Conversation Starters

[i]

John 4:27New

International Version (NIV)

²⁷ Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

Recently, at the delightful reception of a beautiful wedding, eight of us were sitting at a table where 6 of us were more or less closely related. The other two were total strangers. For some reason I personally feel uncomfortable ignoring the presence of someone who is in close proximity to me. I guess that in the past I have been snubbed enough times to not like the feeling.

Introducing myself, I asked the couple their names. They told me. Over the next half hour I found out they live in Riverside, where I live. Riverside has close to a half-million people, so it’s no surprise that we didn’t know each other. They’re happily married after some thirty years. They have a 24 year old daughter who might be getting married one of these days and two teenage sons.

They’re hoping to move north and live within 30 miles of the Canadian border once they both retire. Naturally, their children do not share their joy in living in the wilderness. “What are you going to do for fun, Dad?” The couple loves the out of doors, especially hiking, an interest we share enthusiastically. We spoke of places near Riverside that we enjoy visiting. When we parted at the end of the evening, we hugged each other as though we had been long time friends.

Later I couldn’t help thinking of how I had come from being a dedicated nerd and introvert to the point where I could talk to people like these. Many years ago a long time friend introduced us to Amway. I worked Amway hard and lost money consistently. It just wasn’t my kind of life. But I learned one thing from these zealots. They encouraged me to “FORM” strangers. This is an acronym of a way to get others talking, so I don’t have to, and make friends in the process. Ask the new acquaintance about these:

F    their Family;

O    their Occupation;

R    their Recreation;

M    then present your Message.

I was encouraged to listen closely and, as soon as possible, try to write down names and important points for later reference. Although I never sold a box of soap (Amway), I found this FORM acronym of great help whenever I found myself sitting uncomfortably next to someone I didn’t know.

Try it on someone you’re sitting next to on a plane or standing next to in an interminable line. It is absolutely amazing what you’ll learn. Usually the former stranger parts from you thinking about what an interesting conversationalist you are because you let them do all the talking.

Lord, thank You for an easy way to talk to strangers, like You did with the Samaritan woman. And give me wisdom to weave Your message of love into the conversation.

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[i] http://infed.org/mobi/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/conversation_jason_schukltz_cc_by_nc_2_flickr_jdawg_484678361.jpg

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 10 - Week of Prayer and Volcano

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 10 - 
Week of Prayer and Volcano

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 2^nd year in the morning and 1^st 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 14^th of March. We fly to Cape Town and spend a little over two weeks in the Cape. Then on the 30^th we fly out of Cape Town and arrive in Los Angeles late in the evening of the 31^st. 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 3^rd 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

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 9 - Potluck and Farm

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 9 Potluck and Farm

Sylvia Arriving at the Potluck

The Language Department organized a “Potluck” on Sunday afternoon, the 17^th of January. The students each paid 2,000 Ar. to attend and brought their own rice, plate, cup, and spoon and fork. All the chairs were placed around the edge of the largest classroom in the Technology building.

Potluck

Several tables were placed down the center of the room where the food was placed. A large pot contained curried chicken (the school cafeteria serves only strictly vegetarian food, so this was a great attraction) and curried vegetables. They also served a delicious drink made from the many passion fruit that Dr. Prity Bairagee and her husband grew in their garden. Sweet cut up mangos served as dessert. Students and several of the Language Department faculty had spent Saturday night and all Sunday morning preparing and cooking for this event.

The Bairagees, Pam, Danielle, and Anitha

After everyone had eaten their fill, they moved the tables into a tight square. Then they turned the music up to the pain threshold and started some traditional dancing. It is more like line dancing than anything else, and they really got into it. I took short movies of two of these dances before I went home to take a nap.

Malagasy Dance

In the late afternoon we joined Pam for a walk down the north side of campus through the farm. They have four milk cows that they keep permanently tied in their milking stalls. Their hooves have grown to the point it must be painful for them to stand on. Past the milk barn we came to the chicken farm. Their chickens are all kept in the egg batteries. The place was at least clean, unlike the cows having to stand in their own manure. Sylvia figured there must be a gross of chickens in this battery. I opened the door and walked into to see how the chickens were faring. (Pam & Sylvia were ahead and at the other end of the building by then.)

