I'm in Tulear AGAIN. Came in on a whim yesterday afternoon because the two Australian sisters, Clare and Michelle, are leaving so I just decided to come with them. I have to leave in a couple of hours (it's 8 am now) to hope to be back by kids' club at 3. Christina's not there and another gasy staff member, Lova, who speaks pretty good English is going to help out. We're supposed to do collection of sharp objects today and then figure out how to dispose of them. It'll be in a hole, but I don't know if we can dig a hole for their general use or if we should just use the ReefDoctor hole today as a model. But I'm afraid if we don't go ahead and dig them one they'll never dig themselves one. It's also fady to bury anything (fady being taboo) because burial has to do with the dead- hence the reason for all the giant poos on the beach- so this could stand in the way. I just hope I'll get back in time to figure it out. Egil is still getting settled and doing more observation than anything so hopefully he'll be better equipped to help more soon.
I finally am getting my buoyancy right with diving. Yesterday we did two hour long dives and I finally felt like a legit scuba diver. I'm glad I've gotten to have a lot of fun dives where I can just swim around and am not so focused on performing some skill when I'm not even 100 percent comfortable in the water.
Monday we did an AMAZING dive on the exterior at a site called cathedral. Since I don't have my advanced yet we had to stay at 18 meters and above but it was still the deepest I've ever been and the topography was gorgeous- rock and coral canyons and caves, just amazing. We saw sooo many fish. A couple of giant grouper almost gave us a heartattack; Will was my buddy and he grabbed me when he saw them so my heart skipped a beat automatically thinking something was wrong, and then we both went crazy not knowing where to look. Sensory overload. Now I'm spoiled and am only going to want to go back to exterior sites. But that being said, my two dives yesterday were at Ankaranjelita and Vato Soa, both of which I've been to and the latter of which I've been to at least 5 or 6 times, and they were really great dives since I'm getting the hang of everything. I start Advanced this upcoming week I believe. I'm going to try and not come back to Tulear until I have my Advanced because I think I'm mildly addicted to coming here. And my Denver app is STILL not up, and I'm going to guess it'll be up Sept 15 like it was last year.
Anyway, hope to hear from anyone soon.
Alex
Sorta Beautiful
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
I just got back from English with the new volunteer, Egil (not Edgehill like I originally thought). I’m sitting in the hammock outside the house because they are counting, IDing, weighing and measuring fish from a beach seine catch which they do about 3 times a week. It smells terrible. It’s a room full of juvenile fish dead fish spread out everywhere. Gross. And also really sad because the beach seines are horribly destructive. A beach seine is a large net (sometimes even mosquito nets are used) that is held by two opposite ends on shore and the other ends taken out into the sound by pirogue and weighted down. Then they are all dragged in by people on the shore. There are several people pulling each side in (it looks like two one-sided games of tug-of-war) and the net literally ravages the sea grass beds which are extremely important habitats for juvenile fish and sweeps up anything and everything in its wake. As you can see it is beyond terrible for the ecosystem and it has actually been illegal since the 1930s or somewhere around there but national laws aren’t enforced. Ifaty does have a law against it but Mangily and other villages don’t; and unfortunately people come into Ifaty at night and beach seine. We’ve even had them doing it right in front of ReefDoctor which is realllllly not cool. It’s people who are not Vezu (the ‘sea people’ of Ifaty and other coastal towns) who have moved to the coast from inland because the drought has devastated most of the agriculture and the sea is looked at as an infinite provider. We think the people that seine in Ifaty at night come from other villages, but we’re not entirely sure.
