Clarke's Christmas Letter in 2024

 

Christmas 2024

 

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

Uni took the picture above at Thanksgiving this year. Our Thanksgiving was celebrated with Fred and Uni in Riverside. In our picture, David and Julia Zuckerman are standing, Uni and Fred Clarke are on the floor trying to get Oso to look at the camera. On the couch we have Craig and Esther Kinzer sitting next to Sylvia and Wil Clarke with Katie (or Catherine the Great) lying on Oso’s bed. Our whole family was together! Our dogs even made it, but on account of their consideration, the cat and rats stayed at their respective homes. Our kids made the food including dessert. They asked us to bring the drinks. Thank you, kids, for your consideration for the old folks!

A website called NaNoWriMo tends to build a fire under me to keep writing, even when it’s inconvenient. NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writers’ Month = November, and any genre (not just novels) is grist for their mill. It helped me get all but the last chapter or two of my book about our experience in Tanzania (1967-1971) written. It is in memoir form. I should really say our book because Sylvia has put a lot of time into it, too. I hope that before next year at this time, we will have the printed book in hand.

You may remember that there was an eclipse of the sun back in August, 2017. I was still recovering from West Nile Virus, and that prevented me from traveling to see it. So we laid plans to see the eclipse this year (April 2024), the only other total eclipse visible from the U.S. until 2044 (at which time I would be 102 years old, if I lived that long.) Julia, who works at Cal. Tech., figured out that Torreon, Mexico, would have the best possible chance of clear skies. So we flew there in April. We rented a car that was supposed to seat six people. Herz cheated us and gave us an SUV that only seated five. There were six people in our group: Julia, David, Fred, Uni, Sylvia and I. Almost everybody on our plane was going to Torreon, Mexico, to see the eclipse, so there were no other cars in the area from any rental company. Uni volunteered to sit in the back facing backward. Thank you, Uni! The skies were cloudy in Torreon, so we drove for over an hour to Durango and had a wonderful view of the eclipse. Watching the total eclipse gave me an amazing, unexpected emotional high. We are grateful to our children for making this possible.

We travelled east again this summer. My cousin Fred’s wife passed away around Thanksgiving last year, and my primary goal for the trip was to attend her funeral in June. (Because the ground freezes in northern Michigan during the winter, they delayed the funeral

until June.) An advantage of attending funerals is that it is usually accompanied by a family reunion. It is a foretaste of the grand family reunion we will have when Christ comes. I’m counting on you to attend that one with me! Thank You, Jesus!

          On Lincoln Highway in Wyoming

A couple years ago two young people phoned me from Ontario, Canada, They had done some research and wanted to write a historical novel about my mother, Esther. I asked them how much they knew about her, and Nolan sent me a document close to 50 pages long of stuff they had found on line! I was stunned. We spent a few weeks on and off, talking on the phone about her, and I tried to give them an idea of the human side of her life. So I set another goal to stop and see these two, Nolan and Sarah.

I had a frustrating time trying to get a time when we could all three meet. Nolan and Sarah live about 150 miles apart. While I was in Michigan and Ohio, I just couldn’t get it to work and couldn’t get hold of Nolan by phone, I finally prayed to the Lord to have Nolan phone me. That was about 10:00 one night when Sylvia and I were sleeping in the bed of our pickup. The Lord usually doesn’t answer me with such alacrity. But 2:00 a.m. my cell phone rang, and Nolan promised to make all the arrangements. I was stunned that God had chosen to answer my petition so soon! After the phone call, I lay back and laughed just like Abraham and his wife laughed when God promised to give them their son, Isaac. It is an astounding event when the almighty God chooses to answer you personally. We had a tremendous get together the next Sabbath in St. Thomas, Ontario. We were delighted to meet both of their families. Now I’m eagerly awaiting the fictional story of my mother’s life from their computers!

We had originally planned to come home via Washington State and see Sylvia’s brother Judson. However, a sequence of events brought us home pretty much along I-40, which doesn’t go anywhere within half a country from them. So in August we outlined a detailed plan that would take us north to Washington to see Judson and a number of our other family members and friends.

    At Pumpkin Rock near home

Sylvia and I are now both octogenarians, so the morning we left home, I said to the Lord, “You know, Lord, I haven’t really talked to You about our trip. Please give us a safe trip, and if You think we shouldn’t go, please let us know, and we’ll turn around and come home.” The temperature was well above 105º (40°C), but we made good time. We were driving our car this time, and it has a better A/C, than the pickup. At 168 miles (270 km) from home along US 395, we stopped at a rest area.

