Tag: volunteering

Rural Madagascar – Tsagnoria

Giulia Marta CortiLeave a comment

10th July 2015 – Remembering the best trip of my life (so far)

Leaving Fort Dauphin in a massive bus, I reckon it went at 30km/h on the road. The road wouldn’t be considered a road in Europe, it was literally a bumby adventure. It was a 4 hour drive to Tsagnoria, a small village that would host us for a few weeks. All the windows were open (there were no windows really) and many times we had to duck down because branches and leaves were visiting us very briefly. The best temporary visit was by a frog!!!! Unbelievable. I saw it jumping all around me, on someone’s knee, then onto someone’s head and then back outside the van. It was a tiny white and red frog, like one I’ve never seen before.

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To get to the village, and the school that we were going to reconstruct, we had to pass through a river. It was shallow, but the stories went that a few weeks ago a crocodile had eaten a piggy and a couple months back I baby! A human little being was murdered in this river…Nothing to worry about though. If you cross rivers inhabited by crocodiles, do it with a group of people! We were in many, the community welcomed us, with many kids helping us out carrying our luggage and equipment. When we arrived at our camping site, we set up our tents and ate lunch. The kids stayed and watched, and here’s a photo that perfectly represents my excitment.

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Then we went through all the rules that we had to follow, and explained the culture appropriate and inappropriate behaviours so we’d be aware of not offending anybody by mistake. My shorts were too short and a girl’s tits were hella exposed, yeah, that was not okay. After we changed we had a meeting with the town Chief, who thanked us for helping out the development of Tsagnoria. We then had a tour of the rural village, with kids following us everyday, it was incredible and so so beautiful. And I was about to spend 2 weeks in this remote paradise, pure nature, untouched and full of life.

Fort Dauphin – Madagascar

Giulia Marta CortiLeave a comment

Thursday 9th of July 2015 – A day around Fort Dauphin

In the morning we walked to the Azafady Office. We got to see lovely people and beautiful views. We had a briefing about the history of their charity and presented each other. We ate lunch with the whole team, beans and rice, the meal that would soon become a part of my daily routine. In the afternoon we went to the beach and hiked around the coast of the island.

On the way to the beach, the path was not really clear and being very intrigued by abandoned buildings, I headed towards this torn down momument. Accidentally I hadn’t realized I was stepping on recent planted crops…nothing had grown up to the ground but I somehow found myself on a crop field. Fuck. And this local woman dressed all colourful and cool started yelling at me, and I, clueless as ever, couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Thankfully one of the guides who accompanied us to the beach told me to get off and walk cautiously back on the “path”. Words can’t describe how guilty I felt, and I couldn’t even express how sorry I was.

In the night I stayed up drinking and getting to know the other volunteers I would spend 2 weeks with. We layed down and watched the stars, how incredible. It was a great.

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