We enjoyed the walks around the Park as one can get good views towards the coast and see a little more wildlife. The Education centre is worth a visit and we had a long chat with the young man in charge about conservation.

The Park obviously has Malagasy visitors, though they will be mostly from better educated backgrounds.

On the way into the park you pass a village by the riverside which shows the poorer side of the local life with villagers sitting with piles of stones to break up presumably for road maintenance or building work? This is hard work and probably not well paid.

It was also very obvious that the woodland area is heavily degraded because of the small scale gold mining by poor Malagasy families. They don’t appear to be a direct threat to the sifakas by hunting but by their mining they must be slowly damaging the eco system. We visited a village in the forest which our guide Angeline says has been set up with FANAMBY support to try and give support to these poor miners and possibly find them alternative employment. The miners were friendly and we had an interesting visit where we sat round the cooking fire and met the families.

Our campsite back on the river bank attracted local children who were fascinated by the vazahas, especially our daughter Freya with her golden hair. We enjoyed their company over a couple of nights around the camp fire on the river bed, even having an impromptu disco when our driver put on his car stereo to the kids delight. A lovely experience in this remote area away from the formal tourist set ups in some reserves.

First, not all travelers are rich… or even middle-class. Personally, I’m on the poorer side of the socio-economic scale, making less than $20k/year. Traveling on a shoe-string budget is tough, but when everyone around you assumes that you’re rich, you can find yourself in uncomfortable situations. For example, I made friends with someone in Fort Dauphin, and they asked me to spend a couple of weeks with their family in Beloha, where I would help the English teacher in the family practice English. It was an amazing experience, and I was even flattered at the end when they offered to throw a party in my honor. I then offered to buy a few chickens for dinner that night to return the favor. Despite covering all my food expenses (and some of theirs) up to that point, and providing two week’s salary as a token of gratitude for their hospitality, my offer to buy chickens got turned into an expectation to feed not only the family I lived with, but also their extended family. I was also expected to buy alcohol and soda that night for everyone. In the situation, I found it impossible to say no. After several similar experiences, I found myself so short on cash that I had to cancel my visits to 2 national parks and camp out in Tana for the last week with only enough money for food and a place to stay.

Second, this perception of money that has developed over the years is ultimately eroding their culture, replicating our culture of fashionable consumption, and creating illusions about the nature of money that are demonstrably false. It is eroding their culture because, traditionally, the Malagasy value family above all things. Personally I was noticing a gradual shift in the definition of “wealth” from family to cash. (Admittedly, this seems understandable in such an impoverished nation. You need cash to sustain your family.) However, this mentality has created a lot of problems in western culture, particularly environmental and social arenas. Do we really want to replicate that in Madagascar?

Probably the most disturbing thing I witnessed was the use of my gift money on fashionable clothes, sunglasses, etc. (from the expensive stores) by people who had hungry children to feed and sick family members. I lost count of the number of Malagasy (men and women) that valued finding a Vazaha wife/husband above the futures of their own families. (They often lie about their marital status, FYI.) Most said they wanted to use such marriages to leave Madagascar, get a job in the U.S., and send the money back home. But given their fashionable consumption habits, I had my doubts. (Admittedly, I spent most of my time around middle-class city-dwellers from Fort Dauphin, not the extremely impoverished rural farmers.)

The last point is one that may come as a shock, even for vazaha. When explaining the nature of our money to the Malagasy, I encountered a lot of shock and disbelief when I told them that most of our money is not real, but is actually debt. Debt seems to have very negative associations to the people I met, mostly due to the debt the Malagasy government is in to the developed world. For those who don’t know, the concept of credit does not exist in Madagascar. (Hence the lack of credit cards and their use outside of expensive hotels.) What the Malagasy own, they have paid for in full up-front… including their houses and cars (if they’re rich enough to own one). Factoring debt into the economic equation, I found that many of the Malagasy farmers were “richer” than I. When you add up the value of their zebu, goats, and property and compare that with the value of my property, savings, and debt (subtracted out), they came out ahead of me. And given that many Americans (and increasingly Europeans) are far more in debt than I, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true for many non-wealthy vazaha in Madagascar. The difference, of course, is our quality of life. (Keep in mind that for most of us, our discretionary income is already spent through credit.)

Needless to say, it’s not a bad thing for the Malagasy to obtain money from vazaha, either through transactions, gifts, etc. But the fashionable consumption and the focus on money lead down a road where the necessities of life take the backseat in a race where the Malagasy increasingly want to be like us (based on the pictures they see in music videos and advertisements), but are impossibly disadvantaged due to a lack of credit.

So think before you throw your money around, and possibly try to help the Malagasy understand that we’re not as rich as we look. In many ways, the Malagasy are richer than us. If you don’t believe me, just look at the perpetual smiles on their faces and their close-knit families — two things that even the most dire economic conditions cannot tarnish.

Shortly after I got back, the BBC published an article entitled “Africa – ‘dumping ground’ for counterfeit goods”: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8424403.stm

Before I had read this article, I had my own thoughts on the topic. My father has worked as a manager in quality control at several U.S. factories, and having myself worked in quality control for one summer during college, I can tell you that large corporations will do nearly anything to force defective products past quality control. Given that the electronics industry has a notoriously high rate of manufacturing flaws (and thus the high prices), I started thinking about what an industry might do to keep costs down and maximize profit when batches of electronics are deemed questionable and not suitable to be covered under warranty. It seemed pretty obvious. Ship them to a developing country, where warranties are meaningless and the goods will sell at nearly the same value as they do in the developed countries!

I have no doubt that counterfeits are sold in Madagascar. A Diesel backpack I bought was a clear example. The sewing job was very sub-par and started coming undone within days, and the metal zippers also started to snap off within the first 2 days. Regardless, I feel that the BBC article listed above only tells half the story. I don’t have any evidence, but my idea easily falls in line with the capitalist mentality of maximizing profits and externalizing costs to the general public.

Anyway, the skinny of it all is this: BEWARE WHAT YOU BUY! Especially consumer goods that were shipped in from abroad. Whether they could be counterfeits or manufacturing rejects, you will be taking risks either way. If anything, this gives all the better reason to spend your money on local goods while traveling in Madagascar.