Election Weekend

Gae, Miora, Tony

 

View from the house of the man below

 

 

Happy on voting day

 The man: Tovo

 Toaka gasy warms the belly

Learning to flow

Below is the hostess, whose wedding we went to in Ambositra

 

AFter party

quirks

On thing that everyone must know is that there is some tea that smells and tastes like a fruity pebbles with milk: verimanitra/

Another thing: this is such a poor country. There is trash everywhere, the streets are use as toilets, most of the buildings are severely damaged, and the cars were made before catalytic converters. What gets me is how ridiculous people look when they get rich. They spend their money on a new car, flashy clothes, and a nice place. But when everyone is wearing dirty clothes, you just look like a chump getting out of your Range in a suit.

Another thing that is important: the different between loaka and a vegetable dish in the US or Europe is not in the ingredients. Rather, since loaka is made to be eaten with rice, it should be that a small morsel flavors a spoonful of rice, so it needs a lot more flavor than a side dish.

Google loses searchers to Facebook, because when people watch a video that is posted on fb, they do not search on Google for the video. What may have been outweighing this fact is that Google gains searchers via the gain in number of people using the internet caused by Facebook.

I was asked by three guys who smoke and drink at the market near my place my opinion is on how to improve Madagascar. I was surprised, but I talked, even though I am sure they have ideas of their own that they wanted to tell me. But you know, the French abused the Malagasy, and the Malagasy still want to be like foreigners. In fact, the only foreigners the Malagasy people know well were abusive. The people that are in power are those who are willing to be as abusive as the French, so it is pretty amazing the is no civil war; I mean, it shows how the Malagasy understand without imitating, all except for those in power. What matters is that the Malagasy thought the French were abusive. I don't know whether the French were actually abusive; I don't know whether they tried to be abusive. They might have thought they were doing a lot of good by bringing cars here. Cars are a lot less useful when you cannot use them to travel to other countries. Plus, they brought dirty, old cars here. Anyway, I told them they should not rely on another country.

Another weird thing about this country is that potholes are not always covered. So, once in while there is a hole on the curb. Most of the time its only a few feet deep and full of trash. But sometimes the drop is about fifteen feet down a narrow passage. So, pedestrians and drivers have to look out for these. This is another danger of traveling at night.

There are some streets that have bumper to bumper traffic all day long. One such street is home to the school where I teach. Despite the fumes from all these cars, there is a huge tree across the street from the school that has managed to produce blue flowers.

I recently finished reading The Pillars of the Earth by Keith Follet. It was fun to read, but it was a bit shallow. The best part was how the book covered such a long time period without dwelling on boring events. That is to say, the pace was good and the distance was also good. But the book was written by a good observer, not a great inventor. It is a long book, and sometimes he used the same words to describe one of the villains. That was one way I picked up on his weaknesses. But the lack of depth was mostly in the commentary on the relationship between secular magic and Christian magic.

Two people have told me that one reason there are so many forest fires here is that people like to see them. As a volunteer, we were told that the practice, tavy, is to fertilize the soil, but that its effect was short lived.

Shoulders

OK well its ten pm on Sept 26. This is Thursday. Tomorrow is the last day of the second week of my first trimester teaching English at CNELA. It has been fun. I tell a lot of jokes and I get the students to talk at lot.

I am living with Fred. He is 27 and he has a high paying job in the surveying industry. He is a boss. He works late. My second class ends at seven thirty pm and my first class starts at four pm.

I teach from a packet and original materials. So far, I have had some success with having a few plans from which I can chose. The first class is going a bit better than the second. But the second class is a bit bigger than the first, so it is a bit harder to keep everyone interested.

I am cooking a lot. There are bugs in the house, but I am starting to get used to them. I was only slightly bothered when I found a dead cockroach in my bed two mornings ago. I guess they are here because my roommate was living alone for a while before I moved in and he doesn't really clean the kitchen all that much. 

I plug some weird type of thing into the wall in the evening to repel mosquitoes. I would prefer to use a net since I have no idea what I am breathing, but I am just using a mattress with no bed frame, so there really isn't a good way to put up a mosquito net.

