andava village
post by scott
Andavadoaka is a pretty small village. The people there are known as Vezo and are fishermen. The soil on the southwest coast of Madagascar is too sandy to grow anything substantial so everyone lives off the sea. The picture above is taken from the Blue Ventures camp looking out over Andava beach and the village behind. The main street is below.
The village has two or three shops, two bars, a coffee shop, school and a small hospital run by Italian volunteers. Most houses are made from wood or branches with thatched rooves, and fences everywhere are made from mangrove tree trunks. People keep chickens, ducks, goats and even the odd turkey. There were however no pigs or sheep as these are considered fady (taboo) here.
The men fish from pirogues which are square sailed boats with a single solid-wood hull and outrigger using both nets and lines. As the population has increased and fish supplies grown more scarce they had resorted to using smaller diameter nets in order to catch increasingly smaller fish, to the point where they were using mosquito nets to drag up anything and everything. However the village has now banned this practice. Another interesting technique which is also banned (But still practiced in some parts) is the use of a poisonous plant sap mixed up with sand and then spread over an area of low tide to kill all exposed fish. Apparently while the sap is extremely toxic to fish (and to humans if ingested) it is still ok to eat the fish’s flesh.
While the men are fishermen, women glean octopus – ‘gleaning’ is the word they use for walking the reef flats at low tide and catching octopus using an interesting trick of “tickling” them with the end of a spear, waiting for them to grab on and then pulling them out of their hole before stabbing them. Whenever the tide was low we would see women and children patrolling the shallow waters looking for a meal.