Island-Sity

When I got to the shallower water I looked down to see four black spines hanging out of my thigh! Apparently, I had found my first sea urchin. I pulled out the spines, and immediately started to bleed out of the four little holes. Nico said we should go to the bungalow and use tweezers, but I seemed to remember a similar story told by former Peace Corps Volunteers about an old local man fixing the very same urchin spine problem with a rock and some moonshine. It was something like that. In retrospect, I think I may have dreamed that.

I limped over to the two ladies that run the hotel and showed them what happened, explaining my situation very badly in Malagasy (I said something like “I was swimming and then there were black things here and now my leg is sick”).

They knew what I was talking about, and told me to sit down while they got a needle, and I sent Nico to get a lighter to kill the germs, and some old dude came up and tried to sell me a wooden canoe until he saw the blood, and then he was all about helping too.

So there are now four people crowded around my leg, not including myself, with some strange canoe-selling man poking a needle into one of the holes, and one of the ladies trying to squeeze another one, and then they’re saying that Nico should do it because it’s OK if he hurts me but it’s bad if a stranger causes me pain.

After a few more minutes of poking and bleeding, the ladies decide that there’s actually nothing left in there, that the spines bruised and poisoned the muscle a little but all the parts are out. That’s where we stand now, and I do have four little raised bumps and it sort of hurts, but there’s no sign of paralysis or death. So far.

Yesterday, a lady asked which of my parents is Malagasy. I was walking to town to get some water and rum and coke, because everything is way more expensive in the hotel, and she was walking along too, trying to sell some wooden carved whales and boats and stuff.

I told her I couldn’t buy any right now because they would break in my luggage and that would be sad. I guess she was so surprised to hear me speaking ‘Gasy that she assumed that my family must be from here.

I felt bad about not buying something from her plastic bag because she told me the cyclone last year destroyed her family’s houses, and they still haven’t gotten the money to rebuild. Then I remembered how much the hotel is overcharging and figured out that I couldn’t afford to buy her stuff even if I wanted to.

We’ve had a lovely time here, very relaxing, with some excellent food. I’ve eaten fish for almost every meal. Nico says I am made of fish. Well there are worse things to be made of. Like McDonald’s hamburgers.

This morning we went with Romeo on a canoe tour around the island. He came by yesterday to arrange a time, and showed up early while we were still eating breakfast. He has a bright blue canoe (lakana in Malagasy) that only leaks water a little.

It was a nice trip, albeit a little hot, but I had my trusty hat. Romeo is around 20 years old, has spent his whole life here on Ile aux Nattes, has gotten Malaria several times, and dropped out of school to give canoe tours to pay the school fees for his younger sibling, who is so smart that he hasn’t had to repeat a grade yet (that’s unusual here).

He says his family owns some land on this island, and what he really wants is for someone to build a house on it and then rent it out or live in it, which would give him the money he needs to go back to school so that he can finish his education.

There have been so many times on this trip that I’ve wished I was really rich, and this was another one. Imagine, having a house on this beautiful island that you could live in during part of the year, then rent out to tourists for a week or so at a time, and help this nice kid go to school and do what he wants to do in life. Oh, pipe dreams. We leave tomorrow to go back to Sainte Marie, to stay with some Belgian friends in their lovely studio hotel room and see what we can see on the main island.