They Lay Very Hard-shelled Brown Eggs

A cat snuck into the building behind me and then dashed up onto the rafters overhead. The fowls seemed to take my presence in stride, but when they saw the cat, they about went berserk. I figured it might actually be a threat. It took me a while to catch it. When I did, it submitted calmly to my picking it up by the scruff of its neck and gently carrying it outside. As soon as it was put down, it immediately resumed its superior air and stalked away haughtily. I had taken the precaution of securing the door before putting it down.

Cat in the Hen Coop

On past the farm is a group of buildings owned by the university called the bungalows. They are wooden buildings (all other permanent buildings on camps are made of baked mud bricks). Girls stay in these rooms for a cheaper price than the dorm. They put them 8 to a room with not even any wardrobe space.

Bungalows

Further on we walked by an orphanage run by a woman in the states. She demands that they support each child on a dollar a day. This is impossible even in Madagascar. The stand-off is hardest on the orphans.

Orphanage

We walked back up to the university behind the women’s dorm, a little over a half-mile east of our home. We saw a soccer field that a former school administrator had carved out of the hillside below our tennis court. He did it without committee action. It was all done by shoveling out the hillside by hand. Since it is on the hillside, it needed a rock facing to keep it from being washed out severely by the frequent heavy rains during the rainy season. Out of money, the administrator went to the finance committee to seek funds to finish facing it. The committee turned him down, undoubtedly some dirty politics at play, though I have no evidence for it. With only a half height wall, the field, which I think is actually a good idea, is now seriously eroded and probably beyond repair. The shunned administrator tried to raise money to finish by making bricks out of the same hillside. Unfortunately the mud is of inferior brick-making quality, so he was unable to dispose of them. So the bricks are piled in untidy heaps over much of the field. The administrator is, I assume, long gone; his boondoggle remains as a shouting mute witness.

Would-be Football Field—Leveled Off Entirely by Pick and Shovel

On Monday I went to chapel as they like us faculty to do. When I discovered it was going to be something in French, I almost got up and left. But I didn’t see how I could do so without making a scene, so I stayed. Dina came over and sat next to me to translate for me. I’m amazed how they always get someone to do a running translation whenever I show up for worship or chapel or church. Since these are mostly students, their knowledge of English is necessarily limited; furthermore, a continuous translation is almost impossible for everyone, even experts, so one typically gets less than 50% of what happens. Nevertheless, it does relieve the tedium and gives one an idea at least of what is going on. They had a cultural “Jeopardy” kind of quiz with three or four different possible answers for each question. Since the questions, written in French, were projected on the front wall of the church, I had essentially no trouble reading most of them faster than Dina could translate them for me. I got better than 50% of the answers correct before the translator had finished translated them. She was utterly amazed at my accuracy and kept asking me, “Are you sure you don’t speak French?”

A teacher asked me to substitute-teach a three hour English class for her. She gave me the animated movie The Prince of Egypt to show the students and try and help them to comprehend the English used in it. They have four overhead projectors for teacher use. I got the one with the weakest lamp and poor sound. Two different teachers loaned me speakers, none of which were really loud enough for the size group I had. We couldn’t see the video because the windows had no way of shutting out the light. I finally commandeered the largest monitor in the lab, cut the security tie restraining it, and used it as one monitor and the laptop monitor as a second one. This worked better than anything else I had tried. The students seemed to understand what was going on. I stopped it three or four times and discussed what was happening.

In Sabbath School on the 30^th of January the English group spent considerable time talking about the story of David and Bathsheba. After the usual condemnation of David’s adultery, they started to move on. I raised my hand and pointed out that at the end of David’s life he was still living with Bathsheba, and asked, “Will he be saved at the last judgment?” Silence reigned. Finally the discussion turned to David being called a man after God’s own heart. He is listed amongst the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11. He did indeed repent but continued to live with her. So the consensus seemed to be that he would be saved in the end. I then mentioned that this is an example of God’s tremendous grace. There are sins that plague each of us, and no matter how we try, they remain with us to the end. But God’s grace is the instrument that saves us in spite of our sinfulness, imperfection, and weakness. I find that Adventists have been very reticent to acknowledge and accept God’s grace. We try to perfect our own lives and then get depressed when we can’t do it. Ours is still a do-it-yourself kind of salvation—which, in the end, is futile.

