Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 8 - Midterm

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 8 Midterm

UAZ Church

We arrived in Madagascar on December 17, 2015. So Sabbath, January 30, will be our 45^th day in Mada. We have a maximum limit of 90 days on our visa. Ergo! This week, January 24 to 30, is our midterm in Mada--unless we were to leave earlier than planned.

Our latitude is approximately −19.9°. This means the sun was directly overhead at (solar) noon on Friday the 23^rd if my calculations are close to being correct. Anything truly vertical casts no shadow, a phenomenon we haven’t encountered since we lived at Ikizu in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was sick enough on Friday not to care.

I think there is an unwritten law somewhere that says that I can’t stay in any foreign place very long without picking up some health bug that really makes me miserable. This is especially true if we don’t drive to the place. On the morning of the 18^th I woke up with a scratchy throat. I gargled with warm salt water, and that cleared it up. I said to myself, “Ouch! This feels like a cold coming on!” It didn’t bother me the rest of the day, but I had this feeling of a pending cold with me all day. I drank lots of water. I gargled once or twice more but didn’t feel the need. Of course, as night came on, so did the scratchy throat. Having drunk that much water, I was up practically every hour that night. Each time, I drank a tall glass of water and gargled with Scope. On Tuesday, my sore throat sort of stayed with me all day.

Pam told me, “Several families are planning a celebration in honor of your birthday on Thursday since they can’t do it on Wednesday.”

“That’s super! But I feel a cold coming on, and it feels like it’s going to be nasty by then.” Never-the-less we did a little planning. We were going to do it in our house and ask everyone to bring their own plates and cutlery.

On Wednesday a number of people wished me “Happy Birthday!” Some were afraid that maybe the party was a surprise and didn’t try to talk about it. By then I knew I was going to be miserable on Thursday. I was already taking Ibuprofen for a nasty headache.

Thursday morning, Pam came by about mid-morning. “How are you feeling about the party?”

“If I had my way, I would cancel it,” I mumbled. “However, people have probably started to prepare for it. So I will go through with it.”

“Well I’ve talked with everyone except for one family, and they won’t start preparing for it until this afternoon. They’re O.K. with canceling it.”

“Cancel it! But talk to the other family before you do so.” I felt somewhat better for just having made the decision.

By Sabbath, not even the Ibuprofen was making much difference. I was coughing, had a sore throat, and my sinuses were all blocked up. On Friday Sylvia had bought me a sure-fire cure from a pharmacy in Antsirabe. The pharmacist told me to take two tabs on Friday and two on Saturday, and the cold would be gone. I believed it as much as if he had told me to take the medicine, and in two days I would look like I was 30 years old. I looked at the first ingredient and saw it was pseudoephedrine. Sylvia had not asked for the right medicine—or they did not have it in the pharmacy. Pseudoephedrine tends to send my heart into all kinds of calisthenics, so I’m very leery of it. I forgot to throw a bottle of Benadryl into my bag before we left. That really helps.

We had planned to spend the weekend in Tana with Pam and Gideon and Etienne and Elaine Koen, ADRA workers in Fianarantsoa. But I backed out on that. Then there were a couple of real medical emergencies on campus, so P&G couldn’t go either. It ended up that Gideon went on Sabbath to a preaching engagement he had, and Pam stayed home. On the way home, well after sunset, he stopped at a pharmacist (It took him 45 minutes to get there, and he had to walk the last half kilometer because of deadlocked traffic) and bought me another antihistamine without the pseudoephedrine. I have thanked him profusely.

I also started taking a whole cluster of garlic, a whole small onion, the juice of one lemon and a quarter of a cucumber, all whizzed up twice a day. By the end of the second day of that regimen, the concoction burned my mouth, tongue, and throat all the way down. Pam swears by the remedy.

Pam stuck around our place Saturday night, and we watched a movie called The Accidental Husband, about a woman of the Dear Abbey variety on radio. Her counsel had broken up the engagement of a fireman and his fiancée. The man’s son hacks into the public documents and makes his dad the husband of this Dear Abbey. She goes down to get a wedding license the next day so she and her publisher can wed, and they won’t let her have one because she’s already married. The plot thickens from there on. Shortly after the movie ended, Gideon got back from Tana.

Yesterday and today I have felt well enough, with the help of Ibuprofen and garlic, to teach my classes. I have a second class coming up in an hour as I write this.

I spent time with Anitha Monday morning concerning next week. Next week my class load jumps from 5 class periods and 53 students to 13 class periods and 165 students. The other 8 classes are all on Wednesday for the month of February. These students are all nursing students and hate English with a passion. Besides, in the past the dean of nursing seemed to delight in messing with instruction. The students see no reason why they should take it. And in my heart of hearts, neither do I. They will be working with Malagasy patients almost exclusively, and the French they also have to take should be more than ample. I don’t voice my feelings, however.

During the day our drinking water container got cracked so that it leaked like mad. We had new keys made to our flat so that Sylvia and I can both have a set and not leave the place open. The new keys didn’t work! The bug on the Africa computer has gotten sufficiently nasty so that it won’t let us download anything from the Internet. Secondly we haven’t been able to get onto the Internet since sometime last week. I found out late Sunday that they had changed the password and not bothered to let us know. The electricity had been out for over 3 hours on Sunday night, so Sylvia’s C-PAP machine wouldn’t work. I had been trying to keep her breathing all night as well as my having to get up due to this miserable cold.

By nightfall I recognized that I was also in full fledged depression. I sat down at the computer (not Africa) to start this issue of the Sojourn and stared at a blank screen for an hour before giving up. I realized that depression was undoubtedly due just because I had been away from home for 6 weeks, even if the other things hadn’t happened.

