Sojourn to Madagascar Part 8 Midterm
UAZ Church
We arrived in Madagascar on December 17, 2015. So Sabbath,
January 30, will be our 45th 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 23rd 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 18th 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
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