Before taking off from there, I pulled out a map and studied it a bit. My cell phone rang, and my ENT (otolaryngologist) said, “I just got your culture back, and you have a staph infection. Find the nearest hospital and go to the emergency room and get treatment.” He was sure they would admit me. Not wanting to be in the hospital out there in the desert—if there were one to by found—I realized that the Lord was telling me to turn around. At about 9:00 p.m. I pulled into the Riverside Community Hospital. They indicated they wanted to keep me there. However, by about 2:00 a.m., they sent me home with a prescription. A couple weeks later, my ENT did surgery on my sinuses, and the staph has disappeared. Thank You, Lord, for taking a personal interest in my well-being and Dr. de Jager for following up on my condition.

One of the major reasons for going to Washington State was to see my cousin Eugene. He was in a precarious condition health-wise, and I really wanted to see him again. However, that was not to be. He passed away a couple months later. If I had driven north, I would have probably seen him, but there may have been two funerals instead of just his. My brother, Elwood, helped me financially to fly up to Eugene’s funeral.

Sylvia is celebrating her retirement by taking voice lessons from a voice teacher she found in Loma Linda, CA. She has sung in choirs on and off ever since before we were married and got a lot of training there. However, she never had the opportunity to take personal voice lessons, before. She is really enjoying the training. She has performed in a couple concerts recently including singing “The Holy City”, a musical ballad composed in 1892 by Michael Maybrick (alias Stephen Adams) and text by Frederic Weatherly. Needless to say, I’m mighty proud of her! This season she has laid some plans to take groups singing carols in the neighborhood especially for people who are shut-ins. You’re welcome to come and join her.

“The Inlandia Institute is a lively center of literary activity serving the 29,000 sq. mile inland Southern California Region”. Sylvia and I have benefited and been benefitted by the Institute. I have been an Inlandia Writing Workshop leader for four years now. I started doing this after the untimely death of Ms. Celena Bumpus, who was our leader for years before she passed away at the beginning of 2021. I have neither the creativity nor the wide knowledge she had. But our group is producing excellent material. Both Sylvia and I enjoy meeting with our group, Celena’s Scribes, and with Rose Mongé’s Memoir Writing Group. Rose spends a lot of time preparing for her group. She even publishes an annual writing anthology. Both Sylvia and I contributed some articles to what Rose calls Writing Warriors: Time Passages this year. Sylvia also has seven pages and I have six pages in the 2023 anthology, Writing From Inlandia, published last month. Besides my Tanzania memoir that I am finishing up, I also have a devotional blog I call “Experiencing a Bible Verse,” and I encourage you to check it out at https://wils-thoughts.blogspot.com/  I have not published as many blogs this year as previous years. Let’s just attribute that to my slowing down as the years go by.

We wish you a blessed and merry Christmas this year and pray for a powerful and prayerful 2025. It appears to us that things may be winding up for the spectacular coming of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We can rejoice to meet Him in person.

 

Love,

Wil & Sylvia Clarke

5547 Wentworth Dr.

Riverside, CA 92505

Wil’s cell: 951-231-5402

E-mail: wil.clarke@gmail.com

Erase our home phone if you have it

 

 

 

 

GPS and theWisemen

 

[1]

Matthew 2:9 Holman Christian Standard Bible

⁹ After hearing the king, they went on their way. And there it was—the star they had seen in the east. It led them until it came and stopped above the place where the child was.

 

In the year 04 BC, electronic GPS was non-existent. It appears that many of the people never gave any thought to the shape of the earth they walked upon. Approximately 240 years previously, an African-Greek by the name of Eratosthenes, believing the earth to be round, set out to find its circumference. He knew that on summer solstice the sun was directly overhead in a deep well in what is now Aswan, Egypt. In other words, it cast no shadow there. By measuring the length of the shadow of a vertical pole in Alexandria and hiring some skilled surveyors to accurately measure the distance between Aswan and Alexandria, some simple mathematical proportions enabled him to calculate the circumference of the earth.