When I first got to College in the fall of 1962, Dr Giddings warned me, “If you feel that everything is going wrong and everybody is against you, it is probably due to your just being tired and worn out. Get some extra sleep, and you’ll probably be just fine.” Her council came to my mind Monday evening. I didn’t get to sleep as early as I had wished, but I do feel a lot better as I write this.

We just got word that the six packages of books I had mailed to the UAZ Library on December 7 last year are sitting in Antsirabe all safe and sound. Customs wants to charge the university 80,000 Ariary to release them (that’s only $25, but it sounds like a king’s ransom to the treasurer here). It cost me $517.50 to mail them (that’s 1,656,000 Ariary and that sounds like a king’s ransom to me). The university had voted, before I mailed them, to reimburse me $431.25 for the postage. It remains to be seen whether and how long it will take for them to do as they promised! The extra million and more Ariary would help us to live here without our having to bring any more dollars into the country.

Jan mailed us a Christmas card before Christmas. It still hasn’t gotten here. So Jan, keep hoping! It will probably arrive one of these days, even before we leave here! Everybody reading this: Don’t try to mail us anything. Even expensive Priority Mail takes over 8 weeks to arrive.

Sylvia invited the Barriagees over for Sabbath lunch on January 17. We have a very limited number of dishes (service for 4), so we seldom have anyone over. Sylvia and I went home from church shortly after Sabbath School. The P.A. system was malfunctioning, and the result was worse than if they had not used it at all. Since the service was in French, that just made it harder for me to get anything out of the service.

UAZ Church: Big enough to seat the current student body.

Actually Sylvia left church about 15 minutes before I did. When I got home Sylvia asked me to cook the beans. She already had a scalloped potato dish in the oven. I cut up some onions and garlic and then cut up the frozen beans. When I tried to light the stove, it refused to light. Sylvia then remarked that the burner she had stuff on had gone out. Suddenly we realized we were out of gas. We checked the oven; sure enough, it had gone out, too. A mild panic struck us. Here we had guests coming for lunch and we had no way of cooking anything.

We thought about it for a moment. Sylvia suggested I bring in the gas burner we had in storage. I laughed and suggested it would have the same problem.

“Oh! We can heat the soup and serve that!”

Again I laughed, and she saw the folly of her suggestion. We don’t have an electric burner or a microwave. I suggested we put some bread and fixings on the table. Sylvia put together a tomato and cucumber salad. We realized that we were in a fix. And we had never invited them over before, either.

Our Kitchen with the offending gas bottle on the floor

The Barriagees arrived with flat bread stuffed with egg, greens, and spices, and a pitcher of Mango smoothie. We all laughed about our predicament. Sylvia at least had a very good pumpkin pie that she had baked on Friday. The whole meal went off very well. Conversation centered on the central role that education has played in Adventism. Afterwards the Bs went home to rest, and we went in to nap. Before they left, Barriagees told us they keep a spare gas tank at all times and loaned it to us. We replaced it with a full tank after sending ours in to be refilled the next Wednesday. A full tank costs 50,500 Ar and the exchange of tanks.

It rained fairly hard while we were napping. After about an hour’s nap, we phoned Pam and told her we were going to take a walk down to see the farm on the south side of campus. She wanted to go for a walk but on the north side of campus.

We went north from her house down into the valley below the campus. Along this valley some enterprising person has put in quite a few fish ponds alongside the inevitable rice paddies that line the valley. We walked west along the valley and angled back up the hillside to the area north of the campus until we crested the hill and looked down on the valley along the south side of campus. Finally we turned back east and home.

The Fish Farm (UAZ is about a mile off to the left)

While we walked, Pam told us of her experience the previous evening, Friday. They had had two cats for about 6 months and had raised them from kittens. Like all cats they came and went as they wished. One went missing a couple weeks previously. Then the other turned up missing but returned home a few days later with a ring of fur missing around one front paw, evidence that he had been tied up around that front paw. He was very restless and paced back and forth mewing. Pam began to suspect that he knew where his brother was being held prisoner.

So late Friday afternoon Pam called to the cat. He came readily, and mewing as he went, he walked down the hill the way we were going. He had turned west along some trails that led along the ridges between rice paddies for a long ways. Finally he had gotten to the main north-south Madagascar highway, NR-7. As he walked he kept looking back at her to see if she was still following. He kept mewing encouragement to her. He crossed NR-7 and kept going until he came to the railroad track. He followed the track north until they came to Sambaina, a village about 3 km (2 miles) north-east of the university.

Sylvia & Pam: The edge of Sambaina village is on the hillside just above Sylvia’s head

While she was walking along the track, she phoned Gideon and asked him to join her and bring a flashlight because it was getting quite dark. They followed the cat up a hill beyond Sambaina. The hill is higher than the hill we live on. They were walking on pathways that went from homestead to homestead. When the flashlight finally failed, it was pitch dark. They had to turn around and retrace their steps to Sambaina where they had parked the car. The cat started to howl his dissapointment. She never has been able to go farther to see if she can find the other cat.

That evening we watched Into the Wild, a movie about a young man who left home after college graduation. He was angry at the way his parents had brought him up. He went seeking happiness that took him down the Grand Canyon in a kayak, into the inner city where he was homeless, and a number of other adventures. He ended up hiking out into the wilderness in Alaska, where he died of exposure. His body was found a couple weeks later by some hunters. The story is allegedly true and is written by Krakauer in a book of the same title.

