Sojourn to Madagascar Part 6
Into the Rut
New Year’s Day dawned under a heavily overcast sky. I walked
down to the library to see if I could use their Internet. The previous evening
I had gone to the Faculty Lounge and had gotten an error message on my U.S.
phone that I had never seen before, “No voice, message and data on this plan—Do
you want to change plans?” Well, I didn’t want to change plans. Thinking that
it might be the Internet, I went to the Library first. There was no WiFi.
UAZ Library
The Library is about a kilometer (6 city blocks) from the
house, whereas the Faculty Lounge is almost exactly 200 m (about 1 city block).
Furthermore, I walked right past the Faculty Lounge to get to the Library. I
walked back to the Faculty Lounge and behold there was beautiful WiFi. This was
New Year’s so none of these places were open, of course. I stood outside the
Faculty Lounge and called Elwood, Fred, and Jason. They could hear me fine, but
I couldn’t hear them. Then I called, Julia, Esther, Jan, Jud, and Elvina, and
their calls were crystal clear. My phone had also forgotten that it wished me
to change plans.
By this time the sky had cleared up, and a good tropical sun
was smiling down on us. After our Christmas experience I knew we would have to
pay for the beautiful sky! For starters there was no hot water. They had
installed a hot water heater--when it became too embarrassing not to.
Nonetheless, my spirits were high as I walked back to the flat.
With the sun so beautiful against a deep blue sky, I
suggested to Sylvia that we walk around campus and take some pictures of the
university and the gorgeous wild flowers that spring uncultivated all over. We
ate breakfast and hung clothes on the line after having washed them the day
before.
Fools, we should have acted on that impulse. The clouds
rolled in about the time we wanted to start our photo tour. They
unceremoniously but quite spectacularly dumped a half inch (12 mm) of rain in
10 minutes. Then it rained on and off for the rest of the day. It was cold and
dismal. So the spirits that had soared aloft under the blue sky crashed
abruptly, all on the first day of the year.
Sylvia discovered that she had lost both her American and
Madagascar phones. She had lost her American phone somewhere on campus the day
before and her Mada phone the next morning. We prayed about it. Then we phoned
the latter and found it lying in plain sight charging in the bedroom. We
couldn’t do that on the yellow phone. We walked up and down campus looking for
it and asking people if they had seen it. The next morning she found her yellow
phone on the floor next to the bed. Undoubtedly it had been in the bedclothes
for almost 36 hours. She had made the bed, and it didn’t fall out the first
morning either.
Monday the 4th we started our teaching duties in
earnest. I met with two classes first thing in the morning. Sylvia conducted
worship for the language department staff and faculty at 7:30 that morning. I
had been asked to talk about my New Year’s Resolutions as a part of the chapel
service at 11:00. I told the students that I considered them to be special and
to have a brighter than usual future. After all, they are trilingual and in
university whereas most of the country would never get a college education. They
had an excellent chance to marry someone who is also educated. They were
Christian with a hope of life eternal. They seemed to receive the talk well.
A typical day goes something like this.
5:30 I get up, take a warm shower, and often eat breakfast
before Sylvia gets up.
7:30 Mon, Tues, and Thurs there is faculty/staff worship.
Sylvia makes about half of these.
8:00 Three mornings a week I’m scheduled to teach. In
January the nursing students are out in the hospitals doing an internship. In
February I will teach them from 8:00 to 5:00 on Wednesdays. I expect to be
really worn out that day.
For the last two weeks I have spent upwards of two hours a
day wrestling with the Internet—or more accurately, with the lack of Internet.
12:00 we eat in the cafeteria about half of the weekdays.
Lunch is a paltry $1.00 each. It consists of a tray with 6 impressions. The
large center one holds the rice that is placed there by filling a large soup
bowl with rice and then inverting it on the tray. In three or more of the other
impressions there is a protein, a vegetable, and a salad. Otherwise Sylvia
cooks for us. Sylvia tends to be the chief cook and I the dishwasher.
Cafeteria is the last door on the left. The Faculty
Lounge is the second door from the right.
Sylvia teaches two more advanced classes for six units a
week and one remedial conversation for an additional one unit/hour. This means
she has a lot of papers to grade. My classes, 8 units right now and 13 units
next month, are conversational. I give them a simple quiz which takes only a
minimal amount of marking. Both she and I have spent a considerable amount of
time in class preparation.
In order to get Internet, we have to go to the Faculty
Lounge or the Library. At the Library we are competing for bandwidth with a lot
of students, so we normally go to the Faculty Lounge. Furthermore, the Library
is a half mile (0.8) farther away. On the average we have 3 or 4 power outages
a day, at least during the rainy season. Also the Internet connection is flaky
at best. Last week Thursday I spent the whole day in the Faculty Lounge, and
the only thing I got for my time was a huge chunk of frustration. So both
Sylvia and I spend a lot of time doing essentials that a straight forward
Internet would do in a couple of seconds.
6:00 We normally have supper at six, although this can vary
a lot.
