Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 10 -
A Zebu Cart in Front of a Jesus Saves Sign
February started out almost like a wholly new experience.
The first week was Semaine de Priére, Week of Prayer. I still had the remnant
of the cold that blighted the last ten days of January.
Sylvia invited the Semaine de Priére speaker, Pastor Rado,
over for lunch on Tuesday. He is the new communication director for the
Madagascar Union Conference. He mentioned to us that he has two children, one
about 1½ and the other still a babe in arms. He seems older than a man with
children that small. Then in one of his sermons he mentioned that his wife died
some years ago. So we assume he has remarried. He preached entirely in
Malagasy, so I missed out on stories that seemed to keep the kids riveted. Our
interpreters couldn’t keep up with the rapid fire Malagasy he was preaching.
All we got were disconnected sentences, and it was extremely evident that they
weren’t sure what English words to use for some of what he was talking about. With
the translators we got we were lucky if they were able to translate even 25% of
what was presented.
Classes were rearranged and shortened to make time for a
daily worship period at 4:30 each afternoon. Faculty and Staff members were
expected down at the church at 7:00 a.m. for an extra meeting each morning. I
confess to only making it to the morning meeting on Wednesday. That particular
morning Pastor Rado spoke until 8:00, when classes are scheduled to start. Then
a local yokel stood up and repeated the sermon, also in Malagasy. Then we had
ten minutes of prayer and singing that included repeating the theme song,
actually for the sixth or seventh time during this service alone. The song
repeats over and over again, “Make me a servant, Lord,” in English without a
catchy tune. And no one really means what they are singing, nor do most of them
realize what they are actually singing. This meeting was for the faculty and
staff of UAZ only. The student meetings were at 4:30 in the afternoon. Then
after the song, everyone filed out with dignity and stood in a line outside the
door and shook hands with everyone else, repeating “Bon jour no,” or “Salama tompko,”
French and Malagasy greetings.
Anitha walked down to the nursing building with me and
introduced me to the second year nursing students whom I was meeting for the
first time. They then split up into four groups, whom I taught separately for
the next four hours. Actually, I only had the first group for twenty minutes on
account of the unexplainable behavior at the morning meeting. It dawned on me
later that no one has classes on Wednesday morning except the nursing
department.
The Nursing Department of UAZ is the largest department. To
meet nursing accreditation, the students have to spend every other month out in
the hospitals. So all of these students had been interning at hospitals in
January. The first Wednesday of February I had 8 new class periods and 112 new
students to teach. The new nursing students have the reputation that they can’t
learn English. Since they only get English every second month, they are
definitely behind the other students I teach. But they are very willing and
seem to try. However the second year students seem to be no further along than
the first year. I’m currently teaching 165 students total, which is somewhat
more than one-third of the total student body.
I was scheduled to teach in NCC 3 (Nursing Classroom). When
I got there I found there were no electricity plugs in that room, none, nada, nul. There was one hole in the
wall with two wires sticking out of it! I told the powers that be that I had to
have a plug to use my computer. They took me to NCC 4 which had a plug that was
hanging dangerously out of the wall. When I moved it, which I did when I
plugged in my computer, all kinds of flashes sparked out of the back of the
plug. They desperately need a fire marshal around!
I started my marathon of 8 hours of teaching 2nd
year in the morning and 1st year in the afternoon. I did have an
hour off for lunch. I taught the same material to each of the eight classes and
approximately 112 students. After a while the whole day degenerated into a
blur. I had to keep asking myself, “Have I taught this to this group yet?”
During the sixth consecutive period, a woman came to my door and said
pointedly, “This is my classroom for this period. I’ve always taught in this
room!” She had a whole crowd of students there to back her up.
I stood solidly in the doorway. My mind raced, and I said to
myself, “If I were Sylvia I would immediately acquiesce and leave and go
nowhere. You need to let the poor lady have her classroom. All of the other
classrooms are full.” Anyway, still standing solidly in the doorway I replied,
“I was assigned this classroom by Mr. Sajik and Dr. Richards. We need to get
someone in authority here to settle the matter and find a room for your class
or mine.” She looked very frustrated, and I really feel sorry for her. As the
new kid in the block I had no idea how to find another classroom. I stood there
in expectation that she knew where to find somebody. She just stood there, so I
turned around and went back to teaching the class. I’ve heard nothing more
about it. Maybe I will next Wednesday?