Gerald Durrell in his book The Aye-Aye and I, (1992 Touchstone, NY, p. 32) writes of the language Malagasy as follows. I got a big laugh out of it. “Malagasy is a fine, rackity-clackity, ringing language which sounds not unlike someone carelessly emptying a barrel of glass marbles down a stone staircase. It maybe apocryphal, but it is said that written Malagasy was first worked out and put down on paper by early Welsh missionaries. They must have greeted the task with all the relish of people who christened towns and villages in the own country with names that seem to contain every letter in the alphabet. The map of Wales is bestrewn with such tongue-twisting names as Llanaelhaiarn, Llanfairfechan, Llanerchymedd, Penrhyndeudraech, and, of course, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrindrobllantyssiliogogogoch. So the missionaries, licking their lips, must have approached with zeal the job of making a whole language one gigantic tintinnabulation, and they surpassed themselves in the length and complexity of their translation. So, when my dictionary fell open at the word ‘bust’ and informed me that in Malagasy it was ‘ny tratra seriolona voassokitra harramin ny tratra no ho miakatra’, I was not surprised. It did not, of course, tell me whether it translated ‘bust’ in the sense of broken, going bust in a financial sense, or a woman’s bosom. If it was a lady’s bust, however, I decided it would take considerable time to get around to describing and praising other delectable bits of her anatomy, by which time she may well have come to the conclusion that you had a mammary fixation and lost interest in you. A language as elongated as this tends to slow down communication, particularly of a romantic nature.”

The Aye-Aye and I

I read the translation of ‘bust’ to Madame Noée, our neighbor and chair of the Language Department (i.e. my boss) and asked her which meaning of bust it was talking about. She looked embarrassed and very funny as I read it, and of course mispronounced it, and I imagine that if she had been as white as me, she would have blushed. She finally said, “It is saying something about a woman’s chest.” I did not pursue it further.

#MADAGASCAR, #UAZ, #SDASCHOOLS, #GASCOOKING, #CATS, #HIKING, #DINNERGUESTS, #COMMONCOLD, #MEDICINE, #POSTALPROBLEMS, #BIRTHDAY, #MALAGASY, #DEPRESSION

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 7 - Taking Stock

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 7

Taking Stock

In our own minds, Sylvia and I often compare our living conditions here with those we had at the beginning of our marriage at Ikizu Seminary and Secondary School in Tanzania almost 50 years ago.

Ikizu 1967 to 1971	U. A. Z. 2016
High school level academically	Elementary language instruction in a university
I taught upwards of 40 (40 min) class periods plus was in charge of maintenance, electricity, water, printing press	Teaching from 5 to 13 (50 min) class periods per week.
Remote, about an hour’s drive over dirt and gravel roads to the nearest town with a market	Remote, about an hour’s drive over a potholed tar road from the nearest town with a market
No car. We had to rely on the generosity of others, especially the principal	No car. We have to rely on the generosity of others, especially the rector.
Electricity 3 ½ hours a day	Electricity 24 hours a day but with frequent outages
Water sufficient but not plentiful	Water plentiful during the rainy season; other-wise they have rationing in place
Drinking water—we boiled our own	Drinking water—We boil our own
Bathing water—gas water heater	Bathing water—Electric water heater after the first 8 days
Laundry—We had our own washing machine and line dried our clothes outside	Laundry—We use rector’s washing machine and line dry outside, with high risk of rain, or on limited covered lines on our back porch
The bed was more like a hammock than a bed.	The bed is more like a hammock than a bed. We get real’ cozy this way.
There was no heat in the house. Being a degree and a half off of the equator, we didn’t miss it. There was no winter.	There is no heat in the house. Being almost 20 degrees off the equator, we have missed it. We’re lucky not to be here in the winter
We had many books along with us, and we spent our evenings reading.	We have practically no books along. Pam has leant us a hard drive with a number of movies.
Vegetables—many brought to our door by locals, the rest through the town market and a grocery store	Vegetables—occasionally brought to our door, eggs available at local farm, the rest through the town market and grocery stores.
Communication—regular and dependable mail service; radio-telephone that was flaky and eventually discontinued	Communication—mail totally undependable; email flaky; local cell phone; U.S. Wi-Fi phone
Languages—multiple local languages, Swahili predominant; English widely understood	Languages—Malagasy predominant; French widely understood; English rarely understood
Radio available with limited local stations; no TV; no computer or Internet	No radio or TV; Internet available nearby
Security—very safe, petty thievery, walked everywhere—even at night	Security—safe; I wouldn’t walk far outside at night. We have a 9:00 p.m. curfew.
Home security—no bars on windows and simple locks on doors. We left them open during the day	Home security—rebar bars on all windows. Two heavy half inch steel bolts on solid wood front and back doors. Closed during the day.
Respect by students—very good	Respect by students—very good
Friendliness—Everyone was very friendly	Friendliness—Everyone is very friendly
Malaria—present mainly during the rainy season. We took a prophylactic	Malaria—nominally not present. But Pam caught it a couple weeks ago; we are taking a prophylactic
Sidewalks—sand	Sidewalks—clay, very muddy and slippery when wet
Lawns—mowed by mowers I kept working	Lawns—mainly neglected, on rare occasions cut with shears or sickle
Countryside around partially cultivated. Lots of natural savannah bush	Countryside around intensively cultivated, especially near the national road. No natural rain forest left.
Majority of faculty were expatriate missionaries	Majority of faculty are Malagasy
Weather was very dry and never got much above 80° (27°C) or below 60°(13° C) all year round, even in the rainy seasons	Weather never gets much above 80° (27°C), and right now the humidity stays very close to 100%. In the winter time they can have frost.
I wore sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt all year round	I wear socks and shoes, long sleeves, long pants, and an undershirt every day in summer
There were no toilets in any of the classrooms or dining room.	There are toilets in the buildings. They are not labeled by gender
When you arrive at someone’s home you call “Hodi!”	When you arrive at someone’s home, you call “Oidia!”
People go to bed early and arise early. It does not make them wealthy.	People go to bed early and arise early. It does not make them wealthy.