I started drinking beer again. The few cigarettes I smoke leave me paying the price of a sore throat the next day.

I meet with the mother and family of my roommate on Wednesdays. We speak in English mostly, but they aren't quite as good as my roommate, so I usually learn some Malagasy. The second son of the family is my age. This weekend he has his finals for a correspondence course in computer science. The last child is a teenage girl who seems pretty mature.

Last weekend I started learning Wushu from some sort of official school. The master didn't really appear, but there is probably a lot of conditioning work for me to do before it is really worth his time.

I am watching Naruto. It is OK, but I had to start with the second season, in which Naruto wears orange and black. There was an arch in which four people attacked Konoha that seemed pretty worthless. It is becoming more serious now: Team 10 and Team Kakashi have just defeated two Akatsuki.

Lastly, the internet needs to be free and stay free. The biggest problem with democracy is that voters are uninformed. The internet gives people a chance to be informed. Therefore people need access to the internet. Further, the information on the internet can neither be censored nor costly. That is way I mean when I say that the internet needs to be free and stay free.

Brooklyn

So on the day after I got back from Ambositra, I went to see a dance contest with Gaelle. The contest was for a position in a Brooklyn Arts School competition. There we many foreigners amongst the guests. We sat with a boy and his sister. I have seen the boy before, but I don't exact remember where. He must have been a contestant in the last show I judged. Anyway, there was a band playing while we waited for the contestants. I got to hear the traditional instrument, Faly incorporated into a band, instead of into a sales plot for tourists. It is cylindrical, but basically like a guitar. At first I could hear it, but not the accompanying guitar, but I learned to distinguish the guitar from the sharper notes of the Faly.

There were four performers: the first incorporated many different tribal traditions. It was the best all round performance. There were bright colors, many costumes, and enthusiastic dancers. The second group feature some boys in shiny, sky blue suits with white sashes. Their dance was a bit like some of the Tai Chi I know. I really enjoyed this, but then some big middle aged women came onto the stage and I was a bit disappointed since they couldn't really dance and their voices were pretty much drowned out by the band and the other signers who had mics. After, A beautiful young girl came out alone. She was nervous but capable. At the end she settled down. The third group I don't really remember that well. Oh yea, the second group was from the Highlands according to Galle. Anyway, I think the third group was doing a Tandroy dance. There was a mock fight over water. The last group depicted a famadihiana, or turning of the bones. There was some miming that I didnt really understand. I haven't actually ever seen a turning of the bones festival, so I guess that is one reason I didn't get the mining. this group was pretty creative with some dark cloth. They created something like a tomb, and did some visual trick with the body in which it was difficult to track which person was supposed to be dead. Then everyone was dancing.

Well, after the first two groups, there was a performance by a younger group. Two kids that must have been less than ten years old were the main singers. They had pretty big voices. Also, at every break, there was an emcee who did his best to speak in Malagasy, French, and English. His comfort decreased while using languages further towards the end of that list. He was pretty funny anyway. The competition ended with a talk by two guys from the US. It was translated into Malagasy by an internationally famous Malagasy singer. I hope someone will remind me of her name so I can listen to one of her songs. At the end, it was announced that Bakomanga won.
I walked Gaelle home with Francia, the previous president of the group that put on the English Speech contest in Trano Pokonoly. We were a bit scared to walk in the dark, but there were no buses. I took a bus back to CNELA from Gaelle's.

Double vests

I went to Ambositra on the morning of the 25th of August. I was with Fred and three of his colleagues. We arrived at the house of Jira, the boy whose wedding we were to attend, just before dark. We had some beer on the balcony. I think that gave me a headache. Over 50 percent of the last five times I drank beer I got a headache. Around nine pm, we were invited into the kitchen. It was about the size of a closet and featured two open flames. Oh man there was a lot of smoke. But it was warm. I wasn't feeling great when dinner came around. I remembered some times in Nepal when there was an impossible amount of food in front of me. I had to concentrate to stomach every bite. Deep breaths. Its not that the food was bad: it there were even vegetables for me. But the traveling, the beer, the heat, and the foreign environment got to me. We slept in the groom's room. I woke up earlier than the rest to hear Fred snoring. I though, geez, I will never get back to sleep. But when everyone was up, the others said I was just as loud as Fred! 

