To my joy (and some days despair) the farmers cooperative I work with recently elected a new president, the former secretary Jean Marie, and things are finally starting to get done. Suddenly I am flooded with requests, I spent nine months beating down doors and beating my head against a brick wall trying to figure out what I should work on and who I could work with and now requests are coming from all sides.

One of the projects I am now working on is helping the VOIs (a type of community based forestry management organization) transfer to another status called a COBA. Once the VOIs transfer to the COBA system they will sign a contract with the State and they will have a lease on the forest and become responsible for its administration and protection. Hopefully the communities will be able to financially benefit from managing the forest, each COBAs contract is individual and details how the community can use the forest, some times they are strictly conservation COBAs and then they have to be supported by an outside organization but frequently the community is allowed to harvest forest products, participate in eco-tourism and sometimes log sections of the forest in a sustainable manner.

The farmers cooperative I work with also encompasses 6 VOIs all in different stages of transferring to the COBA status in this particular situation I was helping the VOI in Amboditifara with a small reforestation project, they had been asked to plant 50 saplings to prove that they were really interested in becoming a COBA and that there are people in the community that support the idea beyond just the president of the VOI.

So there I am dragging myself out of bed way too early on a sunny Sunday morning trying to convince myself that the lost sleep is really worth it. I mean it is a hard choice after all, stopping erosion or getting some quality shut eye, what would you choose? In the normal world I would have probably just rolled over and gone back to sleep, but I am no longer in the normal world so I got up slathered on the sun screen and headed off to Amboditifara, the village closest to the VOI I was helping that day.

I arrived to find everyone assembled and ready to go, a rarity here. Usually I will show up for some scheduled event and then sit around and wait for two hrs for things to get started but not this time. They were waiting for me. We gathered to trees out of the nursery and headed off to the reforestation site. Unbeknownst to me getting to the site involved scaling a mountain. They had asked me if I could climb and I had answered in the affirmative not really aware exactly what they were asking, and I wasn't lying I've climbed a number of mountains since I've gotten here and even did some rock climbing back home, but this was ridiculous. We tramped through the forest for a while before we got to the base of the mountain like hill we had to climb, it wouldn't be exaggerating too much to say it was strait up and it had all been deforested so it was in the blazing sun and it was eroding away under our feet so things were pretty slippery and hot to say the least. We all stopped and took a bit of a breather; I gulped down half my bottle of water and then we were off. Well they didn't so much as climb the mountain as run up it. I thought I was doing really well until about ¾ of the way up, then I had to stop and catch my breath I simply couldn't keep up the pace. All I could think was "Really, seriously why did they have to put the forest on top of the mountain?" I eventually made it to the top not far behind the main group and not the last person up (ok, so the only two people behind me were the pregnant lady and the old grandpa)

Once up on top we made short work of the tree planting and had the 50 seedlings in the ground within 30 min, the part of the entire expedition that took the longest (after getting there) was writing up a "fiche de presence" aka taking attendance. The NGO that is helping support the VOI likes to know that this is really a community effort and not just one or two people who want control of the forest. Unfortunately this is a part of Madagascar where most people are illiterate, making it very difficult to fill out the paperwork.

After getting the paperwork done and taking some pictures we headed back down by another route (just as steep) so we could visit a site were they had done some previous reforestation. The views were fantastic and in the end that combined with a job well done made the difficulty of running up the side of that mountain well worth it. While the Malagasy all went of to work in their rice fields I went home and took a nap.