With regard to the toilets in buildings, the other day I needed to use the toilet. I walked down the hall in the Technology Building. The toilets are on opposite sides of the west end of the hallway. The doors to the restrooms always stand wide open. The one on the left has a urinal right next to a sink with no privacy panel. I had figured that no one would use it because of its exposure to the hallway. My carefully applied deductive reasoning was based on the false premise that Malagasies have some shame or longing for privacy in a toilet. Here was a guy using the urinal and ignoring all passersby. There are several stalls as well, which I chose to use!

Pam has loaned us an external hard drive with a bunch of movies that her sister and a couple other people have recorded. So far we have watched:

v  Freedom Writing:  a dramatization of the experience of a young English teacher in Woodrow Wilson High School during and after the Rodney King beating trial in 1994

v  Summer Holiday: a fictional adventure of four young men who borrow a London double-decker bus and drive it to Greece picking up four young women en route

v  Journey to the Center of the Earth: A modern take-off of an old Jules Verne novel of the same name. Fun but highly unrealistic

v  Cairo Time: A woman comes to Cairo to meet her husband who is on a U.N. assignment in the Middle East. They don’t get together until the end of the movie

v  The Philadelphia Experiment: a WW II experiment to make a battle ship undetectable by radar causes serious spatial disruption and inadvertent time travel

v  Santa Paws 2: a kid’s movie trying to put the materialism back into Christmas by making it more humanistic. Mrs. Santa saves the day

v  Grown Ups: a spoof on the Peter Pan idea that some men don’t want to grow up. Their wives, of course, have a hard time with it

v  Prince of Egypt: a Hollywood version of Moses from bulrushes to the Red Sea. We watched this before showing it to Pam’s class.

The second week in January was one of a plague of June bugs and mosquitoes. I keep the light on over the front door. Each morning there would be a carpet of bugs on the front porch. Scores of mosquitoes would also be dead alongside the bugs. Scores more would be sitting on the walls, doorway, and window waiting for me to open the door so they could fly in. Scores more of these mosquitoes would find ways to squeeze under the front door or through the cracks in the louvered kitchen window. It is the only window in the house that is not screened in. We killed as many as we could. One night they got so bad that Sylvia sprayed the kitchen and living room with the bug spray she had thoughtfully packed in her suitcase. I spent a half hour the next morning just cleaning up and disposing of their carcasses. In deference to the Sabbath commandment, none (zero, zilch) of them were in evidence anywhere inside or outside the house on Sabbath morning. They were back on Sunday morning but in greatly diminished quantities.

Neither Sylvia nor I were bitten by the mosquitoes, although they would buzz in our ears if we let them get that close. Thank God that none of the mosquitoes were anopheles, the kind that carries malaria. Look them up on the Internet. We’ve almost forgotten how handy the Internet is when it is available all the time. We only have Internet when we are down at school. It took me three days of trying to upload Sojourn 6. On the other hand, we have had fairly good success using our Republic Wireless phones on Internet mode to call people in the U.S. That has been a real treat.

Our home is equipped roughly like homes were in the 1930s except that we do have an old, small electric fridge with all its inner workings exposed.

On Monday, January 11, I gave my talk Numerology and the Hebrew Mind for chapel. See http://faculty.lasierra.edu/~wclarke/nhmx.pdf  It was one, with several modifications, that I gave at a Science and Spirituality Conference at Andrews University some years back. I was asked to speak on Thursday evening. Friday I was lucky, after several hours of trying, to download a copy of the speech. I was concerned that it wouldn’t be understood, even though there is no math in there except adding numbers up to get 666. English is a rather distant third language for most of these students. There was substantial talking amongst the students. But they did laugh when I made jokes and respond at some surprising things I told them. So a fair number must have been following.

On the way home Monday evening, we stopped and picked up some groceries we had ordered through Pam. We got mangos, personal size papayas, bananas, tomatoes, plums, carrots, leeks, and one or two other vegetables for 10,000Ar (about $3.00). This was a special order because it went through with the cafeteria’s order which is in bulk. The same usually costs us closer to 30,000 Ar (closer to $10) for the same amount. If I had gone to the market myself rather than having a Malagasy do the shopping for me it would have cost closer to 100,000Ar. So it doesn’t pay for me to go to the market!

This is a spiritually oriented campus. We pray at the beginning and end of each class. Students want to sing at the beginning of each class and do so in many classes. 

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 6 - Into the Rut

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 6

Into the Rut

New Year’s Day dawned under a heavily overcast sky. I walked down to the library to see if I could use their Internet. The previous evening I had gone to the Faculty Lounge and had gotten an error message on my U.S. phone that I had never seen before, “No voice, message and data on this plan—Do you want to change plans?” Well, I didn’t want to change plans. Thinking that it might be the Internet, I went to the Library first. There was no WiFi.

UAZ Library

The Library is about a kilometer (6 city blocks) from the house, whereas the Faculty Lounge is almost exactly 200 m (about 1 city block). Furthermore, I walked right past the Faculty Lounge to get to the Library. I walked back to the Faculty Lounge and behold there was beautiful WiFi. This was New Year’s so none of these places were open, of course. I stood outside the Faculty Lounge and called Elwood, Fred, and Jason. They could hear me fine, but I couldn’t hear them. Then I called, Julia, Esther, Jan, Jud, and Elvina, and their calls were crystal clear. My phone had also forgotten that it wished me to change plans.