10:00 Goal for retiring for the night.
Our first 10 days in Mada we had rain every day. We hardly
ever saw the sun. On Christmas Day we had beautiful sunshine in the early
morning but rain the rest of the day. Finally, during the first full week of 2016,
we had several days when it didn’t rain. We had two glorious evenings when the
Milky Way stretched across the sky, and the two Magellanic clouds were bright.
They’re two island galaxies that are associated with the Milk Way. Canopus, a
first magnitude star, caught my attention in the Milky way right overhead, and
the collection of brilliant stars connected with the Southern Cross were just
rising in the low south-eastern sky. Those two evenings have not been repeated
since.
Southern Cross and the Magellanic Clouds[i]
On several mornings I have gone outside about 4:30 and seen
the magnificent pageant of the planets: Jupiter high in the sky still close to
Leo; Mars racing past Spica on its mission to tangle with Antares (in Greek
Mars was called Ares); and currently Venus and Saturn make a nice trio with
Antares in Scorpio. It would be great to see Mercury to finish out the
classical planets all in one quadrant of the sky, but that would be asking too
much of the Madagascan sky in the midst of the rainy season. Clouds always form
a ring around the horizon.
In the conversation class for first year
English/Communication majors, I gave them a quiz the first week:
1. Write your name clearly so that I can read it.
2. Draw a picture of your left palm.
3. Do you want to fail this class?
Nine answered “no” to the last question, five answered
“yes”. I repeated the last question several times. This means that over
one-third of the class either have a death wish or do not understand English.
They theoretically have had at least 4 years of English instruction in high
school.
Sylvia gave the same quiz to one of her classes, and one
student complained that since he was left handed he couldn’t do question two! [Editor’s
note: For this class, I asked the 3rd question in the negative: “You
don’t want to fail this class, do you?” and all of them answered correctly with
a “no”. Here they are sometimes confused by how the question is asked. I tell
them to answer the FACT, not just the question as worded.]
I tried to use a data projector in class. These are stored
in the registrar’s office. The one I borrowed gave a beautiful picture, but the
volume was so low only the kids in the front row of the class could hear it.
After class I borrowed a second, older projector that allegedly has good sound.
However, there was no sound cable, and I didn’t bring one. Its picture was much
poorer than that of the first projector. I think my students are destined to
not watch a movie in my classes.
Pam has loaned me a small loud speaker. I used it this week
and played Esther reading Caddie Woodlawn
by Carol Ryrie Brink. I had to stop it after every two or three sentences to
explain what the English meant in the sentences. It’s a kid’s book, and it is
the audio book with the most basic English I have along. This way they hear two
people’s pronunciation. Esther, our daughter, reads with very clear diction and
excellent expression.
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink[ii]
I have given every student an assignment to speak for one
minute in class next week about something they really love to do. I gave them
an example by talking about climbing in Joshua Tree N.P. I’m really curious to
see how well they do. Here’s where their years of English should pay off.
As I was leaving the Faculty Lounge after another
frustrating session with a very reluctant Internet, a tall young man caught up
with me. Most Malagasies are several inches shorter than I; Romain was about as
tall as I was. He asked if he could talk with me. I said, “Sure, walk along
with me as I go to turn in the key to the Faculty Lounge.”
“No!” he implored, “I am busy teaching math in that room.”
He pointed to the room next to Faculty Lounge. I knew there were high school
students in the room because they were all in uniform. I stopped.
“I understand you know mathematics?” he queried.
“I taught it for over fifty years.” Word gets around.
Romain went on to explain that he has a degree in
Agricultural Engineering and an MA in Agronomics. He is presently studying
theology at U. A. Z. and teaching math for the academy here. He mentioned that
he had very little math and has a number of questions on several different
topics that he doesn’t really understand. He wanted to run these questions by
me.
We set up a time for next Tuesday as starters.
On Friday,15 January, while I was sitting and writing on
this document--and more or less fluently cussing the deplorable state of the
Internet, two students timidly stuck their heads in the door and asked if they
could speak with me. Since this room is for faculty, students are not welcome
there. Since I was the only person in the room, I invited them in. They were Meola
and Denis and are in one of my classes and also in one of Sylvia’s classes. So
instead of cussing the slowness of the Internet, I gave them somewhere between
a half hour and an hour to practice their English. They wanted to know how to
improve their knowledge of English. That’s why we came to Madagascar in the
first place.
I encouraged them to get hold of a recent translation of the
Bible in English, then sit down with it and their Malagasy Bible next to each
other and read the English Bible, consulting with the Malagasy text only when
they didn’t understand. I have used that technique successfully in learning
several different languages including, German, Dutch, Swahili, and Spanish. It
backfired with Dutch because I got hold of a Dutch translation of the same
vintage as the King James Bible, and Dutch has also changed a lot since the 17th
century! When Elwood and I spent 5 days in Holland, I caught on to my mistake
very quickly.
[i] https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2823/12643022353_4635c84221_b.jpg
[ii] http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1178941045l/857961.jpg
