Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 13 - Church Elders and Rain

The Moth Who Stayed for a Day

In the last Sojourn I mentioned right at the end that I had seen the five naked-eye planets on Thursday morning. I also mentioned that a cloud occluded Jupiter shortly after seeing it. I worried because Jupiter didn’t seem as bright as it should. My apologies; it wasn’t Jupiter. Two days later, on Saturday morning, the sky was perfectly clear at 5:10 a.m., and I went out again. This time Jupiter was clearly visible and as bright as I remember Jupiter’s being, only it was further west than Spica, in Virgo, which I had mistaken for Jupiter. As I correctly predicted, Venus and Mercury are both moving very fast and were considerably closer to the horizon than two days previously at the same time. They were also apparently much closer to each other.  

In Part 11 of these Sojourns I told you about the task of getting and activating the FAMA Newsletter email address list. Between Friday and Sunday I got all of them sent off and have only had about 4% of the addresses bounce. I have no idea how rapidly email addresses are dropped or exchanged, but I think that’s pretty good for any address list. In reply to the Newsletter we’ve had a number of offers to speak at the upcoming reunion on the first weekend of June.

Wildlife is not very impressive in our part of Mada. I was asked on the phone recently if there were any Zebra near us. Well, in spite of the Madagascar movies, there are no African big game of any kind. The Fossa is the largest carnivore on the island, and it is a kind of mongoose and not much bigger than a big cat. However we have beautiful moths and butterflies. I love stalking and taking pictures of butterflies, but they tend to be very uncooperative. I am including a picture of a really spectacular moth that sat on our door for about a day and two pictures of a small chameleon. With tail the chameleon probably was no longer than about 8 inches (20cm). It got the black patterns when it felt agitated or threatened.

Our Chameleon Visitor, Aggravated and Calm

A week ago all of the churches in Madagascar had a weeklong celebration of women in the church. The week culminated in Pam’s preaching at the Sambaina church. This past weekend they had training sessions for all church officers and their spouses. Mada society is very much a male dominated society, and the officers in the church tend to follow societal trends. So when I write “spouses,” you should probably read “wives.” Meetings in our church ran from Friday evening all the way through Sunday noon. They went fairly late into the night on both nights and started again at seven o’clock in the mornings. All of our students were asked to go and meet in a classroom block for Sabbath School and church. Our church was packed almost to the bursting point.

People from the other churches in the area packed the pews so tightly that they must have had a hard time breathing! In America people tend to sit in the pews with a space between each person. People don’t sit against each other unless they are in a romantic relationship. So I find it interesting to sit with bodies, arms, and legs right up against mine. I almost experience a bit of claustrophobia.

Crowded Church

The church organization has conferences made up of a number of church districts. Each district is made up of individual churches. There is a district pastor who is in charge of each district, and then each local pastor is in charge of several churches, unless the church is large--like the U A Z church which has its own pastor. Pastors are all on the conference payroll. Each church then has at least one “elder” or more where the church is larger. Elders are elected from the church members and must meet the strict requirements laid out for a “bishop” in 1 Timothy 3. Adventists have broadened the criteria in 1 Timothy to include both women and men as elders. All of the elders from our district sat in the front three rows of the church for this special meeting. There were no women elders, so I deduced that Mada still sticks closely to the criterion that the elder must “be the husband of one wife.” As such an elder cannot be a woman. We had one, newly elected, elder from our church. So there was a special ordination service for him in which all the pastors and elders present participated. They also had a deacon ordination and a dedication of 10 babies.

Dedicating 10 Babies

Sylvia and I went to the UAZ church as usual. Mr. Tahina translated for us from Malagasy into English. He did the best job of translating that we have had since our arrival two-and-a-half months ago. Usually all we get are some rather disconnected phrases and sentences that we have to try and piece together to make out what was actually being said. Mr. Tahina kept right up with the speakers.

Our district pastor preached the sermon, actually a charge to the elders. I have never, knowingly, laid eyes on him before, but he seemed to command a huge amount of deference and respect. The fact that the translation was so good caused me a certain amount of distress. Let me summarize what I remember from his charge.

He chose Psalm 23 as his text for the charge. In Malagasy the first verse starts out “Jehovah” is my shepherd. The King James Version of our Bible starts out “The LORD is my shepherd,” indicating that the Hebrew Bible uses the sacred Tetragramaton,  Yahweh, as God’s extremely holy name as being our shepherd. Then the pastor launched into a charge to the 31 elders (Sylvia counted them). “You are the shepherd.” You must cause the people to lie down in truth filled, green pastures. You must prepare a table of good food for the people. Your rod must guide the people into paths of righteousness.

