Saturday, February 18, 2012

Blog #7: When it Rains, it Pours, Pt. 2: Cyclone Giovanna


2/19/2012

I was in Moramanga with my fellow “Atsinanana/Toamasina” PCVs for a regional meeting last weekend when we started to hear more news about the cyclone coming straight for Madagascar. At first, we weren’t really worried, and some people who live right on the coast said they were just going to go home. We learned a little later that it was a huge storm, a category 4 cyclone (hurricane in the Southern hemisphere that rotates the other way) and that it would hit somewhere between Tamatave and Vatomandry, basically ensuring that none of our sites would really be safe.

So we were told to get to the capital and stay at the PC transit house until the storm passed and we could find out the damage to our sites. When the storm passed over Tana, we didn’t really see much. A few trees and poles fell, and some very low-lying areas flooded, but the worst the PCVs suffered was about an hour of time when the generator outside ran out of fuel before actual power was restored to Tana (First-world problems!) The day after the worst of the storm, we were able to go around town and do things normally.

But for a few days we didn’t know anything about our sites because electricity and telecommunications were out on the east coast. Finally we started to get information. Corey, my friend near Vatomandry got a text saying her house, made of local materials, (i.e., sticks and leaves) was completely destroyed. Few people heard anything else before riding toward the coast in a car with Peace Corps to assess things. The doctor in my town, who is also my neighbor, called me once the cell phone network was back up, and the first thing he said was that my roof was gone because of the wind. My house, structurally, is probably fine other than the roof. If you look above, you’ll notice it’s concrete, which I am lucky as a PCV to have. Without a roof, though, it’s likely that I’ll come home to some ruined things. He said the town was hit pretty hard. I think that power has not been restored to Lohariandava yet because now the cell phones are dead.

So I head back to site tomorrow morning and I’ll start to assess the damage to my stuff and my house, and I’ll see how everyone in my town is doing. I have a place to sleep at my doctor’s house if mine is still flooded or whatever the case may be. I don’t regret evacuating like Peace Corps told me to do, but it definitely brings to mind the ways that I am still not as much a part of my community as is seemingly possible. If I get seriously ill, PC will send a helicopter to my site. If there’s a big tropical storm, I have somewhere to go stay until things are safe. If my site is really bad, and my house will take time to be repaired, I’ll be put up in a hotel somewhere or brought back to the capital.

Anyway, I’ll get updates out when I can, but I’m fine, and I’m not that worried about my “stuff”. I’m more worried about my community. I actually had a pretty decent time in Tana because I was able to talk to some of you and see some friends.

Here’s a picture of the cyclone right as it’s over Mada, showing how it’s basically the same size as the entire island.



As for other updates, I just had a great trip on the east coast with my counterpart Jonathan. The photos are all up on facebook finally, so I didn’t post them here. We basically saw some more water systems outside of my commune and were able to talk about work and research ideas.

That’s it for now. I’ll post soon-ish. I also am only posting the link to this thing today, very much later than these were actually written, so that buys me some time

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