The U.S. has placed 31 Global Positioning Satellites in exact orbits around the earth so that each remains above a fixed spot on the equator of the earth. This way there are always at least 5 satellites within view of any point on earth—except the poles. Each satellite emits a distinct radio signal. Then a GPS device calculates the exact angle of four or five of these satellites. It then performs a series of very exact calculations and can tell the exact altitude, latitude, and longitude of the device. By pinpointing these “’tudes” on a map data base, we can see exactly where we are.

Think about the amount of knowledge and technology that is needed to perform this feat. Now imagine going back in time and trying to explain all of this to Eratosthenes! Undoubtedly, he would think that either you knew a bunch of magic, or you were stark raving insane.

If you have used a GPS to guide you to a place you were going, you know how it can occasionally actually mislead. One time, in the arid country northeast of Denver, Colorado, I asked the GPS to take me to the nearest Walmart. It got me off the freeway and led me along a dirt trail to a spot with no buildings in sight—just extremely dry grass and a few cottonwood trees. Another time, I was driving across a miles-long bridge in Louisiana when it demanded that I make a right turn off the bridge and into the bayou. A third time, while I was driving east across the Yukon in Canada, the GPS positioned me 50 miles north of the highway I was driving on. And I could go on and on.

The wisemen, or magi, were following a star—precursor to the GPS—to find the infant Christ. It led them directly to Herod’s office. They must have felt like I did on the occasions mentioned in the previous paragraph. It probably took them several days before the word came from King Herod that he blessed them on their way to Bethlehem and asked to be informed so he could come and worship the Christ, too. This showed God’s divine purpose to alert the Jewish equivalent of Washington DC to the birth of the Messiah. That evening, when they left the city, they rejoiced to see the star back in its place. Again, they followed it until it actually led them to the exact place where the Joseph of Nazareth family was living.

Father in Heaven, we are relying on you to lead us accurately into your kingdom.

 

---

[1] https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/eco-catholic/seeking-synchronicity-star-bethlehem-story

Love Thy Neighbor

 [1]

1 John 4:21

Common English Bible

²¹ This commandment we have from him: Those who claim to love God ought to love their brother and sister also.

 

Sylvia and I were studying with Sara in Somerset West who had expressed an interest in studying the Bible. She sat in an easy chair in the corner of her living room. Nestled on her right arm sat the chubbiest little black Wheaton Terrier I’ve ever seen. Every so often she would reach into a box of chocolates with her left hand and pop one into Wheaty’s mouth. He would lick her fingers and then chew contemplatively on the chocolate.

Sara had been telling us about a lady, Melody, from down the street whom she couldn’t stand. She mentioned several minor things that bugged her: her lawn was neatly manicured, not just mowed like Sara’s. She had a big golden lab that she would walk on leash every morning. Sometimes the lab would leave a pile on Sara’s lawn. Melody would reach into her fanny pack and take out a plastic bag. Then she would lean over and primly pick up the pile, tie the bag in a knot, and walk on. In Somerset West nobody ever picked up after their pet.

Once in a while Sara would be out in her yard with Wheaty when Melody came by. When Wheaty saw the lab, he would dash, barking wildly, and nip at the lab’s heels. Usually the south-easter was blowing relentlessly. Petite Melody would struggle with all her might to drag the lab away while also fighting vainly to keep her skirt modestly covering her legs. Sara would laugh at the struggle and just let Wheaty do his worst. Served her right!

When Wheaty finally returned triumphantly after chasing “the enemy” away, Melody would call back cheerfully: “Good morning! Have a beautiful day! Don’t you just love this south-easter—the old Cape Doctor?”

Bright and early on Christmas morning, Melody had rung Sara’s doorbell. When Sara had opened the door, Melody stood there in a bright summer smock. She had reached out with a winning “Happy Christmas!” and handed Sara a festively decorated platter of neatly braided and decorated koeksisters. Then she had skipped joyfully down her sidewalk toward home.

“I just can’t stand her cheerfulness. I never have anything ready to give her!” she grouched. Sara looked at me: “I know the Bible says to love your neighbor.” Then she paused for effect before adding with venom: “Just because I have to love her doesn’t mean I have to like her!”

How do you respond to an outburst like that?

Lord, help me to love those I really can’t stand—like You love me.

