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 13th 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