31 Elders from Churches in Our District

I felt prickles run up and down the back of my neck. If I had had any hair, I’m sure it would have been standing on end. Was this district pastor saying that these elders must be God to their churches? Or was this simply blasphemy? At the time I felt it was blasphemy. I almost felt like I should get up and leave before the Lord struck us all dead.

But, of course, the district pastor went on and on. He had the audience with him by this time by using the time worn method which essentially is “If you agree with me say ‘amen!’” There was a rather lame “amen.” “Do you really mean it? Say ‘Amen!’ louder.” He soon had the audience literally shouting “Amen!” He used it several times to keep them with him. It seems to be a common method in the meetings I’ve been to in Mada to elicit crowd response by getting them to shout a phrase, whether it is “Amen!” or some other mantra.

He encouraged the elders to have personal devotions: “just you and your Bible. Of course you have family worship, and prayer meeting, and attend church. But that is not enough! You must spend at least 3 or 4 hours a week alone with your Bible.” Three or more hours of personal time with our Bibles would be good for all of us. When it is dictated it and not freely entered into, I’m not sure how much good it will do.

“You must listen to the news (this may have been un unfortunate translation) from the General Conference as you receive it on the Internet and as it is passed down to you by your Division , and your Union Conference, and your Conference and your District Pastor (meaning himself).” Somehow he left out “and your Local Pastor,” if I remember right. But that may be a glitch in my memory, or the translator had to hurry to keep up with the relentless flow of words.

Later they had all the elders stand in a line in front of us. That’s when Sylvia counted 31 elders. I looked at them and believe that indeed many of them are men of God. By the way a number of them were dressed,  I’m sure that they don’t have electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing in their homes, let along the Internet to receive word from the GC.

A Volunteer (like us!) Easter Lily in our Front Yard

What distressed me in this long set of injunctions for the elders was that there was not a single mention or even an allusion to the glorious hope we have in the soon coming of Jesus. Not once did he mention the love of Christ and His marvelous grace, without which we are “of all men most miserable.” It seems that they were to stay abreast of all the promotional programs dreamed up the various church administrative bodies, but they can forget the simple grace of Jesus Christ which is our only hope. Of course, I’m sure he didn’t mean that, but I did notice that the elders sat there stunned. As they stood in front of us afterward, they still looked stunned and showed no sign of the joy of salvation.

Zandritiana  (foreground) Who Played, by Ear, for Sylvia to Sing

Afterwards the visitors from the dozen or so churches in the district spread their blankets or sheets on the university’s extensive lawns and ate their lunches. We hung around for a half hour or so at the church so Sylvia could practice singing the Lord’s Prayer with a student accompanist, Zandritiana, who is a very able pianist. Pam had to do a spouse training meeting as part of the special district meeting and asked Sylvia to sing the Lord’s Prayer for it.

Lily opening and as it looked after the rain on the same day

The next meeting was to start at 2:00 p.m. We walked home, and as we got within a couple hundred yards or meters of home, large drops of rain began to hit us--not enough to get us wet, just enough to warn us that more was coming. By 1:30 the beautiful blue sky of the morning had given away to grey clouds and extremely heavy rain. We got over an inch (25mm) of rain in the next hour. A lovely lily that was just opening up that morning in our front yard was beaten almost beyond recognition. Hopefully someone got the church unlocked and opened so the people could take refuge inside! On Sunday we got another pounding rain with over an inch-and-a-quarter of rain (30mm). Some have suggested we must be on the edge of a cyclone. Who knows? We have no source of news except what we can ferret out of a very moody and reluctant Internet.

The previous day, Friday, we went to town with Pam and Gideon. They were scouting out conference rooms. They found one in Le Royal Palace (or was it Le Palace Royal?) and we chose to eat lunch there. We ordered two medium vege pizzas, two curried vegetables with eggs and four juice drinks. Then the waiter returned, looking very embarrassed, and told us that they had run out of rice: Would we like spaghetti instead? Realize that it is almost impossible in Mada to eat without rice. It is eaten in copious quantities at every meal, three times a day. I chided the waiter good naturedly. So he went and placed our order. He came back a few minutes later and even more shame-facedly confessed that they had no eggs. Could they substitute extra cheese on the spaghetti instead? The standard exclamation at this point is “Welcome to Madagascar!” usually voiced by Gideon. The food turned out to be excellent—the best I’ve eaten when we have eaten out. And the whole meal came for less than $20 for the 4 of us.