By this time the sky had cleared up, and a good tropical sun was smiling down on us. After our Christmas experience I knew we would have to pay for the beautiful sky! For starters there was no hot water. They had installed a hot water heater--when it became too embarrassing not to. Nonetheless, my spirits were high as I walked back to the flat.

With the sun so beautiful against a deep blue sky, I suggested to Sylvia that we walk around campus and take some pictures of the university and the gorgeous wild flowers that spring uncultivated all over. We ate breakfast and hung clothes on the line after having washed them the day before.

Fools, we should have acted on that impulse. The clouds rolled in about the time we wanted to start our photo tour. They unceremoniously but quite spectacularly dumped a half inch (12 mm) of rain in 10 minutes. Then it rained on and off for the rest of the day. It was cold and dismal. So the spirits that had soared aloft under the blue sky crashed abruptly, all on the first day of the year.

Sylvia discovered that she had lost both her American and Madagascar phones. She had lost her American phone somewhere on campus the day before and her Mada phone the next morning. We prayed about it. Then we phoned the latter and found it lying in plain sight charging in the bedroom. We couldn’t do that on the yellow phone. We walked up and down campus looking for it and asking people if they had seen it. The next morning she found her yellow phone on the floor next to the bed. Undoubtedly it had been in the bedclothes for almost 36 hours. She had made the bed, and it didn’t fall out the first morning either.

Monday the 4^th we started our teaching duties in earnest. I met with two classes first thing in the morning. Sylvia conducted worship for the language department staff and faculty at 7:30 that morning. I had been asked to talk about my New Year’s Resolutions as a part of the chapel service at 11:00. I told the students that I considered them to be special and to have a brighter than usual future. After all, they are trilingual and in university whereas most of the country would never get a college education. They had an excellent chance to marry someone who is also educated. They were Christian with a hope of life eternal. They seemed to receive the talk well.

A typical day goes something like this.

5:30 I get up, take a warm shower, and often eat breakfast before Sylvia gets up.

7:30 Mon, Tues, and Thurs there is faculty/staff worship. Sylvia makes about half of these.

8:00 Three mornings a week I’m scheduled to teach. In January the nursing students are out in the hospitals doing an internship. In February I will teach them from 8:00 to 5:00 on Wednesdays. I expect to be really worn out that day.

For the last two weeks I have spent upwards of two hours a day wrestling with the Internet—or more accurately, with the lack of Internet.

12:00 we eat in the cafeteria about half of the weekdays. Lunch is a paltry $1.00 each. It consists of a tray with 6 impressions. The large center one holds the rice that is placed there by filling a large soup bowl with rice and then inverting it on the tray. In three or more of the other impressions there is a protein, a vegetable, and a salad. Otherwise Sylvia cooks for us. Sylvia tends to be the chief cook and I the dishwasher.

Cafeteria is the last door on the left. The Faculty Lounge is the second door from the right.

Sylvia teaches two more advanced classes for six units a week and one remedial conversation for an additional one unit/hour. This means she has a lot of papers to grade. My classes, 8 units right now and 13 units next month, are conversational. I give them a simple quiz which takes only a minimal amount of marking. Both she and I have spent a considerable amount of time in class preparation.

In order to get Internet, we have to go to the Faculty Lounge or the Library. At the Library we are competing for bandwidth with a lot of students, so we normally go to the Faculty Lounge. Furthermore, the Library is a half mile (0.8) farther away. On the average we have 3 or 4 power outages a day, at least during the rainy season. Also the Internet connection is flaky at best. Last week Thursday I spent the whole day in the Faculty Lounge, and the only thing I got for my time was a huge chunk of frustration. So both Sylvia and I spend a lot of time doing essentials that a straight forward Internet would do in a couple of seconds.

6:00 We normally have supper at six, although this can vary a lot.

10:00 Goal for retiring for the night.

Our first 10 days in Mada we had rain every day. We hardly ever saw the sun. On Christmas Day we had beautiful sunshine in the early morning but rain the rest of the day. Finally, during the first full week of 2016, we had several days when it didn’t rain. We had two glorious evenings when the Milky Way stretched across the sky, and the two Magellanic clouds were bright. They’re two island galaxies that are associated with the Milk Way. Canopus, a first magnitude star, caught my attention in the Milky way right overhead, and the collection of brilliant stars connected with the Southern Cross were just rising in the low south-eastern sky. Those two evenings have not been repeated since.

Southern Cross and the Magellanic Clouds[i]

On several mornings I have gone outside about 4:30 and seen the magnificent pageant of the planets: Jupiter high in the sky still close to Leo; Mars racing past Spica on its mission to tangle with Antares (in Greek Mars was called Ares); and currently Venus and Saturn make a nice trio with Antares in Scorpio. It would be great to see Mercury to finish out the classical planets all in one quadrant of the sky, but that would be asking too much of the Madagascan sky in the midst of the rainy season. Clouds always form a ring around the horizon.

In the conversation class for first year English/Communication majors, I gave them a quiz the first week:

1. Write your name clearly so that I can read it.

2. Draw a picture of your left palm.

3. Do you want to fail this class?

Nine answered “no” to the last question, five answered “yes”. I repeated the last question several times. This means that over one-third of the class either have a death wish or do not understand English. They theoretically have had at least 4 years of English instruction in high school.

Sylvia gave the same quiz to one of her classes, and one student complained that since he was left handed he couldn’t do question two! [Editor’s note: For this class, I asked the 3^rd question in the negative: “You don’t want to fail this class, do you?” and all of them answered correctly with a “no”. Here they are sometimes confused by how the question is asked. I tell them to answer the FACT, not just the question as worded.]

