Frank Ryan Lawson and another U.S. student in Mohazarivo, Madagascar, with one of his host families	Making a Mark in Madagascar Frank Ryan Lawson (S01) bounces along in the rickety old bus perched atop large sacks of rice, with chickens scrambling around his feet. As the trip progresses, Lawson notices the riverbeds drying up and the trees turning into brush and cactus. Then, suddenly, the bus sputters and the engine dies. Lawson’s heartbeat begins to race as he realizes he and the other passengers are in the middle of a desert on Madagascar without any water and he cannot speak the same language as any of them. None of the other travelers appears concerned, however, and the group waits patiently for two hours for another bus. The next bus finally arrives and proceeds to hitch up the second bus to drag it, causing the normally two-hour trip down a simple dirt road to take close to 10 hours. The trip ends late at night in a tiny desert village known to have bandits. Lawson, who is still only halfway to his final destination, has only the contents of his backpack and a tent. During his senior year, Lawson spent a quarter studying environmental conservation in Madagascar, an island off the East African coast that is famous for its beautiful and extremely diverse terrain. Although he spent four months doing field research in Fort Dauphin, one of the largest cities in southern Madagascar, the highlight of the trip was an independent study in the village of Beza Mahafaly in the Spiny Desert. When Lawson first arrived in Madagascar, he was surprised by how little he really knew about the country and its culture. He lived with his six-person host family in a two-bedroom cabana in Fort Dauphin and had to rely on them for the little things he did every day — "even to cross the street!" One day the family asked Lawson to go to the market, where he found meat still connected to the animal carcass and rice in piles on the ground, often with gravel from the road mixed in. He had to learn from the family the essentials on nutrition — which vendors sold the best rice and which sold meat that wouldn’t lead to sickness. "It was the most basic things that really threw me off," Lawson says. "I was put in the position of being a child again, learning to bargain rather than pay a sale price, knowing whom to buy from, figuring out directions, learning how to use the post office." There were no computers, of course, and only a few telephones, which he rarely had a chance to use anyway. "I was without a lot of the comforts we have [at home]." Madagascar’s diverse geography includes beaches, rain forest and desert, all of which merge in certain spots to form a drastically changing, often abused environment. Most of Lawson’s classes in Fort Dauphin were field studies, during which he would explore the reef ecosystem one day, the water-deprived desert the next and the rain forests, increasingly burned down to provide cattle feed, on other days. Cattle are the main indicators of wealth in Madagascar, and the new growth, called green bite, that sprouts through the burned rubble is good feed for them. Initially Lawson found himself especially bothered by this kind of slash-and-burn deforestation, in which daily behavior based on time-honored customs leads to air pollution and environmental destruction. "You’d see a rain forest one night, and the next day, you’d see smoke and half of a hillside gone," Lawson says. "They destroy the rain forest to support themselves and their families, and it gets out of hand." And the rain forests are not the only terrain affected by the desire to raise cattle. The people of Beza Mehafaly in the desert are mainly cattle herders, too. So almost everything else living in the desert, like wildlife and cactus (the villagers’ main source for water), is burned off to feed cattle. Yet Lawson’s experience eventually gave him good insights into why the villagers acted in a way that would seem so destructive to most Westerners. "As Americans, we see it as their destruction of the environment," he says. "They just have a totally different value system. They don’t see it as long term, and they choose cattle over the environment." During his independent study in Beza Mehafaly, Lawson decided to apply for a grant to publish a children’s book that would include cultural explanations — which the villagers had passed on to their own children — for the defoliation by fire. He continued to collect stories and, upon his return to Northwestern, signed on Jaimie Henthorn, an Illinois native living in Spain, to illustrate his tales intertwined with personal journal entries. The undergraduate research grant provided money for materials, production and art. Lawson is currently working as an operations and treatment technician for the water department of the city of Northglenn, Colo. He is finishing the book and hopes to get it published in the near future. "The grant enabled me to tie things together and to explain things in the book the same way they were explained to me," says Lawson. "I could have gone and just come back with the memories, but instead I returned with a connection to Madagascar that won’t ever fade." — E.R. RETURN TO FEATURE STORY