youth for biodiversity conservation

Been having way too much fun as the Blue Ventures Education and Outreach Coordinator!

Thanks to our partnership with UNICEF, a lot of my job involves teaching kids about conservation through a variety of innovative ways:

learning to make art from "beach rubbish"

…through Saturday Schools, where in- and out-of-school children get hands-on environmental education every weekend;

learning to interact with the internet for the first time...

…through Connecting Classrooms, where kids learn to think about their culture and their environment, and learn to share that they’ve learned via the internet on www.ConnectingClassrooms.net;

filming a film being filmed... Jon Slayer films Hery (JRC) filming Roger (president of Velondriake Mgmt Committee) on field trip with Connecting Classrooms

…and through the Junior Reporters Club, where I help young people to learn to use film to share news and stories about local conservation with their peers.

Recently we had a filmmaker come here to Andavadoaka to document the scope of our youth conservation activities, Jon Slayer.  His films are nearly ready for a big roll-out with UNICEF… they will form the core of the newest Blue Ventures online endeavor, LiveWithTheSea.org,  where youth and communities will share information, strategies, and best practices about marine and coastal conservation. Live With The Sea is also being made possible by a UNICEF grant.

In the meantime, I put together a film documenting a piece of Jon’s process of documenting the UNICEF youth conservation initiatives at Blue Ventures, especially Connecting Classrooms and  the Junior Reporters’ Club (with members learning to document local conservation issues in a manner that inspires their peers) … In a sense, the lens behind the lens behind the lens.

Without a doubt, these kids are the future of the Velondriake locally-managed marine reserves… and an inspiration to my colleagues and me!

Click here to watch the film.

Atsika: conservation, education, sustainable development

After years of collaboration on the ground, as Peace Corps Volunteers and beyond, Julia and I have finally reached our goal:
Atsika is officially a 501(c)3 non-profit organization!

Through Atsika, which means “we” or “us” in the dialect of northwest Madagascar, Julia and I will continue to work with a growing network of partners to support conservation, education, and sustainable development in the Ankarana region.  The region is famous for its karst limestone “tsingy” massifs (known as “harana” in the local language), and for the unique Ankarana culture, where caves are sacred, taboos are deeply embedded, and a prince still influences the community as much as or more than the local government.

This is also the magical region that brought us all together — myself, Julia, Amido, Fidele, Andrew, Ian, Lisa, Alex, and countless others — from backgrounds in development, anthropology, agriculture, biology, and more — from America, Canada, the UK, and Madagascar.  You can read more about our extended family in the latest edition of Anthropology News, in the article Good Neighbors.

My time in the Ankarana began in 2004, Andrew’s long before that, Julia’s just a few years after.  Our work with the community has spanned a number of sustainable development projects, from a solar-powered community radio station to a schoolbook donation project with Oceane Aventures and CorsairFly.  Since 2007, we have been working to help establish community-based natural resource management and conservation in the Ankarana, notably through helping to establish KOFAMA, the first local natural resource management association of its kind in the northwest.

Edward must be a young man by now. He will grow up with KOFAMA, and community-based natural resource management, as the norm

Click here to read more about the history of KOFAMA.

Atsika will be formally working with KOFAMA to support its local conservation and ecotourism activities, including guide training, small business management training, and environmental education.  Importantly, our activities will also include support for primary education and literacy throughout the community, because improving access to education is crucial to ensuring sustainable long-term management of the local natural resource base.

Atsika is also planning the construction of an environmental resource center.  We envision this center as a base of operations for Atsika in the Ankarana, an office and classroom for KOFAMA activities, a base for our key partner university overseas studies program (the University of Western OntarioMadagascar Environmental Anthropology field course, now in our 5th year of partnership), as well as a visitors’ center for ecotourists.  Dreaming big: hoping to begin construction in 2012!

