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!
