Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 16 - Morondava B - The Weekend

With Anne on the Pirogue

In the previous Sojourn I told you of our visit to the Allée des Baobabs and the Kirindy Forest Preserve. Here we fill you in with the rest of the weekend we spent at the coast.

After checking into the Tecicogne (Three Coconut) Resort, which is really just a small hotel with about 10 rooms, we went out to the Morondava Beach. Low waves between a foot and two feet (around 50cm) high broke gently on the sandy beach which seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in either direction. The flooded river, its mouth opening just south of Morondava, sent a stream of yellow-brown water some two city blocks wide north along the beach. Beyond this stream we saw a sharp line, and then the clear deep blue Indian Ocean stretched to the horizon.

Only a few people sat or strolled on the beach, most of them Malagasies. We crossed the sand and played a bit in the warm waters of the ocean. No one had a real urge to swim in the muddy brown waters. I met a well dressed Japanese woman who is touring the world alone. She taught me a few Japanese sentences and then made a movie of my repeating them to send to her friends.

Pirogue Under Sail

Out in the blue of the ocean a fishing pirogue (dugout canoe made from a balsa log and a side rigger) sporting a large dirty square sail glided lazily northwards. Just about opposite us it turned in towards the beach. As it came in the two fishermen furled the sail and lowered the mast. They easily rode the small breakers in to the beach. Some people standing nearby joined them in pushing the boat up just above the water’s edge. They laid their entire catch on the sand: one stingray and what Sylvia called, a nurse shark. A small, curious crowd gathered around and chatted with them about their experiences. As usual my lack of any understanding of Malagasy precluded my learning anything from their conversation. Eventually someone with some money came by and dickered for the fish. Most of the crowd then grabbed the pirogue and dragged it way up the beach beyond the reaches of a high tide.

Nurse Shark and Sting Ray

Sylvia squatted at the water’s edge and dribbled wet sand into a forest of squirrely trees. Pretty soon the two Payet children joined Sylvia, although the restive Aldwyn couldn’t stay in one place very long. The temperature of the water was a comfortable 80-something degrees (close to 30°C)—a far cry from the Pacific off the California coast.

After breakfast on Sabbath morning, Edwin and I walked out of the hotel and down to the end of a sand peninsula that hosted scores of vessels. Most of them were pirogues, but there were a few larger vessels in various states of disrepair. The two-masted Fahenvenua was about half the size of the Mayflower model in Plymouth Harbor. It was beached like all the other vessels, but the watchman on it told us they were awaiting cargo.

After breakfast we took the families out to an abandoned resort on the beachfront. We sat down on the deck in the shade of one of the A-frame bungalows and listened to the children as they told us stories about their Sabbath School lessons. Ann had a very good story that showed that she had been thinking about it. Aldwyn’s story blended Bible and action fantasy. It had plenty of action but no plot.

Sabbath School at an Abandoned Beach Resort

We ambled slowly back to the Trecicogne because of the heat which was well up into the 90s (30s C). By the time we got back, we decided we were hungry. The ladies pooled all of our leftovers and opened cans of lasagna and lentils. After lunch we sacked out for a well earned, or not, siesta.

About 3:30 people were stirring. We found Gilbert, the pirogue owner, who earlier had offered to take us out in the lagoon and river and show us the mangroves and the fishing village across the wide river. He spoke both English and French, which was an extra plus.

Mick, Ellie, Alphia, Aldwyn, Edwin, and Anne under the Hat

His pirogue was dug out of the trunk of a large balsa tree. The balsas grow south along the coast towards Toliara. It had one outrigger. I often wondered, but not for very long, why they didn’t have two outriggers for greater stability. I had my answer when we docked along a sand bank and I stepped out without getting my feet wet. If there had been a second outrigger, we could never have gotten that close to the bank.

Gilbert pronounced his name as the French would but allowed us to pronounce it in English. He explained that there are three types of mangrove trees. Midwives make a tea of the leaves of the small-leaf mangrove. The mother drinks the tea right after giving birth. I don’t remember what effect the tea had on the woman. Sorry!

Large-Leaf Mangrove Fruit

Women grind up the fruit of the large-leaf mangrove to make a mask that they coat their faces with. Of course it helps keep the direct rays of the sun off of their faces, but they seem to wear the mask for the same reason some women wear lipstick. We saw a lot of women wearing this mask in Morondava. The practice hasn’t seemed to spread to the rest of the island.

The Latest in Mangrove Fashion

Gilbert didn’t tell us about uses for the medium leaf mangrove.

