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

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 7 - Taking Stock

Sojourn to Madagascar Part 7

Taking Stock

In our own minds, Sylvia and I often compare our living conditions here with those we had at the beginning of our marriage at Ikizu Seminary and Secondary School in Tanzania almost 50 years ago.

Ikizu 1967 to 1971	U. A. Z. 2016
High school level academically	Elementary language instruction in a university
I taught upwards of 40 (40 min) class periods plus was in charge of maintenance, electricity, water, printing press	Teaching from 5 to 13 (50 min) class periods per week.
Remote, about an hour’s drive over dirt and gravel roads to the nearest town with a market	Remote, about an hour’s drive over a potholed tar road from the nearest town with a market
No car. We had to rely on the generosity of others, especially the principal	No car. We have to rely on the generosity of others, especially the rector.
Electricity 3 ½ hours a day	Electricity 24 hours a day but with frequent outages
Water sufficient but not plentiful	Water plentiful during the rainy season; other-wise they have rationing in place
Drinking water—we boiled our own	Drinking water—We boil our own
Bathing water—gas water heater	Bathing water—Electric water heater after the first 8 days
Laundry—We had our own washing machine and line dried our clothes outside	Laundry—We use rector’s washing machine and line dry outside, with high risk of rain, or on limited covered lines on our back porch
The bed was more like a hammock than a bed.	The bed is more like a hammock than a bed. We get real’ cozy this way.
There was no heat in the house. Being a degree and a half off of the equator, we didn’t miss it. There was no winter.	There is no heat in the house. Being almost 20 degrees off the equator, we have missed it. We’re lucky not to be here in the winter
We had many books along with us, and we spent our evenings reading.	We have practically no books along. Pam has leant us a hard drive with a number of movies.
Vegetables—many brought to our door by locals, the rest through the town market and a grocery store	Vegetables—occasionally brought to our door, eggs available at local farm, the rest through the town market and grocery stores.
Communication—regular and dependable mail service; radio-telephone that was flaky and eventually discontinued	Communication—mail totally undependable; email flaky; local cell phone; U.S. Wi-Fi phone
Languages—multiple local languages, Swahili predominant; English widely understood	Languages—Malagasy predominant; French widely understood; English rarely understood
Radio available with limited local stations; no TV; no computer or Internet	No radio or TV; Internet available nearby
Security—very safe, petty thievery, walked everywhere—even at night	Security—safe; I wouldn’t walk far outside at night. We have a 9:00 p.m. curfew.
Home security—no bars on windows and simple locks on doors. We left them open during the day	Home security—rebar bars on all windows. Two heavy half inch steel bolts on solid wood front and back doors. Closed during the day.
Respect by students—very good	Respect by students—very good
Friendliness—Everyone was very friendly	Friendliness—Everyone is very friendly
Malaria—present mainly during the rainy season. We took a prophylactic	Malaria—nominally not present. But Pam caught it a couple weeks ago; we are taking a prophylactic
Sidewalks—sand	Sidewalks—clay, very muddy and slippery when wet
Lawns—mowed by mowers I kept working	Lawns—mainly neglected, on rare occasions cut with shears or sickle
Countryside around partially cultivated. Lots of natural savannah bush	Countryside around intensively cultivated, especially near the national road. No natural rain forest left.
Majority of faculty were expatriate missionaries	Majority of faculty are Malagasy
Weather was very dry and never got much above 80° (27°C) or below 60°(13° C) all year round, even in the rainy seasons	Weather never gets much above 80° (27°C), and right now the humidity stays very close to 100%. In the winter time they can have frost.
I wore sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt all year round	I wear socks and shoes, long sleeves, long pants, and an undershirt every day in summer
There were no toilets in any of the classrooms or dining room.	There are toilets in the buildings. They are not labeled by gender
When you arrive at someone’s home you call “Hodi!”	When you arrive at someone’s home, you call “Oidia!”
People go to bed early and arise early. It does not make them wealthy.	People go to bed early and arise early. It does not make them wealthy.

