Wealthy countries are all alike; every poor country is poor in its own way.

That's a clear lesson to be learned from contrasting Madagascar, a beautiful and complicated place, with Mali. Many of the signs of Mali’s poverty and lack of development are apparent even to a newcomer like me: dirt roads, open sewers, scarce water. Madagascar is almost as poor as Mali, according to officials who measure such things, but the reasons are not so immediately obvious. Tana especially looks far more developed than Bamako; the streets are paved, the sidewalks clean, the shops modern. On the other hand, groups of ragged, shoeless children roam the streets of Tana like urchins from a Dickens novel. They swarm the vaza (foreigners) and well-off Malagasy who exit the Shop-Rite supermarket, begging for a bite of food.

As for the rest of the island, I wondered how anyone could be poor in a country where water is so plentiful. Of course, nature can be harsh even in the lushest of environments, as was demonstrated the first few days of my visit. I was supposed to fly to a town on the northeast coast; had I gone, I would have arrived in Sambava the same day as “very intense” (i.e., category 5) tropical cyclone Gafilo. I was able to change my plans, but the coastal residents could only hunker down and hope for the best. When the storm hit Madagascar the wind speeds were 125 miles per hour. A ferry from the Comoros Islands, carrying over one hundred passenger (and maybe dozens more unreported), sank in the Mozambique channel; only two passengers survived. Several dozen others died in the storm, thousands more lost homes and crops, and as many 800,000 people were affected in the end. Just when it seemed like Gafilo had passed for good, it did like Elita did a few weeks before, and angled back across the lower half of the island, less forcefully but still tropical-storm strength. It is hard to get by, let alone accumulate wealth, when one gets battered like that every few weeks, several months out of each year.

Aside from international aid for emergencies like Gafilo, Madagascar attracts vaza and their money with its diverse wildlife and abundant natural resources. Unfortunately that doesn’t translate into increased wealth for most Malagasy. For instance, sapphire and other types of mines are not well-regulated, and quite lucrative -- for foreign investors, of course, and not for the Malagasy communities they affect. Another example I saw for myself in the village of Andasibe. It is situated right next to the popular Perinet national park, but most tourists never see it. The road from the highway reaches the park entrance before the town, and along that road are expensive bungalows. Like the tourists who pass through Antananarivo on their way to Nosy Be, eco-tourists can see the beautiful, amazing things Madagascar has to offer, without having to face the whole, complicated truth.

See pictures from my trip to Andasibe.

*Double apologies to Tolstoy, actually, since I first titled this post "apologies to Dostoevsky."