On Monday we had the usual chapel just before lunch. It was a special chapel this time. Madam Noée, head of the Language Department and my immediate boss and our neighbor who lives in the other half of our duplex, displayed two trophies the students won down at the English Drama Contest in Antsirabe a couple weeks ago.

Madame Noée, English Dept. Chair and Trophies Won at Drama Contest, Antsirabe

In addition, Gideon, our university president, had the high officials from church and state out for groundbreaking for the new student center for the university. This has been sorely needed. A large percentage of our students commute from nearby towns. This will give them a place to study and rest on campus in rain or cold. It will provide a cafeteria and a gymnasium and a large meeting hall. This will be larger than our church, so it will accommodate more students as the size of the student body increases.

Ground Breaking for New Student Center

I walked around town (the third largest city in Mada) with Gideon looking for a new battery for his Samsung phone. We found dozens of Samsung batteries none of which fit his phone. You have to wonder what kind of engineers they have at Samsung. By the end of the afternoon, I had begun to applaud Apple’s multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Samsung!

#MADAGASCAR, #UAZ, #MALAGASY, #PREACHING, #CHURCHORGANIZATION, #PLANETS, #EATINGOUT,  #CELLPHONE, #RAIN, #GRACE, #TRANSLATION, #SALVATIONBYWORKS, #CHAMELEON, #MOTH, #TROPHY, #LILY, #EASTERLILY

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 04 -- Lemurs

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 4

Lemurs

Where I grew up the day after Christmas was also a holiday called Boxing Day. Every time I heard the term, I imagined guys with big, fat gloves try to punch the other guy in the nose. However, it apparently came from the idea that wealthy people would receive a horde of gifts from well meaning or favor seeking people. They would then box them up and pass them on to the poor and underprivileged. I have never witnessed this generous event; instead it was simply long lines of disgruntled recipients trying to cash in on the unwanted gifts at some store or other.

Our Boxing Day also just happened to be a Sabbath. Neither Sylvia nor I could stomach sitting in church for another 5 or 6 hours listening to long speeches in a language we could not even distinguish a single word, one translated by someone sitting two or three people away with a very unfamiliar accent whom I could barely hear. I could sense that the quality of translation varied considerably by the various people who did it. I am very aware of the problem of translating when the speaker pauses to give the translator time to do it. But running a continuing translation from a continuous speech is an almost impossible task. I have tried it many times, just to myself, to see if I could do it. So I have deep appreciation for anyone who tries.

In consequence we decided to go to the University Church connected with UAZ. Most of the service was done in French. I don’t understand spoken French although I can often make out the meaning of written French. The trouble with French is that it has a lot of English words in it, but they are pronounced extremely incomprehensibly. So it is a puzzle to understand and a puzzle I enjoy doing. We always had volunteers ready who would sit down and do their best to translate for us. I found that often I could supply a word that the translator was groping for.

Sylvia has more trouble with these translators. She often sits and writes her thoughts about the snatches she does catch from the translator or the French itself. She catches a lot of the French as well.

We attended the English Sabbath School lesson. Both the former president and the current president of UAZ were in attendance. Their theologies don’t quite match, especially on the position of “grace” in a Christian’s experience. So they were both very restrained in what they said. From a certain amount of inductive thinking, it appears to me that the former president had been slated to teach the lesson but at the last minute insisted that one of the female theology students do it. (They have several female theology students, but there is no way in the present local church policy that they can ever become a pastor in Mada.) From my glance at her quarterly, it was evident that she had studied only 20% of the lesson, so she stretched out that part for the whole time. The lesson tended to drag on account of that.

UAZ Church

They have a sermon between Sabbath School and church that used to be called lay activities years ago. This was done in Malagasy. Church had three women on the platform (no men), which is apparently very unusual at UAZ. There was another sermon for the offering. (I’ve found that this is standard for churches in Mada.) Finally they had the sermon of the day labeled a “homily”, although the label is misleading. The woman who did that had a Power Point Presentation to go along with it. As usual, I found that I could understand her PPP much better than I could her spoken French.

It was raining very lightly when we left church. By the time we had walked the 1.2 km (.75miles) home, we were fairly wet. The jacket I brought with me is dry clean only, but it seemed to stand up okay to the mistreatment. So we changed clothes as soon as we got home.

Sylvia fixed lunch, and I helped make the Spanish rice. We also had some potato salad that I had made for our Christmas Eve supper. Pam and Gideon joined us for it. We had a great visit. Then they went home, and we all took our afternoon “lay activities.” Whoever coined that term for church missionary outreach needed his (her?) head read!