Gilbert’s brother Mick road in the rear and Gilbert in the front. Mick seemed to only understand Malagasy. As we were first getting into the pirogue, Ellie came running up and climbed in, so there were 9 of us in the pirogue.

Ellie was a Greek woman of about 30, I would guess. We had first encountered her at the Thursday evening dinner. She spoke English and French perfectly with hardly any accent. She has an MBA and works at some big international concern in Paris. She tours the world as a financial consultant, and as if she doesn’t get enough travel in that way, on her vacations she flies to exotic places. She had been in Mada for a week or so, and she was leaving early Sunday morning by car to Tana where she would catch a plane back to Paris on Monday and be in the office first thing on Tuesday morning.

She seemed to really enjoy our company. She and Sylvia had had a long discussion on Thursday night. She told Sylvia that she gives the existence of God a 50-50 chance. On the other hand, she was very respectful as we said grace when she joined us for Saturday night supper at the hotel restaurant.

Gilbert took us to a fishing village on the south side of the Morondava River. Thousands of people live there and travel back and forth daily. At low tide there is a large sandbar right down the center of the river. There are two large pirogues that provide transport across the river. One takes people from Morondava across to the sandbar. The people all get out, walk across the sandbar, and then get in the second pirogue and travel on to the island. Of course there is equal traffic crossing the other direction too. At high tide the river covers the sandbar, but the crossing remains the same. People travel to the sandbar. They get out and wade, with the water up above their knees, to the other pirogue and ride on up to the village. Of course they have to wade out from the bank to get into the pirogue and then wade from the pirogue to their destination. The fare is 1000 Ariary one way, that’s about 32¢ U.S. This is indeed a sizeable sum to them. Most of the villagers are extremely poor. The village cannot be reached by road.

We crossed the river higher up than the water taxis do. When we reached the sandbar, Gilbert and Mick jumped out and pushed with all their might to get us across several 100 yards (meters) of sand bank.

 Jocelyn (Dzudzel) and the 50,000 Ar. Home (Under Construction)

We walked around the village with Gilbert. He pointed out a new house that someone was making for themselves out of mangrove poles. They thatch the roof with coconut leaves. The final cash cost for the house will be about 50,000 Ariary (about $15.00 US). Since mangrove poles don’t last too well, the house will probably not last more than 18 months, maximum. There is a large, neatly kept compound in the middle of the village built by nuns. They live in relative luxury compared with the rest of the villagers. A number of these poor houses, including the nunnery, had a satellite TV antenna.

Sunset on the Pirogue

Sunday morning we left Trecicogne for home. We stopped in town so the Payets could buy souvenirs, we could purchase drinking water, and the driver could fill the van with diesel. For about 400 of the 540 km trip the thermometer on my watch read about 105° (over 40°C. We had no air conditioning. Then we hit a rain storm as we got back into the highlands. My pate about froze, and I rode the last hour with my hand on my head to try and keep it warm.

On the trip home we had Edwin and Alphie tell us about their courtship and marriage. He is from Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean about 875 km (550 miles) from Madagascar. Alphie is from the Philippines, which is about 10 times as far from Madagascar or Reunion. They met at the Adventist graduate university AIIAS in the Philippines.

Arriving Home

We arrived home about 7:30 that Sunday evening, and yes, it was still raining.

We left UAZ one week later. On our last Sabbath we had potluck at the Payet’s home with all of the other expatriates. This time we contributed nothing, nada, since we had essentially nothing in the house. We spent the evening packing. We were only allowed two bags instead of 4 since South African Airways considers this an internal flight. Furthermore they restricted the weight in our bags much more tightly than they had on our international flights. We repacked our bags when we got to the airport so that none of them was more than a kg overweight. We were allowed to take our two smaller bags as carry-on, which they subsequently checked at the gate.

Pam and Gideon took us on a tour of the Adventist organizations in Tana. We briefly toured the ADRA area. Then we spent some time in the Indian Ocean Union Conference area. They have a fairly large medical and dental presence there as well as a print shop and other amenities. Finally we visited the Central Madagascar Conference compound. At one end of the compound it has a huge amphitheatre that they have carved out of a natural valley. It seats several thousand people with a huge baptismal font in the shape of a cross where they can have at least a dozen pastors baptizing people simultaneously.

We had grown to love Mada and its people, and we really hated to leave it all. I about choked up as we flew around Tana on our way out. On the other hand, we were headed home!