Back to teaching, Egil is a teacher in Copenhagen and here for a month to dive and help with education stuff. There is so much to do it’s a bit overwhelming. We need to make activity books relevant to the curriculum for Kids Club and we need to do something similar for beginners and advanced English. It doesn’t sound like much but I don’t even know where to begin. The communication barrier makes everything harder, especially when people who are supposed to help you translate don’t show up, like Pepin didn’t today. I was fine with the beginners today; we review the “how many are there?” activity and “to have” and “to be” and practiced simple sentences like “I am a girl” and “I have a pencil.” Pepin was supposed to show up and explain to them “who, what, when, where, why” questions but he didn’t for God knows what reason. Thankfully Egil could sit in with the advanced students. I still have worked with them one-on-one by myself and I am extremely intimidated to do so if I ever have to. I like working with the beginners, there is a regular group that shows up and they are younger so I don’t feel so ill-suited to the task. And I guess I just prefer kids. It was nice today how I could get the ones who did understand what we were doing really well to explain to a couple of the other ones who didn’t understand so even without Pepin we could make it work. I just translated the gasy work “explain” (manadava) to manitra and hanitra and they explained for me. Next time I’m thinking I might bring in a bunch of clothes in a bag and continue using “I have” and explain “I am wearing…”
Oh and another random side note… so yesterday coming back from Tulear we were late to the taxi-brousse station so we couldn’t fit in the afternoon brousse so we had to get on a cameo-brousse instead. A cameo-brousse is essentially a school bus sans windows, wheel axels, or breathing room where at least 100 people are packed into. “Cattle car” ran through my head a myriad of times during the course of the trip. At the beginning I was sharing a seat with two other women with the various body parts of the people standing in the aisle shoved in my face. But at the first police road check (there are several that stop the brousses in order to get bribe money for no reason) all the Vazaha got our passports checked and for some reason he pulled me, Alana, Katie and Josh outside and took us under some little hut with his machine gun to look at our passports like they weren’t real or something. I was already not in the best spirits so by this point I was seriously just pissed. Alana argued with him in French some and after going through all of our photocopied passports he let us get back on. But I was the last to get back on and they started the brousse before I was in the door so I was half way flying out and finally the eight men standing in the back got me shoved in where I proceeded to cry. Thankfully my sunglasses mostly hid it because all of the gasy people in the back were shouting and laughing at me and one awful huge disgusting woman next to me was grabbing my bag asking for money. Josh took it and held it while I got to spend the rest of the ride sandwiched between two gasy groins holding on for dear life as the brousse sped over sand versions of pot holes and my entire body would be lifted off of the ground. All I have to say about that little experience was that it was character building and I am going to do everything I possibly can to avoid ever taking one of those buses of death for the rest of my life. I’m going to eat beans and rice, veloma,
Alex
Back to teaching, Egil is a teacher in Copenhagen and here for a month to dive and help with education stuff. There is so much to do it’s a bit overwhelming. We need to make activity books relevant to the curriculum for Kids Club and we need to do something similar for beginners and advanced English. It doesn’t sound like much but I don’t even know where to begin. The communication barrier makes everything harder, especially when people who are supposed to help you translate don’t show up, like Pepin didn’t today. I was fine with the beginners today; we review the “how many are there?” activity and “to have” and “to be” and practiced simple sentences like “I am a girl” and “I have a pencil.” Pepin was supposed to show up and explain to them “who, what, when, where, why” questions but he didn’t for God knows what reason. Thankfully Egil could sit in with the advanced students. I still have worked with them one-on-one by myself and I am extremely intimidated to do so if I ever have to. I like working with the beginners, there is a regular group that shows up and they are younger so I don’t feel so ill-suited to the task. And I guess I just prefer kids. It was nice today how I could get the ones who did understand what we were doing really well to explain to a couple of the other ones who didn’t understand so even without Pepin we could make it work. I just translated the gasy work “explain” (manadava) to manitra and hanitra and they explained for me. Next time I’m thinking I might bring in a bunch of clothes in a bag and continue using “I have” and explain “I am wearing…”
Oh and another random side note… so yesterday coming back from Tulear we were late to the taxi-brousse station so we couldn’t fit in the afternoon brousse so we had to get on a cameo-brousse instead. A cameo-brousse is essentially a school bus sans windows, wheel axels, or breathing room where at least 100 people are packed into. “Cattle car” ran through my head a myriad of times during the course of the trip. At the beginning I was sharing a seat with two other women with the various body parts of the people standing in the aisle shoved in my face. But at the first police road check (there are several that stop the brousses in order to get bribe money for no reason) all the Vazaha got our passports checked and for some reason he pulled me, Alana, Katie and Josh outside and took us under some little hut with his machine gun to look at our passports like they weren’t real or something. I was already not in the best spirits so by this point I was seriously just pissed. Alana argued with him in French some and after going through all of our photocopied passports he let us get back on. But I was the last to get back on and they started the brousse before I was in the door so I was half way flying out and finally the eight men standing in the back got me shoved in where I proceeded to cry. Thankfully my sunglasses mostly hid it because all of the gasy people in the back were shouting and laughing at me and one awful huge disgusting woman next to me was grabbing my bag asking for money. Josh took it and held it while I got to spend the rest of the ride sandwiched between two gasy groins holding on for dear life as the brousse sped over sand versions of pot holes and my entire body would be lifted off of the ground. All I have to say about that little experience was that it was character building and I am going to do everything I possibly can to avoid ever taking one of those buses of death for the rest of my life. I’m going to eat beans and rice, veloma,
Alex
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