I tried to use a data projector in class. These are stored in the registrar’s office. The one I borrowed gave a beautiful picture, but the volume was so low only the kids in the front row of the class could hear it. After class I borrowed a second, older projector that allegedly has good sound. However, there was no sound cable, and I didn’t bring one. Its picture was much poorer than that of the first projector. I think my students are destined to not watch a movie in my classes.

Pam has loaned me a small loud speaker. I used it this week and played Esther reading Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink. I had to stop it after every two or three sentences to explain what the English meant in the sentences. It’s a kid’s book, and it is the audio book with the most basic English I have along. This way they hear two people’s pronunciation. Esther, our daughter, reads with very clear diction and excellent expression.

Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink[ii]

I have given every student an assignment to speak for one minute in class next week about something they really love to do. I gave them an example by talking about climbing in Joshua Tree N.P. I’m really curious to see how well they do. Here’s where their years of English should pay off.

As I was leaving the Faculty Lounge after another frustrating session with a very reluctant Internet, a tall young man caught up with me. Most Malagasies are several inches shorter than I; Romain was about as tall as I was. He asked if he could talk with me. I said, “Sure, walk along with me as I go to turn in the key to the Faculty Lounge.”

“No!” he implored, “I am busy teaching math in that room.” He pointed to the room next to Faculty Lounge. I knew there were high school students in the room because they were all in uniform. I stopped.

“I understand you know mathematics?” he queried.

“I taught it for over fifty years.” Word gets around.

Romain went on to explain that he has a degree in Agricultural Engineering and an MA in Agronomics. He is presently studying theology at U. A. Z. and teaching math for the academy here. He mentioned that he had very little math and has a number of questions on several different topics that he doesn’t really understand. He wanted to run these questions by me.

We set up a time for next Tuesday as starters.

On Friday,15 January, while I was sitting and writing on this document--and more or less fluently cussing the deplorable state of the Internet, two students timidly stuck their heads in the door and asked if they could speak with me. Since this room is for faculty, students are not welcome there. Since I was the only person in the room, I invited them in. They were Meola and Denis and are in one of my classes and also in one of Sylvia’s classes. So instead of cussing the slowness of the Internet, I gave them somewhere between a half hour and an hour to practice their English. They wanted to know how to improve their knowledge of English. That’s why we came to Madagascar in the first place.

I encouraged them to get hold of a recent translation of the Bible in English, then sit down with it and their Malagasy Bible next to each other and read the English Bible, consulting with the Malagasy text only when they didn’t understand. I have used that technique successfully in learning several different languages including, German, Dutch, Swahili, and Spanish. It backfired with Dutch because I got hold of a Dutch translation of the same vintage as the King James Bible, and Dutch has also changed a lot since the 17^th century! When Elwood and I spent 5 days in Holland, I caught on to my mistake very quickly.

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[i] https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2823/12643022353_4635c84221_b.jpg

[ii] http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1178941045l/857961.jpg

Communion or Controversy

John 2: 9-10

The Message

 When the host tasted the water that had become wine (he didn’t know what had happened but the servants, of course, knew), he called out to the bridegroom, “Everybody I know begins with their finest wines and after the guests have had their fill brings in the cheap stuff. But you’ve saved the best until now.”

[i]

Every time I read this verse it brings up not the fact that Christ’s first miracle was simply to remove the embarrassment of running out of wine at a weeklong feast, thus saving face for a family friend and honoring his mother but rather the Adventist controversy over what happened.

When I was in college at Helderberg, a group of boys went into the vineyard of “the Prince” and stole a pillow case full of grapes. We carried this back into the dorm and placed the pillowcase in a tub. Vic took his shoes off, washed his feet, and trod out the juice. Each of us took a gallon glass jug and filled it with the juice. (Vic never got the stains out of that pillow case.)

I screwed the lid down tight and put my jug up in the top of my wardrobe. About five days later I took down the jug, and several of us savored the wine. It was really good, had a nice kick to it. We drank about half of the wine. I resealed the jug, put it back on the shelf, and forgot it for a few days.

One day Ian, a floor prefect, said to me, “Clarke, your room smells like a winery. You’d better do something about it before you get in trouble.” All alcoholic drinks are banned by the church and, since Helderberg is a parochial college, were banned on campus.

I opened the wardrobe door and looked at the jug. It was empty, completely empty. I grabbed it by the ear of the bottle and took it down. The bottom of the jug had broken out neatly in a perfect circle and remained on the shelf. The wine had run down between the boards of the shelf and soaked my one and only suit. I never did get the stains out of the suit either.

At the time I was sorely disappointed over the loss of a good drink. Since then, my friends and I have always had a good laugh at my troubles.

Adventists have debated whether the wine Christ made at the wedding feast and the Passover wine that was served at the Last Supper were unfermented or fermented wine. Ever since I saw how quickly my grape juice turned into wine, I have leaned towards thinking of the “finest wine” as being fermented. This doesn’t mean that I keep wine in my house, however.

Lord, please keep us from losing the magnificent blessings of Christ’s miracles by mundane debates over particulars.

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[i] http://mattstone.blogs.com/photos/christian_art_symbols/communion-wine.jpg

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 05 - Year End

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 5

Year End

While we were at Domaine Saint Francois (DSF), we asked the manager, Fanja, Parany’s sister, what the purpose of the institute is. A large poster explaining their operations hung on the wall, but all of the writing on it was in Malagasy which is still as mysterious as ever to me. DSF is financed mainly by lay people in France. It takes 20 destitute families in Tana each year into the institute. They test them for eligibility and aptitude. As soon as they are admitted into the program, then both parents must work full time for DSF for a year. During this time they are intensively trained with classes for parents and schooling for the children.