#MADAGASCAR, #MALAGASY, #EATINGOUT, #MORONDAVA, #SUV, #TRECICOGNE, #PIROGUE, #MANGROVES, #HEAT, #ADVENTIST, #ROMANCE, #FLYING, #FLOODS

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 15 - Morondava A - Friday

Lovers

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

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

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

Anne with a Baobab Flower

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

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

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

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

Aldwyn in a Baobab

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

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

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

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

Allée des Baobabs

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

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

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

The Payets Measure a Baobab, Sylvia Looks On

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

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

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

Swallowtails at Kirindy Headquarters

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

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

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

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

Red-Fronted Brown Lemur at Kirindy

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

Verreaux’s Sifaka Ready to Leap

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

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

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

#MADAGASCAR, #MALAGASY, #EATINGOUT, #MORONDAVA, #KIRINDY, #LEMUR, #SIFAKA, #SUV, #TRECICOGNE, #POTHOLES, #NIKON, #LUMIX, #SWALLOWTAIL, #HOGNOSESNAKE, #EROTICA, #FOREST, #IGUANA, #SKINK, #BAOBAB

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 14 - Easter Lilies and Sad Dogs

Easter Lily

It is Easter season, and the volunteer Easter lilies are blooming all around us. There are not a lot of flowers now towards the end of the summer. So their gorgeous beauty is a welcome sight.

As I hurried to class on Tuesday afternoon about 4:00, it started to rain. The closer I got to class the harder it rained. Half a dozen students were in class waiting for me. The rest, another dozen or more, dripped in by ones and twos. I had a final exam review prepared using PowerPoint, and we started right in and finished just at 5:00. Outside the window it had been raining steadily. Now the rain picked up to resemble a cloudburst. The driving, heavy rain continued for the next hour. I sat in the classroom for that hour, not wanting to walk a kilometer home with my computer on my back in that downpour.

Several students were sitting around waiting for the rain to let up, too. A student, not from that class, whom I’ll call Marc, walked in. He spoke English much better than any students of my class. He asked if he could talk with me, and I readily agreed. I recognized immediately that he had an agenda but said nothing. I listened to him go on for twenty-five or thirty minutes and said nothing except just enough to keep him talking. Three other students pulled up chairs close to us, but Marc did all the talking. He thanked me for coming to Madagascar to teach them. He wished I would stay until the end of the year. Then he remarked about my going home and knowing a lot of people in America. He kept hinting that all these people would have plenty of money.

Marc pointed out how there were many students who had no money. Yes, there were scholarships available, but if a student had, by no fault of his own, failed a class, then he wasn’t eligible for the scholarship. He finally began to be specific about himself. If he failed a class, the university might require him to stay a fourth year. (A bachelor’s degree at U. A. Z. is a three year program, like the universities in Europe, rather than four years like in the U.S.) He felt that was eminently unfair, but he wanted a degree. I mentioned that he might look for a job and earn some money he needed. He parried by insisting there was nowhere that he could work. I suggested that he speak with the president or the treasurer or the dean or the man in charge of plant maintenance. He immediately indicated that there is money available, but that it came with conditions, with strings attached. He needed money with no conditions. I and the other students still listening to him laughed heartily, and I asked him if there was anybody on earth who would give money away free and with no strings attached.

His request that I could do something for him became more pointed. He was sure that I would like to see him finish his program and would be willing to talk to my friends to see if they could help him. He also was sure that I could help him.

I laughed sympathetically with him and said, “Let me tell you about my experience. I had no support in university, so I worked between 30 and 35 hours a week to pay my school fees. It took me five-and-a-half years to earn my bachelor’s degree because I had to work so much. I feel that my education was worth every effort I put into it. This is why I suggested that you earn your way through university.”

Marc was momentarily stunned. He had set a trap for himself and fallen right into it. True Malagasy style, this didn’t stop his talking. He went right on with all sorts of reasons that he thought would justify his receiving money. If there is anything I have learned while in Madagascar it is that no self-respecting person will say something in ten words if he can say it in a thousand. Just calling for the morning offering in church literally takes at least ten minutes.

By this time it was six o’clock. The downpour had settled back to a steady rain. A woman whom I hadn’t seen before stuck her head into the classroom and asked, in Malagasy, that we leave so she could lock up the building. The students with me told me what she had said. We were all ready for a change of venue and conversation. They headed on out to the highway and their rooms. I headed back up the kilometer long hill. I had a student walking with me who shared my umbrella for a couple hundred meters (yards).

As I write this the neighbors’ pretty little white terrier, Pato, [pronounced pa-too] is howling forlornly. My guess is that she probably weighs less than 10 pounds (4 kg). This is its standard behavior. Pato is confined to a tiny little box outside the back door. Short of feeding it once in a while, the neighbors ignore it completely. We are serenaded by poor Pato’s loneliness. There is no animal rights group to appeal to. Most dogs simply run loose. Most are so underfed that their ribs stick out and they are always hungry. Confining Pato is perhaps the only humane thing to do because some large dogs are severe bullies and appear to kill simply for the joy of killing.

