Posted on February, 12 2008

Vazaha means foreigner. That we were foreigners in Madagascar became clear after the first time a couple of kids jumped up and down, pointing at us, screaming “vazaha, vazaha!”, as if an UFO had just landed in their backyard and some green creatures from Mars had come out. And that was only the beginning.

Wherever we went, we were the attraction of the village, the sensation of the year. Everything seemed to be thrilling – how we read, how we talked, how we ate and chilled out. Especially in the beginning it was not easy to understand, why we should be so special to the Malagasy people - just because we had a different skin color? Was it our fancy outdoor gear? Our cameras? Sometimes I ran after the kids and played theatre for them, just to DO something, something that justified me being the center of their focus.

Nevertheless, that was something we could get used to. But what about our trip to the very north of Madagascar, where the local WWF staff usually dropped us in the best restaurants for lunch and then disappeared and went somewhere else, somewhere cheaper for them? What about official dinners with WWF staff and local authorities, where rice and chicken was cooked for everyone – and salad for the vazahas? Whatever we tried, it was absolutely impossible to convince them, that what is good for them is good for us. Never were we allowed to carry as much stuff as all the Malagasy around us. Only exceptionally did they let us do the washing-up. And in the rainforest, they told us to stay at the campsite every second day to relax a little! I sometimes felt like a princess, a princess vazaha!

In a world where your skin color is obviously so different to anyone else’s, it seemed clear to me, that the Malagasy people we met wanted to serve me because I was coming from the “developed” world - and that made me sad. I came here to fight exactly that, I wanted to prove to them that we were prepared to live their life and leave our habits behind.

It felt like a huge relief, when our coordinator Sahondra, herself a Malagasy lady from Tana, reassured me, that it had also happened to her, when she went up north. She was also a vazaha and got treated like a princess. It feels so much better to know, that the people we met, the people we worked with made no difference between her and me. It was more politeness than subservience towards us, which is okay with me. After all, that world was not so different from the one I wanted to live in.