Not a Creature was Stirring, Not Even a Lemur

Sitting here on Christmas Eve, it occurs to me that Christmas will for me be forever linked to northern climes. Christmas in the Dominican Republic a few years ago was odd, but spending it with family made it seem a bit more like home. Now I am going to be spending the most significant holiday of the year with a group of people that I will most likely never see again. The sense of community is understandably stilted, especially for me as I have been here the least amount of time and will be leaving the soonest. And, to make it even more surreal, there is a chance of sunburn on the beach instead of the annual frostbite that attends marathon hockey games in subzero temperatures.

Eventually you start taking steps away from the family hearth, but it is difficult to imagine what each step will result in. Sometimes the step is forced through circumstance, while other times it is carefully analyzed as closely as possible before being taken. This step, the first Christmas away from home, was willfully taken, so I hope this doesn’t come across as some sort of forlorn monologue from Madagascar. It was worth it to come, to have this experience, but with each moment spent doing one thing, you miss the opportunity to involve yourself somewhere else. The opportunity cost of scuba diving in Madagascar is difficult to calculate, especially since the other opportunity isn’t just Christmas in Fort McMurray - everywhere that I am not is what I'm missing. There are a myriad of places and experiences that I cannot indulge in because I am here, but it’s difficult to miss what you don’t know, so instead I am keenly missing home.

Have a Merry Christmas – I will too, plus a deep tan.

Now an Advanced Diver

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.

Open Water to Advanced

Now that I am an Open Water Diver, I am starting out on the Advanced certification. Open Water is basically just four dives to make sure you can swim and breathe from a regulator – the very basics. If you don’t progress from this, then every time you go to dive you have to be supervised by someone with a higher certification, and you cannot descend to a depth greater than 18 meters. The next level after Open Water is Advanced, followed by Rescue, Divemaster and finally Instructor. The Advanced certification involves five different dives, each of them intended to increase skills and proficiency in the water. It is a bit personalized in that you get to pick which five you would like to do, choosing from options like night and drift dives, underwater photography, boat dives (which each of our dives here is), deep dive (down to 30 meters) and others. Claire is the one who taught my Open Water course, and now she has gone home, so the new Instructor, Johnny, will be bringing me out for the Advanced portion.

I’ve been out on six dives so far, and I have to confess that at first it wasn’t the fantastic experience that I imagined it to be. The incredible profusion of life and the experience of weightlessness are great, but before my sixth dive I didn’t see it as something that I would be that interested in pursuing after my time here in Madagascar. However, now after my sixth dive, I have a completely different perspective. For my sixth dive we headed out to a dive site known as Coral Garden, inside the reef just north of the south pass. It was the deepest dive that I had been on, and we dropped meter after meter in the water, our bubbles sparkling towards the surface. The topography of the area is fantastic, with massive irregular columns of coral reaching nearly to the surface, with wide sandy channels snaking their way in between them. There were four of us on the dive and for the first ten minutes or so we kicked against the tide channeling between the columns, moving a foot for every six feet of effort. I still don’t know enough of the words for what I am looking at, but we did get to see a humphead wrasse, a gigantic fish that I spotted swimming above us. There were a dozen sea snakes waving like flexible green pencils out of the sand floor and of course the anemones and fish that I have seen on all of my previous dives. On our way back to the boat I swam through a school of fish, and spun around as I kicked, watching the fish split, circle and close the gap that they had allowed for me to pass. The visibility was the best that I had experienced as well, and we were able to see a good 35-40 ft, which made the dive that much more enjoyable. All in all, I am now looking forward to my next dive.

This dive was Friday afternoon, and after that we headed in for a fund-raising party in Tulear. We were incredible lucky, and got into the back of a Mitsubishi pick-up only minutes after walking away from Reef Doctor. Seven of us sat in the back of the truck, and it was much more comfortable than my ride in the taxi-brousse the previous weekend. After the party, I headed back to the hotel, and then Johnny came in an hour after me. He had foolishly decided to walk back, and after having too many drinks, he made an easy target. That is to say, he was mugged. Five guys jumped him on his way back to the hotel, rifling through his pockets while he drunkenly and ineffectually swung at them. He is money was in a zippered pocket which they missed, but they did make off with his cell phone. Johnny figured he deserved what he got for his stupidity, as the rule is to never walk anywhere after dark in Tulear – especially alone, and especially inebriated.

