments with sifaka in the forest as well. Screw bears. Sifakas were definitely designed to be stuffed animals for little children.

And now I have a few days to catch my breath in Fort Dauphin before my rural village stay all of next week. I will certainly have a lot to share when I return on March 3^rd. This evening’s dinner conversation got pretty deep—we somehow transitioned from my brother’s total certainty that Michael Jackson is buried on the moon to whether or not there are vampires in Pennsylvania (I explained that they all live in Romania and in Washington State-- yes, the Twilight movies have made it here) to 2012 and the end of the world as we know it. Maybe I misunderstood, but my family said that when there was a solar eclipse last December they were so afraid they locked all the windows of the house and didn't come out or look at it. I couldn’t tell how earnestly my host brother believes that the world is ending this December, though. He kept saying he read it on the internet, but my host dad said it was nonsense and nobody could ever know, because in the Bible, it says not even Jesus knows when the world will end. My brother said that on December 20th he’s going to eat some good food and then hide. I guess that if the world was ending, there are far worse places to experience it than here in Fort Dauphin, on the beach drinking vanilla-flavored rum by the light of Michael Jackson’s final resting place.