____________________

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/26/happy-ever-after-25-ways-to-live-well-into-old-age#img-7 

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 in Madagascar--03 Christmas in Madagascar

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 3

Christmas in Madagascar

On the Tuesday of Christmas week we actually met with Anitha (say “Anita”) who has been doing most of the filling in between Elaine, who started the semester teaching the conversational English classes and then left, and our arrival. This is her first time teaching conversational English, and she must have been pulling her hair out to do all of the work, grading, teaching, etc. for 13 classes. They want Sylvia to teach the advanced classes, Voice and Diction, Written English, as well as one remedial conversational class. I will take over the 13 classes. Our duties are mainly on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, giving us long weekends to catch our breath. I think I will learn a lot, and hopefully the students will learn something.

The university has two WiFi hotspots that are often available to connect to, one in the library and the other in the faculty lounge. However, the Internet is an elusive thing. Whether I’m working hooked up with an Ethernet cable to it or just using WiFi, it will suddenly disappear. Then within minutes it will be back again. At times there is nothing for a day or more. It took me at least two hours just to post my last Sojourn on the blog. That doesn’t count the time creating and editing it.

We were warned before we came that the season we plan to be here, from mid-December to mid-March, is the rainy season. Tourists are encouraged to stay away because many roads are closed. I’m writing this on New Year’s Day, 2016. This morning had a beautiful sunrise around five o’clock; the rest of the sky was heavily overcast. I walked down to the library under a very gloomy sky. The hills to the east of us (see below) were shrouded with a heavy layer of cloud almost to their bases. The walk was very pleasant, however. I pulled out my U.S. phone and could see the Internet, but it wasn’t working. So I started home and got to the faculty lounge, which was locked, and I don’t have a key. Last night Sylvia and I had stood under the window and texted “Happy New Year” to the family. Our phones gave us the error message that our cell phone plan didn’t cover voice.

This morning I stood in the same place. This time it let me phone, but the first three Internet calls were terribly broken up. After that I made more calls, and the reception was better than the same phone often has while I’m sitting in the living room of our home in Riverside. By the time I went home for breakfast, the entire sky was a glorious blue, and my spirits soared. I spent about 15 minutes coaxing some water, any water, to run out of our shower. I took a bunch of our wet wash out and hung it on the line while Sylvia went down to the faculty lounge window and chatted with our family who were all still languishing in the old year. We ate breakfast enjoying the singing of birds outside. Sylvia made breakfast, and I did the dishes. I sat down at this computer to work on my syllabus when I heard Sylvia cry, “Oh! No!” Hearing the patter of large drops on the roof, I dashed out to help her bring in the laundry I had hung up only an hour and a half earlier. In a matter of about 10 minutes we got over a half-inch (12mm) of rain.

Last week Tuesday, after we worked with Pam and Anitha, Gideon came by and took us out to the student dining room for lunch. They gave us each a stainless steel tray with a number of depressions in it. The center depression was probably larger than the other six or so combined. It was piled at two inches high with pure white rice. One of the other depressions had a bit of fruit in for dessert; the others held various well cooked vegetables to be eaten with the rice. There was also a fruity drink something like what the Mexicans call agua. I hesitated to drink anything for fear of picking up a stomach bug but was assured I didn’t need worry. So I drank it with no ill effects. I ate my fill and still didn’t clean up my plate, as did the other four at our table. The meal only costs 3,000 Ariary, Gideon told me. That’s about a dollar. I imagine that Sylvia and I will probably have lunch there frequently while teaching!

We have a very solid, primitively attractive wardrobe in our bedroom. It had a key stuck in one of the doors. I worked at it and worked at it with no tools until I eventually got it out. It had been jammed in there with a bunch of sticky gray gook. It seemed to go in and out ok and locked the wardrobe very effectively. An hour or so later, Sylvia tried it. It locked beautifully for her and then refused to come out or turn in either direction. I borrowed a hacksaw blade from physical plant and was told it was brand new, but worthless, like so much other stuff that is imported to Mada from the Far East. Most of our clothes are in that wardrobe. So I stuck the naked blade into the slot between the door and the cabinet and sawed away for a half hour until I had cut the bolt off.

Electricity was off for over two hours that Tuesday evening and 20 minutes the next evening. It seems to go off for short periods of time several times a day. After a lightning storm a couple months ago, we heard the electricity was off for several days.

As I write this we are suddenly in the middle of the second cloudburst of the day. Coming from drought stricken California, I love seeing the rain. In fact I wish we could ship it over there. It is causing major trouble for the people who live in the area. Most of them are extremely poor and depend on their rice crops to support them for the rest of the year. However, probably over 50% of their rice paddies are flooded to the point of destroying their crops.