Our trip back on Saturday did not go as smoothly as trip into Tulear, and we (Johnny, Anne, me) waited for over two hours in the sun at the taxi-brousse station, trying to hitch a ride in a quatre-quatre. We finally got one, and when I made it back to Reef Doctor it was none too soon. Let me just say that my stomach problems have yet to subside.

Supper was pizza in Mangily, which seems to be a weekend ritual here, though the two hour round-trip walk makes it barely worth it. Stomach problems slowed me on the way back, but hopefully some immodium with curtail what has unfortunately turned into a daily problem.

There you have the lengthy description of my last few December days in Madagascar. It really doesn’t feel like December at all, and aside from some Bing Crosby on the plane over to Tana, I have had nothing to really remind me of coming Christmas. Still, I am counting down the days until I put my feet up in my hammock on the 25th and sip some holiday cider that Mom gave me to take along for that express purpose.

A Volunteer's Perspective on Reef Doctor

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.

Mora, mora (Slowly, slowly)

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.

Under the Water

Dec 4: I did my first open water dive yesterday, descending to 5.5 meters over a coral reef. I and my instructor were down for 45 minutes, and saw a variety of sea life. The time passed so quickly, and we were back on the surface in no time at all. I had to do two Confined Water dives before this, so-called as they are usually done in swimming pools. I of course did them in the ocean, which aside from the somewhat limited visibility and the salty water, is exactly the same as it would have been in a pool. The skills portion involved clearing my mask underwater, emergency breathing from another regulator as well as achieving neutral buoyancy. In all, things have gone well, and I am on track to finish up the Open Water course by Friday. I had a bit of congestion in my sinuses, which hurt a bit, but after ascending and then descending again more slowly, I was able to deal with it. Claire swam slowly about, with her arms folded neatly in front of her, just using her fins to propel herself through the water. It took a while to achieve that ease, and for the first fifteen minutes or so I spent most of my attention on staying level in the water. I had to use my hands to do this, sculling with my right and then my left, and was at some points almost straight up and down in the water with my face to the floor, at other times all the way over on one side or the other. After I cinched up my weight belt – it had slid up onto my stomach when I was upside down – things went much more smoothly, but the comfort that Claire exhibits underwater will be a while in coming.

This morning, yesterday’s congestion caught up with me, and I woke up with a full-on head cold. I slept for another couple of hours after breakfast, and then was feeling back to normal for lunch. Regardless of my condition and whether or not I can dive, there is not enough air in the tanks anyway, so I will write my final exam this afternoon and then do the last few dives on Friday to complete the Open Water certification.

Ifaty, only a five minute walk away from Reef Doctor, was the scene of some seldom-seen Malagasy violence last night. The bar that I went to with everyone on my first night here to see off another volunteer had a fight in it last night. Jose’s, as it is called, is one of two bars in the village, and the word “bar” grossly exaggerates what you might expect. It is a little shack, with about half a dozen rough-hewn tables and chairs, with a thirteen-inch television on one wall showing the same Bob Marley concert over and over. This is the place to be, as the other bar’s only claim to the name is that they serve beer. Anyway, last night, around nine o’clock, there were half-a-dozen gunshots, and this morning at breakfast we learned that a few bottles had been broken over a few heads, and that one Malagasy had been shot in the shoulder. Everyone here is pretty relaxed about it, and I feel safe in my little hut made of reeds. This may be an unreasonable sense of safety, as the walls wouldn’t stop a fist, let alone a bullet, but we have a security guard who walks about all night, which is a good deterrent for anyone looking to come onto the property at night.

Nights in Madagascar

The last few days can be encapsulated in one line – “Lazy living on the beach.” My responsibilities are minimal most of the time, but on Sunday nothing much happens at all, and on Monday, there was a halt to any work scheduled, as it was a festival day. What this involved was three ceremonies along Ranobe Bay commemorating the establishment of a number of no-take zones within the bay. These zones will be allowed to grow back for six months to allow the octopi population to rebound, which will help the commercial fishermen, as well as to create more spots for tourists interested in scuba diving. I went with the group headed to Mangily, where I was looking forward to the zebu being slaughtered. Whenever something of importance happens in a village, a cow (zebu being the Malagasy name) is killed and the meat divvied up among the villagers. We missed this action, only getting there in time to see the skin being scraped of any remaining meat as the little kids played with the tail. This had happened in the morning, and as the speeches were in Malagasy and French and not scheduled until later in the afternoon, I headed back to Reef Doctor in the heat of day, right after lunch. It was low tide, which made it a nice walk, but the heat made snorkelling in the afternoon all the more enjoyable.

