Our second stop in Madagascar – the southern beach town of Tulear (aka Toliara)!

After spending an amazing few days in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, we were ready to be off to our next stop – Tulear (aka Toliara). We had planned to spend a day and a half there with the UNFPA, and then to launch into our driving tour (for fun!) from Tulear back to Antananarivo.

But, we hit a slight hiccup. We woke up early on Tuesday and headed to the airport for our morning flight. But, when we got there the check-in counter wasn’t open and the place was pretty empty. Soon we found out that our flight had been delayed by six hours, whomp whomp. I had read online that Air Madagascar often has these types of delays, and, well, what can you do, so we just went about shifting our plans.

We headed back to the UNFPA office in Antananarivo where we spent some more time with our contact there and also got some things done for our trip and for life. We also got in touch with the UNFPA office in Tulear, who so kindly moved our activities to the following day. Soon the time had passed and we were ready to head to the airport again. After a quick-ish ~2 hour flight we landed in Tulear and settled in for the night.

Tell me a little more about Tulear

Tulear is a town on the southwest coast of Madagascar. The actual name of the town is Toliara, but during colonization it was named Tulear. It was re-named Tulear in the 1970s, after Madagascar got its independence, but locally more people use Tulear still. It kind of reminds me of the Bombay/Mumbai thing in India.

Anyway, the town has a population of 200,000, which is rising quickly like Antananarivo, because people are moving in from the suburbs to the urban areas. The city rests on the water, which makes fishing the main economic driver of the region, and also allows for some beautiful beach resorts (including Ifaty and Anakao, which we hope to see another time!). The area is really hot as well, with temperatures not ever going below 70 degrees and highs getting into the 90s and beyond, with lots of sun.

The main form of transportation is the famous Tulear tuk-tuk, which is ridden with a bicycle in the front (and can be seen in the first picture below – also texting and driving, some things are the same around the world, sheesh). Many families own tuk-tuks to take their children to school and then rent it out to other drivers for them to use during the day. We didn’t ride in one (I have this thing about not riding in open vehicles where cars can hit me and I’m not wearing a helmet …) but I loved that it was so pervasive (and basically pollution-free!).

I’d say overall it felt like there was more poverty in Tulear than in Tana, though perhaps it was just in a different way as opposed to being more. Since the city is spread out and more rural, there were more people living in grass/straw houses and walking long ways to get water during this dry season, while perhaps in Tana there was more urban poverty. In the picture below women are crossing a wide and dry riverbed with water for their families (the river is only full a few months a year, and then it is strong).

Our day with the UNFPA in Tulear

I know I mentioned this in our last post, but just to give you a refresher, the UNFPA is an agency of the UN and its mission is to deliver a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled. I am very passionate about the work they do and have been involved with them for the last two years. As part of our travels I got the opportunity to see the work UNFPA Madagascar does on the ground, and it was so meaningful to both of us.

After our time with the UNFPA in Antananarivo, I was looking forward to learning more about and seeing firsthand the impact that UNFPA has in a location such as Tulear, which is more remote and with a more disparate population.

Stop 1: Youth Center of Tulear

The Youth Center of Toliara opened in 1997. 3,500+ youth use the center each year as a place to come together, do leisure and sports activities, learn and be exposed to life resources. About 50-80 youth come to the center twice a day; and 75% of the youth that come to the center are boys, because there are not enough resources to address the interests of girls in the area (e.g., sewing machines).

The facilities at the center include a youth meeting room, a reading room, a computer room, an outdoor basketball court and play area, and an indoor leisure room. As expected, internet time has the highest demand and youth are limited to 15 minutes per day and the sign-up sheet fills fast (you can see the sheet in the picture on the left below, where youth sign up for 15-minute increments of time). One thing I thought was really smart was that the computers have messages as the wallpaper, which change weekly (the one below is about making the right choice re: HIV/AIDS).

There’s also a Youth Ambassador (YA) program where top performing students are chose to lead activities in their schools around reducing pregnancy rates, gender-based violence, fistula repair, family planning, etc.. We met with the President of the Youth Ambassadors (he’s the one in the red shirt in the middle below), who told us about why he decided to be a YA – he believed he could do something to better his community and help his peers, and he feels very proud to serve in the role. How awesome is that?

I have the softest spot in my heart for children, first and foremost, and we had so much fun with the kids who were using the center while we were there for our visit. I love the picture below, where you can’t even see Damian, but you see all the kids piled around him, trying to see the pictures he took of them on his phone.

There’s a lot of ways we can help the youth center, from providing materials to bring more girls to the location, to fixing the bricks overhead in the rec room (the green room in the picture above) to prevent them from falling onto the kids. More to come on all that soon!

Stop 2: Listening and Legal Assistance Centre

The second stop for the day was a counseling center that opened in 2012 and has been supported by the UNFPA since 2016. The mission of the center is to prevent gender-based acts of violence through community education. They do this through outreach events, training on GBV/women’s rights and counselor programs. Additionally, there is a library on-site with resources similar to the listening center we visited in Antananarivo.

About 500 individuals use the CECJ each year for counseling on the subjects of physical violence, sexual violence, economic violence and psychological violence. We spoke to one brave woman who had come in suffering from economic abuse. Her husband was not sharing his wages with her and she was not able to buy food and other needs for the family.