At nine o’clock on Thursday morning (Christmas Eve) we attended a holiday celebration for the faculty and staff of Universite Adventiste Zurcher. Everyone met in the Dining Room. The speaker of the morning was Priti Buragy (spelling??). During her speech she pointed at me and talked about the eventual aging and decline of everyone. She waxed eloquent about how old I was. She pointed out the wrinkles on my face, the total loss of hair on my head, and how weak and fat I was. She went on and on, enjoying the effect. Of course, everyone stared at me, so I let my head sag onto my left shoulder and my tongue loll out of my mouth. As you can imagine, the whole crowd roared with laughter at my discomfort and distress. I doubt anyone in the room can tell you what point she was trying to make in her speech. But everyone now knows me and greets me with a warm and friendly “Bonjour!” or “Bonsoir!” whenever they see me.

Then they played a game where everyone was given a small square of paper on which was written one word, some in Malagasy, some in English, and some in French. We were supposed to find someone with a word that went closest with our own word. Everyone entered into the game with gusto. Of course, there were several false pairing, and some who found no partner. I got “window” and Priti got “curtain”. So she wound up paired with me!

Then they divided us up into groups by the months of our birthdays. They formed between 8 and 10 groups; some months didn’t have very many birthdays. (There’s got to be a cultural reasoning for this phenomenon!) Each group was given a poster with one of the missions for UAZ on it. They were supposed to come up with ways they had supported their mission of the university in 2015, how they would support it in 2016, and name a mascot for that mission.

Our group received the title “Desire for God” written in both English and Malagasy. The Malagasy title filled two entire lines written in much smaller letters than the English title. The Malagasy never say anything in one syllable that they can say in ten.

The group chose me to be their spokesperson and then promptly started a long and evidently fruitful discussion in Malagasy. They would break every so often and give me the gist. When it came our turn, I stood up hesitantly, not really knowing my audience or what had really been discussed by our group. To start with I read the title in both English and Malagasy. The group had coaxed me in blundering through the long multi-syllabic title. The audience loved it! When I came to the part about the mascot, I told them our choice was “juice,” and pointed to the glasses of juice ready for use on the table behind me. The audience looked at me blankly, not understanding. “We chose juice because it satisfies __________” and said the Malagasy word again. There was great clapping and laughing. I’ve forgotten the term.

Right after this activity the university treasurer, Mr Manda, handed out a “small token of appreciation”--a large bag of rice with a bottle of oil and some cookies and candy nestled in the rice. Even we got a bag—and we had rice for lunch!

While we were eating lunch, two men from maintenance came in carrying a new water heater for our house. They installed it in the attic to our flat, while outside a great electric storm issued peals of thunder. Yay! We got a hot shower for Christmas! You would appreciate it too if your home was in the 60s every morning when you got up and wanted to shower.

In the evening we took a potato salad, Ruth brought some lettuce salad and pistachio nut ice cream, and Pam made pizza at the Petersen’s to celebrate Christmas Eve. We watched the movie Freedom Writing. It is the story of a young woman who taught English writing in the Woodrow Wilson High School in inner city L.A. right after the Rodney King beating trial in 1994. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch it.

The electricity went on and off at least a dozen times during the show. We had Gideon’s computer hooked up to a data projector. Of course each outage killed the projector but not the lap top computer. Finally we gave up and watched the remainder of the movie on the lap top screen.

On Christmas Day in the morning, Sylvia and I joined up with Pam and Gideon and a student who knows Malagasy and walked across the road from the university toward the mountains to the east of us. There is a long ridge that runs north and south and is probably at least 500 feet high. Fleurot is from Fianarantsoa, about a 6 hour drive south of us. He was a good sport with an excellent sense of humor. He carried our lunch and Sylvia and my bottle of water. Since he speaks Malagasy, he was an invaluable asset. He also predicted that it wouldn’t rain until 5:00 p.m. The sun was shining out of a partially cloudy sky when we left.

We walked east across the UAZ driveway past a little Adventist Church then down into a valley. At the bottom of the valley is a deep gully with water flowing swiftly and apparently quite deep. It has vertical banks, so if one fell into it, she would have a difficult time getting out of it.

We crossed it on some rather flimsy looking logs. No mishap. Apparently students from UAZ used to come down this way and conduct a branch Sabbath school on the far side of the gully. When one of the girls fell into this gully, they decided to move the meeting place and built the church on the UAZ side. They still conduct church there.