These English Sabbath School lessons are usually taught by final year theology students. The particular student we had started talking about Eliye. None of us knew who he was talking about. Finally it dawned on me that he was talking about Elijah. I mentioned this to him and told him that no one knew who he was talking about because he was using a Malagasy name for him. He answered by saying, “Yes, I am talking about Eliye.” He never did try and pronounce the name in English. I couldn’t help laughing at him, poor chap!

At the end of the lesson I addressed the half-dozen or so theology students who attend the English class. I pointed out that the great leaders in God’s work throughout the ages, such as Moses, Daniel, Paul, and Isaiah have been highly educated, God-fearing people. Furthermore, they are becoming the educated, God-fearing leaders in our church in Madagascar. They should keep themselves so connected with God that He can use them like he did Elijah of old to reform the Madagascar church when God decides to do so.

Sylvia has found that it takes her at least twice as long to fix a meal here in Mada because she has to prepare everything from scratch. So it was after 2:00 p.m. when we sat down to eat potato-salad that I had made several days previously, green beans fixed the way I like them with tomatoes, onions, and a bit of Italian seasoning, and a ratatouille from eggplant, onion, green pepper, and tomatoes.

Last Week’s Groceries

We make a list of market produce and Pam gets a student to go to the market in Antsirabe on Friday and purchase for us. I include a picture of what we got this past week for about 22,000Ar. ($7). She is young and not very careful about the quality of produce she picks. So some of it has to be used immediately or simply discarded. You might find the papaya (pawpaw in South Africa) hard to recognize.

Sad Papaya

Saturday evening we went over to the Faculty Lounge and spent about a half hour chatting with Joy and Rodney Wright using Skype. We found that we would have a perfectly clear conversation, and then suddenly it would go silent. After 20 seconds or so it would transmit perfectly clearly again and repeat the performance. This is apparently characteristic of our Internet. It is most annoying. Eventually the lights went out and took the Internet with them, of course. We went home. Later the lights came on long enough for Sylvia to fix a lovely fruit salad for supper. Before we sat down to eat, Pam stopped by and mentioned we hadn’t turned the light out in the F.L. I confessed that indeed they were out when we left but not because I had turned them off.

I walked back down, put the key in the lock and opened the door. The lights were off. I did a double take, then walked back outside—sure enough all of the campus lights had gone off during the act of opening the door. I switched the switch off, locked the door, and walked home. We ate supper by the light of the Wacka-Wacka we have. They didn’t come back on until about 10:00 a.m. on Sunday. We were delighted that Mr. Palaya, a missionary from the Philippines, had dropped off a great big old truck battery earlier that evening so Sylvia could use her C-PAP to sleep that night.

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 8 - Midterm

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 8 Midterm

UAZ Church

We arrived in Madagascar on December 17, 2015. So Sabbath, January 30, will be our 45^th day in Mada. We have a maximum limit of 90 days on our visa. Ergo! This week, January 24 to 30, is our midterm in Mada--unless we were to leave earlier than planned.

Our latitude is approximately −19.9°. This means the sun was directly overhead at (solar) noon on Friday the 23^rd if my calculations are close to being correct. Anything truly vertical casts no shadow, a phenomenon we haven’t encountered since we lived at Ikizu in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was sick enough on Friday not to care.

I think there is an unwritten law somewhere that says that I can’t stay in any foreign place very long without picking up some health bug that really makes me miserable. This is especially true if we don’t drive to the place. On the morning of the 18^th I woke up with a scratchy throat. I gargled with warm salt water, and that cleared it up. I said to myself, “Ouch! This feels like a cold coming on!” It didn’t bother me the rest of the day, but I had this feeling of a pending cold with me all day. I drank lots of water. I gargled once or twice more but didn’t feel the need. Of course, as night came on, so did the scratchy throat. Having drunk that much water, I was up practically every hour that night. Each time, I drank a tall glass of water and gargled with Scope. On Tuesday, my sore throat sort of stayed with me all day.