With regard to the toilets in buildings, the other day I needed to use the toilet. I walked down the hall in the Technology Building. The toilets are on opposite sides of the west end of the hallway. The doors to the restrooms always stand wide open. The one on the left has a urinal right next to a sink with no privacy panel. I had figured that no one would use it because of its exposure to the hallway. My carefully applied deductive reasoning was based on the false premise that Malagasies have some shame or longing for privacy in a toilet. Here was a guy using the urinal and ignoring all passersby. There are several stalls as well, which I chose to use!

Pam has loaned us an external hard drive with a bunch of movies that her sister and a couple other people have recorded. So far we have watched:

v  Freedom Writing:  a dramatization of the experience of a young English teacher in Woodrow Wilson High School during and after the Rodney King beating trial in 1994

v  Summer Holiday: a fictional adventure of four young men who borrow a London double-decker bus and drive it to Greece picking up four young women en route

v  Journey to the Center of the Earth: A modern take-off of an old Jules Verne novel of the same name. Fun but highly unrealistic

v  Cairo Time: A woman comes to Cairo to meet her husband who is on a U.N. assignment in the Middle East. They don’t get together until the end of the movie

v  The Philadelphia Experiment: a WW II experiment to make a battle ship undetectable by radar causes serious spatial disruption and inadvertent time travel

v  Santa Paws 2: a kid’s movie trying to put the materialism back into Christmas by making it more humanistic. Mrs. Santa saves the day

v  Grown Ups: a spoof on the Peter Pan idea that some men don’t want to grow up. Their wives, of course, have a hard time with it

v  Prince of Egypt: a Hollywood version of Moses from bulrushes to the Red Sea. We watched this before showing it to Pam’s class.

The second week in January was one of a plague of June bugs and mosquitoes. I keep the light on over the front door. Each morning there would be a carpet of bugs on the front porch. Scores of mosquitoes would also be dead alongside the bugs. Scores more would be sitting on the walls, doorway, and window waiting for me to open the door so they could fly in. Scores more of these mosquitoes would find ways to squeeze under the front door or through the cracks in the louvered kitchen window. It is the only window in the house that is not screened in. We killed as many as we could. One night they got so bad that Sylvia sprayed the kitchen and living room with the bug spray she had thoughtfully packed in her suitcase. I spent a half hour the next morning just cleaning up and disposing of their carcasses. In deference to the Sabbath commandment, none (zero, zilch) of them were in evidence anywhere inside or outside the house on Sabbath morning. They were back on Sunday morning but in greatly diminished quantities.

Neither Sylvia nor I were bitten by the mosquitoes, although they would buzz in our ears if we let them get that close. Thank God that none of the mosquitoes were anopheles, the kind that carries malaria. Look them up on the Internet. We’ve almost forgotten how handy the Internet is when it is available all the time. We only have Internet when we are down at school. It took me three days of trying to upload Sojourn 6. On the other hand, we have had fairly good success using our Republic Wireless phones on Internet mode to call people in the U.S. That has been a real treat.

Our home is equipped roughly like homes were in the 1930s except that we do have an old, small electric fridge with all its inner workings exposed.

On Monday, January 11, I gave my talk Numerology and the Hebrew Mind for chapel. See http://faculty.lasierra.edu/~wclarke/nhmx.pdf  It was one, with several modifications, that I gave at a Science and Spirituality Conference at Andrews University some years back. I was asked to speak on Thursday evening. Friday I was lucky, after several hours of trying, to download a copy of the speech. I was concerned that it wouldn’t be understood, even though there is no math in there except adding numbers up to get 666. English is a rather distant third language for most of these students. There was substantial talking amongst the students. But they did laugh when I made jokes and respond at some surprising things I told them. So a fair number must have been following.

On the way home Monday evening, we stopped and picked up some groceries we had ordered through Pam. We got mangos, personal size papayas, bananas, tomatoes, plums, carrots, leeks, and one or two other vegetables for 10,000Ar (about $3.00). This was a special order because it went through with the cafeteria’s order which is in bulk. The same usually costs us closer to 30,000 Ar (closer to $10) for the same amount. If I had gone to the market myself rather than having a Malagasy do the shopping for me it would have cost closer to 100,000Ar. So it doesn’t pay for me to go to the market!

This is a spiritually oriented campus. We pray at the beginning and end of each class. Students want to sing at the beginning of each class and do so in many classes.