I’ll call another neighbor’s dog Fido, since I don’t know his name. My guess is that Fido is closer to 100 lb (40 kg). People have asked his owner to restrain him, but he runs freely around the more than 400 ha (800 acres) of the campus.

When we arrived on campus in December, there was a female stray that would come by Pam’s hoping for a handout. Pam is a pushover, and Stray usually got something. She was obviously pregnant and very skinny. She had her puppies a few weeks ago. Since she didn’t have regular food, she became very gaunt. One day last week I came up to the kitchen to give the cook a receipt so we could eat lunch in the cafeteria. I saw Stray carrying a puppy around the side of the building and towards me. She lay the puppy down in the sunshine to try and get it a little warmer. She licked the fellow all over to clean him up. This was right between the kitchen door and farm produce door. Poor Stray was so gaunt it was a wonder she could even stand up. Who knows how much milk she was able to give the little fellow.

Stray Trying to Protect Her Puppy

The man from the farm came out and carried the puppy back to where it had been staying. Dogs are an essential part of the community but are despised and never treated as pets. Sylvia went around and found where they had put the pup. She came back to me crying her heart out. All of the other puppies had been killed, and this was the only one left. Pam heard about it, fetched Sylvia, and the two of them took the puppy with Stray following around next to Pam’s kitchen door and made them comfortable in a box that used to house turtles. [Sylvia wrote about the cats earlier. Both are now missing and assumed dead.] I took the picture of Stray protecting her last remaining puppy in the box.

While we were down at Morondava for the weekend, the Petersens heard a commotion outside their back door. Gideon went out and found Fido leaving having killed the last puppy. He didn’t eat it, nor does he need food. He just satisfied his bully streak. Stray was standing there, half Fido’s height and staring forlornly at what was her last little piece of joy in a harsh, uncaring world. It seems Fido still continues his reign of terror unhindered.

On Wednesday morning, March 9, I sent out my second issue of the FAMA Newsletter. I sent out 540 copies before the Internet bully, Google, stopped me without so much as an “excuse me.” I then published a copy on this blog site. As usual I sent out a notification on Facebook. Looking down my Facebook page briefly, I saw a picture of my brother’s niece Cindy’s family. They were holding their third little baby with everyone clustered around her. The baby had been in NICU for three-weeks with a defective heart and other troubles, and just hours before I got online, the baby finally gave up the struggle. Our last week here at UAZ has turned out to be a sad one.

This last week is also the time we give our final exams. The rest of the school gives theirs next week. Since we fly out of Tana on Monday, the day before our visa expires, we gave our exams early. I taught only oral English classes. So I spent from 5 to 10 minutes with each of 52 students. Each one made a one to two minute presentation telling me about either her family or her education to date. Some were good; most were interesting. And then there were those that went something like this:

“My fadder’s name is Ravaoharimiaina, and my mudder’s name is Razafimanana. I have two brudders and tree sisters. One brudder’s name is Mahatolimiairina and de udder brudder is Ninjananamaminy…” Unfortunately they mumble and murder each name, because they don’t usually pronounce the whole name. They might just use the first three syllables, or the middle two syllables, or some other concoction. Somehow a student in this group didn’t seem to make as good a grade as some of the others.

Most of the students come from “a small family wid 2 brudder and 1 sister.” “My family is not poor, but nieder are we rich.” They don’t have federal grants for education here, so the very poor cannot go to university. The nation is one of the poorest in the world, as are many former French colonies, like Haiti. In stark contrast, many of the former British colonies are very well off, like the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Hong Kong, Kenya, and the list goes on and on.

Taxi-Brousse, Motor Cycle, and Hand Drawn Carts

Many students’ parents came from larger families, so they had 12 uncles and 14 aunts. Most had parents who lived in the cities and towns and were teachers, lawyers, vendors, doctors, pastors, nurses, and the like. They came from all over Madagascar. As we’ve discovered personally, travel in Mada is very difficult and time consuming. To get to the university, students often travel for days and nights in over-crowded taxi-brousses. These are small busses designed to seat 8 to 12 people but crowded beyond belief with people, animals, and luggage. They sit in each other’s laps, on boards set between seats, and even hang out the back doors. Notice that in the picture the back door is ajar. The “conductor” stands there to pull people in as they try to board the taxi while it is still moving, as well as to collect the fare.