We walked along a narrow wall with a rice paddy on our right, an irrigation ditch separating us from the paddy on the left. We eventually had to cross this ditch on a much smaller log anchored on the far side on mound of dirt that was split and collapsing into oblivion.

Then we started up a steep trail lined with sisal plants of two varieties, deep green short ones and green and white striped big ones, both with the deadly thorns characteristic to sisal. At one point Sylvia slipped on the slippery clay path and ran up against the thorns on the leaves. She didn’t injure herself badly. Then the trail ran through the front yards of three or four housed built right next to each other.

We turned and hiked steeply up again, right next to 3 or 4 burial buildings (tombs) built of cement block with some cement decorations on them. The Malagasy have a lot of fady (taboo) associated with these tombs. Periodically they are instructed by the spirits to open the tombs and rearrange and wrap the bones interred therein. It is taboo for anyone who is not of the family to be there when this happens. It is also taboo to take pictures of the tombs.

We got a close look at the irrigation schemes employed to flood the terraced rice paddies that go for hundreds of feet up the side of the mountain ridge. Unlike many other things in Mada, these irrigation schemes work well, and they are maintained by the owners working on them on a daily basis. I’m intrigued by both the engineering intricacies of the irrigation and the socio-political factors that must be in place to keep water flowing continuously without fighting! (Or is there fighting?)

The sun was hot, and it was probably about 80° (26°C) in the shade with close to 100% humidity. Sylvia’s energy was flagging, and she had to rest more and more often. Our goal was a waterfall higher up.

When we found an open steeply sloping meadow, we sat down and drank our water and ate sandwiches Sylvia had made and yesterday’s pizza Pam had made. Back across the valley we could see a rain squall drenching the UAZ campus. In at least four other directions great, heavy thunderstorms were in progress.

The squall came down the hill the way we had walked and crossed the valley and then came inexorably up the hillside towards us. The flanks came in advance and semi-surrounded us just like a military campaign. As it came up the hill, its strength grew, and the sides widened and deepened until we started to feel drops of rain fall gently on us. Then the rain started in earnest and drenched us almost immediately. We zipped up our backpacks and headed for home.

The path became increasingly treacherous. It was very slippery and made of hard clay. With just a little rain the clay became like grease. It gave way under out feet. It stuck to our shoes and pants and made our feet almost too heavy to lift. I slipped once and caught myself with both hands. Now they too were coated with the sticky mud. I found an irrigation ditch about waist high where I could wash the mud off my hands. Gideon was not so lucky and sat down in the stuff and got a seat full of it.

Towards the bottom of the hill, the squall blew past us, and within a few hundred yards the clay began to firm up so that we went more easily. We again made it across the logs without incident. Back in the pine forest we examined deep V-shaped scrapes a Chinese company has put on every tree. They’re catching the gum or amber that flows freely out of the wound. The plastic bags used to capture it are small and poor receptacles and filled with more water than gum. We worried what effect these wounds would have on the trees.

We eventually got home about four hours after we started. We didn’t stone Fleurot for his lousy prophecy. It had started to rain in the morning! We again rejoiced in the hot water we had so recently gotten to clean up in.

We took a long nap then went down to the Faculty Lounge and used Skype to talk to family and friends. Indeed it was a Christmas to remember!

Sojourn in Madagascar 2--Settling In

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 2
 Settling In

Every morning since arriving here I have started the day with a cold shower, not because I like cold showers but because the hot water heater in our flat doesn’t work. I spoke with the chief financial officer on the 20^th, and he indicates that they are planning to fix that. I know what you’re thinking, “You’re in the tropics in the summer time and it is hot and humid—a cold shower ought to be refreshing!” Actually at close to 5,000 ft. elevation, the only part of your equation we don’t have is the “hot.” Unlike La Sierra it has rained every day and every night since we got here.

A View from in front of our flat

The Administration Building center and Part of the Cafeteria on the right

Our house or flat is part of a duplex. We have the west side, and the house faces north, so it will be the shady side for the next few weeks until the sun gets into the north again. We have three bedrooms, a shower/toilet, a kitchen and a living room/dining room. The tile floors are made to look similar to the entry way to our home in Riverside but are probably asbestos tile. The living room is a step down from the rest of the house, and I nearly killed myself on it once. I think I’m getting used to it. So far the temperature indoors has remained in the 60s with a brief excursion into the very low 70s during an early afternoon sunshine spell before the usual afternoon rains set in.