DSF Mission

The second year these families learn and practice farming on the DSF campus. If they pass these two years, they are provided with a brand new home in a remote area about 200 km (125 miles) west of Tana. They are financially set up for farming and housekeeping for the full year. They can use the proceeds of this third year to finance themselves for subsequent years. The Catholic Church gains 20 new self-supporting families in a region that is semi arid and has no one living in it. The families develop a loyalty to the church and have the drive and capability for independence, living on their own and becoming responsible members of the community.

DSF has very nice rooms that they rent out to people like us to help raise funds for their program. Fanja thanked us personally for our support for their program. She is 10 years older than Parany. I guess she is in her forties. The institute has a small dairy where the cows are still milked by hand. They have a model garden with a variety of vegetables and fruit and not a weed. Lovely warblers and some flashy red birds graced the garden.

We were told when we checked in at DSF that there was an American woman from California who was staying there. She was quite sick and hadn’t eaten anything for several days. I wondered if that were a tummy bug that she got as a result of eating the food served at DSF. When we got to supper, our first meal in the institute’s dining room, she showed up and sat at a nearby table. We invited her over to sit with us, and she complied weakly.

She looked to be in her sixties and rather frail. They brought her a salad plate before they brought any of our food. I suggested that we could pause in the conversation if she wanted to say grace. She demurred by saying lightly,” Oh it’s all right. I’m sure he understands,” and she pointed vaguely upwards.

She had flown down to Toliara, a coastal city south west of Tana. There she had spent a few days then joined a tour that was coming back to Tana over land. The group spoke about a certain mountain that was very interesting, and she joined the group to tour it. When the group started up the slopes of the mountain, she went along. Apparently the group didn’t speak English, so there was a major lack in communication. She said, “If I had known they were going to the top, I wouldn’t have gone!”

However, as they climbed higher and higher, she said she felt as though she was going to die. Finally she made it to the top with them. From the symptoms she described, I’m sure she was suffering from heat stroke. Her symptoms sounded very like mine did when I had a stroke as a teenager from working all day in the tropical sun outside of Bulawayo in the tropics in what is now Zimbabwe.

We eventually introduced ourselves. She told us that she is Dr. Diana Prince, with emphasis on the Dr., from San Diego. She has published a number of books and is working on a travel book, Adventure on Planet Earth. She toured much of Southern Africa a while back and now is working on her last two chapters on this trip—Namibia and Mada. She planned to fly out of Tana for home before the new year.

While we were talking about everything, our food arrived. The other eight of us at the table stopped for grace before starting to eat. She then apologized for not praying, but it was obvious that it was not her custom. From her conversation I concluded that at best she is a skeptic.

At one point I mentioned that something we had seen was so old it must have come out of Noah’s Ark. Her eyes lit up, and she told us that four years ago she had published, through Amazon, a book called A View from the Ark. In it she reports on a find on a mountain called something like Chudy or Judy in Turkey about 2 miles (3 km) from the Iranian border. A structure has been pushed up partially out of the ground that has the exact measurements of Noah’s Ark in Genesis. Some device something like an ultrasound has revealed compartments in the structure. The mountain is within sight of Ararat so fits the Genesis account well. She has written another book on Mary Magdalene which follows her travels including her sojourn in a cave in France. I think she says she has published about 12 books.

We saw Diana at breakfast the next morning. The food and sleep seemed to have revived her considerably. I may have to revise my estimate of her age downward to upper 50s or close to 60. I asked her if she had family that she notified about her being so ill. She indicated that she has friends who were shocked about where she went. I took it that she is single and may have been single all her life.

I had told the group about my experience on a two-night-three-day bus ride from Ikizu to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in about 1967. The bus stopped away out in the plains so that people could get out and take care of their biological needs. The group all filed out and formed a large circle on the open plain and relieved themselves. I was too self conscious or too proud to do so. A couple hours later I need to go so badly I was almost blowing bubbles. When the bus finally stopped at another barren spot like this, I joined the circle! I asked them why they stopped in such an open area where there was nothing to provide privacy. They were afraid of snakes and lions. In an open area they didn’t have to worry about these dangers. Privacy is highly overrated anyway. After I told him this, Gideon called stopping in the bush to relieve ourselves “going to Tanzania.”

On our way back from Andasibe National Park, we took things a little easier. We stopped at a couple of the falls and took some pictures and “visited Tanzania”. Some of these beautiful spots were on a steep climb from about 3,340 to 5,570 feet in altitude according to my watch, which measures altitude by sensing barometric pressure. It is seldom accurate about the altitude of a spot unless it has been recently set. It is, however, reasonably accurate when measuring the change in altitude. So the road went up some 2,240 feet (680 m).

While we were eating breakfast in the Parany’s unit at the Hotel Le Guayave, their five year old Valerie sat next to me. She is a sweet little girl who speaks a fair amount of English and is both well trained and well behaved. She sat looking wonderingly at my naked forearm. Finally she looked into my face and saw that I was amused by her interest. I nodded approval, and she gently touched the hair on my arm. Satisfied, she removed her hand and continued eating. Here the people’s arms are hairless as if they had been waxed. Mine, on the other hand, are closely akin to those of Esau. Obviously in their eyes I am proof positive that at least my race descended from apes.

On our way home from Andasibe, just before entering the terribly narrow streets of Manjakandriana, we turned south on an unmarked dirt road that leads to Mantesoa, the site of a large man-made lake created to help in the generation of electricity. It was built in the 1930s and called the Reservoir de Mantasoa. An English couple who used to work for the Scripture Union, an international missionary organization, has lived there for 21 years now. They are Martin and Mary Barb (spelling?). He has built a large campus for the Scripture Union. On the other side of one arm of the lake he has built several lovely rooms with space to house various conventions or for people to rent for rest and relaxation. His buildings are very carefully built to his exacting standards and completely finished, unlike anything at UAZ or other places we have stayed in Madagascar. They are built almost exclusively of local material so are not very expensive.