Pam told me, “Several families are planning a celebration in honor of your birthday on Thursday since they can’t do it on Wednesday.”

“That’s super! But I feel a cold coming on, and it feels like it’s going to be nasty by then.” Never-the-less we did a little planning. We were going to do it in our house and ask everyone to bring their own plates and cutlery.

On Wednesday a number of people wished me “Happy Birthday!” Some were afraid that maybe the party was a surprise and didn’t try to talk about it. By then I knew I was going to be miserable on Thursday. I was already taking Ibuprofen for a nasty headache.

Thursday morning, Pam came by about mid-morning. “How are you feeling about the party?”

“If I had my way, I would cancel it,” I mumbled. “However, people have probably started to prepare for it. So I will go through with it.”

“Well I’ve talked with everyone except for one family, and they won’t start preparing for it until this afternoon. They’re O.K. with canceling it.”

“Cancel it! But talk to the other family before you do so.” I felt somewhat better for just having made the decision.

By Sabbath, not even the Ibuprofen was making much difference. I was coughing, had a sore throat, and my sinuses were all blocked up. On Friday Sylvia had bought me a sure-fire cure from a pharmacy in Antsirabe. The pharmacist told me to take two tabs on Friday and two on Saturday, and the cold would be gone. I believed it as much as if he had told me to take the medicine, and in two days I would look like I was 30 years old. I looked at the first ingredient and saw it was pseudoephedrine. Sylvia had not asked for the right medicine—or they did not have it in the pharmacy. Pseudoephedrine tends to send my heart into all kinds of calisthenics, so I’m very leery of it. I forgot to throw a bottle of Benadryl into my bag before we left. That really helps.

We had planned to spend the weekend in Tana with Pam and Gideon and Etienne and Elaine Koen, ADRA workers in Fianarantsoa. But I backed out on that. Then there were a couple of real medical emergencies on campus, so P&G couldn’t go either. It ended up that Gideon went on Sabbath to a preaching engagement he had, and Pam stayed home. On the way home, well after sunset, he stopped at a pharmacist (It took him 45 minutes to get there, and he had to walk the last half kilometer because of deadlocked traffic) and bought me another antihistamine without the pseudoephedrine. I have thanked him profusely.

I also started taking a whole cluster of garlic, a whole small onion, the juice of one lemon and a quarter of a cucumber, all whizzed up twice a day. By the end of the second day of that regimen, the concoction burned my mouth, tongue, and throat all the way down. Pam swears by the remedy.

Pam stuck around our place Saturday night, and we watched a movie called The Accidental Husband, about a woman of the Dear Abbey variety on radio. Her counsel had broken up the engagement of a fireman and his fiancée. The man’s son hacks into the public documents and makes his dad the husband of this Dear Abbey. She goes down to get a wedding license the next day so she and her publisher can wed, and they won’t let her have one because she’s already married. The plot thickens from there on. Shortly after the movie ended, Gideon got back from Tana.

Yesterday and today I have felt well enough, with the help of Ibuprofen and garlic, to teach my classes. I have a second class coming up in an hour as I write this.

I spent time with Anitha Monday morning concerning next week. Next week my class load jumps from 5 class periods and 53 students to 13 class periods and 165 students. The other 8 classes are all on Wednesday for the month of February. These students are all nursing students and hate English with a passion. Besides, in the past the dean of nursing seemed to delight in messing with instruction. The students see no reason why they should take it. And in my heart of hearts, neither do I. They will be working with Malagasy patients almost exclusively, and the French they also have to take should be more than ample. I don’t voice my feelings, however.

During the day our drinking water container got cracked so that it leaked like mad. We had new keys made to our flat so that Sylvia and I can both have a set and not leave the place open. The new keys didn’t work! The bug on the Africa computer has gotten sufficiently nasty so that it won’t let us download anything from the Internet. Secondly we haven’t been able to get onto the Internet since sometime last week. I found out late Sunday that they had changed the password and not bothered to let us know. The electricity had been out for over 3 hours on Sunday night, so Sylvia’s C-PAP machine wouldn’t work. I had been trying to keep her breathing all night as well as my having to get up due to this miserable cold.

