Christmas Letter

Christmas 2016

Last year Christmas day found us in Madagascar. Our very dear friends Pam and Gideon Peteresen invited us to climb the mountains to the east of the Zurcher Adventist University (UAZ) campus. We had a student along since none of us speak Malagasy so he could translate for us. We crossed the highway and walked down into the valley where we crossed a very angry looking river on a couple narrow logs.

Sylvia Crossing the River on Logs

Then we hiked along a narrow mud ridge separating two rice paddies. We passed several homes and some communal graves. We climbed the steep slopes of the mountain until we finally came to a grass covered meadow that sloped fairly steeply back towards UAZ.

Wil in Front of Our Flat at UAZ

While eating our delicious lunch we idly watched a tropical thunder storm pouring rain on the UAZ campus then realized that it was coming directly towards us.  However there was nothing we could do to escape its path. In due course we were soaked to the skin. The trails were all on red clay, which now became extremely slippery, and our shoes built up great layers of clay.

At the University Gate

We spent three months at UAZ as English teachers to the freshman and sophomore students. We also toured a rain forest and a dry forest, both of which sported several Lemur species.

Ruffed Lemur

In many ways our stay in Madagascar reminded us of our 5 year stay in Tanzania way back in the late 1960s. If you wish to read more about our experiences in Madagascar, please see the Sojourn to Madagascar entries in December 2015 and January to March 2016 blogs at http://wils-thoughts.blogspot.com.

Two Ring-Tailed Lemur Babies Riding Piggy-Back

We found the people to be very friendly and helpful. The 150,000 Adventists in Madagascar are quite conservative and often spend all day Sabbath at their churches. UAZ is serving an essential role in providing leaders for the church and its missions in the Indian Ocean and increasingly to the Francophone portion of worldwide Adventism. It was a great privilege to have a brief chance to help their program. If you are interested in volunteering in Madagascar, contact Pam Petersen at headinghomesoon@gmail.com

One of Several Churchs Founded by UAZ Students

Allée des Baobabs in Madagascar at Sunset

Returning From the Trip to See the Baobabs and Lemurs With the Bairagees

On our way home from Madagascar we spent 17 days in and around Cape Town, South Africa. We spent most of the time with long time friends. We toured Butterfly World on our way to climb Paarl Rock. Joy didn’t feel up to climbing, but then, spurred on by our example, she and Rodney joined us at the top where we had a grand panoramic, if smoggy, view of the Western Cape including Helderberg Mountain and Table Mountain.

Rodney & Joy with Sylvia on Paarl Rock

Joy and Rodney are Pam’s parents. On Sabbath Lincoln, Rosemary, and Gwen hosted a potluck with his Sabbath School class. Many of the members are our friends, so it was a great reunion.

African Penguins

The first part of the next week we tried to visit Cape Point but picked a holiday to do it, and half of Cape Town was also trying to get there, so we watched kiteboarding at the Cape’s most popular beach instead. We also stopped at a breeding colony of African penguins. They were called jackass penguins when I was a kid because their call sounds like the braying of a donkey.

With Rodney & Joy in Kirstenbosch Gardens

We reveled in the beauty of Kirstenbosch Gardens that specializes in the beautiful and rich Cape flora. Heather took us out to a posh resort in Arniston where we were able to tour Cape Agulhas and the area surrounding the southernmost tip of Africa.

With Heather at Arniston

The next Sabbath Gideon had invited us to his mother’s home in Ottery, a suburb of Cape Town. Gideon and Pam had come from Madagascar especially to see his mother since she was very sick with cancer. The whole Petersen family showed up, and we had more excellent food than we could eat. We toured Cape Town in the afternoon with Pam and Gideon.

Lincoln and Rosemary took us around to their special sites during our last three days. We drove through four beautiful mountain passes and stopped for lunch at Gideon’s Famous Franschhoek Pancake House, not to be confused with the Gideon in previous paragraphs. We also got to pet alpacas and llamas. Now it’s your turn to figure out what the difference between them is.

With Lincoln & Rosemary Feeding Alpacas

Against my better judgment, I allowed myself to be elected the president of the Fellowship of Adventist Missionaries to Africa (FAMA) at the meeting held in 2014 at La Sierra University. Just before we went to Madagascar, our very capable editor passed away. So in Madagascar I spent a lot of time and energy trying to get the FAMA address list. Then I sent out several Newsletters mainly to apprise our members of our next meeting in Fletcher, NC.

