Volunteer Conservation Research Program in Madagascar

I had a really wonderful time with SEED Madagascar, on their conservation volunteering project in Sainte Luce. I was made to feel very welcome, and was very well looked after by the team on the ground. With the challenging conditions, health and safety was everyone's top priority, and I felt 100% safe and supported throughout my stay. Living conditions are basic - camping with limited sanitation (long drop toilets, well water bucket showers, purified rain water for drinking), and food is provided but options and variation is limited - but that is because you are living right in the forest, and the camp is regularly visited by lemurs, chameleons, frogs and other wildlife, wich more than makes up for it! With walking, and the occasional pirogue (dug out canoe) being the only locally available methods of transport, you need to be prepared to walk or paddle long distances (often 40 mins - 1hr) in the heat, and so good shoes (that can get wet - I highly recommend a pair of crocs!) and water carriers (a backpack bladder-type is ideal, but a good sized water bottle is fine too) are important. These treks are a reward in themselves, though, with breathtakingly beautiful scenery during the day and wonderfully dark night skies where the milky way and magellanic clouds were clearly visible. Helping with day and night-time surveys in the forest meant I got to see a wide variety of wildlife, much of it endemic to Madagascar, and to help SEED with their ongoing efforts to protect what is left of this unique and endangered habitat. I was also able to assist with conservation lessons at the local school, which were a fascinating glimpse into life in the local community. If you want to see Madagascar off the beaten track and away from the tourist towns and cities, and want to contribute to an organisation making a real difference on the ground, you really couldn't do better than volunteering with SEED Madagascar. I wish I had been able to stay longer, and really hope to return in the future.

I volunteered with SEED Madagascar during the autumn of 2018 on their Community Development programme where they gave me the opportunity to work within the local community and prioritise their needs in the work we did. Every day seemed to bring a new and exciting challenge from helping on the construction of a new school building where you work alongside a local construction team who are very friendly and accommodating during your work, to trekking to remote rural villages to make assessments on wells constructed by SEED as well as follow-ups on training they run for beekeeping in the area to help encourage a diverse range of livelihoods in the area to supplement the small scale agriculture already done by most families. The town of Fort Dauphin which you stay during the programme is also surrounded by some beautiful landscapes as well as offering a wide variety of foods and services as well as many excursions that are available to you within the vicinity all adds to the experience that awaits you.

I was on the Pioneer program for a total of eight weeks and loved almost every minute of it! The construction work challenged me just enough to drive me to improve my own skills, and if there was something I did struggle with the local construction team and the guides were always there to help. I found that the nature of our work meant that the volunteers worked together well as a team and therefore I have now made (hopefully) friends for life from across the globe. One of the aspects I enjoyed the most was the chatting that we all started when we were working, because it wasn't just the volunteers and the Malagasy guys in separate groups, there was a lot of overlapping between everyone, resulting in me learning a lot of Malagasy while I was there. Of course we worked hard, undertaking tasks such as brick laying and levelling in preparation for pouring the concrete floor. Another benefit of doing the Pioneer program is that if you are volunteering for 6 or more weeks, the last two weeks are spent at the conservation permanent location in Saint Luce, which meant I was able to get a view of the consvation efforts that SEED undertakes as well as making an immediate difference in the construction side of the program.