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

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 12 - Queen's Palace and Lemurs

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 12

Queen’s Palace and Lemurs

Wil and Sylvia in Tsimbazaza

I had over a million Ariary. Pam and Gideon had an appointment with an embassy in Tana. After asking if we were interested, they arranged for us to hire a car in Tana and tour some of the interesting sites there. Traffic is so really bad in Tana that you’re lucky to get to two or three places during a whole day. We left home about 5:00 a.m. with the Petersens and made good time up to the edge of Tana. Then we hit the traffic, and it was 9:30 a.m. by the time we arrived La City, a shopping center.

1,100,000 Ariary

Noée and Tantely live in the other end of our duplex. Noée’s brother, Matio, and Tantely’s shirt tail relative, Lova (say Loova), met us in an old convertible. They took us out to the Queen’s Palace, about a 4 or 5 mile drive and a little over an hour away in the stop and go traffic. At one point we were stopped dead for a while on a very narrow one-way street. We could see that a car had stalled about ten cars ahead of us, and no one could get around it. Finally all the drivers ahead of us got out and went up to the stalled car. They bounced and manhandled the thing sideways far enough so that we could put one set of wheels up on the very narrow sidewalk and squeeze around him.

A Game with Dark and Light Stones at the Gate

We got up to the gate of the palace and squeezed into a non-parking place. Lova stayed with his car. Matio got into the palace free since he’s Malagasy. We paid 40,000 Ariary for entrance and a guide. You have to pay for a guide everywhere you stop. I think they are provided to keep an eye on you more than to provide guidance. Matio was horrified about how much we had to pay. He kept saying, “I’m sorry.”

At the Gate into Queen’s Palace

Our guide, Tefe, was a young man with a very pleasant disposition. His English was almost not understandable. He apologized to Sylvia and told her that he speaks perfect Italian—fat lot of good that does for us. We walked through the stone gate and into the courtyard. Beyond us lay a fairly impressive square stone structure about three stories high. On each corner was a square structure another story higher.

Arivo Ariary

The guide told us that a warrior king had moved a thousand soldiers into Antananarivo in the 1700s. The word arivo is Malagasy for a thousand; just look at the 1000 Ariary banknote. So the city name means the place of a thousand warriors. The main reason that Malagasy words are so long is that their meaning is a whole sentence. The warrior king, Andrianampoinimerina, had built a simple palace about 20 km (12 miles) north of Tana. But his queen liked the Rova, or highest hill in Tana, so she built her own more elaborate palace on the Rova.

The Queen’s Palace With the King’s Palace on the Left

 The Queen’s Palace was designed by a Scottish missionary by the name of James Cameron, and was built of beautiful rosewood. Rumors have it that there was a certain romantic tryst between the two of them. The guide said nothing of that. In the late 1800s a Frenchman (and the rumors of a romantic tryst are more probable with him) built the beautiful stone structure to completely contain the rosewood palace. In 1995 a fire totally destroyed the wooden palace and damaged the outer stone palace. They are allegedly restoring the inner palace, only they are creating it in concrete and then coloring the concrete the dark color of rosewood. So with our outrageous entry fee, we never got into the palace itself. They are a long way from getting anything done.

To our right as we walked in lie hundreds of stone blocks from the part of the stone structure that collapsed in the fire. To our left are two square burial structures, tombs. The closer one is more highly decorated, although built out of cement block, and contains the remains of four queens. The further tomb contains the remains of the three kings, including Andrianampoinimerina. By the way, the Merina part of the name is that of the warrior tribe that has kept control of the other 18 or 23 tribes (depending who you listen to) of Madagascar for hundreds of years. Even now, in the Republic of Madagascar, the Merinas hold the best positions in the government.

Looking Back and the Gate

Turning around and looking back, north, at the gate we just came through, you can see a great stone eagle perched atop a short pillar. The stone eagle is a gift from Napoleon Bonaparte. To its right is a 2 or 3 meter tall, erect, circumcised phallus. The circumcision is characteristic of the Merina tribe, who regard circumcision as the source of their superior power.

In those early years the Merina regarded wood structures as comfortable and worthy of human habitation. Stone structures are regarded as inferior and the reasonable home of their zebu (cattle or oxen with a hump on the front shoulders). It was only after several disastrous fires that they were persuaded that stone was indeed fit for Merina habitation.

