The Garden of Earthly Delights

I always fret that I won't have enough pictures to create a decent post each month. Then I sit down when it comes time to make my post for the next month and realize I have an abundance of pictures to sift through so that I don't overwhelm you with the vast expanse of my photographic exploits. This month though, there were simply too many good pictures to post, so sit back and enjoy the visual outputs from my little northern Malagasy township...

Let's begin where we left off last month.

The rabbit hutch! Here it is in assembly at its final home. After this we wired the cages in, attached the doors and nailed on the roof. All told it took about four hours once it was in place to get everything together.

And here's the finished product. The rabbits seem to like it well enough. There're two girls and one boy. They are being bred for replacements and then eating! In this shot the cage on the left is empty because she was sick and so they removed her to a different cage to avoid infecting the others.

Here's the male in the middle cage. The cage is elevated with a wire mesh floor so the clean up is easier, and the rabbit waste can be harvested for fertilizer too.

Since I finished with the rabbits, lets move to the rest of the animal report for the month.

 This is a tenrec. I named him or her Billy Tenrec because that is a solid name for a tenrec in my opinion. I was unsure at first exactly what it was and so had a neighbor clarify for me. He also filled me in on the general characteristics of tenrecs, namely that they are quiet, not mean, and fight rats. I instantly made him my friend and invited him to stay living behind my trunk for as long as he desired. Unfortunately he vacated that evening, but in the mean time I've at least got this picture to remember my time with Billy...

On a trip out to a neighboring town to look at a possible future site for a new volunteer we stumbled across this very interesting spider. It blends in extremely well with the log that it was on, but the really cool thing that drew us to check it out more closely are the markings on its back that look distinctly like a lion's head.

The spider wasn't the only cold blooded creature I came across this month as I finally was able to catch my first fish in country! This Orange Spotted Grouper was a great early morning surprise in the waters off Diego Suarez. He fought like a stereotypical grouper and almost made me lose him in the rocks twice, but I finally got him in.

Here's the best selfie I could manage with a fish flopping in my hands. He was a little on the small side, so I put him back to fatten up for another day, but now I head out for my next expedition with a little more confidence that it is actually possible to catch fish in these waters!

Of course Snow is still around too. Here she is waking from a lazy afternoon nap in the sun by my fence. She's getting bigger by the day and is now able to put her paws on my kitchen table. A fact I discovered in a moderately disappointing fashion as I watched her abscond with a cube of beef that was destined for my dinner! Now I have to keep my eye on the little thief to make sure I get to eat too, although she's going to have some pretty stiff competition in a little while because...

PUPPIES! 8 in total. In this shot they are 2 days old and already looking super cute. I can't wait until they are walking and I can play with them all.

Here are some of the local boys butchering a teddy bear that had been on the ground for some time. When I asked what they were doing they pulled out the stuffing and shoved it around the puppies to make a nice soft bed for them and melted my heart a little in the process too. Although in a month they'll probably be kicking the puppies, at least for now they're trying to be nice!

 Speaking of the local kids, here are some of my students on a carnival. They marched from the school all the way to the far side of town and back while singing and clapping and dancing! It was a great event and they completely blocked the road as they went. In the background you can see a taxi brousse that stopped to load and got encircled.

Not everyone in town is young, and this month as a testament to that I attended another funeral. This time it was an elderly neighbor so I went to the full event which lasted four days! As it went into the night they needed to keep the lights going and with no electricity they improvised lanterns out of papaya, bamboo, and kerosene. Here is one of the lantern makers putting the finishing touches on a papaya!

With the funeral lasting for so long, people got to eat. Here you can see the tin roof they constructed to make a dry area for cooking for everyone. I took this picture before people started showing up so the festival wasn't really in full swing, but by the high point they had two huge pots of rice and a separate huge pot of beef going at all times to make enough food for everyone.

Everyone eats in shifts according to rank starting with the old men, then the old ladies, then the young men, young ladies, kids, and so on until everyone has eaten. Here's me along with a few of the stragglers one day downing some rice and beef.

I felt a little awkward taking all of the pictures that I did of the event, but everyone kept asking why I wasn't taking more pictures! They definitely don't have the same aversion to photographing the deceased that many in the US do! Here they are constructing the bier for the trip to the cemetery. It was a three kilometer walk out with about 60 or so people singing and dancing all the way.

Once we arrived at the cemetery the burial began and a group of young guys pictured here sat down near the grave and just started jamming for about 30 minutes! They would look around and pick an item out of their surroundings and shout out its name as the lyrics to the song. At one point they saw me watching and, to my embarrassment, I became the lyrical highlight of the verse.

After the interment I walked around the cemetery to see what else was around and stumbled on this amazing vista. Not a bad place to be parked for eternity in terms of the view!

One of my neighbors saw me taking the picture and jumped in for a quick photo shoot. Alban obviously wasn't too interested in the funeral proceedings at that point after four days!

I've also been doing some more projects around the house too, here are the results of this months labor.

House Hat! My roof has been leaking since I've moved in so I finally got some tin to make it a little more rain proof. Unfortunately, my neighbor who has been helping me fix my house was not the greatest roof technician so this has caused the leaks to get worse. Now it's on to silicon caulk to see if I can patch up the tin, and if that fails, it might be time to pull out some big guns!

 On the smaller side I made some corn holders. My neighbors gave me a lot of corn a few days ago and I had no way to handle it when I went to eat it, so these were born out of my hungry frustration!

I made them out of a scrap of wood that I had laying around. I whittled points into the end and shaved down the sharp edges to create a unique and functional set of natural corn holders.

 I also made a garden for myself with some help from my neighboring volunteer. Here is the bed as I marked it out and scoured for rocks.

After that we added some raffia walls and bamboo support poles to hold it all in place and filled it in with some good soil. I haven't got anything planted yet, but I bought some carrot and pepper seeds the other day, so soon I'll be rolling in the veggies!

I added an ax and a small shovel to my tool collection pictured here. Both will be of great use in projects to come, but as of yet still just scraps of iron waiting for a purpose!

From my last fishing trip, a nice sunrise over the bay in Diego. A beautiful sight indeed and reason enough to keep returning even if the fish aren't biting that day!

This month marks six months at site and thats a quarter of my total time here. It seems like it has gone by so fast, and yet I've got so much still to come. Stay tuned for future adventures and hopefully this blog will continue to be as easy to find pictures for as I constantly worry it won't be!