We ate our last meal in the cafeteria on Monday when both Sylvia and I were giving exams. I broke down and took a picture this time. The pile of rice in the center is scooped onto the tray by a large soup bowl. The rice is well cooked and free of all flavoring, including salt. The salad on the left is a sliced local squash and a piece of tomato. The relish at the top is what I used to call cow peas as a kid. The relish on the right is a mixture of local greens and potatoes. Both relishes are slightly over salted so that when they are combined with the rice, the combination is very palatable. They also serve a drink. This is usually the water used to soak out the burned part at the bottom of the pot where they cook the rice with some fruity flavor added. By the way, as a Malagasy you eat with the spoon and use the fork to push food onto your spoon.

Typical Cafeteria Meal

On Thursday, March 5, I completed my last duties at the university. At 7:30 in the morning I told the story of my conversion to Christianity. I have added my notes of what I planned to say at worship. I simplified what I said considerably because it was being translated into Malagasy, and the volunteer translator initially had a difficult time with what I was saying. Later that morning I emailed my grades and some of Sylvia’s grades into the registrar’s office. Finally at 4:00 p.m., I gave approximately three-quarters of an hour presentation on academic cheating and ways to minimize it to an academic policies committee. I noticed from their minutes that they had discussed several cases of cheating during their previous meeting. They also had me give the morning devotional to the Language Department on Monday morning. After those two devotionals, they’ll probably be happy to see me go.

Notes for my Thursday devotional:

My Christian Experience

I am a 4^th generation Adventist. Great Uncle Joe was sent by Ellen White as a missionary to the freed slaves in the south part of the United States.

I attended Adventist schools from standard 1 through Andrews University. I learned a lot of Adventist faith, doctrines and way of life. I had been taught that we must live a perfect, sinless life now because in the Time of Trouble we will continue to live the same way without an intercessor.

I was taught that there is no sacrifice for someone who sins willfully.

I had sinned willfully more times than I could count. Therefore my teachers assured me that Christ’s sacrifice would not cleanse me and I was damned to eternal hell. I was very well versed in Scripture, and I knew they were quoting scripture correctly. I accepted that indeed I was damned to hell, and there was no alternative.

When I was 20 I attended Seminar Marienhöhe in Germany to learn German. I knew absolutely no German when we got there. And all I heard in the dorm, in the cafeteria, in church, and in the classroom was German, which I didn’t understand. In the process I became very depressed when I could understand nothing.

About a kilometer down the hill from the school was an American military base, and I walked down to it every Sunday morning and attended church on base just to hear English spoken. I joined their choir and made a number of very good friends. A Pentecostal soldier took special interest in me. When he learned with horror that I was an Adventist, he warned me strongly to get out of the Adventist church.

Always ready for a good argument, I enjoyed arguing with him. But my heart was not in it. After all, I wasn’t really an Adventist; I had been an Adventist, but I was now on a direct route to hellfire. He read me the texts about how the law was nailed to the cross. I had learned my lessons well and countered that the Ten Commandments were not included in that verse.

Every time I saw him, he would quote Romans 10: 9. If we confess with our mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and if we believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, we would be saved. He would keep telling me that my salvation had nothing to do with keeping the law. It had everything to do with believing that Jesus had died for me and that he had risen from the dead.

I searched my Bible carefully. It became more and more evident that this young soldier was 100% right and that the interpretation I had accepted was flawed. Finally I had to agree with him, and I accepted Christ and his sacrifice as the only way I could be saved. So I was baptized as an Adventist when I was 12 and became a Christian when I was 20! Those verses that had troubled me are true, but Christ’s grace saved me just as much as it saved David in his sin with Bathsheba.

For the next ten years I studied Adventism all over again. I read every book Ellen White had written. I read the Bible in several versions and several languages.

If you haven’t done it yet, I challenge you to study for yourself everything you can find about God’s grace and his marvelous, unbelievable love for you. I guarantee it will change your life, forever. Put aside everything you have learned about our doctrines and teachings and do what all the early Adventist pioneers did: study the Bible for yourself. Find out exactly what it says about faith, grace and, love. Every time before you open the Bible or Ellen White, quote James 1:5 in a prayer to God for wisdom, and He will give it to you. Your eternal happiness and very salvation depend only on your relationship to Christ.

#MADAGASCAR, #UAZ, #MALAGASY, #PREACHING, #RICE, #PLANETS, #EATINGOUT,  #DOGABUSE, #PETABUSE, #GRACE, #TRANSLATION, #SALVATIONBYWORKS, #CHEATING, #TAXI, #TAXI-BROUSSE, #LILY, #EASTERLILY

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