This is the second time in about a month that I have been
scheduled in a classroom concurrently with another class. Something has to
give! At that time another class was already settled in the room. So I took my
class up to the Language Lab and unwittingly displaced a class that was already
there. There were only three or four students, and they were all sitting at
computers. The teacher who was supposed to teach them came in 20 minutes late,
so she wasn’t there to defend her turf. I got told about that one by several
different people! But, as rear-admiral Grace Hopper once commented, “I found
that it was a lot easier to apologize than get permission,” referring to the
navy in her case.
So when I bade the last class goodbye at 4:20, I felt like I
had just come through the wringer on one of those old fashioned washing machines.
I walked up the kilometer-long hill to our house. I desperately needed to sit
on the can but couldn’t bring myself to squat over the terribly filthy toilets
in the classrooms with no toilet seats and no paper.
I hoped Sylvia would be home so I could use our facilities.
I tried to phone her, but my phone died after the second ring—battery dead. The
outer door of our house was closed, and my heart sank within me. I tried the
door. It was securely locked against intruders, crooks, rapists, murderers, and
me. I had my backpack with my computer in it on my back. I didn’t dare leave it
at the door. So I headed down the path that goes down to the farm behind our
house. It goes through a stretch where no one has done any clearing for several
years. I found a number of young pines anywhere from 5 to 10 feet high (2 to
3m). I squatted in this thicket and used the tender branches as paper. I had
barely walked 20 yards (20m) back up the hill when I came upon a grandmother, a
mother, and a daughter coming down the trail. That would have been
embarrassing! As it was, I greeted them cheerfully; they greeted me likewise,
and we went on our diverse ways.
A Five Inch (12cm) Spider with the Pine Thicket in the Background
“Why didn’t I have my key?” you ask. Well there is only one
key in the entire universe to our house. I tried to get a second key made. They
actually made two new keys—neither of which works. When I mentioned this to the
powers that be, they each shrugged and said, “Welcome to Madagascar.” We still
have only one key. If I were in California, I would long ago have gone down to
Walmart, bought a new lock, and installed it. Again, “Welcome to Madagascar.” So!
Pine thickets here I come! “Welcome to Madagascar.”
Stop press! Mr. Palaya (maintenance) sent one of his workers
over today who dripped some oil in the lock and actually got one of the new
keys working. Now both Sylvia and I can be out of the house at the same time
and still be able to get back in! Thank you, John and Mr. Palaya.
And more Stop Press: we are booked out of Tana at 3:00 p.m.
on the 14th of March. We fly to Cape Town and spend a little over
two weeks in the Cape. Then on the 30th we fly out of Cape Town and
arrive in Los Angeles late in the evening of the 31st. We should be
there just in time to do our taxes. Drum roll, please!
A little over a week ago we had the electricity go off for 3
½ hours one night. That means Sylvia’s C-PAP quits working. I had to get her to
roll over so she could breathe several times during those hours. Pam and Gideon
took us down to Antsirabe [say “aunt-sear-a-BAY”] the next day, and Pam and I
walked up and down the streets looking for a voltage inverter. We finally found
one rated for 1000W and costing 110,000 Ariary. The shopkeeper tested it with a
battery and a 30 inch TV, and it worked just fine. We brought it home Friday
evening. Gideon parked his car outside our house and showed me how to take the
battery out. He was going to actually take it out and put it in our room so we
could use it that night. I told him to leave the battery in, and I would come
out and fetch it if the lights did go out. They didn’t! At least not that
night.
The next day we attended the English Sabbath School and sat
next to the Palayas, missionaries from the Philippines. He mentioned that
Gideon had told him we needed a battery, so he brought over a big truck battery
that evening. It was a godsend. That night the electricity was off for 12
hours! Our fridge self-defrosted. And the battery/inverter worked perfectly.
It’s a bit noisy but not bad, and Sylvia really needs it. [Editor’s note: I’m very
thankful for this backup power supply.]
Tritriva Volcano Covered with a Forest
On Sunday morning Pam came over about ten o’clock. She
wondered if we wished to go to see the Tritriva (say “Cheecheeva”) Volcano and
Lake. The road there is really bad, so they wouldn’t take their car. She had
spoken with a man who was willing to drive us from Antsirabe the 25 km (15
miles) to the volcano on such short notice for 100,000 Ariary. He spoke
English. I jumped at it, and Sylvia was willing to go if I went. Gideon was
grading papers, all written in French which he doesn’t speak. He had a student
to help him, so he felt he couldn’t go. Whether he wanted to or not I’ll never
know.
I cooked up all the eggs we had in the house and made three
egg salad sandwiches from three hamburger type buns that were whole wheat and
tasted better than those we can usually get in CA. Sylvia went down to the Faculty
Lounge to use the Internet to contact an LSU client she has.