That evening we met with Pam and Gideon and Parany and Harimalala Razafimahafaly about six o’clock to plan a four day trip to see Lemurs. I also finished the second part of this Sojourn, but when Gideon took me to his office, the Internet was down, so I couldn’t send it until after our trip.

About 4:00 a.m. something on my bedside table started making a steady beep about once every 2 or 3 minutes. I didn’t want to awaken Sylvia, so I tried to figure out what was making the beep while lying quietly in bed. There was a phone and 2 Lumix cameras on the table. Finally, after at least 10 minutes, I sat up in bed and placed one camera on the foot of the bed, one on the floor at my feet, and the phone on my bedside table. It was the camera on the floor. I pulled it out of its case, and the back was all lit up with the error message saying that the zoom was working right on the camera. I tried to switch the camera off, but it was already off! I switched it from photo mode to view mode. It dropped the error message and showed the last picture I had taken. I switched it back to photo mode, and the lens came out this time since it was not in its case. I pulled the battery out of the camera, and it died as expected. As soon as I reinserted the battery, it switched on. All of the functions seemed to be working--except the on/off switch.

 We left UAZ at precisely 8:00 a.m. the next morning. Well… that was the plan anyway. It was closer to 9:00 by the time we got out away. Our first destination was the Domaine Saint Francois (DSF) institute west of Tana. Parany’s sister Franza runs the institute sponsored by layman and the Catholic Church in France. So we were trying to follow him. However, he seemed to be able to get around the big trucks on the road more easily than we did. So they would pull over and wait for us every so often. We noticed that the rivers were considerably higher than they were nine days previously when we drove south from Tana upon our arrival in Mada. We ate lunch under a roof in DSF. While we ate, a rain squall caught up with us. If you are ambitious enough to look up our progress on a map, we came north on NR-7 and then west on NR-1.

Rear L to R: Wil, Sylvia, Gideon, Pam. Front: L to R  Parany, Veronica, Harimalala, Adriana, and the Manda family

After we cleaned up from lunch, we deposited our cases in our rooms at DSF. Our room was called Orchidee, I’ll let you guess what that means. Then we headed to Lemur Park sandwiched between NR-1 and a river that was definitely in flood. They have about 10 or 12 families of different species of Lemurs. Each family lives in its own tree. Because the Lemurs are very territorial, they don’t move away from their tree as long as they are fed. The staff feed them well, and we had the privilege of seeing them feed several families. Also because they are terrified of water, the lemurs don’t try to cross the river. So there are no cages about the lemurs. They’re free to come and go any time they wish. We paid 20,000 Ar each to get into the park, about $7 US, which included our guide, Heri. We walked around the park for well over an hour and saw many of lemurs. Fortunately the rain had stopped by the time we started walking.

Ring Tailed Lemur and twins

We had arranged with a rental company to provide us with a nine seat vehicle and driver for two days. The driver was supposed to arrive at DSF at 9:00 in the morning to pick us up. This included, besides Sylvia and me, Pam and Gideon and Parany’s family: wife Harimalala, Veronica at 5 years and Adriana, a babe still at breast. When he hadn’t arrived at 10:00 and we had received no communication from the company, Harimalala got on the phone and phoned for about a half hour. At first she tried the company and driver. She could get no response out of the driver. Then she phoned around until she had found a new company that offered us the same service for 60,000Ar less.

Our goal had been to get to the Andisabe National Park in time to tour it that day. Then we would find a place to sleep and come back the next day to DSF. We had a distance of about 200km (125 miles) to go. The worst part was to get through the south end of Tana and out on NR-2 going east. Tana has terrible traffic and no expressways or traffic lights.

We finally left DSF about one o’clock in the afternoon. Our driver, LaLane (I have no clue how he spelled his name), was a nice soft spoken young man and an excellent driver. His only English was “I’m sorry, I do not speak any English.” The road went through gorgeous mountains almost immediately after leaving Tana.

One of the first mountains we encountered was a massive rounded granite boulder towering at least a thousand feet (300 m) above the road, called Slaughter Rock. In the 1800s the Catholic Church sent missionaries to Madagascar, and thousands of people became Christians, especially in the central highlands where we were. A new queen came to power and decided to return the island to its animist heritage. Thousands of Christians were hurled to their death from this rock and many other such rocks up and down Mada. There is a great inscription on the rock that I can’t read. I’m guessing it is in Malagasy. About 80 km (50 miles) further east, the road plunges down about 2000 feet through second growth rain forest and eucalyptus trees. Beautiful cascades and waterfalls are visible on almost every turn. We got Andisabe (pronounce this “and disobey”) NP, but the guard at the gate turned us back and told us the park was closed. They do have night tours, but none of our literature nor the guard chose to mention this.

