Published in Silver Kris
June 1998

VISIT TO ISLAND OF BLACK LEMURS
STIRS "MATERIAL GIRL" INTO ACTION

by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski © 1998

Nosy Komba, MADAGASCAR

I had befriended the ombiasy, the traditional healer, of Nosy Komba village on an island off northern Madagascar. One afternoon I passed him as I headed towards a marongay traditional kick-boxing match.

"Are you going?" I asked.

Clearly embarrassed, Hamatra Besinoa, 70, shuffled his head no.

The marongay was held in order to raise a few dollars to buy supplies for the local school. Besinoa didn't have the 70 cents admission charge. Not much money, but more than he had.
I gave him a few crumpled notes and gestured that we could go together.

"I'll meet you there," he said. He arrived ten minutes later, having changed into a clean shirt and trousers.

I was on Nosy Komba with a group from Earthwatch, a non-profit organization which sends paying volunteers to work on nature conservation, community development, and scientific research projects around the world. Our task was to help British researcher Josephine Andrews study whether black lemurs can happily coexist with local Malagasy and foreign tourists, who flock in increasing numbers to enjoy the region's pristine beaches.

The villagers have a complex relationship with the black lemur, a threatened species. Traditionally, the lemur has been respected as a vaguely powerful symbol of the occult. Then there are more mundane considerations. Farming villagers consider the crop-marauding black lemur a pest, while villagers who earn money from tourists who come to have a close-encounter-of-the-lemur kind see the cat-sized animals as a God-send.

For many people in our primarily American and British group, the two week stint in Madagascar, ranked as one of the world's poorest countries, challenged our notions of poverty, richness and possessions.

Economic improvement is the sine qua non of the development gurus working for the World Bank and nature conservation groups. In the world-view of northern experts, people are happier, and nature is more secure, when villagers have enough cash to buy televisions and motorcycles. But schizophrenia lurks and the same conservation groups that encourage rural folks to make money from conservation also encourage the villagers to maintain "traditional values".

In general, rural people buy into the notion that their lives will be happier when they have a few western goodies under their roofs.

In his book Ishmael, Daniel Quinn suggests that the world can be divided into 'takers' and 'leavers'. 'Takers', which include most of the well-educated, primarily northern readers of this article, base their society on making and getting products. 'Leavers', in contrast, structure their wealth in terms of human support. Quinn suggests an easy way to distinguish between the two: "Taker wealth can be put under lock and key, but Leaver wealth can't." Leavers' society is sustainable, he argues. Takers' society isn't.

The people of Nosy Komba are traditionally 'Leavers' with strong family ties and relatively low environmental impact on the seas that they fish. But the outside world has come to the inhabitants of Nosy Komba, as it has to most rural groups around the world, and the people of this village of several hundred people have adapted to serve the market. They still fish and farm, but they also make handicrafts from live shells and coral they gather from the reefs and from rare ebony trees they cut in the nearby protected nature reserve.

I work in nature conservation, but I'm not about to criticize people's need for cash to repair a nearby school which is virtually uninhabitable because of the stench from guano excreted by the colony of bats that lives in the building. I'm not about to deny the people of Nosy Komba the pleasure of huddling around Madame Yvonne's television, the only one on the island. And I'm not about to deny a new shirt for wizened old Besinoa so he can watch a wrestling match in dignity.

And into this society-in-transition comes 16 volunteers from the world of 'takers'. We come with lots of cash, and lots of things.
Earthwatch volunteers combine a touch of altruism with a bit of hedonism. Most of the volunteers I spoke with feel they are doing something useful, "giving something back to the earth" in the words of Andrew Mitchell, Earthwatch-Europe Deputy Director, but they also are enjoying an added-value holiday to some of the most exotic, and otherwise hard-to-reach places on earth.

Some volunteers were genuinely moved by their experience.
Jonas Tam-Alkis, 31, a broadcast engineer from London, says that "before coming here I was thinking about changing my life.

Amazingly, everything I wanted has happened." He plans to return to school to study the biology and conservation of the uroplatus, an endemic Madagascar lizard that is hunted for the rare pet trade in Europe."

But for other Earthwatch volunteers the 'takers' mind-set is hard to break. A businesswoman I'll call Veronica, who manages several hundred people in the United States, defined her relationships by stuff. She came to Madagascar with a mini-Imelda collection of shoes, enough outfits to see her through several cruises in the Caribbean, sufficient makeup to beautify a Beverly Hills high school prom, and enough provisions - the sourdough pretzel bits were good though -- to survive weeks on a desert island. Veronica gave away three suitcases of goodies to new friends in Nosy Komba, but took home about the same volume of ylang-ylang oil, vanilla beans, model fishing boats, sea-shell ashtrays, embroidered table cloths with lemur motifs and dozens of T-shirts and sarongs.

Veronica is well-trained. One of the America's leading pilgrimage sites, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, attracts more visitors each year than Mecca or the Vatican. Veronica is bombarded with some 3,000 advertising messages a year. No wonder she travels with six types of herbal tea.

If Veronica moved to Melanesia she could become a patron saint of the cargo cultists who believe that if the proper rites are performed, the ancestors will bestow good health and material goods. Many of the local people thought of the whites as gods, because of their incredible material possessions and the magical manner the goods were acquired. In some areas, tribesmen set up tables and chairs and ate with knives and forks, hoping that this was the proper 'ritual' to obtain the goods.

Even though Veronica was generous, I doubt that anyone in Nosy Komba even-vaguely considered deifying any of the Earthwatch volunteers, although the villagers were happy enough to sell us souvenirs and darn our clothes. However the important point for me was that the villagers were equally happy to sit and chat for an afternoon and to tell us about their family history and to show us their gardens and fishing boats and sacred trees. They were in a marketplace mode only when we were in a marketplace mode.

I thought Veronica had shopped herself out in Nosy Komba, but on our last day in Madagascar, in the capital Antanarivo, someone pointed out a man selling larger-than-football-sized eggs of the aepyornis, an extinct three-meter tall flightless bird that some say was the origin of the roc in the Sinbad stories. The eggs make intriguing souvenirs, but they are also illegal to take out of Madagascar, since the government considers them to be part of the national heritage.

This was explained to Veronica, who nevertheless returned to the hotel proudly cradling her new treasure. Referring to the man who sold it to her she added: "He was selling it, wasn't he? And anyway, I'll appreciate it more than he will."