Being back in State College, I’ve hung pictures of my time in Madagascar all over my dorm. I can peak at the thin, paper rectangles into the rainforest, the street-side coffee stands in Kianjavato and the raincloud shrouded mountains, as if peering through the holes of bricks missing from a wall. In some ways, Madagascar doesn’t seem as far away as it really is. I’m still working on the data I collected over the summer in preparation to publish my honors thesis. All my fieldwork is compressed into data files and spread sheets now, though the three months of research expand endlessly in my memory. Hours spent hiking through the dense lianas and vines of the understory, climbing rock faces, straining to hear the tiny metallic ping of my aye-aye’s GPS collar. The days dotted with leeches, trudging through the slick coffee plantations and up mudded hills looking for signs that my lemur had gnawed on the dead trees in my vegetation plots. The warm bowls of rice and toasted peanuts, eaten morning in and morning out as I packed my equipment to go into the field and start the day’s work a new.
This was, to me, the fun part. For as difficult as it was sometimes to live in a tent, to negotiate the stomach cramps and various instances gastrointestinal distress, to stay awake through a day measuring trees after hiking all night (literally) the night before, it was beautiful. My time in Madagascar was coffee and sweet bread scented, livened by the presence of close friends and team members who share each moment of work, each broken piece of equipment, each bowl of hot steamed cassava with me. The work I do now (the researching through countless journals, the hours I’ll spend learning coding systems and analyzing data) is propelled forward by the tangy-cold mornings I spent among friends and colleagues around a thermos of coffee and a plate of fried bananas. And my hours at the desk now are motivated by the hope that in a few years I’ll be once again writing from my tent in the jungle, rather than my photograph-speckled dorm room.