Trip preparations

In only three weeks I will board a plane to Antananarivo, Madagascar. The flying time will be a total of 18 hours, with a layover in Paris. I will be in the country for 10 weeks, and although at this point I'm not completely sure what I'm in for, I do know that it will be a tremendous and meaningful trip. For ten weeks I will be working in and around the small town of Fort Dauphin (Tolagnaro), which is located on the southeast coast of Madagascar. I will be one of 15 volunteers working with a humanitarian NGO called Azafady, which means "please" in Malagasy. Madagascar, like most African countries, has a lot of problems. A weak economy, overpopulation, and climatic shock are the source of rampant food insecurity and malnutrition. Less than 50% of people have access to potable drinking water. One in ten children dies before the age of 5. Simply put, the quality of life in Madagascar deserves improvement.

To help fund my trip, the Tucker Foundation at Dartmouth has granted me a $4,000 stipend as part of the Tucker Fellowship I received in August, for my plans to engage in international volunteer work with Azafady. For 16 years, Azafady has had the objective of improving the quality of life in Madagascar, and its efforts have proven to be quite effective. The staples of Azafady's approach to humanitarian development include building schools, implementing more sustainable agricultural practices, building wells to provide access to clean drinking water, and teaching English as well as basic health/sanitation, all catering to the needs expressed by Malagasies living in some of the most remote and poorest areas of the island. These are the types of projects I will be involved in, and most of my service will be in the form of manual labor and construction work. Perhaps the most meaningful aspect of my experience will be learning about and interacting with the Malagasy people--seeing how they live, understanding better the sources of their poverty, and discovering what brings fulfillment to their lives.

Madagascar will surely be a beautiful place to live for ten weeks. It offers an extremely unique variety of flora and fauna--80% of its flora species are endemic to the country. Sometimes called the "eighth continent," Madagascar is considered to be one of the most biodiverse places in the world, which is why deforestation and slash-and-burn agriculture are so threatening to the island's ecology and the ecological sciences in general. Along with community development, Azafady also focuses on environmental conservation, so I very well may be involved in spreading awareness of and helping to eradicate high levels of deforestation and environmental degradation.

Hopefully I will have my visa soon, and my tent--I will be camping for almost the whole ten weeks. I leave New York on October 2, and I arrive in Antananarivo (Tana for short) on October 3. I will stay two nights in Tana, so I will have a full day to walk around the city, which should be awesome.

Jesse