A Few Moments in My Life

         I awoke one night around 1:30am. Not sure if I was truly awake or not, I heard singing in my small Malagasy village. This doesn't happen on a regular occurrence. In fact, this was the first time I had ever woken up in the middle of the night to hear much of anything going on in my town. People close their houses when it gets dark and are all asleep by around 9:30pm because there is no electricity for lights and the few folks who have generators only run them on special occasions. Thus, I was perplexed as to why a group of people would be awake in the dead of night and singing as if it were a Sunday worship service. I sat up in my bed and wondered how to address the situation. Because, obviously, I had to do something with such a strange event happening. I remembered the "sleep-together" that had happened several months ago when a friend of mine's 2 year old daughter had died and many folks from the community went to his family's house and spent time with them, ate with them, drank (a lot) with them, and played cards and dominoes with them through the night. I feared that something similar may be happening in my community again. So, I donned my blue jeans, UNC-Asheville t-shirt, flipflops, and a hoodie. I put my headlamp on and left my house to investigate the late night chorus. When I reached the main road, only about 20 yards from my house, I encountered one of the store owners in my town and asked him what the singing was all about. "Misy faty," he said. Someone is dead. "Iza?", I asked him. He told me that Dada Gil had died. Gilbert, better known as Dada Gil, was not old by American standards. Not quite 60, was most people's guess. I had played dominoes with him many times and shared rum with him from time to time. He struck me as a classy man; he always wore a white and blue striped sports coat that reminded me of the train engineer overalls I used to wear when I was a kid. A Ben Hogan style cap was always graced the top of his head. He had cloudy eyes, which I guess made him seem older than he actually was; they made him seem wiser too. He had been sick with something for weeks, I don't know what. After returning from getting medicine in Moramanga earlier that day, he found himself unable to breath and died early in the evening. As per Malagasy tradition, the whole community would come to his house to attend the wake (I guess we would call it) throughout the night, where the women of the community would be drinking taoka gasy and singing hymns; and the men would be drinking taoka gasy and playing cards and dominoes, and Dada Gil would be lying in his bed with a sheet over his body, and candles around his head. This was the second "sleep together" I had attended, and I don't I'll ever get used to them. They're so weird, cool, sad, depressing, fun, and interesting. You never really know what to feel.

        I ate a tenrec the other day. Watch the BBC series on Madagascar and you'll see a nice little segment about them. They're kinda of like hedgehogs with more color. I went out to weed the rice fields that I and my friend, Tahiry, are currently working on. We should be harvesting around the end of April/early May. When we got to the path that leads to our fields, I noticed that there was a dead tenrec lying in the trail. Tahiry asked me, "Efa nihinana trandraka ve ianao?". I answered him, "No, I've never eaten tenrec before, nor have I ever seen one". He told me it was "really good"! I asked him how long he thought this one had been dead. "Vao maty tamin'ny maraina izy," he suggested. Considering that it had just been killed by who-knows-what during the morning, he proposed that we have it for lunch. Why not, right? So we did the work in the fields we had come to do, and when we had finished, picked up the dead tenrec to be cooked for laoka anto'andro, "that which you eat with rice during the middle of the day". It smelled ok. It tasted ok. But the tenrec is pretty much the equivalent of the North American possum. Kind of strange to think about eating such an animal. After finishing it, I was glad to have tried it and could now say that I'd eaten one. It had a very gamey taste to it. However, about an hour later, my burps began to have strange taste to them. Have you ever smelled a dead skunk that's been hit on a highway? That's what my belches tasted like. So, for future advice for those who may be tempted to eat a tenrec, be advised: it may taste OK doing down, but the "Sonic the Hedgehog" of Madagascar makes your burps taste like roadkill. Enjoy.

         I had a meeting with one of my partner organizations in Moramanga earlier this week. The secretary of the association, Mr. Franklin, had invited me attend the meeting and had asked if I would bring a certain picture of me and him that had been taken at a previous meeting in the coastal city of Tamatave. In the picture, we posed shaking hands. Always happy to attend official meetings, I came to Moramanga on Tuesday, wondering what the content of the meeting was going to be. The meeting began and I quickly realized that I had been duped. Conservation International had initiated a project about a year ago doing work with pig raising and ginger growing. However, my community's branch of this organization was not a part of this project, making my attendance of the meeting irrelevant. The project doesn't affect my town or my work. Having been here for a year, I only laughed after realizing that my attendance at the meeting was only so that Mr. Franklin could get the picture from me and get it developed. This is the indirectness of the Malagasy culture. Yeah, I would have preferred him to just ask me if we could get the picture developed in Moramanga sometime for him, but I wasn't angry or perturbed that he'd gone the round-about way of getting it. It just made me laugh.

     I've taken up playing dominoes with the local men in my town. Women don't play. I didn't make the rules or the cultural norms, sorry. But I find playing dominoes is another way to further integrate into my community. I've learned a lot of new, very applicable words (and a few dirty ones), my ability to count in French has gotten much better (though I tend to count in English in my head then announce the sum in French), and the local men have come to see me more as just one the guys in town, not just the "vazaha", though I definitely am still that. The dominoes table is set up in a little shelter made of wood and palm leaf along the highway next to one of the busier stores in town. Previously, this building was use to keep sacks of charcoal out of the rain. The table itself is a flat sheet of old plastic-like material, set on an old tire. The seats are logs and stones. The dominoes themselves are perennially dirty as they fall off the table quite often when the Malagasy slam the pieces down on the not-so-sturdy-table, an action meant to display the superiority of the domino they are playing to those that the other players have in their hands. Their hands are also often very dirty as well, most of them being charcoal makers. But, such is the way of it. We put 200 Ariary on each game, if you win you make 400 Ariary. 200 Ariary is the approximate equivalent of 10 cents in the United States. 10 cents can actually get you a quite few things at the local store: 2 cigarettes, 4 small packs of peanuts, 2 cookies, 2 tomatoes, 4 small onions, some cooking oil, a little kerosene for your lamp, or even a double shot of Malagasy moonshine. Making 400 Ariary (about 20 cents) is a nice little pick up at the end of the day for most of the men in my town. I lose a lot. Most of the time, I play, enjoy myself playing a game with the guys of my village, and lose 200 Ariary. Being the guy from who-knows-where across the seas of the world, they aren't expecting me to win. I don't expect myself to win, I've never been much of a dominoes player anyway. But sometimes, I don't lose. And when I don't lose, the guys who are watching are so surprised I get a full round of fist bumps. The money I do make I use to buy cigarettes or a small snack for the guys I beat. But I'm starting to get good, well, better than I was. But it doesn't really matter to me so long as the guys keep letting me play with them and be just another guy in town, killing time and hanging around.

My MOM will be here in Madagascar in two week!!! I can't wait to meet her at the airport in Antananarivo and show her the life I live here. Bring your camera, Mama.

Until next time, I hope everyone enjoys NCAA March Madness. Tennessee's playing today (3/15) to get into the semi's of the SEC tourney. Go VOLS.

Amin'ny manaraka indray e!

James