We left home on May 17 to drive to the FAMA get together which started on June 2. We headed towards Indianapolis and then south to Tennessee and eventually our niece’s home in Roanoke, Virginia. En route we got to visit relatives and very good friends. When we didn’t overnight with people we knew, we “camped” in Walmart parking lots. We were driving our F-150 pickup with a cap on the back that covers our bed. We suffered from some very cold nights as well as some extremely hot nights in these parking lots.

FAMA Meeting in Fletcher NC 2016

Thanks to excellent help from many sources, our FAMA meetings were very spiritually rewarding and allowed us to form new friendships as well as renew many old ones. The meetings lasted from Thursday night until Sunday morning, the first weekend of June. When we left there we drove south from Fletcher and paid a very brief visit to new FAMA Newsletter editor, Lorna. She is proving an excellent editor with lots of new ideas and artistic talent.

We continued south to Orlando, Florida. In April we had spent a weekend with a group that facilitates Bible translations in many parts of the world where the Bible is still not available to people in their mother tongues. We stopped at Wycliffe to see firsthand what was happening. Wycliffe Associates has pioneered a radical new translation technique that relies on native speakers of these languages. The average time for translating a Bible has been around 25 years per language and is very expensive. The old technique is too expensive because translators must be supported by others all this time.

 The new technique produces a very passable gospel of Mark in the target language in about two weeks. It uses a computer printer to produce a copy that is passed out to Christians who speak the target language. These critique it and then encourage and support their translators who, with due diligence, can turn out the New Testament in less than a year and the whole Bible in two years. Since the expenses are borne by the local churches, they feel an integral part of the whole production. We are very excited by the obvious blessing of the Holy Spirit on their efforts. Their goal of having a copy of the Bible in every language that people want a translation in by 2025 now seems to be a real possibility.

Wycliffe Associates Bible Translators

We got home before our 51^st wedding anniversary on June 27. A month and a half later I, Wil, came down with West Nile Virus (WNV), a mosquito borne disease. It originated in Africa but is now found in almost all of the states in the U. S. The county health department here keeps close track of the spread of the disease. WNV hit me very hard. I remember taking a group from the church to the San Bernardino County Museum on August 18 to see their new mastodon exhibit. I was feeling sick on that day. Then I remember essentially nothing until the second week of October. I was in hospital for three weeks before they finally diagnosed WNV. It is a rare disease in Riverside County, where I was the fourth person diagnosed with it this year. I hallucinated a lot and spoke absolute garbage. Then they put me in a rehabilitation center for another 6 weeks, where I slowly regained my senses and learned to walk again. I lost 30 pounds (14kg) of muscle during those weeks in hospital. I just wish the loss had been around my waist!

Sylvia Supporting Wil in Rehab

The picture was taken after a total of eight or nine weeks in hospital and rehab.

A headache and dizziness have haunted me constantly ever since my memory kicked in again in early October. Recently I had another MRI done on my head to try and pinpoint the cause of the problem. From reading on the Internet it appears that these symptoms may be with me for a year or longer. My family has been very supportive, especially Sylvia and Elwood who have spent long hours day after day with me. I returned home the end of October. Since then I have been to Joshua Tree National Park three times. I don’t have the muscular strength to climb anything, but I do enjoy the hikes that are somewhat level. I also spend time almost every day hiking in the hills around our home. Our dog, Cleopatra, who has been with us for over 15 years, is ailing and has a hard time doing the longer walks.

Thank you for your prayers for our well being and my healing. We covet your further prayers on our behalf. We pray that you will have a lovely Christmas and a prosperous New Year, 2017. We treasure each of your greetings.

Our Address is still:

Wil & Sylvia Clarke

5547 Wentworth Dr.

Riverside, CA 92505

Phone: 951-687-4556

e-mail: wil.clarke@gmail.com

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 15 - Morondava A - Friday

Lovers

We got up at 4:30 on Thursday morning, March 3and left home about 6:15 for Morondava. Our driver was Jocelyn (say “dzoosel”), a male if the name misleads you. He drove for almost 10 hours to get to Morondava 516 km (321 miles). That’s less than 35 miles per hour (55 kph) on a paved road. It has lots of potholes and a fair number of towns which often reduce the speed to that of a walking man.

We traveled with Edwin and Alphie Payet and their two delightful children Anne (“almost 9”) and Aldwyn aged 6. His name is a combination of his mother and father’s names. Both kids spoke excellent English and French.