Main Building on Scripture Union Campus. Martin at the door

Mary has set up a factory staffed with the local people who produce handicrafts, also to exacting standards, like homemade shopping bags which she ships to England where they are sold in the better class of shops for very good prices. Martin says they have twice yearly furloughs back to visit their relatives in England. This has, I’m sure, benefited their finding ways to market their handicrafts and earn hard currency.

Vadette in Mary’s factory

Peter and Vadette Delhove run ADRA (Adventist Development and Relief Agency) in Madagascar. He and his wife were staying in one of the “homes” Martin has built right at the edge of the high water mark of the reservoir. The water level was way down because of a severe drought they have had over the past couple years. Peter remarked that the water had come up several meters in the last couple days, so I think the rains are helping solve their problem. Delhoves find it very restful to take the two hour drive out from Tana and spend a weekend there. Peter claims he does it in an hour. It took LaLane almost an hour to drive from the Scripture Union campus back to the tar road. LaLane handles the nasty traffic in Tana much better than he handles rough dirt roads.

Martin’s latest “Home” L to R: Peter, Gideon, Pam, Sylvia’s back, Vadette

We stopped short of DSF, and Harimalala got 3 pizzas—two “grand” size vegetarian and one personal size with meat for LaLane. He was very happy. That evening we ate back in the DSF dining room. They made us boiled potatoes and a quiche. Harimalala had suspected that that wouldn’t be enough, so she purchased the Pizzas to supplement dinner. The dessert was pineapple slices as it had been two nights previously.

I got up about 5:30 Wednesday morning (December 30) and sat out in their outdoor dining area and wrote in my journal for about two hours. Breakfast was the same white bread, “chocolate” croissants (a big croissant with a minute dab of chocolate inside somewhere) and tea. This time, at our request, they brought Sylvia and me a couple eggs each.

After breakfast we packed up and were on the road by 9:30. Gideon phoned Mr. Manda, who lives in Tana, and found out a route that he reported was clear of traffic. We took it, but by the time we got there, it was stopped dead with traffic. It took us 3 hours to do 17 km. (10 miles)! At one intersection it took us ten minutes just to move one car length. I timed it. We bought a bunch of groceries at Shop Rite.

We sat at this intersection for about a half hour

Pam had been feeling quite sick for the previous two days and was feeling even worse by Wednesday. At the Seventh-day Adventist Indian Ocean Union Mission they have a medical clinic that is open 24/7 to help locals as well as workers and missionaries. This is where they have promised to take us if we get sick. We got there about 2:30 and found the place closed for the year and locked. I’m praying that we don’t get sick! Apparently the doctor on duty wanted to do some shopping before New Year’s Eve and simply went AWOL as did his whole staff! So much for 24/7! Pam went into the nearby dental clinic and found Hanitra who joined us in the car and guided us through a maze of streets to a Doctor Etienne (Steve in English). He felt Pam for a fever, chatted for 20 minutes or so, gave her a malaria shot, 4 more vials to be given at home over the next two days, an antibiotic, and some ibuprofen pills to keep the fever down. Pam was sure this had been a misdiagnosis because “there is no malaria at UAZ.” However, she started to feel much better by the next day. She figures she may have gotten it when they stayed overnight at the ADRA compound the time they picked us up at the airport. We’re taking our anti-malaria medicine faithfully!

Indian Ocean Union Mission Headquarters

Adventist Medical Clinic

Here people greet friends they haven’t seen for a while by leaning in towards each other and touching right cheek to right cheek, then they touch left cheeks, and finally touch right cheeks again. It is done with either sex and at times with people whom they have only recently met. I don’t know enough about when it is done it initiate myself.

On our way out of Tana we stopped at Jumbo Scores. It is a large department store something like Walmart or Target. There is one in Antsirabe, but it is much smaller, rather like the two other grocery stores in town. Sylvia had brought her electric curling iron from the States. When she plugged it in to the standard 220v, without thinking, there were a lot of popping noises. This brought her to her senses, and she unplugged it immediately. I don’t know whether she has ruined it or not. My guess is that the 110v she brought with her is no longer worth carrying back to the States to see if it works. Anyway, we found another one at Jumbo.

We left Tana in the hot late afternoon sunshine but quickly ran into heavy rain. The valleys that are carefully bisected into hundreds of rice paddies that are carefully supplied with enough water to keep about 6 inches of water in them while the rice grows were covered who knows how deep with the yellow-red water that had rushed off the surrounding hills in floods. The rivers came up almost to the bottom of the bridges. I felt really badly for the thousands of peasants who plant the rice as their only income for the year. They use a hand cultivating device that is a six or seven foot long steel rod with a handle at one end and two multiple star wheels, each placed one foot and two feet (30 and 60 cm) respectively from the other end. They run this up and down between the rows. Of course with everything flooded like it was, cultivation is also impossible. Fortunately the rivers went down as suddenly as they had come up. As I write this, two weeks later, we are again getting a lot of rain, so they may rise again.

Rice paddies from the road

We arrived home close to 7:30 p.m. in the dark. Short of a few chips and a couple pieces of broken bread, I ate nothing other than the white bread breakfast for the day. Much of the day had been spent in the terrible Tana traffic—no traffic lights and few if any traffic police.

#UAZ, #MADAGASCAR, #ANTANANARIVO, #SAINTFRANCOIS, #ZURCHERUNIV, #TRAFFIC, #RICEPADDY, #FLOOD, #TOLIARA, #NOAHFLOOD, #SCRIPTUREUNION, #ADRA, #MALARIA