In addition, Atsika activities will support the local artisans’ association that Julia and I developed, l’Artisanat de l’Ankarana.  You can read the story of the artisans here, and if you’re in Rhode Island you can even purchase their crafts at Midnight Sun!  Enabling local artisans to access the ecotourist market in the Ankarana is an important step to ensuring that they derive direct economic benefits from ecotourism, allowing them to see the advantages of sustainable natural resource use and conservation as an alternative to traditional destructive resource use practices.

first visit to the caves, early stages of KOFAMA, 2007

Last but not least, Atsika will take on the task of finishing construction of our Analasatrana community school, the product of three years of generous donations from private sponsors in the UK, who, just like Julia and I, fell head over heels for the Ankarana and saw the need to support access to education.  The school is nearly finished, teachers ready to teach, students ready to attend classes.  Analasatrana is a small village within the southern Ankarana region with no school of its own.  Those children able to study do so in other villages in overcrowded schools, while most are not able to study at all… until now!  Through Atsika, our generous donors will be able to formally continue to support the school, and the Ankarana community can hope to open more schools in the near future, aiming for a 100% primary school attendance rate for local children.

some of the students in Analasatrana... excited for school!

We are thrilled to have made it here on our journey…  here’s to a fantastic 2012 for the Ankarana community, and for Atsika!

Check out the previous blog entry for more information on Atsika… or check out our new websites!

www.atsika.org        and        www.ankaranaeducationproject.org

Atsika: Education, Conservation, & Cultural Preservation for the Ankarana

a new endeavor on the horizon….
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

The connection that I have built with the Ankarana region of northwest Madagascar neither begins nor ends with me.

Before my arrival, the legend of Jao Ankarana (professor Andrew Walsh) was already a tall and lively tale around many-a cookfire.  “Now that white man can DANCE just like one of us!  He can recite proverbs like an elder!  He knows our history better than we do!”

Equally legendary, there was Mboty Ankarana (professor Lisa Gezon), a name that would spark knee-slaps of recognition, set faces a-smiling at the recollection of Mboty.  “You talk about strong!  That woman can carry water on her head for miles just like our women.  And tall!  Mwah!  She would sit and listen to our stories for hours, and now she knows us like we do.”

Once I started to learn to speak a bit of “teny Ankarana”, rumor started going around that I was their younger sister.  I tried to live up to the high bar they had set: I practiced carrying things on my head whenever my routes led me through the woods, until finally I was ready to walk through the village with my bag on my head — and I once walked all the way to Ambilobe and back using only my head to carry my things.  But I still can’t dance like Lisa, and I don’t hang out with the Ankarana royalty like Andrew.   : )

When I finally met Andrew and Lisa, it did sort of feel like family.  I grew to know them, I learned from them like a little sister should, and we soon began to plan collaborative projects together.

The most amazing of those collaborations — a study-abroad program designed by Andrew and his colleague Ian Colquhoun — involves the University of Western Ontario, the Universite du Nord in Antsiranana (Madagascar’s northern province), and our new community-managed natural area in the Ankarana.  Andrew, Ian, and a group of Canadian and Malagasy students stayed at our community-managed site for one week, helping to evaluate, improve, and support this innovative natural resource management and cultural preservation initiative.  Two students stayed on for an additional two months studying the local culture and ecology; one just defended her Master’s thesis about her research in the Ankarana.  The circle continues.

You can read more about that collaboration, now entering its fourth year, here.

By the time the study-abroad program happened, Julia had arrived in the Ankarana to replace me as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  I could not have asked for a more perfect person to join our chain of northern addicts.  Within hours, people were wondering if we were sisters.

Since my activities in the Ankarana were a bit more complex than usual, and since I had been there for four years, Peace Corps allowed Julia and I to overlap for three months before I left the north for good.  Our time together was fantastic.  Within days, she was digging into the social intricacies of the Ankarana community, and overwhelmed by its ecological beauty and cultural uniqueness.  I was so happy that she was there for such a critical stage in the growth of KOFAMA, the name of the local association I had founded to manage the natural area, and for the project with UWO.

And by the time Julia left, she was as thoroughly attached to the Ankarana as the rest of us:  Jao, Mboty, and Soariziky (my adoptive name, “good fortune”) was joined by Soameva (Julia, “blessed and beautiful”).

And now Julia is spearheading the creation of a non-profit organization that we’re calling Atsika, which means “we” or “us” in the Ankarana dialect.  This is a new initiative to bring us all together, to tie together our activities to support the Ankarana, and to allow us to continue to work to support conservation, education, and sustainable development in the region into the future.

We have a temporary website up at www.ankaranaeducationproject.org.  In the near future, we will be transferring content to www.atsika.org, and the Ankarana Education Project will feature the story of our ongoing Analasatrana community school project.  Completing the school and creating long-term sustainability for it will be a key initial activity for us at Atsika.

