Sylvia's Notes From Madagascar 2 - February

Notes from Madagascar: 2

February 19, 2016

            Today is a milestone birthday for our youngest—Fred.  This evening I enjoyed a short visit with him via cell phone—just as he was taking off for a day of skiing in the mountains, assuming the hot weather at home hasn’t diminished the snow there in the meantime.  It is rewarding just to know that he is taking time to do something like that on his special day.

            Meantime I heard from daughter Julia that she and David and her sister, Esther, with husband Craig plan to celebrate with Fred on Sunday.  They will take food for a potluck lunch and play games at Fred’s place (his choice).  Wil and I plan to stay up a little late Sunday night so we can Skype all our children during their time together there.  That will be a real treat!!

            Today we had our own adventure.  Yesterday we spent going to Tana and taking in some of the attractions there.  It was well after 9:30 when we got back to the University and our flat (home here).  I may tell what we did later, but now about today’s events . . .

            Yesterday and today two teams of Zurcher University students participated in a drama competition held in Antsirabe, 35 kilometers south of campus.  The theme this year was “Protecting the Environment,” and each entry was to be an original script acted out by students from the school where it was written.  I heard of this competition the same day that the Language Department put on an original play (in English) for chapel.  Based on some things I heard in that drama, I asked the department chair if I could edit the scripts to be used for the contest.  I just wanted to be sure there were no grammatical or usage errors.  She welcomed my help.

            Well, just last week I finally had a chance to edit three scripts.  Some of our students were acting in these, so Wil and I accepted Pam’s invitation to go with her to the contest so we could show support for our students.  We left soon after 11 a.m. and found the University bus waiting for one last person—Elisha, the student who was director for most of what they were to do once they got to town.

Pam backed up and drove to the house where he stays, and he squeezed into the back seat with two female students and me.  Then we headed south toward town.  Meantime one of the students used my phone to call the bus driver and ask him to wait so Elisha could get on the bus.  We caught up with the bus several kilometers down the road and gave up our extra passenger.

About half way to town, Wil noticed that the heat gauge was at the top—in the red area—and called Pam’s attention to that fact.  Pam pulled the car off the road and moaned, “Why does this always happen when I’m driving?”  The air conditioner had been on full blast, but she had turned that off before we stopped.  Soon, as Wil lifted the hood (bonnet) of the car, we saw the steam rising from the radiator.  The students went to ask for some water at a nearby house, and the lady there graciously helped us with a small bucket full. 

Meanwhile, Pam drank the remaining water in her water bottle, and I dug out the empty two liter bottle I had left in the vehicle the night before.  We filled one bottle from the bucket, and the girls went back for more water.  This time the woman gave them a larger pail and an enamel mug to dip the water with so we could fill the bottles.  Soon we had two bottles full and ready to use once the engine had cooled enough.  As you can imagine, we had a few onlookers by this time, interested in what was going on.  

Waiting for our Engine to Cool

A man in a green SUV stopped by the car and asked what the matter was.  The girls recognized him as one of the people who had been at the drama competition the day before, so Pam asked if they could ride with him since they were to be in the competition, too.  Just then three young boys walked by, each with a slender bamboo pole that Pam realized could be used as fishing poles in one of the dramas to be performed.  So she had the students negotiate to buy two from them. The girls took them and the few props that were with them, got into the green SUV, and rode on into town.

After a while, Wil could start pouring water into the reservoir and watch it bubble and boil out.  When the temperature gauge showed normal, Wil and I got back in the car, and we turned around and headed toward home.  It was too late—and too risky, Pam decided, to try to go on.  The gauge stayed in the good zone only a couple of kilometers, and then it jumped into the red zone.  So we stopped on the side of the road and waited for the engine to cool.

We did this several times, only getting a kilometer or so each time before we had to stop again.  It was 12:30 when we turned around, and Pam was getting hungry.  Fortunately, a boy with a basket full of good looking pears came by and persuaded Pam to buy them.  I was willing to try one, so Wil chose the ripest one he could find and handed it to me and then gave me his knife.  I shared a piece or two with each to stave off our hunger.  Then we drove one or two kilometers before the car got too hot again.

In one place, Pam and I left Wil to write in his journal and look after the car while we took a walk.  We went past a newly planted citrus grove, a plot of small apple trees, an older garden of orange trees, some with flowers and a few bearing fruit, and plots of lemon balm and other plants—quite a variety.  All this appeared to belong to the establishment on the other side of a small valley with ponds of water and rice fields in it.

We saw a couple of large warehouses, a two story concrete building under construction farther in, and in a grove of trees, several red brick houses or other buildings.  We climbed some large earthen steps planted with field rice and at the top came upon two graves, not built in the traditional way, so we began to guess that this was part of a Christian mission.  Beyond the graveyard, a row of new buildings stood, and in the fields beyond quite a number of workers planted, cultivated, or worked on the irrigation ditches around the newly planted fields.  Pam and I each have reddened areas on our skin from being out during the middle of the day.

Back at the car we took another little hop toward home.  Eventually, the bus from the University stopped behind us on its way from town to take the shoppers home that had gone to Antsirabe early in the morning.  Soon the school GMC truck also stopped.  They hotwired the fan to run all the time, and Wil poured more water in the radiator reservoir.  I hopped on the bus, the truck driver promised to stay behind Pam as she drove slowly the rest of the way, and Wil rode along with her.  I didn’t have a key to our house, but before the bus got to the top of the campus, Pam and Wil drove past us.  That was our adventure.  [All’s well that ends well!]