On the east side of the Queen’s Palace is a 25 or 30 foot (10 meter) Kings Palace made of rosewood. I think it is a replica of the actual palace about 20 km north of town. We were allowed to walk into the King’s Palace as long as we stepped over the threshold with our right foot and backed out of it when we left. The palace has a tall ‘A’ frame structure. On the north wall there is a wooden ladder going all the way up to a platform about two feet (65cm) wide and the length of the building immediately under the peak of the roof.

Tefe Standing Next to the Eunuch Statue at the King’s Palace

The king who built this structure would climb all the way to the top and lay hidden from view on this platform anytime visitors would come. No one explained the right-foot-first principle to visitors. If a hapless visitor stepped into the palace left foot first, he was received cordially enough but there was absolutely no chance he would ever see the king. On the floor of the palace were five short stone supports for a giant pot. Around the pot were a dozen or so rounded tiles for diners to sit at. They would all eat out of this giant pot. A wooden fire would be under the pot to cook the food and later keep it warm. The left-foot enterer would be seated at the dishonorable (south) end of the pot (only he wouldn’t know it was dishonorable). After eating he would be ushered outside with apologies that he hadn’t been able to see the king.

When a person came in right foot first, he was seated at the seat of honor on the east side of the pot. Then if the king actually decided to meet with him, he would drop a pebble down onto the floor. The wife (wives) would know the king’s desire and leave the north seat open for him to come down the ladder and eat with the guest.

In the northeast corner of the King’s Palace, there was a depression in the dirt floor. This was where the king and others communed with the ancestors and the spirit world. The animistic philosophy and religion still strongly influence the people, even Christians, in Mada. Sylvia has been putting together several experiences from her students that illustrate this phenomenon. We backed out of the king’s palace, as required by protocol. On the outside of the King’s Palace is a statue of a Frenchman who was in charge of the King’s harem. The king turned him into a eunuch so that he would not molest the women. This is told along with all the stories of the Merina’s fixation with the male organ and its source of their power.

Tefe, Sylvia and Matio in the Church

We walked on around to the church built next to the palace and in the Rova complex. It was started by the British before they traded Mada for Mauritius with the French. So the church is a Protestant church, probably also due to the influence of Cameron. The king continued to build the church. It is built of cut stone. Since the Merinas had no cement at the time, they used a mixture of sand and egg white as mortar. This placed a very high value on eggs, and citizens were taxed highly for any eggs they used personally. According to Tefe most Malagasy don’t eat eggs for this reason. This mortar doesn’t last as well as cement based on lime, so they’re having to replace some of the mortar. The church has stained glass windows and resembles a miniature cathedral in many ways.

From the Rova we could look down on the Tsimbazaza National Park, a forested region, immediately at the base of the southern edge of the Rova. In spite of the officious name, Tsimbazaza is merely a zoo. Although it is more in the spirit of many modern zoos where some of the animals appear to be able to roam the park as they wish, it is that in appearances only. They use the fact that most lemurs cannot swim and will not cross a body of water and other restraints that don’t appear as restraints to us. We certainly could not walk into the Lemur’s area.

Looking Up from Tsimbazaza to the Queen’s Palace at the Top of the Rova

Although the Tsimbazaza was literally only a stone’s throw from the Rova, we had to descend the mountain (really a hill) and that must have taken at least a half-hour. Remember the proverbial Tana traffic must move on extremely narrow roads where every house is also a shop for various items not carried by its neighbor. Parking at the main entrance to the Tsimbazaza consisted of a slight widening of the road in one spot in which roughly ten cars were crammed so tightly into the space that it was almost impossible to open the car door simply to exit the car. We paid the usual 10,000 Ar. apiece to get in, and the guide demanded 30,000 Ar. Bruno, it turned out, was worth every bit of the $10 we paid him. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of both the fauna and flora of the park. Furthermore, he had a wealth of stories to tell about everything. One had to listen closely because he spoke English using the only four or five vowels of Malagasy, but he was much easier to understand than Tefe had been. For example, it is usually impossible to tell whether they are saying live or leave.

