By Martelline Razafindravola Be (l’Université d’Antsiranana) and Andrew Walsh (Western University)

We’ve been working together – in Madagascar, in Canada, and on-line – since 2007. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. Maybe this is a hallmark of a good collaboration? Our chats, check-ins, and shared projects have taken on a distractingly steady rhythm.

Our first meeting was unforgettable. Martelline had been chosen by her supervisors as the first participant in an exchange program between our two institutions (l’Université d’Antsiranana in Madagascar and Western University in Canada). Her Air France flight from Antananarivo arrived in Paris as planned, but the connecting flight to Toronto was cancelled. This meant, first, that Martelline was transferred to an Air Canada flight, and second, that Andrew was waiting for her in the wrong terminal, imagining any number of catastrophes as minutes turned to hours. After an hour, Martelline found an airport volunteer who was finally able to get Andrew a message. Coming face to face that first time, then, was a matter of shared relief more than anything. We were already laughing about it on the drive home, not knowing that we’d just experienced what has most definitely become a hallmark of our ongoing collaboration. Things haven’t always gone smoothly, but we’ve managed.

Martelline’s first three months in Canada were eye-opening, requiring her to adapt to a new city and campus and educate neighbours who were surprised to learn that “Madagascar” was more than a cartoon creation. She had come to study and to help plan the first offering of a course intended to involve students from our two institutions in a way we hadn’t seen tried before. The curriculum didn’t matter as much as the central premise: to bring Canadian and Malagasy students together, as peers, to carry out exercises and projects that would introduce them to what, in our earliest requests for permission and funding, we called “the joys and challenges of cross-cultural collaboration”. To date, we’ve gotten 39 Canadian and 77 Malagasy students involved in such collaborations, sometimes in Madagascar sometimes in Canada.

We began in Madagascar in 2008 with a cohort of five Canadian and five Malagasy students. They spent their first evening together seated around plastic tables and takeout pizza, teaching one another games and riddles they’d learned as children, Malagasy students using their rarely practiced English and Canadian students scribbling new vocabulary and sounding out Malagasy expressions. Over the next five weeks, they studied, walked, camped, laughed, and karaoke-ed together while completing coursework and short ethnographic projects on local and foreign engagements with northern Madagascar’s ecosystems. Along with our colleagues Ian Colquhoun, Alex Totomarovario, and Louis-Philippe D’Arvisenet (without whom we never could have managed) we watched as much as we led, amazed at what could be done by simply bringing students together. We did it five more times over the next decade.

Obviously, the differences we and our students have had to negotiate haven’t only been cultural. There’s no escaping the profound power disparities at the heart of any program of this kind. For us, these were never more obvious than when planning travel, and figuring out how to pay for it all. The 29 Canadian students who have worked with us in Madagascar over the years have mostly breezed into and around country, having their airfare subsidized by their home faculty, securing visas on site, and enjoying the benefits of their weighty foreign currency. For Malagasy students coming to Canada, however, things have always been more complicated and expensive. We’re heartened to have been able to support 11 research and study placements for l’Université d’Antsiranana students at Western, but we’d like to do more.

One of our bolder experiments came in May 2016 when we reversed the normal course of things. That year, Martelline and five classmates came to Western’s campus for six weeks to participate in an intensive spring-session course alongside a cohort of Canadian students – a variation of the courses we had previously run in Madagascar. We adapted our exercises to new circumstances and had teams of Canadian and Malagasy students work with community partners in London on short “experiential learning” projects akin to those we’d previously carried out in Madagascar. The joys and challenges were different but no less illuminating.

Over the pandemic we did what we could to keep things rolling by getting students on Zoom for occasional conversations, but there was no reproducing the magic of bringing them together. And, so, we’re doing it again (in Madagascar) in May 2024. It seems only appropriate that one of the community-based conservation projects we’ll be working with this year – Bobaomby Nature Conservation  – was co-founded by program alum Hortensia Rasoandrasana. In fact, it was while completing her placement at Western in 2013 that Hortensia developed this project, drawing from lessons learned in Madagascar while participating in our 2010 and 2012 courses.

What’s comes next? We can’t be sure, but that’s no reason to stop, so we’ll keep going.