We look forward to your support as we move ahead!  The goal for 2011: get ourselves legally established as a non-profit association under US law.  Check back to this blog and to our new website for updates, or subscribe to the website to be notified of our progress.

fingernails, beatitude

I bought a new pair of nail clippers the other day, one of my first purchases in village here in Andavadoaka, Madagascar.

Glancing at the Chinese lettering on the side of the box, I tried to be optimistic about their quality.  I tried to tell myself that I was exaggerating in remembering how ridiculously poorly-made things can be here, things that arrive in great heaps, via unregulated export channels from no-name-crap factories across mainland China…

But later on, after clipping a mere four fingernails, the damn handle snapped in half.  Snapped!!  Whoever heard of a nail clipper snapping?  My nails are, for the record, of normal length and thickness.  It’s just that this nail clipper was made from reconstituted tuna cans, or spray-painted popsicle sticks.

So with no other option (since I forgot my damn nail clippers in Rhode Island) I bought another nail clipper, from another Chinese-lettered box, from another street market stall… clippers at which I am now gazing prayerfully, for two reasons:

One, I hope and pray that they won’t snap on me.

Two, there is a hologram of Jesus on the little handle.

But the best part about this beatific nail clipper is its third use – clipping nails being the first use, praying to Our Savior Jeebus Christ being the second.  Thirdly, it’s also a bottle opener.

the Holy Hologram

This should be disturbing on multiple levels, whether your value system revolves around the Bible, the bottle, or basic principles of hygiene.

The part that cracks open a beer (to be raised to your lips or poured in your glass) is just centimeters from the part that cracks off a toe nail (after it has collected a menagerie of germs from your bipedal travels) or fingernail (harbinger of an untold variety of communicable diseases).  Both of these parts are neatly arranged around Dear Lord Jeepers.

Dear China, this is either a brilliant design, or a humiliating design flaw — flaws for which, as my long-standing theory goes, many items end up shipped to non-Anglophone, non-FDA-approved Madagascar, as opposed to their originally-intended developed-world destination.  Like tee-shirts that say “Yuor so my rainboww flower, happyness”.

But out of necessity, I now own this little holy grooming tool/party tool.

Alas, I drink wine but not beer, practice yoga but don’t pray… but I do have dirty fingernails.

World Wildlife Fund “Life Grows On” photo contest… please vote!

Several weeks ago, I entered a handful of my most memorable East Africa images in the WWF “Life Grows On” photo contest.  One of them is now a finalist for the grand prize:

morning at the mountain of god (oldonyo lengai, northern tanzania)

WWF says that more than 10,000 entries were submitted, so I’m pretty stoked that this image made it to the top 150 images (50 finalists in each of 3 categories).

Here is how I described my image to WWF:

“In a lumbering, open-air, all-terrain vehicle, it took us nearly half a day to travel out of range of Oldonyo Lengai, or Mountain of God.  Not Tanzania’s highest mountain but one of its steepest, Lengai seemed to loom all around us as the road wound downward and doubled back along itself, almost encircling Lengai as it led us away from the Lake Natron region.  I love how this image seems to place Lengai in a small serene garden, and yet to convey a sense of motion around its massiveness.”

Please take a moment to vote for this image in the WWF Life Grows On photo contest, and to check out all of the beautiful images that are also in the running.

To see more images from East Africa, please visit my website, and go to the East Africa collection in the Portfolio tab.

Thank you!

memorable night of “Tracks Through East Africa”

Jubilant drumming on the sidewalk, a vibrant crowd inside, and a warm summer night…
Tracks Through East Africa  exceeded our loftiest expectations.

It was serendipitous how things fell into place: one day, just 24 hours after returning from Africa, I walked into Orbie’s Cafe and saw the artwork on the walls.  I told the owners, John and Jess, about my recent work in Africa and asked about having it shown at Orbie’s.  Within days, Pam Santos happened to come in, a local artists, and mention her paintings from Africa.  John passed me her contact and I got in touch.  On top of it all, Doug Norris, the Arts & Living editor for the local newspaper, the South County Independent, who has his morning coffee at Orbie’s, got interested with the idea…

And it took off!

