It has been a while that I have updated this, a week in fact, and the reason is that our new generator – four days in operation – failed last Sunday evening. We only got a new one last afternoon, what with the problems of shipping and finding a suitable one. I won’t regale you with what happened; suffice to say that everything that could go wrong did. Which made for another mora mora week here at Reef Doctor. I am now an Advanced Open Water diver, which means that now I can start doing a bit more of the classroom work, working on coral and fish identification.
On Monday I did some book work and did land navigation with a compass, practicing the routes that I would be doing in the water for the Navigation dive. As I think I mentioned before, Advanced is basically a series of five dives, each one with a specific purpose in skill development. Anyway, I didn’t get into the water as a diver, and instead just did some swimming in the ocean. The water is usually a little choppy from 10 in the morning until 6 in the evening, meaning that best time to get out is either in the morning or in the evening – or else you end up swallowing a good portion of surf.
We got out onto the water for diving on Tuesday, doing two dives, both of them in the morning. Since we were out around 6 the water was like glass – a great way to start the day, moving across the water as the sun comes up over the spiny desert. The first dive was a Deep dive, and we went down to about 25 meters. The second one was the Navigation dive, and I swam squares and triangles to show that I knew how a compass worked. These were the two required dives, with the rest being my own choice.
We headed out early on Wednesday as well, managing to get our two dives in before lunch. The first was a Multilevel dive, where you have to plan the dive through different depths and times. This allows for a longer dive as otherwise you have to assume your maximum depth throughout the entirety of the dive. Since the deeper you are the more nitrogen your body accumulates, doing a multilevel means that you get to stay under longer. The second was a Photography dive. The visibility wasn’t great, but I did get a couple of good shots. There are waterproof plastic housings that are designed for digital cameras, and this is what I used. It’s basically just point and shoot, but the complication is that you have to hang motionless in the water as you do it. These means that you have to fine-tune your buoyancy, breathing shallowly so that you don’t keep on rising and falling given on the amount of air in your lungs. As you could probably guess, buoyancy is the number one skill in diving, and if you don’t have that under control it makes things pretty difficult, for picture taking as well as general swimming.
After the four dives there was only one more to go. This one was a Drift dive, meaning that we would drop into a current and then drift for however far our air lasted – or until our dive time was up. The boat followed along behind us, picking us up where we surfaced. We dropped into the south pass channel in the interior, and then drifted out the channel into the exterior. There were four of us in all, those being Johnny and myself as well as Tom and Caroline. This was the first drift dive that they have done here, so I was lucky that I was one of the four. Tom and Caroline were chosen as the other team as they headed back to the U.K. on Friday. We were thinking that the water would be moving us pretty quickly, but it was basically at a swift walking pace. There were many things to see, especially since we covered so much more ground that we would have on a normal dive. When we first dropped into the water, we were floating and organizing when Tom looked down and saw that we were over a huge school of barracuda. There were about 30-40 of these 2-3 foot fish swimming slowly beneath of us, but we didn’t get the chance to descend through the school as they were gone before we could deflate. Everyone but me saw a shoal of rays, which was too bad, but in all it was by far the most interesting dive I have done to date. It also ended up being the deepest as we were at 30 meters at one point in the dive.
On Friday, as a newly Advance diver I went out with Viv where we did a benthic point-out, which is basically a veteran surveyor going out with a newbie and showing them the types of coral on the reef. We had a remora follow us the whole way, jumping from first me then to Viv and then back again, which was pretty neat. A remora is a small fish with a sucker on its head that attach themselves to bigger fish, usually sharks, and then hitch along for the ride in the hope of getting a better chance at some food.
That was my week of diving, and on Saturday I was aiming to get out and do some surfing. Pepin, one of the Malagasy here who speaks English, has been out on the waves since he was nine years old, and he was going to take me out for some time on the breakers on the reef. He showed up this morning after an all-day absence yesterday, as he had been drinking on Friday and decided he wasn’t up to surfing on Saturday. A bit of a flake, but he did say that we would head out next weekend, which hopefully happens as it will be my last weekend here. It’s hard to believe how quickly the time has passed here, but I guess that’s how it goes with most things: looking forward, time always seems longer than when you look at the same span from over your shoulder.
While I don’t have extensive experience with the workings of NGOs (non-government organizations), I think that most would operate a little more smoothly than Reef Doctor. The people here are paid 100 pounds a month (about 200 dollars) and right now wages are behind for everyone. Finances are tight all around actually, and this month rent was late, as well as only half of what was owed. They are waiting on grants from the World Wildlife Federation, as well as from the director, Rod Stein-Rostaing, and until those arrive, they are literally living from hand to mouth. The day-to-day operations, like having enough fuel for the boat, and enough fuel for the generator, seem to be no one’s responsibility, and dives have been cancelled as a result of not enough fuel – or not enough dive tanks. As you already know, the back-up generator failed a couple of days ago, but since it was the back-up, you might think that they would have gotten a main generator before that one failed. But they didn’t.