Morondava is quite a small town. Coconut palms grew along the outskirts and the usual endless rows of small kiosk like store fronts lined the streets. Nothing resembling a grocery store like ShopRite in Antsirabe could we find. Lots of baobabs grew at odd intervals for the last 50 kilometers (30 miles) along the road. They are slenderer than their African cousins. They do resemble upside down trees with their branches underground and the stem and roots up in the air. Since it was the rainy season, they did have leaves and stringy red flowers on those “roots.”

Anne with a Baobab Flower

We drove directly to the Trecicogne Hotel. We chatted with the clerk and got an air conditioned room for ourselves. The A/C room cost an extra 10,000 Ariary (about $3 extra)--the best three dollars I’ve spent in years! They warned us that the electricity is turned off between 3 and 7 a.m. every night. So we brought a truck battery and a voltage inverter so Sylvia could sleep with the benefit of her C-PAP all night. It also meant that the A/C was off for roughly half the night.

On the first night I awoke about 4:18 a.m. feeling very warm. I kicked the blanket off. As consciousness slowly worked its way into my mind, I thought the A/C has gone off again!... Oh, that must be because the electricity has gone off… Oh… Yeah…Sylvia’s C-PAP isn’t running… Oh I need to connect her to the battery. I did. Then I opened all the windows. The other two nights I awoke when the electricity went off.

The windows have no screens. We slept under a mosquito net so the mosquitoes didn’t bother us. I was concerned that someone could easily and noiselessly climb into the room and steal us blind. Eventually I went back to sleep.

I woke up suddenly as I heard the door handle go down very slowly. I hopped out of bed, pulled on my pants and unlocked the door. When I peered out, it was half-daylight, and there stood little Aldwyn looking up at me with great big, wide-open eyes. “I’m looking for my mother!” His worried voice carried a note of panic in it. Tears were very close to the surface.

Aldwyn in a Baobab

I stood and talked with him for a while and tried to comfort him and assure him that his mother would be back very shortly. I invited him into our room.

“No!” and the panic was back in his voice, “I must go and find my mother.” He walked purposefully away. I grabbed a shirt and shoes and headed after him. By this time his mother and father had showed up. They had walked down to the shops for some supplies. They had told the kids where they were going (or at least they had told Anne). But Aldwyn hadn’t understood them.

Alphie chewed on the kid pretty hard. I told her that really she should compliment him. A kid needs to have someone he knows he can talk with when he feels in trouble or insecure. And we were definitely the right people in this place where none of us knew anyone. She didn’t see it my way. She was worried that he had disturbed us. I tried to point out that his feelings were very important …

The Trecicogne had Wi-Fi, but it was really bad at this point, so I sat out in the open air cafeteria and texted Elwood for an hour while Sylvia continued to sleep. The voice phone wouldn’t work at all. Elwood was really working to get my pool to the point that it wouldn’t cause us to get a big fine.

Allée des Baobabs

Finally we breakfasted and jumped into the SUV that Jocelyn had ready for us. In Madagascar when you rent a car, you also get a driver. I bought another 9 liters of water on our way out. After my experiences in Namibia and Mexico with drinking tainted water, I was taking no chances.

We headed northeast from Morondava along a secondary road. It was sand and mud with a lot of holes full of water in it. On our way back to the hotel, Anne counted the major holes where the SUV had to drive down into the water and then up the other side. She had me write down that she had counted 55 of these large holes—not counting the even worse holes we drove through on the 5 km stretch when we entered the Kirindy Forest Preserve. The SUV had four-wheel drive and high clearance. It definitely needed the clearance, but Jocelyn never used the 4WD.

About 10 km off of the National Road we entered the Allée des Baobabs. Edwin explained that in French allée means a garden road with roughly the same kind of scenery on both sides of it, nothing like alley in English.  There are upwards of 100 great baobabs on either side of the road. Two species of baobabs grow in this area. One has a smooth outer layer, and the other has a rough, flakey kind of scale as bark. The latter is the more common kind in the Kirindy park where our guide told us about them. We stopped at one tree, and the kids got to play around it. We found a number of small baobab trees, less than 6 feet (2m) high nearby. So they do continue to seed themselves. In shape, their leaves are not unlike those of marijuana.