Gray Bamboo and Crowned Lemurs

Bruno identified the tan eagles we saw near our home a while back as yellow-billed kites. There was a rather moth-eaten one in a cage in the park. We saw about a dozen different species of lemurs. About half of those live in clumps of trees in the center of the park without cages around them. We spent about two hours in the park, about twice as long as we did at the Queen’s Palace. I enjoyed both places, but I definitely like the Tsimbazaza more. Malagasies get in for about a tenth of what we pay to get in, and there are a lot of them that just go there to play a few of the limited sports available or to lounge on the uncut lawns. Lawns are a great rarity in Tana.

Green Gecko

When we left Tsimbazaza, Pam and Gideon suggested we meet them at the Waterfront Shopping Center, an island of modern shopping in a vast sea of street side vendors. Matio and Lova said they knew exactly where it was. I didn’t. I did feel they were taking us the long way around when they went through a permanently deadlocked tunnel toward the center of Tana. I said something, and they assured me this was the best way to go. After “parking” for an hour on the street, we finally pulled up next to La City Shopping Area, another island of modern shopping. It was evident that neither of them had any clue how to find the Waterfront. I phoned Gideon; Pam answered, and they said they would come to us. So we got Lova and Matio to drop us off at La City. (That is where they had picked us up, after all.)

It was about 3:30, and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Our knees were feeling a bit weak. So we went inside and ordered a passable vegetable pizza—if you regard broccoli on pizza as passable. Pam and Gideon got Telma to fix my phone so I could send text messages. I had paid to be able to, but no one around UAZ could figure out how to tell the phone it could. It’s amazing. This little phone cost us $8, and for another $3 a month I have virtually unlimited voice and text. In fact, my plan even has some data capabilities. However, the simple little phone has no plans of letting me use that feature. A big difference in the developing nations is that everyone has a phone and phone coverage is available practically everywhere, even in most remote regions. And all of this is available for significantly less than I’m paying!  In the U.S. I pay more a month for less service than I pay a year out here!

We did some shopping in ShopRite, similar to a small supermarket in the States. Then we piled into Gideon and Pam’s Peugeot and “parked” our way for well over an hour going up and over a couple of Tana’s many hills until we arrived at the national road, RN 7, going south out of the city. Lest you get an expanded idea of a national road, it is a simple two lane road usually with no shoulder. Everybody drives in either direction on whichever side of the road they find fewer potholes or simply more convenient. At times you are sure they are going to hit and kill you. Ah, sweet release! But we missed again. And it took us only about four-and-a-half or five hours to go the 134 km (82 miles) home. That’s just about keeping up with the old pony-express. It’s almost as bad as the L.A. Freeway system during rush hour.

Don’t think I am complaining! I loved a great day away. I enjoyed everything I saw, and I would drop everything and do it again at the merest invitation.

On Friday, we started out for Antsirabe with Pam to see our students perform in a drama competition with their own original work. En route the fan quit working. So it took us about 4 hours to limp about 10 km home. Our students did magnificently without our support, carrying away both the first and second prizes! We were duly proud of them.

On Sabbath Pam was asked to preach at the little church in Sambaina that we attended our first Sabbath in Madagascar. It had been women’s week all week, and this was the culmination. She was given a sermon written originally at the General Conference. The Mada church feels it must follow every directive from the headquarters to the letter or they will follow the damned into perdition. The sermon she received had been translated into Malagasy. She figured out what the texts were and did a great job of weaving them together.

The sermon was based on Ephesians 5:33, a text which has upset feminists for the last I don’t know how many years. The husband is to love his wife and the wife to respect her husband, according the translation Pam used.  The King James Version states “Let every one of you … love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.” Pam read dictionary definitions for “love”, and “respect”. These used lots of synonyms for the terms—which drove her game little translator just about bananas. Kudos to you Pam! We walked about 4 km to get to church and about 3km home, along a steeper shortcut. We were steaming sweat from every pore, both when we arrived at church and when we arrived at home. Humidity was, as usual, about 100%, and it started raining about the time we got home and continued into Sunday.

I got up this morning, Thursday, February 25, at 5:15 and went outside. This morning was the first morning since I have been here that I have been able to see the sky all the way to the horizon in the east. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and the Moon stretched three-quarters of the way across the sky in that order. They were all clearly visible against a beautiful dawn sky. Actually, the Moon was half covered by a cloud that soon enveloped Jupiter. What a rare sight. If you’ve got clear morning skies, go out about three-quarters an hour before sunrise and see the sight. It will be quite different in just a few days—both Venus and Mercury are moving very rapidly right now.