The cook is in the enviable position of living on site, and since she knows she cannot be fired, she puts little effort into preparing the meals. There was so much theft when she was given money to buy food, with people consistently getting too little to eat, that now the practice is to give her one day’s supply of food at the beginning of each day. She still steals a lot, which is obvious even to me, for when we get fish, we get twice as many heads as tails. She and her family eat the tail ends (the choice portions) and serve the remainder to us. As I mentioned before, the director and a few others have taken to eating their breakfasts separately and on their own dime, but that still leaves suckers like me choking down rice gruel for breakfast.
The programs that they have in place in the Bay of Ranobe are various, and all have been thought up by the Reef Doctor staff. They are implemented through a fisherman’s association, but there seems to be little investment by the actual community at large. There are no fishing zones, and while they are guarded during the day and marked with buoys, there is still covert fishing done at night. The most successful conservation ideas are ones that can be demonstrated to the indigent community as useful, and since the slow growth of coral does not put food on the table, convincing the villagers seems to be an uphill battle. The villages do see a return in the way of dive fees for recovering sites that are becoming popular with divers, but this money still does not make up for the lost revenue of the fisherman, instead going to general community projects.
The volunteer program here is really quite self-directed, as in there is no plan or set of expectations for what a volunteer is expected to do and learn, which can be disconcerting in your first few days here. Still, of all the volunteers I’ve spoken to, all have enjoyed their experiences here and have learned a lot. And I am too actually, even if the above gives another impression.
So, the reason that I haven’t been able to post any updates over the last few days is because of some technical problems here at Reef Doctor – that being no electricity. The generator failed, and then the back-up generator failed, and so we have been without water, power and of course the internet. In brief, after the going-away party for Shawn , the outgoing director, and Rebecca and Eileen, both volunteers, I headed into Tulear on Saturday morning with Rebecca. She bused up to Atananarivo, and I got some more ariary from the bank and bought another internet card. The plan was to head back Saturday evening, but we got in late after waiting for 2 ½ hours for a taxi-brousse, so I decided to head back on Sunday with Johnny, who was just finishing up in his vacation, and met Rebecca and me in Tulear.
On Sunday morning I began to experience the typical sickness that most people get after a while in this country, problems with both ends as it were, and limped behind Johnny Sunday afternoon as he got us a quatre-quatre that took us back to Reef Doctor in 40 minutes – much faster than the 2 hour taxi-brousse ride. On the way into Tulear, Rebecca and I and crammed ourselves into a taxi-brousse, and as I had been sitting in the cab on the way to Ifaty, this was quite the experience. We were two of sixteen adults in the back of this single-cab mazda pick-up, along with five kids. I couldn’t sit up straight as the roof to the height suitable for the average Malagasy, and I couldn’t rest my feet on the floor as it was layered in forty pound bags of rice. Anyway, a 4x4 is a significantly nicer way to travel in Madagascar – even if your fellow passengers aren’t familiar with the practice of bathing and the deaf driver is in sole control of the radio and loves Celine Dion. I managed not to throw up for the duration of the ride, and then sat in the bathroom here at Reef Doctor for the remainder of the afternoon, until I summoned the strength to drag my feet through the sand to the volunteer hut at five and go to bed.
I stayed in bed all of Monday, and then got up and had a bite for supper and then headed back to bed. It wasn’t really that much of a wasted day as, aside from there being no generator, there was no fuel for the boat, so there was no diving (a more comprehensive description of the rampant ineptitude here at Reef Doctor to follow). So, that was my Monday.
Yesterday was more successful, and I headed out on my last Open Water dive in the afternoon. I have now completed all the skills, including the 200 meter ocean swim which I did this afternoon, and will be starting Advanced Dive training shortly. As for today’s activities, I went out for my first morning dive just after eight o’clock. My stomach wasn’t cooperating again, and it was difficult to stifle my gag reflex as I choked down a few spoonfuls of rice gruel for breakfast. This concoction is over-cooked rice, cooked to point of becoming sludge, and it tastes just like it sounds – terrible. I made it back for lunch though, and had beans and rice – another common combination here in Madagascar, which though tiresome is much better than gruel. My descriptions of food are not indicative of general Malagasy fare, as the cook here at Reef Doctor comes with the rental of the property. Hence, she takes her position for granted, knowing full well that while the staff might like to get rid of her, they can’t. Breakfasts have become so reviled in fact that a couple of guys have started bringing in their own food and cooking breakfast for themselves. It is ironic that the director, in charge of organizing meals (and supposedly monitoring quality) is so hemmed in by the rental politics that he has started making himself an omelet in the morning.