Friday’s turn-out was more than we could have hoped for — more fun, more music, more people, more funds raised for our charity of choice, the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania…

All smiles, we marveled at how our weeks of planning paid off, bringing out the community to share in our images and stories from East Africa.  Close friends and family, plenty of new faces, and some faces that I hadn’t seen in more than ten years.  Literally hundreds of faces!

A special thank you to Doug Norris for his heartwarming article in the Independent.  Doug’s words brought back beautiful memories, and tied together Pam’s story, my story, and the meaning of Earth Day (the date we held the event) just perfectly.

And to Jess and John as well.  What a pleasure to create this event together.  Your vision for Orbie’s Cafe is an asset to Wakefield and to the wider community.  Looking forward to more!

And to Dennis and Zach and all the rest of the drummers, who drew crowds from all over town with their hypnotic beats.

And of course to all those who donated wine and snacks for the occasion, and one special donor who helped me build my frames…

Our most heartfelt appreciation to all who came to show their support and to enjoy the paintings and photographs.  The Tracks Through East Africa pieces will remain on display and on sale at Orbie’s through June 2011.  Please do stop in and enjoy this little window onto a distant, fascinating corner of the globe.

rediscovery

There’s something otherworldly about coming home after years away, with new eyes and a new sense of appreciation for one’s roots.

 

Goosewing Beach Preserve

Yes, I had been home for a brief spell last summer, before heading to east Africa for a five-month sojourn of work and play… And in Africa, it’s as if I awoke something wild and intuitive in myself, something eager to sniff out old stomping grounds and see how they feel, all these years later, now that I’ve traveled so far afield.

 

curious piping plover

I’m rediscovering Rhode Island and is wild natural places, and trying to capture them through my lens (literally and figuratively).  One chilly afternoon, I wandered along the Narragansett Trail in the woods of Rockville RI, clambering up rock faces and across unexpected waterfalls with my dad.  Once upon a time there was a spool-making mill in these woods, part and parcel to RI’s vital textiles industry.

Narragansett Trail

Another afternoon an old friend and I meandered through the Trustom Pond wildlife preserve, scoping out moss and mushrooms in the woods and osprey nests in the trees on the pond.

Through a new friend and a new membership with the Audubon Society, I’ve discovered the Caratunk wildlife refuge just over the RI/MA line, and even the Fisherville Brook wildlife preserve right in my backyard in Exeter!  All those years that I’d seen beaver dams, but I’d never seen a beaver until now.

beaver in the evening... tail-slap!

And through a volunteer workday with the RI Nature Conservancy, I made my way out to Little Compton and reconnected with shoreline that I hadn’t seen since I was a toddler.  At the Goosewing Beach Preserve, I worked with other volunteers to put up a fence to protect the nesting grounds of the piping plover and least tern, two species of endangered shorebirds in the state.  Observing the dainty plovers at close range for the day, I remember with embarrassment when I used to join in the whining about the plover protection fences at the mouth of Narrow River, one of our favorite spots to relax on the beach and kayak in the wave when I was younger.

How lucky to be able to make these discoveries and rediscoveries!  I’m far from understanding Rhode Island’s natural rhythms like I’ve come to understand Madagascar’s or delved into in east Africa… but slowly making my way.

vivid dreams

There are millions of stars overhead, almost as bright as the fire we sit around.  My fourteen wonderful students and I are gathered together as we are most every night, sipping tea, coffee, Serengeti beer or South African wine, reveling in our beautiful exhaustion and the vast, wild, shadowy surroundings, singing together as Tim serenades us on the guitar.  I don’t know what we’re singing, but we’re belting it out, and every face is streaked with tears.

I’ve had this dream at least twice since returning from East Africa.  I still miss those kids, sometimes more than I realize in wakeful hours.

I’m sitting in a nondescript cafe, across from a calm, wizened face that I can’t quite recognize, but whose every word is irrefutable truth.  I’m pouring my ups and downs into my coffee cup, describing the roller coaster of emotions and events that have marked my return from this latest trip abroad, as is usually the case upon re-entry.  Everything is so wonderful, I tell the calm face, but still so volatile…  He smiles, takes my hand.  Tells me to stop over-analyzing, and let it breathe.  “As long as one third of your day is filled with good people and good things, then it’s all good.  The rest is just noise and highlights.  It’s the Rule of Thirds.”