By nightfall I recognized that I was also in full fledged depression. I sat down at the computer (not Africa) to start this issue of the Sojourn and stared at a blank screen for an hour before giving up. I realized that depression was undoubtedly due just because I had been away from home for 6 weeks, even if the other things hadn’t happened.

When I first got to College in the fall of 1962, Dr Giddings warned me, “If you feel that everything is going wrong and everybody is against you, it is probably due to your just being tired and worn out. Get some extra sleep, and you’ll probably be just fine.” Her council came to my mind Monday evening. I didn’t get to sleep as early as I had wished, but I do feel a lot better as I write this.

We just got word that the six packages of books I had mailed to the UAZ Library on December 7 last year are sitting in Antsirabe all safe and sound. Customs wants to charge the university 80,000 Ariary to release them (that’s only $25, but it sounds like a king’s ransom to the treasurer here). It cost me $517.50 to mail them (that’s 1,656,000 Ariary and that sounds like a king’s ransom to me). The university had voted, before I mailed them, to reimburse me $431.25 for the postage. It remains to be seen whether and how long it will take for them to do as they promised! The extra million and more Ariary would help us to live here without our having to bring any more dollars into the country.

Jan mailed us a Christmas card before Christmas. It still hasn’t gotten here. So Jan, keep hoping! It will probably arrive one of these days, even before we leave here! Everybody reading this: Don’t try to mail us anything. Even expensive Priority Mail takes over 8 weeks to arrive.

Sylvia invited the Barriagees over for Sabbath lunch on January 17. We have a very limited number of dishes (service for 4), so we seldom have anyone over. Sylvia and I went home from church shortly after Sabbath School. The P.A. system was malfunctioning, and the result was worse than if they had not used it at all. Since the service was in French, that just made it harder for me to get anything out of the service.

UAZ Church: Big enough to seat the current student body.

Actually Sylvia left church about 15 minutes before I did. When I got home Sylvia asked me to cook the beans. She already had a scalloped potato dish in the oven. I cut up some onions and garlic and then cut up the frozen beans. When I tried to light the stove, it refused to light. Sylvia then remarked that the burner she had stuff on had gone out. Suddenly we realized we were out of gas. We checked the oven; sure enough, it had gone out, too. A mild panic struck us. Here we had guests coming for lunch and we had no way of cooking anything.

We thought about it for a moment. Sylvia suggested I bring in the gas burner we had in storage. I laughed and suggested it would have the same problem.

“Oh! We can heat the soup and serve that!”

Again I laughed, and she saw the folly of her suggestion. We don’t have an electric burner or a microwave. I suggested we put some bread and fixings on the table. Sylvia put together a tomato and cucumber salad. We realized that we were in a fix. And we had never invited them over before, either.

Our Kitchen with the offending gas bottle on the floor

The Barriagees arrived with flat bread stuffed with egg, greens, and spices, and a pitcher of Mango smoothie. We all laughed about our predicament. Sylvia at least had a very good pumpkin pie that she had baked on Friday. The whole meal went off very well. Conversation centered on the central role that education has played in Adventism. Afterwards the Bs went home to rest, and we went in to nap. Before they left, Barriagees told us they keep a spare gas tank at all times and loaned it to us. We replaced it with a full tank after sending ours in to be refilled the next Wednesday. A full tank costs 50,500 Ar and the exchange of tanks.

It rained fairly hard while we were napping. After about an hour’s nap, we phoned Pam and told her we were going to take a walk down to see the farm on the south side of campus. She wanted to go for a walk but on the north side of campus.

We went north from her house down into the valley below the campus. Along this valley some enterprising person has put in quite a few fish ponds alongside the inevitable rice paddies that line the valley. We walked west along the valley and angled back up the hillside to the area north of the campus until we crested the hill and looked down on the valley along the south side of campus. Finally we turned back east and home.