#MADAGASCAR, #UAZ, #MALAGASY, #PREACHING, #ANIMISM, #ROYALTY, #PLANETS, #TRAFFIC, #ANTANANARIVO, #LEMURS, #GECKO, #PHALLUS, #CIRCUMCISION, #MERINAS, #ZOO, #CELLPHONE

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 11 - Providence and FAMA

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 11 Providence and FAMA

Moth

On Friday, February 12, 2016, I took a nap to help shake a tummy bug I had picked up. At the end of the nap, as I hovered between sleep and wake, I got this overwhelming impression that we were probably never going to get the email addresses for FAMA. I had an equally irresistible urge to get the next issue out pronto. Let me explain.

In 2014 at the last biannual meeting I was elected president of the Fellowship of Adventist Missionaries to Africa (FAMA). I didn’t want the post, but I got it anyway. Everything has gone along fine. We have made arrangements for our next biannual meeting the first weekend of June in Fletcher, NC.

FAMA publishes the FAMA Newsletter roughly once a month, although in 2014 we had 15 issues. Rose Stickle has been the compiler/editor for as long as I’ve known about FAMA. In fact she may have served as its editor ever since the Fellowship was first founded. She has been fighting breast cancer for many years now, but she has forged ahead as editor in spite of her cancer. Then a week after her November issue came out last year, she worsened and died.

Since then the vice president, Bruce, and I have tried to get a copy of the email addresses. However, we had made no headway. I had been communicating with Bruce, and he sounded discouraged. I tend to let things slide when there is nothing I can do about it. Furthermore, my situation in remote Madagascar does nothing to make it easy to do anything else. The fast approaching date, however, could not be denied.

I decided to reconstruct as much of a mailing list as I could and get the details out of the biannual meeting as best I could. I spent Friday afternoon going through our personal address lists and selecting anybody who has ever had anything to do with Africa. I have copies of the last two year’s Newsletters on my computer, so I pulled every email address that Rose had included in these issues. This took hours, and I did not do it on Sabbath. I need all the rest I can get. I ended up with 183 email addresses.

I also called my brother, Elwood, on Friday evening; that’s early on Friday morning for him. He went over to my house and found a folder with a printout of email addresses dated 2008, if I’m not mistaken. Now in the information age, 2008 exists somewhere back in the dark ages. But it was the best we had. He spent I don’t know how much time scanning everything he could find in that folder including snail mail addresses and emailing them to me.

After surveying what he had sent me and trying several tactics to convert the data he had sent, I found that the most accurate was to take the pdf (printer definition file) version and convert it to text. Then I pasted the addresses into MS Excel. Once in Excel I realized I had a gold mine with 540 addresses. I had to massage the data, pull out spaces, and change special characters like “/” and “~” into something. That was purely guessing, of course. Then I created a short “Do Not Reply” email and sent out batches of 75 emails at a time to these addresses. Imagine my dismay when all, 100%, bounced back as invalid.

After doing several hours of sleuthing, I discovered that in creating the email addresses, something somewhere along the line had added a space to the end of each one of them. So I pulled all of the spaces off the ends and resent the 540 emails. This time 438 of them bounced back as invalid.

I also got a terse rebuke from Google blacklisting me for sending so many emails in one day and having so many returned. They had closed my account for probably 24 hours, they claimed. They suggested that I just might be shooting spam out all over the place.

I went home in a black mood. Besides, I was supposed to go to a Valentine program put on by students as a judge of how well the program was organized. The program was to begin at 6:00 and last until 9:00. When I got there a few minutes before 6:00, it was pouring down rain. In fact it had been raining all afternoon. The organizers were having trouble, and I had to stand out in the rain until almost 6:30. Needless to say, I’m sure my mood did not improve my opinion of the program. Sorry guys!

Valentine’s Program

Monday I teach and had several things to do, including writing the evaluation. Finally I decided about 3:30 to go back to the Faculty Lounge where we can get a rather unstable Internet. That’s when I found out that 438 of the second version of my “Do Not Reply” emails had bounced back as invalid. But a few had gotten through. The Dobiases, who had lived next door to us in the 1960’s at Ikizu in Tanzania, had received one of the emails that did make it. They live right within 2 miles (3km) of where our FAMA meeting will be in North Carolina. They not only had gotten our email but were inviting us to stay with them for the weekend. Wow! They just made my day. I was really excited. Maybe we could get something started! Just maybe.