Slaughter Rock

The park hotel nearby charged over $200 a night per room. But we had noticed a brand new hotel, Le Guayave, with a most delightful architecture just outside of the town of Andisabe. We went back to it, and Harimalala talked the agent down to a total of 220,000Ar (about $70) for all three rooms. I had promised to pay for this night, so I was very grateful for her efforts. Each room was a building in itself, built in Malagasy style: Red brick exterior and porch, all topped by a beautiful thatched roof, and inside all wooden doors, tables, chairs, etc, made of very heavy dark red and black wood. Nothing was nicely finished off. There were holes in the ceiling where lights were not installed, toilets that flushed--sometimes, parquet flooring with pieces missing in the corners, mosquito nets that didn’t close enough to keep the mosquitoes out.

Hotel Le Guayave

Parany was suffering from extreme abdominal discomfort from gas. I had a bit of his symptoms myself. Pam was feeling very uncomfortable and had a slight fever. Fortunately we had brought both charcoal capsules and ibuprofen. So we all got to sleep reasonably well.

The next morning we ate breakfast in Parany’s room. It had been raining lightly but steadily ever since before we arrived in Andisabe the previous evening. We arrived back at the entrance to the national park. Hundreds of people were milling around. A guide came up to us eventually and asked us what we wanted to do. The expensive tours, 3 hours and more, left from this point. The regular 2 hour tour left from a different point, and we probably could have found our night tour there the previous evening. Edwin, the guide, climbed into the van with all of the rest of us, and we went to the second place, paid our 20,000Ar, and started out.

It was still raining but got lighter and lighter as we walked. We were using our umbrellas for the first 20 yards or so until we entered the second growth rainforest itself. Then the path was too narrow, and we closed them for the rest of the tour. The vegetation was a wonderland of an almost infinite variety of different plants. The first thing we saw was a young male Parsons chameleon. There are over 80 species of chameleons in Madagascar. The Parsons is the largest species in the world and is always green. It doesn’t change colors like other species. This one was well over a foot long (30cm). The trails crisscrossed this section of the rainforest in every direction. Visibility was very limited. There were lots of parties out, and the guides would notify each other when they saw something of interest.

Parson’s Chameleon

We crossed over a suspension bridge made of branches an inch thick or less (2.5 cm). After crossing the bridge we ran into some brown lemurs first. The brown lemurs didn’t like our company and moved away, sometimes making flying leaps from tree to tree. We followed them through thick undergrowth for a while, but they had the distinct advantage of speed over us.

Footbridge

Edwin  had promised us he would show us the indris lemur, the largest lemur species. Unlike the other lemurs, its tail is less than 4 inches (10cm) long. I heard the guides talking to each other, and then we took off through the forest, not on a trail, and found a large family of indris high up in a large tree. Edwin and another guide started calling them, mimicking their shrill, piercing cry. We had heard a lot of these cries the previous night while we were at La Guayave. The indris made no move to come down from their tree or to even leave it. We watched them for a long time.

Indris

Eventually Edwin called us to come and see a leaf-tailed gecko. So we walked back to a trail and along it for a while till he stopped, retraced his steps, and pulled a young tree down to reveal a flat grayish lizard the same color as the bark. He took hold of the gecko and turned it crosswise on the narrow stem. It slowly readjusted itself until it blended perfectly with the bark. It eventually grew tired of the repeated man-handling and walked slowly up the stem until it was out of reach.

About this time Sylvia saw a chameleon higher up on the same trunk. The guide identified it as an elephant chameleon. It is named that not from its size but the shape of its ears. Then the guide took us out to the road a long ways from where we started, where our driver had mysteriously appeared with the vehicle.

After driving down the road a little, I discovered a little back leech about 3 cm long (inch and a quarter) on the back of my left hand. It had its head starting to attach when I pulled my left hand up. It then put its tail down and felt all over that part of my hand before suddenly flipping its head up and over its tail and back onto another spot on my skin. It walked all over the back of my hand and onto my wrist watch. Then it tried to find a place on my arm above the watch. But it was distracted by all the hair on my arm.  While this was going on, I pulled my camera out of its case with my right hand and took a number of pictures of it. Finally I took it off of me and gently dropped it out of the window onto the rain soaked highway.

Leech on the back of Wil’s hand

#UAZ, #MADAGASCAR, #LEMURPARK, #ANDISABENP, #LEMUR, #GECKO, #CHAMELEON, #LEECH, #SLAUGHTERROCK, #ANTANANARIVO, #SAINTFRANCOIS, #ZURCHERUNIV, #RAINFOREST, #JUNGLE