Posted on February, 12 2008

Analila is a tiny little village and seems to be the end of the world. There are no vegetables, no fruit, only rice, beans and dried fish. Our task here is to found an association, which will be responsible for the sustainable use of the rainforest nearby. Up to now, there was a district officer responsible for giving out licenses to cut a tree. But because he is so far away from all the villages, hardly anyone ever did that – most trees were cut illegally. WWF visits small villages like Analila to empower them and teach them how to manage their own forest.

In a classroom the whole fokontany (community) gets together and in a complicated procedure. The president, vice president, treasurer, supervisor of the treasurer and counsellors are elected. Everything seems to be ritualized and goes according to plan.

On the next day, a bunch of strong men are recruited for our work in the rainforest. The objective is to gather information about how many trees there are, of which species, in which age group, how thick they are, and what their quality is. This is done by using a standardized method. Apart from porters, two cooks and some forest workers, a local botanist was therefore hired as well. Our camp in the rainforest was set up without much care. Too many young trees were cut to build needless things like a luggage rack.

The rainforest is beautiful and sometimes I could not stop admiring and marveling. Because there was hardly any rain in the last couple of weeks, we did not see many frogs – but the freakiest bugs and spiky, acid and beautiful plants. One night, I shone my torch directly into a lemur’s saucer eyes – apart from that they made themselves very scarce.

The vegetation is so dense that the strong guys have to clear the way with their impressive knives (coupe-coupe) first. Very often we crawl on all fours and our legs and arms are cut open and bleed time and again. But falling asleep in the rainforest, in a concert of whistling, buzzing, scrabbling, singing and whispering trees makes up for all our efforts.