But the best was yet to come! I had sent the emails out in batches of about 75 at a time. So the replies, valid and invalid, for each batch were all clustered in a single line on my screen. The line lists how many replies it has clustered. I was busy entering these values into my Excel screen. On one of these lines my thumbed bumped the line, and it spontaneously opened to a valid reply

I was very busy with the counting and regarded the interruption as a nuisance. I did, that is, until I saw that it was a reply from Susan Stickle Woods, the daughter of Rose Stickle. Her email stated simply:

Hi Will,

My dad Herb has mom's FAMA list. I just helped him transfer it to his computer when I visited last week. I think he might be willing to do the newsletter if someone asked him. 

Susan Stickle Woods
Sent from my iPhone

I was stunned. I was excited. It dawned on my thick skull that this was no less than the hand of God. He had directed me, impressed me, and gotten me off of my proverbial couch and doing something. Now, out of close to 500 emails on that page, mostly junk, he had gotten me to pick out the one email that had the answer I needed. Not even the email to myself that was in the pack that had reached me. And here one had reached me from the only person that had the answer I desperately needed.

I now have incontrovertible proof in my mind that God does want FAMA to move on and become a source of power for the church. Ellen White once wrote that “We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history.” (Life Sketches p. 196) One of FAMA’s goals is to try and preserve as much Adventist history in Africa as we possibly can.

God has a really hard time with me. He usually has to hit me up the side of the head with a two by four before He can get me to do something. It took Him three months to actually get me acting on this FAMA challenge. Then in three short days He worked out what Bruce and I had been attempting for three months.  

I phoned Herb Stickle on Monday evening. It took several times to get through. After all, I am using an aggravatingly unstable Internet in Madagascar through to a tiny mobile phone company, Republic Wireless, in the U.S. on a free Wi-Fi line to Canada. He assured me that he was going to spend the day getting the email addresses through to Bruce and me. Herb was not as ready to take up the Newsletter as Susan suggested he might be.

I went to the faculty lounge after class on Tuesday morning, and there were 12 email messages, each with from 60 to 80 email addresses in a separate .vcf file. Stunned, I thought, “Well, I can look at each one, copy the name and email, (3 items) for each file. I hadn’t counted the total number of addresses yet, but in the first email there were 80 .vcf files, and that represented just the names beginning with “A” and “B”!

I asked Google how to convert these into an MS Excel file. In skimming through a couple pages of suggestions, I found two different steps that would do what I wanted. And by the time I went home for lunch, I had an email file with 775 names and email addresses. On Wednesday I taught literally from 8:00 to 5:00 with an hour off for lunch. On Thursday we had a chance to go to Tana (more about that trip later). On Friday I finished the FAMA Newsletter, Sylvia edited it, and I successfully emailed 90 before Google got mad at me and blocked any further emails. Apparently if I try to email more than 50 emails, Google figures it has to be spam and blocks all future emails for twenty-four hours. It also won’t let me send more than 500 per day. Saturday evening I got the total sent out to 450. I had promised our lunch group to try and get them out that week. Well, at least we got the back broken.

Please pray for us in this land of a curious blend of animism and Christianity and the associated devil curses. Pray that God will see us through to getting done what He wants us to do. I wrote the previous sentences several days ago when I was feeling somewhat down from making no headway on the FAMA project. When I got out of bed on Sunday, February 21, and went into the other room to get my electric razor, I suddenly felt an absolute iron grip on my entire upper body. I immediately wondered if I were having a heart attack or a stroke. I felt as if I couldn’t stand up and headed towards the bed in that room. In the process I mentally went through the normal symptoms of heart attack—death, pressure and pain in the chest or arms, nausea, breathlessness. I for the symptoms of stroke—facial distortion, inability to hold arms at shoulder height, occluded vision, slurred speech. I had none of the above and no pain, I was thinking clearly, my heart pulse was strong and normal and regular. The iron grip left as suddenly as it started, but only after I had gone through the checks I mentioned above. I showered, exercised, got dressed, and washed out our drinking water container; everything was normal. Sylvia got up and put breakfast on. I told her about it at breakfast. She said as calmly as if I told her we had just run out of toilet paper, “Oh, it was probably just the devil. He’s quite active around here.” Then she went on to tell me of experiences told in three papers she had received in her writing class and reminded me of the cat experience. Watch for one of her forthcoming “Notes on Madagascar” at this blog site.