When the crews from the three different sites finally arrived back in the evening, they were a tipsy boat load. It was Nicholas’ thirtieth, and his group had spent the time waiting to get picked up enjoying rum on the beach. The drinking continued into the night and I headed off to bed earlier than most. I was the first back to the volunteer shack, and being without a flashlight, was unable to work the combination lock on the door. Luckily a window was open, so I climbed in there instead, allowing the rest of my roommates to figure out what was going on later in the evening.

The night time is completely different here than the day, within a whole host of different creatures making their appearance. Walking on the path a good ways up off the beach, bats occasionally flit noiselessly into the view of your flashlight. You should keep the light trained at your feet, as the various hermit crabs trundling along can be easily stepped on. I have yet to see the small nocturnal snakes, no longer than twelve inches and thin as a pencil, but their tracks can be easily seen interlaced with those of the hermit crab in the morning light. Walking along the beach at low tide, the ghost crabs slip quickly into their holes at the sound of the feet approaching them. So-called because of their colouring, the ghost crabs may run for a few feet and then suddenly stop instead of heading for their hole, and you are hard pressed to pick them out. They blend well into the sand, and sometimes only by taking a few more steps can you get them to run off again and so be able to see where they where.

Today I did my first dive with Claire, one of two Divemasters here at Reef Doctor. It was basically just floating around in chest-deep water, practicing the variety of skills needed in deeper water. After I have completed the Open Water certification – which I hope to do by the end of the week – I will move on to Advanced Dive training. At the end of Open Water, I will be certified for 18 meters, and after Advanced, I will be allowed to descend to 30 meters. I aim to move things along as quickly as possible, as everyone here goes on holiday on the 25^th, and day-to-day operations do not resume until the 4^th of January. Therefore, I really only have three and a half weeks to get my certifications and secondarily, perhaps be of some use in doing some reef surveying. It looks as if I will be heading out on a vacation with Madagascar near the end of December, or I may hang about here with the skeleton crew for a few days. I have yet to finalize my plan, as I was originally under the impression that I would be able to continue diving through the Christmas holiday.

I realize that I have yet to introduce you to the crew here. They are definitely a motley assortment. There are three other volunteers excluding me, as one has already headed home. Two are Americans, with Julia having finished school and is now doing an internship here for a year, while Rebecca decided that a degree in nutrition wasn’t for her after two years and that Madagascar was a much better option. The third is Belgian, Eileen, and she actually has no true place of residence (an interesting story, as her parents live in the UAE) who is here to do some marine work before heading to a masters’ program in Australia. The director, Shawn, is a guy from the States who did a tour with Peace Corps here for two years before taking the position of director for a year. He leaves his post in two weeks, and is being replaced by Bryan, a guy with almost an identical background – he too is from the States and did two years with Peace Corps in Madagascar. The Divemasters are Claire, an Irish ex-pharmacist who decided that diving was more her style about fifteen years ago, and Johnny, a rough-and-ready Brit in his early thirties who is taking over for Claire, as she leaves her post at the same time as Shawn. There is a British couple, Tom and Caroline, who do tech work and science work respectively. Then there are the French, Nicholas, who is the Science Director, and Elise, whose job I have yet to figure out. Anne is the volunteer coordinator, and is also ex-Peace Corps. These are all the vahaza (vah-za) or foreigners. The English-speaking Malagasy are Pepin, who is now training to come on staff as a Divemaster after originally being a boat captain for Reef Doctor, and Christina, who met me at the airport and plans community development work. There are a few other Malagasy staff, but as we cannot communicate well, except for a smile and a greeting, I don’t know their names well enough to include them in this over-long description of Reef Doctor staff.

As you can see, a mix of ethnicities, languages and cultures, and it makes for interesting dinner times. While a conversation in going on to the left of you in French and another to your right in Malagasy, you have to concentrate to make out what the American and Belgian are telling you about spring tides from across the table. While I am the lone Canadian, and one would think a good target for jokes (it’s cold up there without guns and electricity, eh?), the French bear the brunt of the nationalistic joking. It seems to be the same the world over.