I balked at the 100K the driver wanted, and he came down to
80K ($25). He pointed out that the road to Tritriva is very rough. It turned
out to be almost impassable for his little car. But he is a careful driver, and
we made it just fine. Tritriva is southwest from Antsirabe. It’s on our Mada
map as an active volcano. I guess that anything that may have erupted in the
last 100,000 years is regarded as active. There are several hot springs near
Antsirabe, so there must be something hot close to the surface nearby. There do
not appear to be any earthquakes in the area, so it can’t be that “active.”
The whole road out there runs through an area that would be
designated as “thickly settled” in Massachusetts. That means that there are
houses all along the road. It is intensively cultivated and terraced all the
way to the top of the many hills in the area. Tritriva is not terraced. It has
a small ash cone near its base. The ash is not as fertile as the “older”
sections nearby.
Our driver, Mr Tobi, (he told us to pronounce it the Shakespeare
way, as in “To be or not to be”) is an elder in a new Adventist church about 3
km (2 miles) south of the center of Antsirabe. He had been helping paint their
new church before leaving to take us out to the volcano. He proudly told us
that he had chauffeured Ted Wilson, the president of the Adventist Church with headquarters
in Washington DC, during his visit to Mada a few years ago. He also pointed out
the Adventist church in the hamlet next to Tritriva village.
Mr Tobi and the Adventist Church near Tritriva
We went through the little hamlet of Tritriva and then
turned onto a steep road up the mountain. We paid 5,000 Ariary each (except the
driver) to enter the area. It is not very popular; possibly two other cars came
in during the two or three hours we were there. He drove us to a parking lot
about half way up the mountain. As we got out of the car, a host of anywhere
from 10 to 20 kids descended on us. They urged us to buy beautifully polished
stones. They walked right in front of us so that we had to slow down so as not
trample them. The words “no” and “non”
had no effect on them. We finally got to the crest of the crater where we
turned to go down into the crater. The kids figured they had us as a captive
audience and waited for us on the rim.
Lake Tritriva
Local lore tells us that the crater is bottomless. It is a
very elongated lake, and the one rim of the crater must be 500 or more feet
above the rim on the opposite side of the lake. It has very steep sides ending
in a vertical rock cliff that plunges as much as 100 feet into the lake. The
trail spirals down from the rim to a spot where the cliff is low enough so we
could touch the water. It sports dozens of species of beautiful flowers in
every hue of the rainbow. At UAZ almost all of the wild flowers are yellow, but
at Tritriva there was no dominant color.
Lake Tritriva
Sylvia found 2 beautiful skink lizards. The scales on their
necks and upper bodies glistened in many iridescent colors. They were each
about a foot (30cm) long. She also rustled up a slender, dark snake with two
yellow stripes running down its back. There are no poisonous reptiles in Mada,
so don’t shudder. The snake must have been almost a yard (m) long. It apparently
knew it carried no poison to defend itself, so it rapidly fled our presence.
Skink on a Rock
We hiked all the way around the deep green lake. Then we
hiked on up towards the highest part of the rim of the volcano. We didn’t get
anywhere close to the top. We stopped at a good lookout where we could see the
rough landscape of these highlands of Mada. We were only about 400 feet above
our altitude at UAZ. A young man was busy on the slope here, cutting the long
grass with a sickle. He mentioned that Jacques Cousteau had claimed the
bottomless lake to be 146 meters deep (less than 500 feet).
On our way back to Antsirabe, the poor, misused, but
scrupulously clean little car had a flat tire. We were right on the edge of
Lake Andraikiba, close to where the bad road joins the tar road. We walked past
two soccer games going on in the park connected with the lake while Mr. Tobi
fixed his flat.
Lake Andraikiba and Soccer
Back in Antsirabe we stopped to use the bathroom and ate a
small ice cream that was actually quite smooth and good. It did have little
chunks of ice in it due to carelessness on someone’s part. Then, since Pam was
still very hungry, we stopped at the only fast food place in this 3rd
largest city of Mada and bought French fries and an ice cream cone. Sylvia
settled for a passion fruit drink instead of ice cream.
#MADAGASCAR, #UAZ, #HIKING, #MALAGASY, #C-PAP, #FARM,
#TRITRIVA, #VOLCANO, #LAKE, #VOLCANICLAKE, #BADROADS, #NURSINGSCHOOL,
#WEEKOFPRAYER, #PREACHING, #ICECREAM, #FASTFOOD, #SKINK, #SNAKE, #CLIFF