In the last Sojourn (10) I mentioned that I had a bit of a tummy upset. It wasn’t bad, just a continuing discomfort and the necessity of dashing to the john once in a while. On Sabbath the 13^th of February we attended the English Sabbath School lesson study. My tummy was a bit obnoxious, but bearable. When we found out that the church service was going to be in English, we definitely decided to stay. But the call of nature became somewhat insistent, so I went out back of the church to the long-drop marked Homme. It was the size of a normal outhouse but had no seat, only a hole in the center of the floor. The previous 200 or so users had missed the hole, and there was a pile of excrement sloping up to a foot (30cm) deep at the back of the outhouse. The sight and the wrenching smell was all I needed. I went back to church and told Sylvia I was going home. I prayed that I could walk the 1 km (0.6miles) home before everything burst forth. My prayer was answered, barely. I cleaned up and went to bed and slept for at least a half hour.

The Crippled Lamb

That Sabbath we hosted a potluck at our home for all of the expatriates at the university. The first to arrive at our home was Sylvia. Pam had left off two dishes that needed to be baked, so we put them in the oven. Shortly afterwards Robert and Prity Bairagee arrived. They come from Bangladesh and live like us, without a car. The Payets came in separately; Edwin comes from the island of Reunion near Mauritius. French is his native language. His wife Alphie is from the Philippines and speaks English, so their two kids, Ann and Aldwin (about 8 and 5), speak French, English, and Malagasy fluently. They are two really bright kids and a real pleasure to have around. We brought Max Lucado’s The Crippled Lamb from the U.S. It is one of several kids’ books he has written. This approaches the birth-in-a-stable Christmas story from the viewpoint of a crippled lamb that had to stay in the stable rather than be out on the hillside with the other sheep and the shepherds “watching their flocks by night.” Aldwin leafed through the book and then said that he had read the book in kindergarten and seen the movie! His parents confirmed this. Ann sat down and read through it rapidly. The Payets met at the Adventist University, AIIAS, also in the Philippines.

Edwin, Alphie, Evelyn, Roger, Sylvia, Pam, Ann, Aldwin

I proposed to the Payets that they take us to Morondaba on a forthcoming weekend. Morondaba is a city on the west coast of Mada and in the center of the baobab country. They were amenable, and we’re planning this for the first weekend of March.

Pam, Robert, Ann, Aldwin, Gideon

Once Roger and Evelyn Pelayo, also from the Philippines, joined us, the table was full of delicious smelling and looking food.  I formally welcomed everyone and said grace. Everyone proceeded to eat with gusto. Some hadn’t had breakfast, so they were especially hungry.

Pam and Gideon Petersen from South Africa were at a district meeting on the far side of Sambaina. They had invited us to go with them, but we declined because we were hosting this meal. My runny tummy made me glad I didn’t accept. The Petersens came in much later, after we had already started on Sylvia’s excellent chocolate cake that she had baked from scratch.

From Scratch Chocolate Cake

The company was excellent and the conversation stimulating. In an isolated mission like UAZ it is easy for misunderstandings to develop and feathers to get ruffled. We enjoyed the excellent camaraderie and some intelligent interchanges. People stayed for various lengths of time. We enjoyed every minute of the time. Everyone had left by about 4:30, and Sylvia and I took a well earned nap. It rained on and off the rest of the afternoon, all that night, and all of Sunday. We got about a total of 1 ¼ inches (30mm).

I mentioned that I spent most of Sunday massaging the FAMA data Elwood had gotten, scanned into the computer, and then emailed me. While I was at the faculty lounge, Mme Hanitra came in to use the Internet. I asked her if she and her husband would like to be on the FAMA mailing list. She was very interested, so I got her to write her name on a piece of paper. Hers is very typical of Malagasy names and a good reason why I don’t remember the names of my 165 students. Her name is RANDRIAMAMONJISOA Hanitriniaina; they always write their surnames in all capitals and list them first.

 I have added the most recent FAMA Newsletter to Blogspot so you can see it if you wish.  

#MADAGASCAR, #UAZ, #MALAGASY, #PREACHING, #ANIMIST, #DIARRHEA, #GOOGLE, #DATA, #EMAIL, #FAMA, #SURNAME, #DEVIL, #DEMON, #PROVIDENCE, #GOD, #CHRISTIANITY