I awake, eyes wide, with his words in my head.  The Rule of Thirds.  Not just for photographic composition anymore.  An oversimplification, perhaps; but instead of trying to conceive of all of the potential exceptions, I focus on the beautiful elegance of the rule.  Anxiety falls away.

I focus on my beautiful twin niece and nephew, and their every precious nuance.  I focus on the Rhode Island landscape that I meet and re-meet with each new trip home, discovering more and more to marvel at.  I focus on creativity, listening to the part of me that needs to make images, mold shapes, strum chords, and string words together.

This is life.
Portrayed on the stage for ages;
Recorded earthily for centures;
Lived in strangeness for years;
Sung as a hymn for days;
Exalted for but an hour, but the
Hour is treasured by Eternity as a jewel.

~ Tagore, “The Playground of Life”

re-entry road trip

Few girls my age can say they still roadtrip with their grandpa; I’m among the lucky ones.  Our road trip was timed perfectly, a bridge back into the States after all that time away.

From RI, to NJ, to DC, to FL, grandpa and I discussed and argued politics, economics, education, my future… Goodness knows he has lofty goals for his grandkids.  Adviser to the President…high-powered lawyer…change-maker on a global scale… we do what we can here on earth to make him proud.

Grandpa also has an incredible network of friends and colleagues in his hometown of Gainesville.  During the post-roadtrip week I spent with him at his Florida home, I got free dental work, a borrowed bike with all the gear to explore the area, and an unforgettable dinner with photographer John Moran and a group of his friends.  John is known as Florida’s “photographer laureate”; being in his space was an inspiration for a photographer-hopeful like myself.  His studio, a converted shed; a dream.  Stories and advice from years of successful photojournalistic experience.  And suggestions on where to take that bike and my camera in Gainesville…

Thus I ended up at Payne’s Prairie, a vast mixed wetland on the southeast edge of Gainesville, just 6 or 7 miles from the University of Florida.   The expansive prairie couldn’t feel further from the sprawling campus.

The air was still and the sun was bright, yet I found myself trying to capture a bit of darkness on the prairie, pulling stark, exaggerated contrasts from the scenery with black & white exposures.  Maybe it was the effect of having a group of massive carnivores just a few yards away…

Gators sprawled on a sandbar, with blue herons and cranes poised in the shallows beside them, apparently unperturbed.  The boardwalk was a safe yet ominously close perch from which to observe this typically Floridian nature scene…

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Biking back through the busy Gainesville streets, from the southeast corner to my grandpa’s northwest neighborhood, the gators and birds and hundreds of other species found at Payne’s seemed like a figment.

On my last day in town, grandpa and I drove to several small parks and reserves nestled throughout the city, some of which he didn’t even know existed or hadn’t seen in ages.  In between, we visited a few new “model green community” developments, also new to grandpa.  Gainesville is much “greener” than either of us had realized, in nature and in social economics.

Kanapaha botanical gardens

Palm Point, Newnan's Lake

Newnan's Lake

The birds, the gators, the liquid sunset over Newnan’s Lake from Palm Point Park, and everyone’s incredible hospitality all cemented my new fondness for Gainesville, a place of humble natural beauty and caring community.

Grandpa, Mitchell, and John:  my most sincere appreciation to you.

kwaheri, kwa sasa

Return from Africa.  Plunge into America.  Just to make sure I felt it, I wore linen pants and sandals on the flight, letting the wintry Boston air bite my skin to greet me.  I’m the only one for a 1000 mile radius who appreciates this weather.

After five months in Kenya, Tanzania, and a splash of Uganda, I’m back in Rhode Island.  Retrenching.  A job offer in Madagascar, or graduate school in September…and at least a few weeks of down-time to figure it out.  In the meantime, I’m trying to just be.  And to be an auntie to my brother’s little twins, two new bright little lights in the family.  I couldn’t be more proud, or more happy to finally meet them.  There will always be difficult trade-offs to working in far-flung places.  It’s good to be home for a spell.

But I miss my students, of whom I am also immensely proud, and still so grateful to have had the opportunity to lead…  I hope they learned from me even one quarter of what I learned from them.

Kwaheri kwa sasa Africa.  Bye for now.
I will miss it, thankful for all that it’s given me yet again — parasites and all.