We took a long bus ride in to the town of the bride. It was nice because we had frequent stops and I got some mofo gasy and a finger of toaka gasy. We arrived at the civil building just before lunch. We waited outside as the entourage of the bride walked up the red, dirt street. There were three officials in the hall. Two of them had some things to say. The other supplied the couple with some papers to sign. The father of the bride said a prayer. To me, this ceremony married the couple, so I left some money in a collection box.

Next, we went to the house of the bride's parents. There was a buying ceremony, in which small amounts of money were given for one reason or another from the groom's party to that of the bride. With each addition to the pot, there were some formalities said on both parties. Fred told me that most of the time a professional takes care of this. It was a bit trying for the patience of some people. I was just trying to understand.

Lastly, we went over to a recreational center for a feast. Boy, radish, cauliflower, potato, zucchini, and I don't know what else made for a great salad. There must have been some type of mayonnaise. The next course was bread in a really rich cream. Then we had rice and zebu. I was not a vegetarian during this trip. Zebu was fine, but when I ate chicken, I didn't feel great. Anyway, everyone who attended was introduced over the microphone. The dad proved a funny emcee. The was karaoke, dancing, and cake. Then we left. It was really simple, but there is still supposed to be a marriage in the church. When we returned to the house of the groom, it seemed like the whole neighborhood was there to usher the newlyweds into their chambers.
We grabbed our stuff and headed for a hotel. We had a nice meal in a touristy spot and stayed in a great hotel.

The next day, I had tongotromby, or zebu foot soup for breakfast. It was alright, but there was not much meat, mostly just fat. I should mention that all Fred's colleagues and the couple could speak OK English. Still, mostly everyone was in Malagasy, so I was pretty quiet. Fred has a tendency to repeat things three times for emphasis, and imitating him helped me get comfortable with some easy phrases. I learned how to say 'no way' (tsy tafa voaka) and we all repeated it frequently. We met the bride and the groom one last time after breakfast before going to the taxi brousse station. While waiting, we had some spirits and some seriously salted jerky. The ride home was a bit rough for the kid next to me. We were four, but a manager insisted we squeeze another full size man in the row. So this preteen had two shoulders nearly touching in front of his face for about eight hours. We had to stop to change break pads on the way back. Hmm... When we arrived, another employee of Fred's company (ILS?), which, btw, is where the bride and the groom work, was at the taxi bus station to pick us up. We has some soup and I finally tried Nem;).

I didn't bring my camera, but maybe there will be some picture on fb soon...

Books - The Glass Castle and Cutting for Stone

Jeanette Walls begins her book, The Glass Castle, with a desert setting. The story is from the perspective of the second child of an artist and a drunken electrician/ The first chil is a clever girl. The second child is close to the father. All four kids, but especially the first three, learn to fend for themselves in their gypsy lifestyle. The mom wants her kids to be strong and believes that what doesn't kill someone makes that person stronger. The mol has a large inheritance, but won't sell land. The kids end up caring for the parents in the backwards town Welch, WV. They move to NYC to break free.

I really enjoyed the book. I don't know why now. My mom said she didn't like it too much, but it caused a riot at her book club because people had different views on how to deal with alcoholics. I got it from a Californian guy named Kevin who visited Madagascar in a break from his semester (or was it year?) abroad in SA.