The Fish Farm (UAZ is about a mile off to the left)

While we walked, Pam told us of her experience the previous evening, Friday. They had had two cats for about 6 months and had raised them from kittens. Like all cats they came and went as they wished. One went missing a couple weeks previously. Then the other turned up missing but returned home a few days later with a ring of fur missing around one front paw, evidence that he had been tied up around that front paw. He was very restless and paced back and forth mewing. Pam began to suspect that he knew where his brother was being held prisoner.

So late Friday afternoon Pam called to the cat. He came readily, and mewing as he went, he walked down the hill the way we were going. He had turned west along some trails that led along the ridges between rice paddies for a long ways. Finally he had gotten to the main north-south Madagascar highway, NR-7. As he walked he kept looking back at her to see if she was still following. He kept mewing encouragement to her. He crossed NR-7 and kept going until he came to the railroad track. He followed the track north until they came to Sambaina, a village about 3 km (2 miles) north-east of the university.

Sylvia & Pam: The edge of Sambaina village is on the hillside just above Sylvia’s head

While she was walking along the track, she phoned Gideon and asked him to join her and bring a flashlight because it was getting quite dark. They followed the cat up a hill beyond Sambaina. The hill is higher than the hill we live on. They were walking on pathways that went from homestead to homestead. When the flashlight finally failed, it was pitch dark. They had to turn around and retrace their steps to Sambaina where they had parked the car. The cat started to howl his dissapointment. She never has been able to go farther to see if she can find the other cat.

That evening we watched Into the Wild, a movie about a young man who left home after college graduation. He was angry at the way his parents had brought him up. He went seeking happiness that took him down the Grand Canyon in a kayak, into the inner city where he was homeless, and a number of other adventures. He ended up hiking out into the wilderness in Alaska, where he died of exposure. His body was found a couple weeks later by some hunters. The story is allegedly true and is written by Krakauer in a book of the same title.

Gerald Durrell in his book The Aye-Aye and I, (1992 Touchstone, NY, p. 32) writes of the language Malagasy as follows. I got a big laugh out of it. “Malagasy is a fine, rackity-clackity, ringing language which sounds not unlike someone carelessly emptying a barrel of glass marbles down a stone staircase. It maybe apocryphal, but it is said that written Malagasy was first worked out and put down on paper by early Welsh missionaries. They must have greeted the task with all the relish of people who christened towns and villages in the own country with names that seem to contain every letter in the alphabet. The map of Wales is bestrewn with such tongue-twisting names as Llanaelhaiarn, Llanfairfechan, Llanerchymedd, Penrhyndeudraech, and, of course, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrindrobllantyssiliogogogoch. So the missionaries, licking their lips, must have approached with zeal the job of making a whole language one gigantic tintinnabulation, and they surpassed themselves in the length and complexity of their translation. So, when my dictionary fell open at the word ‘bust’ and informed me that in Malagasy it was ‘ny tratra seriolona voassokitra harramin ny tratra no ho miakatra’, I was not surprised. It did not, of course, tell me whether it translated ‘bust’ in the sense of broken, going bust in a financial sense, or a woman’s bosom. If it was a lady’s bust, however, I decided it would take considerable time to get around to describing and praising other delectable bits of her anatomy, by which time she may well have come to the conclusion that you had a mammary fixation and lost interest in you. A language as elongated as this tends to slow down communication, particularly of a romantic nature.”

The Aye-Aye and I

I read the translation of ‘bust’ to Madame Noée, our neighbor and chair of the Language Department (i.e. my boss) and asked her which meaning of bust it was talking about. She looked embarrassed and very funny as I read it, and of course mispronounced it, and I imagine that if she had been as white as me, she would have blushed. She finally said, “It is saying something about a woman’s chest.” I did not pursue it further.

#MADAGASCAR, #UAZ, #SDASCHOOLS, #GASCOOKING, #CATS, #HIKING, #DINNERGUESTS, #COMMONCOLD, #MEDICINE, #POSTALPROBLEMS, #BIRTHDAY, #MALAGASY, #DEPRESSION