Making Dinner

The national dish, ravintoto, consists of pounded cassava leaves and beef served over a hemi-soccer-ball-sized portion of rice.

Footwear

In rural areas, sandals are crafted from untanned zebu hide.

Brotherly Love

It’s perfectly normal (and touching!) to see same-sex friends and relatives to show affection in public, but you’ll never see it between sexes. A friend of mine once told me that he believed a man in town was gay, which is absolutely taboo here. He defended his suspicion with, “He holds hands with women.”

Road Work

Our 4x4 couldn’t navigate around this fallen tree due to the thick cactus lining the road. Fortunately, everyone (except me) carries a machete “just in case,” so we were able to hack out a passageway wide enough to pass through.

New Pumps

For the new pump installation, we’ve been training local crews in a hand-drilling technique called “Rota Sludge.” We’re sticking to manpower rather than machines in order to make sure the community is involved and feels ownership for the well boring.

As shown in the figure, a lever arm is used to drive a drill bit into the ground. First, the lever arm is pumped downward. Then, it is released quickly upward so that the drill bit plunges into the soil. While the drill bit is in the down position, it is rotated so that its teeth chew and loosen the soil. The boring is flooded with a runny mud, a mixture of cow manure and water. The hollow drill rod is sealed as the drill bit moves upward and open as it moves downward. Therefore, the mud and loosened soil are pulled upward through the drill rod. As the boring progresses, additional sections are screwed onto the drill rod for deeper penetration. The mud also serves to seal the soil on the walls of the boring, so that it doesn’t cave in.

Each crew has six to eight members. One member holds his hand over the top of the drill rod, sealing it as it rises and opening it as it lowers, allowing the mud and loosened soil to splash out. The second member holds a wrench at the top of the drill rod, and rotates the drill rod when the drill bit is lowered. The remaining members pump the lever arm up and down. We worked with the team to help its members coordinate all of these movements and optimize progress. I tried to capture the movement in the video; I'm new at this, and you'll have to hold your head sideways to watch.

We also coached them in keeping a boring log, a record of the soil types (sand, silt, clay) encountered as they drill, as well as the depth of the water table. With this information, they can appropriately place the well screen, the openings through which water enters. In this case, they hit a clay layer from nine to eleven meters below the ground surface. Underneath the clay layer was fresh water: a confined aquifer. Therefore, the screen will be placed to draw from this aquifer, and sealed above it to prevent contamination.

As we worked with the team, I could see a transition take place as the drilling crew’s confidence increased. They no longer considered themselves “ditch diggers,” but rather skilled technicians who were collecting and analyzing soil data to design a good well. As their experience grows over the course of this project, I can see that they’ll be able to apply these methods in any setting. It’s heartening indeed to be part of building the capability and resilience of a community.

Tombs

Traditionally, the Tandroy believe that this life is a relatively short bridge to a long afterlife. Therefore, houses are temporary and rough, while tombs are sturdy and elaborate. In addition, the Tandroy spend very little on daily expenses, eating only cassava or sweet potatoes with curdled milk and dressing in rags. Meanwhile, they invest almost all of the money they make from selling crops in cattle. When someone dies, his or her family sells some of the cattle to pay to construct the tomb, slaughters some of the cattle to accompany the deceased to the next life, and takes the house apart to move elsewhere.

This airplane tomb is particularly impressive. The man buried here may have flown or ridden in an airplane, but more likely it was chosen as a symbol of power and wealth.

I got in trouble for these photos. My friends had told me that it’s okay to take pictures of tombs, but in hindsight I should have asked for permission first. As I was snapping away, I heard some yelling from a distance. Some of the relatives had spotted me and were upset at the desecration. I apologized profusely, but they weren’t satisfied, and took me to the family compound for judgment. My Malagasy co-workers saw the trouble brewing and came along to help.

The oldest family member, a grandmother, presided. One of the men who had caught me presented the case. I apologized again, saying I just wanted to be able to teach my family back home about Tandroy culture. My co-workers spoke in my defense. Finally, the grandmother said I had caused them hardship, but I apparently meant no harm, so I could make things right again by paying a fine of 2000 Ariary (about $1). After I paid, we all shook hands and they sent me on my way on friendly terms. It seemed to me an efficient, reasonable judiciary system.

Where's Water?

A total of fifty-four new pumps will be installed throughout Androy over the course of our project. Village-level water associations have chosen potential sites for the pumps: convenient locations that can be protected from vandalism. My co-worker Harline and I trekked out to about a dozen sites around Beloha to gauge whether or not it would be realistic to expect water to be within easy reach below the surface.

The trails out of town are too sandy for bicycles or motorcycles, so we traveled either by foot or zebu cart. Association members led us to existing wells within a half-kilometer radius of the proposed sites, and answered questions about water quantity and quality throughout the year. The Malagasy use the word miteraka, literally “to give birth,” to mean “to produce water.” Some of the wells are shallow, dug by hand, without any wall reinforcement. Others are small-diameter boreholes which were drilled by machine during an earlier UNICEF project. At each well we lowered a rope with a hollow PVC tube tied at one end to measure the static water level and the total depth of the well. The tube makes a “boing” sound when it hits the surface of the water, and the rope slackens when it reaches the solid bottom.

We try to use the simplest, lowest-tech methods possible. Because of the history of French colonization, the Malagasy tend to regard gear and infrastructure as vazaha, “foreign.” There is a tendency to believe that design is outside of their capability, and maintenance outside of their responsibility. Therefore, we hoped to make our job look straightforward, to invoke “These guys aren’t so smart…I could do that,” in local imaginations.

A pattern began to emerge from our survey. Wells shallower than about nine meters tend to have brackish water, and to deplete toward the end of the dry season in September or October. Wells deeper than about twelve meters, on the other hand, give fresh water consistently throughout the year. Therefore, there must be an impermeable clay layer between the two that protects a fresh aquifer. We’ll discuss this information with the boring crews, and create a detailed soil profile as we drill the new wells.

On our hike back to town, we met a man with a wagon full of juicy, refreshing cactus fruit. Perfect.