The Payets Measure a Baobab, Sylvia Looks On

The road leading north is very rough in spots, and it took us several hours to reach Kirindy. The road going into the preserve is only passable by 4x4, high clearance vehicles. We drove into, through, and out of one vast pond after another. Our path looked like a great sine wave. Many of the puddles came almost to the headlights of the SUV. Each one had a center ridge that would have stranded a vehicle with lower clearance.

We got into park headquarters about one o’clock. With permission, the ladies set up lunch in a covered dining area, and we ate well. The air temperature was very close to 35°C (95°F) and humidity was close to 100%. Sylvia had brought a bunch of her cinnamon rolls, and they disappeared like magic. The guides felt we were better likely to see lemurs if we didn’t hurry into the forest too soon. It was nap time for lemurs as well as people.

As we wandered around the headquarters, we saw dozens of large lizards, mainly skinks and iguanas. The iguanas are called collared iguanas and are the smallest of the worldwide iguana family, about 15 inches (40cm) long. We found two hog-nosed snakes, each about four feet long (a little over a meter).

Swallowtails at Kirindy Headquarters

They let us use the restroom in one of the cabins. They insisted that I follow a guide to the cabin, stating that I might get lost. I laughed because we could see the cabins. But he insisted anyway and called a guide. She guided me around a stand of bamboo and to the cabin.

Later I needed the facility again, and this time I took a shorter route. It led right past a wooden structure that appeared to be a bed frame. There were carvings on each of the four corners of the bed. Two of the carvings, on opposite corners, were each carved out of a single rosewood log. They represented a woman sitting on a man’s lap in different poses. Both figures had extra large sexual organs and would be regarded as pornographic by some. Our guide book had commented on the very erotic figures carved on the tombs of this region of Mada. There are very prominent tombs found everywhere in Mada. Most are made of cement block or rocks. I assume that this bed frame illustrated that the erotic carvings exist on more than just tombs. I also assume that it was this bed frame that prompted the ranger to insist a guide lead me to the restroom. Edwin and Alphie told us that they have a lot of these in one of the state museums in Tana. We didn’t visit that museum.

At 2:30 we hiked into the forest. This forest is very dry, unlike the rainforest we had hiked in up in the highlands at Andasibe. Our guide, John, was very knowledgeable about both the fauna and flora of the forest. He claimed to be entirely self-taught. We walked steadily for an hour-and-a-half and saw nothing besides trees and a few, very few, birds and reptiles. Finally Aldwyn got so tired he was falling asleep on Edwin’s shoulders. Alphie took him back to camp and put him to sleep in the car. John walked her to a point where she could make it back to camp on her own before he returned to us. We kept walking in a large circle (or rather square). It was obvious that he expected the lemurs to be in this area.

Suddenly a lemur jumped across the trail about a hundred yards (meters) in front of us. There were four of five red-fronted brown lemurs in the group. Two of them were very tame. One sat in a fork in a tree just above Edwin’s head. He reached up and touched its tail. It didn’t like that but only moved a few feet higher up the tree.

Red-Fronted Brown Lemur at Kirindy

After leaving those lemurs, we came on a troop of four Verreaux’s sifakas. They are a genus of lemurs with long slender legs, body, and tail. These were white with a black face. They can easily jump from one tree, 15 or 20 feet (5 to 7 meters), hit a second tree, and immediately jump an equal distance to another tree and continue rapidly across the forest. They, too, stopped and surveyed us while we surveyed them. They showed no fear of us. When they tired of us, they took off as described above and were gone into the depths of the forest almost instantaneously.

Verreaux’s Sifaka Ready to Leap

We paid 25,000 Ariary ($8) each for entry to the park and another 20,000 Ariary ($6) for John, our guide. He was somewhat past middle age and spoke very reasonable English. The park gets very few visitors during the rainy season, so these guides get very little money for their effort. I think our group was the only one to come that day. There must have been at least a dozen people working at the headquarters. So our money didn’t go far.

We drove back through the Allée des Baobabs just after sunset. Sunrise and Sunset are regarded as the best time to view the baobabs here. The sky was very cloudy, but we did get some excellent colors and good pictures. I used my Nikon for most of this trip. It is supposed to be better than my Panasonic Lumix. But it doesn’t focus nearly as well as the Lumix. The Lumix takes the picture as I press the shutter release whereas the Nikon waits for almost a second. So I am very disappointed in it. The battery on my Lumix went flat, and I couldn’t find the replacements before I left home. I did find them when I got back—too late.

We went straight to bed when we got home, not even taking a bit of supper.  

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