Abraham Verghesse did something pretty cool by writing Cutting for Stone. The beginning is sweet, and it continues like that for a while. But the plausibility breaks down about two thirds of the way through. You know, the book made me proud of my dad because he is doctor. Also, it really drew me into the relationship between the narrator and his twin brother. Basically, a doctor fucks a nun in Ethiopia. The doctor fucks up the delivery. Twins that were conjoined in the womb survive; the mother doesn't.  The doctor runs away to the States, becoming a renowned surgeon. The midwife at the hospital takes in the babies, marries the internal medicine doctor, and they live happily. There is a really sad story about a girl, but it gets unbelievable, like the author didn't have the guts to really describe his ideas. There is war in the country and, because of a relationship with the girl, the protagonist has to flee. He goes to America, where he meets his father and provides some nice comments on being a foreigner in the US. The book culminates in a medical challenge in which the father has a chance to redeem himself through the ingenuity of the twin. 

Living alone

I just finished watching the anime Clannad After Story. It is about a couple. There are two stories about the same couple. In the end, one turns out to be the actual story, but it is not the one in focus. In fact, there were three stories, but one was about the daughter and the dad. This one is related more closely to the sad story that was the focus of the second half of the series. Lastly, there was a drama put on by the wife in the year she met the main character. It romantisized the city in which the anime takes place. The effect this had on the main character, the husband, is that the city was personified, trying to please people. It might seem sad, but even though this was a drama, the action was awesome. The anime wasn't too realistic: there were triplets with purple hair and different eye colors. But one of them, and the class president, were good fighters for some reason. Anyway, the main struggle for the protagonist is having the confidence to be happy about his relationship with the main girl. You know, he keeps thinking she would have had a better life if they didn't meet. In the end, even of the sad storyline, he thinks the joy of his love for her was worth the pain.

One thing about Madagascar is that men and women do not always use separate toilets in public places. Actually, it is not easy to find toilets. They are around, but they are not so well advertised as they are in the US. But when you find one, often, you are looking at something that doesn't exactly flush. Some toilets have buckets of water outside the stalls. Lastly, some places, like the sport center and some of the public toilets where peeing costs 2.5 cents, have tubes on the walls. The tubes spray water down the wall, and there is a tile barrier between the wall and the floor. Guys can just pee on the wall. I think that is pretty efficient since even most urinals require finding a sweet spot where you can pee without spraying yourself.

Let's see, what is is going on. Well, I am almost done applying for my visa. I have a permit to stay while the Ministry of Public Function prepares the last document I need to submit to the Ministry of the Interior. In this process, I had to write to three ministers and one prefect. They weren't personal letters, everyone who so applies has to write them, but the style is crazy! I have the honneur of soliciting your great benevolence... It wasn't not fun at first. But after, it sort of became a game. I met lots of nice ladies working in different offices. I also met a great guy who works for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I mentioned him before. It is an important realisation for me that these sort of administrative tasks, which meant nothing to me, are actually fun and educational. They really gave me a chance to think about what I want to do here. I learned that it is best never to hide my desires and that it is important to prepare people to give thought to my situation in order for them to understand my desires.

I am paying for my internet as I use it. So far, I think it will be about as expensive as accomodation. If I settle down, I will get a long term plan that is more reasonable, because the fee is lower and it is unlimited. Today, I opened a bunch of pages I wanted to read, then shut off the internet because I don't really understand how the count works: is it all done by the quantity of data transfered to the computer or is there also a price per unit of time?

There is no water at my place right now. It has been at least 12 hours. I am going to move in with someone like a friend of a friend of a friend. He is 27 and lives near the school. The lack of water isn't really the cause as I made the decision beforehand. I finally built a computer. It is a desktop. I wanted it that way. Right now, I live on the third story of a sixteen classroom complex. The nearest family lives on the first floor. I talk with them everyday, but I don't live with them. In the new place, I hope to learn Malagasy from the flatmate while in the comfort of my own desktop environment.

This is Koba. It comes in logs wrapped in banana leaf, which you can see. It is really expensive but very delicious. It is made of peanuts, flower, and honey. 

Mofogasy

I am in love with these sweet rice cakes. They costs somewhere between a nickel and a dime.

Mofo Akondro 

This is a fried banana; a good idea that is widely available here. This particular specimen is has exemplary thickness of the fried shell. If it is also sweet dough, you are in for a real treat.