Sojourn to Madagascar Part 2
Settling In
Every morning since arriving here I have started the day
with a cold shower, not because I like cold showers but because the hot water
heater in our flat doesn’t work. I spoke with the chief financial officer on the
20th, and he indicates that they are planning to fix that. I know
what you’re thinking, “You’re in the tropics in the summer time and it is hot
and humid—a cold shower ought to be refreshing!” Actually at close to 5,000 ft.
elevation, the only part of your equation we don’t have is the “hot.” Unlike La
Sierra it has rained every day and every night since we got here.
A View from in front of our flat
The Administration Building center and Part of the Cafeteria on the right
Our house or flat is part of a duplex. We have the west
side, and the house faces north, so it will be the shady side for the next few
weeks until the sun gets into the north again. We have three bedrooms, a
shower/toilet, a kitchen and a living room/dining room. The tile floors are
made to look similar to the entry way to our home in Riverside but are probably
asbestos tile. The living room is a step down from the rest of the house, and I
nearly killed myself on it once. I think I’m getting used to it. So far the
temperature indoors has remained in the 60s with a brief excursion into the
very low 70s during an early afternoon sunshine spell before the usual
afternoon rains set in.
Our duplex neighbors are Tantély and Noeé. Tantély is in the
business department, maybe the chair, and Noeé is the head of the language
department. They are very friendly and have helped us on numerous occasions when
we needed to borrow some salt or a saw, etc.
Pam and Gideon attend the Sambaina Church about a couple
miles from here. It is a little church that is struggling. They told us they
had to be there at 8:30 for Sabbath School. Since P&G had said nothing Sabbath
morning and we were a little late, we left our home at 8:30 and walked down to
theirs. As we got there Gideon had just backed out of their carport and was
headed up to fetch us. Pam wasn’t quite ready yet.
All of the services at Sambaina are in Malagasy. Most of the
words in the language are at least 5 syllables long, and I have detected no
cognates to any of the languages I understand, except for some of the Bible
names. For example “Jesus” is “Josia”. I felt as though a black, sound blocking
veil had been pulled over my head while I was there. Pam led out in the Sabbath
School. She brought a student, Rivo (say Reev and leave your lips as though you
are going to say the sound “oo” at the end but don’t actually give it voice),
who had volunteered to translate to Malagasy for her. She was not very good,
probably because her English is quite weak. It became evident that the reason
she volunteered to come with us was because there is a boy who attends the
church whom she is very interested in. I
see cupid is still alive and well in Madagascar (Mada).
The Sabbath school lesson was about Jeremiah and how he
counseled the remnant of Israelites left in Jerusalem not to flee into Egypt.
Then when everyone ignored his counsel, he fled with them. I didn’t point out
that Ellen White notes that they took him with them (if I remember right). The
question one of the theology/ministerial students asked was, “Does God bless or
save someone who ignores His instruction?” The discussion went one way and then
another. Gideon spoke out in favor of the proposition that God will continue to
go with him although God may not protect him from the consequences of his
ignoring God’s instruction. When the discussion seemed to be reaching a
stalemate, I pointed out that Paul ignored prophets in every church from Asia
to Jerusalem who counseled him against going up to Jerusalem. Indeed Paul was
imprisoned by the Romans for ignoring God’s counsel, but God did not leave him,
and he wrote many of the Pauline epistles included in the Bible while in
prison. That New Testament example seemed to lift the stalemate.
In the interval between SS and church, about 200 pathfinders
swelled the church to a bursting point. They came from all over Mada, and their
intention is to hike 160 km (100 miles) over the ensuing week. They had two
major concerns: the first is that it is in the rainy season, and it has rained,
sometimes hard, every day over the past two weeks; secondly, they are concerned
about bandits or hooligans that might interfere with them. Their leaders
directed them in military fashion, and they seemed amenable to the whole idea.
Gideon was the preacher for church. He used the biblical
simile of Christians’ being the salt of the earth. This involved spreading the
salt sparingly amongst the entire neighborhood so that they could get the
benefit of the savor of the salt and not be turned off by too large a dose.
After church we came back to UAZ for lunch with Pam and
Gideon although Gideon spent most of the lunch time at a funeral service.
Sylvia agreed to speak at the 3:00 meeting, so we went back there and met for
another two hours. Sylvia used the example of a paperclip as a symbol for
Christians. She spoke very well and had the members and pathfinders hanging
onto her every word. Her Toastmasters membership is helping her. Towards the
end of the meeting with the Pathfinders, the leader of the meeting insisted
they weren’t going to leave me out of the service, so they called me up for the
parting prayer. We were able to more or less follow what was going on because
throughout all of the meetings a volunteer would attach him- or herself to us
and translate what was going on. Some translators were much better than others,
but we appreciated all of them. Otherwise sitting there for over 5 hours would
have been terribly stressful and boring.
At seven o’clock that evening there was a program put on by
the UAZ Student Association in the university church. We got there about 7:15,
and the church, which seats over 500 people, was only about a third full. We
got a good seat. This time Edwin Burgarary, chair of Theology sat down next to
us and translated throughout the whole meeting. The program was in French, and
I felt an almost physical lifting of the Malagasy veil. I don’t understand
French, but I can almost follow everything that is going on because of the rich
set of cognates.