Our duplex neighbors are Tantély and Noeé. Tantély is in the business department, maybe the chair, and Noeé is the head of the language department. They are very friendly and have helped us on numerous occasions when we needed to borrow some salt or a saw, etc.

Pam and Gideon attend the Sambaina Church about a couple miles from here. It is a little church that is struggling. They told us they had to be there at 8:30 for Sabbath School. Since P&G had said nothing Sabbath morning and we were a little late, we left our home at 8:30 and walked down to theirs. As we got there Gideon had just backed out of their carport and was headed up to fetch us. Pam wasn’t quite ready yet.

All of the services at Sambaina are in Malagasy. Most of the words in the language are at least 5 syllables long, and I have detected no cognates to any of the languages I understand, except for some of the Bible names. For example “Jesus” is “Josia”. I felt as though a black, sound blocking veil had been pulled over my head while I was there. Pam led out in the Sabbath School. She brought a student, Rivo (say Reev and leave your lips as though you are going to say the sound “oo” at the end but don’t actually give it voice), who had volunteered to translate to Malagasy for her. She was not very good, probably because her English is quite weak. It became evident that the reason she volunteered to come with us was because there is a boy who attends the church whom she is very interested in.  I see cupid is still alive and well in Madagascar (Mada).

The Sabbath school lesson was about Jeremiah and how he counseled the remnant of Israelites left in Jerusalem not to flee into Egypt. Then when everyone ignored his counsel, he fled with them. I didn’t point out that Ellen White notes that they took him with them (if I remember right). The question one of the theology/ministerial students asked was, “Does God bless or save someone who ignores His instruction?” The discussion went one way and then another. Gideon spoke out in favor of the proposition that God will continue to go with him although God may not protect him from the consequences of his ignoring God’s instruction. When the discussion seemed to be reaching a stalemate, I pointed out that Paul ignored prophets in every church from Asia to Jerusalem who counseled him against going up to Jerusalem. Indeed Paul was imprisoned by the Romans for ignoring God’s counsel, but God did not leave him, and he wrote many of the Pauline epistles included in the Bible while in prison. That New Testament example seemed to lift the stalemate.

In the interval between SS and church, about 200 pathfinders swelled the church to a bursting point. They came from all over Mada, and their intention is to hike 160 km (100 miles) over the ensuing week. They had two major concerns: the first is that it is in the rainy season, and it has rained, sometimes hard, every day over the past two weeks; secondly, they are concerned about bandits or hooligans that might interfere with them. Their leaders directed them in military fashion, and they seemed amenable to the whole idea.

Gideon was the preacher for church. He used the biblical simile of Christians’ being the salt of the earth. This involved spreading the salt sparingly amongst the entire neighborhood so that they could get the benefit of the savor of the salt and not be turned off by too large a dose.

After church we came back to UAZ for lunch with Pam and Gideon although Gideon spent most of the lunch time at a funeral service. Sylvia agreed to speak at the 3:00 meeting, so we went back there and met for another two hours. Sylvia used the example of a paperclip as a symbol for Christians. She spoke very well and had the members and pathfinders hanging onto her every word. Her Toastmasters membership is helping her. Towards the end of the meeting with the Pathfinders, the leader of the meeting insisted they weren’t going to leave me out of the service, so they called me up for the parting prayer. We were able to more or less follow what was going on because throughout all of the meetings a volunteer would attach him- or herself to us and translate what was going on. Some translators were much better than others, but we appreciated all of them. Otherwise sitting there for over 5 hours would have been terribly stressful and boring.

At seven o’clock that evening there was a program put on by the UAZ Student Association in the university church. We got there about 7:15, and the church, which seats over 500 people, was only about a third full. We got a good seat. This time Edwin Burgarary, chair of Theology sat down next to us and translated throughout the whole meeting. The program was in French, and I felt an almost physical lifting of the Malagasy veil. I don’t understand French, but I can almost follow everything that is going on because of the rich set of cognates.

The dean of students spoke at length about the meaning of Christmas. On the whole Christmas is ignored in Mada, and Adventists are traditionally skeptical about Christmas and its pagan origins and secularization. Then the students did a dramatization of the life of Christ with emphasis on His birth and His passion. Many of the songs used in the drama were in English. A small portion of the drama was in Malagasy. I could sense it instantly because of the mental veil I mentioned above in relation to Sambaina.