The center facilitated multiple individual and couples counseling sessions and advised the husband that his actions were against the law. Over the course of a month the situation was resolved and the woman is no longer suffering from abuse. Now I know not every case ends like this, but it was nice to see a situation where the issue was resolved and where the center was able to add value.

The biggest issue the center faces is reaching to women in more rural areas, and so they are exploring ways to have more events in further locations and also training women from rural communities to provide listening services to their peers.

Stop 3: Mangily Community Health Centre

This stop also had a special place in my heart. It was just so easy to see the need it is serving in the community and the dedication of the staff there. The Mangily community health center is the only health center serving the ~6,000 people in the immediate area and is one of three centers serving a total population of ~42,000 in the broader surrounding area.

The center is open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, and in addition to health services the center offers family planning and other health training and education sessions 2x a week on site. Regarding maternal healthcare, ~20-30 births per month occur at the health center and the center serves ~10-15 patients a day, mostly women. At times, there are six women in labor or post-labor at the center at the same time, but the center only has two bed pans for them to use (see them in the lower left of the picture below). Isn’t that nuts?

They have recently added a tuk-tuk (UNFPA funded) for emergency transport (e.g., if a women needs a c-section and has to be transported the ~30km to Tulear, which was previously done by ox car!). But, there are still issues – there’s only enough electricity to be used 3-4 hours a day and vaccines being at risk of not enough refrigeration. The birthing bed is so rusted that the top may fall through and there are consistent issues with the trash incinerator and water pumps. There are so many ways we can help this center (bed pans cost $2 each!) and I look forward to sharing them with you soon.

Stop 4: Centre for Women Vocational Training

Our last stop for the day in Tulear was at the women’s vocational center, similar to the vocational center we visited in Antananarivo. While the center is similar to the one we saw in Tana, it serves a population from a much broader area (120km radius) and can provide housing for the 3-month long training.

180 women attend programs at the center each year, but the building only has one room and so must be turned over twice a day to accommodate computer, sewing and cooking programs. The services are free of charge to any woman who wants to attend. The UNFPA contributes by supplying sewing machines and transporting and housing women from the countryside.

The majority of the women who train at the center have had fistula repairs (link here on what a fistula and repair is, if needed), and we spoke to one women who was on the second-to-last day of her training. She was ~6 months post-repair and believed the repair and the training will change her destiny. She had left her three children at home over 100km away for 3 months to train at this center and after leaving hopes to start a clothing shop, which will alter the path of her life and the path of her children’s lives forever.

Lots of <3 for UNFPA Madagascar in Tulear

After our day with the UNFPA in Tulear we had an even greater appreciation for the hard work that goes into changing the lives of underserved women and children around the world, but specifically in Madagascar. We feel forever connected to the experiences we had and a responsibility and passion to ‘pay it forward’. I’m excited to reach out to this group (and more) with ways to support this work and I’ll share those soon. I hope you can help!

Sightseeing fun in Tulear

Before leaving Tulear we wanted to do some sightseeing in the area. We stayed at the Auberge de la Table, which is a nice resort about 10km outside of the main city. They have an arboretum on site (Arboretum d’Antsokay), which Damian did a night walk with, but some people come to the location just for that, so I’m sure it’s quite good!

Since we weren’t making it up to the Avenue of the Baobabs on this trip, we wanted to make sure to see some baobab trees near Tulear, which is one of the trees’ natural habitats. So we headed to the Reniala Spiny Forest Reserve to check them out.

In short, our tour there was awesome. We had a great guide who had been working at the park before it even officially became a national park, and he gave us a great ~1.5hr guided tour of everything in the reserve. His knowledge of all the flora and fauna was great, and he was funny!

Below is the first baobab tree that we saw, and it was so so neat. There are eight baobab tree species that exist in the world, seven of them in are in Madagascar and the other is in South Africa and Australia. They grow very slowly (only 1-5cm a year) and are very important to tourism in Madagascar, so they are now a protected species.

The reserve has a baobab nursery and it’s pretty astounding when you see in person how long it takes for these trees to grow. On the left you see Damian next to a 5-year-old baobab tree. And on the right? We are standing in front of one that is over 1,000 years old! You can also see on the tree there are divots where people used to climb the trees to get the fruits before the animals or bugs did.

The reserve also has a ton of other dry-climate plant species, but one of our favorites was the tree on the below right. They call it a “vaza” tree; vaza means “white man” in Malagasy and they called the tree this not because of its color, but because it peels, like when a vaza gets a sunburn. So silly, ha. The one on the left is not a cactus, but actually a tree whose leaves have adapted to look like spines to help with water conservation in the dry and arid climate.

And finally, at this reserve we got our first peek at lemurs! The reserve has a lemur rehabilitation center on site, and so we got to see some of the ring-tailed lemurs that were being rehabilitated, and some that have been released. Lemurs are non-aggressive towards humans (even though I think their red eyes sometimes look scary!) and they are so cute. More to come on lemurs when we visit some of the other national parks in Madagascar.

Up next – we’re off on a road trip!

We really enjoyed Tulear / Toliara, and our time with the UNFPA, but now it was time to say goodbye and head off on a road trip! We were about to spend the next eight days hitting Zombitse National Park, Isalo National Park, the Anja Reserve, Ranomafana National Park, Ambositra and Antsirabe on our drive back to Antananarivo. Talk to you soon!