The dean of students spoke at length about the meaning of
Christmas. On the whole Christmas is ignored in Mada, and Adventists are
traditionally skeptical about Christmas and its pagan origins and
secularization. Then the students did a dramatization of the life of Christ with
emphasis on His birth and His passion. Many of the songs used in the drama were
in English. A small portion of the drama was in Malagasy. I could sense it
instantly because of the mental veil I mentioned above in relation to Sambaina.
The dean had urged the students to sit quietly throughout
the presentation and not to laugh or applaud. I guessed that he was standing in
front of an ocean and demanding the tide not to come in. The program started
with the annunciation to Mary. It then showed a skit of Joseph’s receiving the
news of his fiancée’s pregnancy. I could sense a growing swell of response
amongst the students. Then when Christ was born and the grand carols of
Christmastide, both English and French, were sung, the joy of the audience
burst into a crescendo of applause and cheering. The whole story of Christ’s
birth, ministry, death, and resurrection was enacted. The audience was caught
up in the drama. All of the music was played between 110 and 120 dB. (120dB
usually causes pain in the eardrums, and I felt the pain!)
I spoke briefly with the dean of students afterwards. I told him of how I sensed the joy and full
involvement of the audience throughout the performance. Furthermore, I
suggested that if the students had remained quiet and unresponsive, even the
stones of the building would have cried out. He still looked glum because the
students had not adopted his sophisticated stoic attitude. Sylvia and I walked
the little over a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) home enjoying the fresh damp air
and allowing the silence of the night to soothe our aching eardrums.
On Sunday we got up late, and then P&G took us in to Antsirabe (the nearest real
town to buy groceries, about an hour’s drive south of UAZ) to do a bit of
shopping. We stopped at Super Maxi Foods, an Indian run shop and bought a few
things. We went there first because it closes at noon on Sundays.
The market came next. Many of the stands were closed because
it was Sunday. It has a roof over most of it, a necessity in this very rainy
area. Everybody is expected to dicker for everything. Since we are vazaha (whites or aliens), we never get
the best prices anyway. We bought plums, small papayas, small bananas, carrots,
avocados, beets, cucumbers, small mild chilis, green beans, and more litchis
than I could eat in 100 years. The largest unit of currency in Mada is a 10,000
Ariary note (worth about $3). It is still regarded by the people manning the
market booths as too large to spend there. This will give you an indication of
the price of vegetables and the amount of cash each agent keeps on herself.
Finally we stopped at a Shop Rite grocery store, and I spent
the rest of the 350,000 Ariary ($110 U.S.) I got as an advance. Shop Rite seems
to have a lot of foods imported from South Africa. P&G took us out to a
pizza place in a former club for the ruling French. The food is good and
hopefully safer to eat than that obtainable at a hotely (the local eateries
that are all over the town). I’m still afraid of the “Montezuma’s revenge” that
is so rife where people never wash their hands before fixing the food. I have
suffered from this malady twice recently. The first one was in Namibia, and it
took me close to a year to get rid of that one. The other one was in Monterey,
Mexico, and was cured by a quick dose of antibiotics.
Pam is trying to prepare us to go shopping without her around.
Since I have no maps of the cities, and streets are never labeled, and no
buildings are numbered, it remains to be seen if I can find my way around the
towns. If I get some Internet and a printer and some paper, maybe I can make
some maps.
On Tuesday, after staff worship at 7:30 a.m., Sylvia and I
met with Pam, who is leading out in the conversational English classes, and
Anita who has been teaching most of our classes while we have been processing
the red tape to get here. We spent most of the morning learning what we needed
to do and setting up a schedule. Sylvia will be doing 8 units of classes that
have a fair amount of writing and hence grading. I will be doing 13 units of
conversation classes, where I will be doing no grading of written work.
We were supposed to have had this meeting on Monday, but the
physical plant crew was working on our home. They got most of the work done,
except for getting the hot water heater working. They assured me there was
nothing wrong with it. They pointed out that it actually got the water a little
warmer than the cold tap. But it was still much cooler than lukewarm. Their
English was much better than my Malagasy, but that’s not saying much. I simply
put my hand under the tap and said, “It’s not warm.” Finally they gave up and
left. Finally on Thursday afternoon they got a new heater and installed it. So
we got hot water as a Christmas present. And it is much appreciated!
We spent most of Monday in the Faculty Lounge working with
the Internet. It was somewhat frustrating because the Internet is flaky at
best. Then the power goes off several times a day. About noon Gideon came into
the Faculty Lounge and invited us to join him, Pam, and Jemima (a prospective
teacher) to eat in the student dining room. We found the food to be
excellent—well good—and we can eat lunch there for only 3000Ar (about $1). A
meal consists of a tray with a large mound of rice in the center and 5 or 6 vegetables
around the mound. I think that when we actually start teaching (January 4), we
will eat there quite often.