The dean had urged the students to sit quietly throughout the presentation and not to laugh or applaud. I guessed that he was standing in front of an ocean and demanding the tide not to come in. The program started with the annunciation to Mary. It then showed a skit of Joseph’s receiving the news of his fiancée’s pregnancy. I could sense a growing swell of response amongst the students. Then when Christ was born and the grand carols of Christmastide, both English and French, were sung, the joy of the audience burst into a crescendo of applause and cheering. The whole story of Christ’s birth, ministry, death, and resurrection was enacted. The audience was caught up in the drama. All of the music was played between 110 and 120 dB. (120dB usually causes pain in the eardrums, and I felt the pain!)

I spoke briefly with the dean of students afterwards.  I told him of how I sensed the joy and full involvement of the audience throughout the performance. Furthermore, I suggested that if the students had remained quiet and unresponsive, even the stones of the building would have cried out. He still looked glum because the students had not adopted his sophisticated stoic attitude. Sylvia and I walked the little over a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) home enjoying the fresh damp air and allowing the silence of the night to soothe our aching eardrums.

On Sunday we got up late, and then P&G  took us in to Antsirabe (the nearest real town to buy groceries, about an hour’s drive south of UAZ) to do a bit of shopping. We stopped at Super Maxi Foods, an Indian run shop and bought a few things. We went there first because it closes at noon on Sundays.

The market came next. Many of the stands were closed because it was Sunday. It has a roof over most of it, a necessity in this very rainy area. Everybody is expected to dicker for everything. Since we are vazaha (whites or aliens), we never get the best prices anyway. We bought plums, small papayas, small bananas, carrots, avocados, beets, cucumbers, small mild chilis, green beans, and more litchis than I could eat in 100 years. The largest unit of currency in Mada is a 10,000 Ariary note (worth about $3). It is still regarded by the people manning the market booths as too large to spend there. This will give you an indication of the price of vegetables and the amount of cash each agent keeps on herself.

Finally we stopped at a Shop Rite grocery store, and I spent the rest of the 350,000 Ariary ($110 U.S.) I got as an advance. Shop Rite seems to have a lot of foods imported from South Africa. P&G took us out to a pizza place in a former club for the ruling French. The food is good and hopefully safer to eat than that obtainable at a hotely (the local eateries that are all over the town). I’m still afraid of the “Montezuma’s revenge” that is so rife where people never wash their hands before fixing the food. I have suffered from this malady twice recently. The first one was in Namibia, and it took me close to a year to get rid of that one. The other one was in Monterey, Mexico, and was cured by a quick dose of antibiotics.

Pam is trying to prepare us to go shopping without her around. Since I have no maps of the cities, and streets are never labeled, and no buildings are numbered, it remains to be seen if I can find my way around the towns. If I get some Internet and a printer and some paper, maybe I can make some maps.

On Tuesday, after staff worship at 7:30 a.m., Sylvia and I met with Pam, who is leading out in the conversational English classes, and Anita who has been teaching most of our classes while we have been processing the red tape to get here. We spent most of the morning learning what we needed to do and setting up a schedule. Sylvia will be doing 8 units of classes that have a fair amount of writing and hence grading. I will be doing 13 units of conversation classes, where I will be doing no grading of written work.

We were supposed to have had this meeting on Monday, but the physical plant crew was working on our home. They got most of the work done, except for getting the hot water heater working. They assured me there was nothing wrong with it. They pointed out that it actually got the water a little warmer than the cold tap. But it was still much cooler than lukewarm. Their English was much better than my Malagasy, but that’s not saying much. I simply put my hand under the tap and said, “It’s not warm.” Finally they gave up and left. Finally on Thursday afternoon they got a new heater and installed it. So we got hot water as a Christmas present. And it is much appreciated!

We spent most of Monday in the Faculty Lounge working with the Internet. It was somewhat frustrating because the Internet is flaky at best. Then the power goes off several times a day. About noon Gideon came into the Faculty Lounge and invited us to join him, Pam, and Jemima (a prospective teacher) to eat in the student dining room. We found the food to be excellent—well good—and we can eat lunch there for only 3000Ar (about $1). A meal consists of a tray with a large mound of rice in the center and 5 or 6 vegetables around the mound. I think that when we actually start teaching (January 4), we will eat there quite often.