Reporting from Anjandobo, Madagascar — Foreigners have come to Anjandobo village, a cluster of wooden huts on the desolate red dust of southern Madagascar. They're vaza -- outsiders.
The vaza are sweating. They wear hats and carry cameras and plastic bottles of water.
The sun exhausts the vaza: four journalists and a group of aid workers from UNICEF and the World Food Program. Scorpions bristle under rocks. There's little shade.
A small Anjandobo child watches the vaza with their water bottles.
"I'm thirsty."
"No water," replies the child's mother.
Her younger toddler chimes in. "I want to drink water."
"No water," the mother repeats, matter-of-fact.
Madagascar's rainfall has decreased 10% in the last 50 years, and its temperature has risen 10%.
-- The World Bank
The spiny forest that once grew everywhere is a memory not much mourned here. It was a tangle of spectacular triffid-like trees with reaching, spiky arms, full of thorns and terrible creatures such as owls, snakes and lemurs.
Here, snakes are bad spirits that strangle children. Eyes popping, an old man named Valiotake clamps his hands on his throat, making dramatic choking noises, miming a child being attacked by a snake. He hoots loudly, mimicking the call of an owl, which heralds death. Lemurs aren't lucky either.
Valiotake, 85, is the oldest man in Anjamahavelo. He founded his village with his brother in 1971 and helped to name it "At the Lucky Baobab," after a common tree on the island. Like many people in the area, he has one name. His face is as dry and cracked as the bottom of a dry riverbed.
"I sacrificed a big fat sheep. I hoped we'd flourish and grow."
The second thing, after the sacrifice, was to slash and burn every bit of greenery. It took only a day.
And the wood made good houses.
Madagascar has lost 90% of its forests.
-- The World Wildlife Fund;
the World Bank
Sometimes people from international aid organizations come to tell the villagers that cutting down trees means less rain. Valiotake listens politely. He knows about the droughts, the crop failures. But he has no inkling of the great forces that are also baking his land to desert: global warming.
In his heart, he doesn't think it's because of cutting down the trees.
"I think the big God is unhappy. Young people are killing each other for nothing. They don't respect the taboos. It never happened in the old days."
In three of the last five years, southern Madagascar has seen crop failures because of drought.
