January 2, 2007

Christmas in Manakana

The request came during announcements at the English Chapel service two Sunday’s before Christmas weekend. Helimission and Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) needed someone to oversee the building project in a remote village that had been almost completely burned to the ground in October. They needed someone to live there and manage the work over Christmas, since they had no other volunteers able to commit to that time period. Doug was intrigued from the minute he heard the announcement. He talked to Jakob from MAF for more details. From all he heard, it sounded like a wonderful way to do ministry and give our family a rather safe experience in a remote village in a rather undeveloped part of Madagascar. Doug had had many such experiences living among the people in the countryside on his trips to visit evangelists and teach but the rest of us hadn’t gotten those opportunities. The biggest challenge was “giving up” our regular Christmas at home to celebrate such a major holiday in the remote village of Manakana.

One big encouragement to go was having witnessed many foreign children at the boys’ school who live in a protective bubble here; rarely, if ever experiencing any of the more rustic or challenging sides of Madagascar. Yet we want our children to know more of Madagascar than chauffeured play dates, tourist hotels, and foreign “country clubs.” So we agreed to embark on this adventure. Yet I felt uncomfortable committing to the entire 8 days because of my work load and yes, some uncertainty about the conditions there. So Doug and Ben went first on December 18th, while Jeremiah and I stayed back until the 23rd.

Fortunately Doug had also gone out on the 14th for the day and had learned more about the situation there. He discovered (after we had already committed to staying there) that the tents were pup tents not ideal for our family and without the air mattresses we had been told were there, that the latrine was a pit toilet dug close to the church with two flimsy slat walls and a low thatch roof, and that our time would be taken up with overseeing many aspects of the building project, doing evangelism and teaching, in addition to taking care of all of our own cooking needs. He also learned that the only food in the town was rice sent by the government, leaves from local trees, fish caught from the stream, and possibly a few eggs. We obviously couldn’t take rice from the community with them desperately needing it. It also didn’t seem like we’d manage well on nothing but rice and leaves for several days. Fortunately we didn’t have to since we would be able to buy ahead and fly in food to prepare there. Of course, had we opted not to fly in our food, that would’ve really given us the full effect of the “living in the countryside” kind of experience. It didn’t quite seem like we were ready for that though. No, this was not going to be a high-sacrifice kind of trip. We stocked up on pasta, rice, sauces, canned vegetables, even cocoa powder for hot chocolate. So, no sympathy earned here! I wouldn’t exactly call that “roughing it.”

Jeremiah and I saw Doug and Ben off at the airport, watching them float up into the sky on that helicopter. Jeremiah immediately said, “Let’s pray for them.” I asked him to start. “Dear Jesus,” he began, “please help the helicopter to go high enough to not hit any trees or run into any mountains.” God answered that prayer. Doug and Ben made it safely to Manakana before Jeremiah and I had even arrived back home. We didn’t know that they had made it for sure, though, for several days, except that I trusted I would’ve heard if they hadn’t. Living in Madagascar has taught me to live with a good amount of ambiguity. Many times Doug has been out of reach for several days at a time and I have had to learn, that in spite of my questions of “what if…?” I need to turn those doubts over to the Lord and trust that everything is okay. Such was the case again with no way to get a hold of him except for a satellite phone he could only use in case of emergencies.

While I was working away here at home to cross several important things off my “To Do” list, Doug and Ben were starting the adventure of “Life in Manakana.” Their helicopter journey lasted less than an hour before they touched down again on the soccer field of the village that once had 170 houses. 163 of them burned to the ground though in October, when an elderly person was not tending their cooking fire carefully and the flames caught on to their nearby grass roof. With roofs practically all touching each other to give the village residents a kind of shelter from the rain even outside their huts, the fire spread quickly from one grass roof to another. The dry, untreated boards used for walls were also rapidly consumed. Within minutes the fire had spread out in every direction, and in just 2 hours the town was consumed with little more than smoldering coals and ash remaining. Fortunately residents didn’t try to save their belongings, but ran away from the blaze, and thus, not a single person was lost in the fire.

Helimission and MAF, hearing about the disaster, decided to seek funding to rebuild the village. Donations poured in and a team began organizing the relief effort. Volunteers from Europe also flew in to camp out in Manakana for a week or two at a time to oversee the construction. Malagasy translators were flown out and camped alongside the “vazaha” (foreigners). Together with the villagers, a plan was worked out to get lumber from the neighboring rain forest with the help of Paul Bunyan-like hand saws shipped in to help the work proceed faster. Money to buy the lumber and pay the lumberjacks came from donations, but all the work of transporting the lumber and building the houses was to be completed by the villagers, donating their time in exchange for a new house.

Upon their arrival, Doug was quickly briefed on the progress to date and his new responsibilities for overseeing the work before his predecessors were whisked away in the helicopter that had just deposited him. Doug quickly took on the task of organizing work crews, some to pummel holes in the beams (see picture) that would become the frames for the 4 meter square houses, some to dig holes for the posts of the house frames, and still others to carry freshly cut 6-meter beams down from the forest (a 1 ½ hour walk minimum down the mountain, over log bridges, through rivers where there was no bridge, and across many a slippery, muddy spot).

Every morning before organizing the day’s work, he and others led a workers’ prayer time in the 70 year old Lutheran church, one of the few buildings which had been spared the fire. For 70 years there has been a Lutheran church in the village, and they were delighted to see a Lutheran pastor, Doug, among the foreigners helping them. Other villagers attended as well. Other than a small Catholic church in town, the Lutheran church is the only religious institution that exists, other than a strong presence of ancestor worship. Many in the town still cling tightly to their traditional practices, even many of those who consider themselves Christian. Alcoholism is a big problem in the village as well, since homemade “moonshine” is manufactured in nearby hills. One of those who had been a slave to such a lifestyle of drinking, several divorces, worshiping idols, and all-around nasty practices, gave a testimony for an evening worship service about how God had changed his life completely when he started reading the Bible and going to church. The Lutheran pastor had met with him regularly to teach him the Bible and this man has now become a strong pillar in the church and community.

Testimonies like his were part of the evangelistic programs each evening. Another highlight was the showing of four Christian films, which Doug brought and showed with the use of a generator. The whole village seemed to turn out for these events, even though it meant leaving in darkness and navigating moonlit pathways all the way home to the small countryside shanties in which the majority of people are now living. Before the fire, almost all of the villagers in Manakana had a hut in town where the family lived, and a small shack out near their rice fields, where one or more of the family members might sleep occasionally during heavy work times in the fields. Those small shacks have now become the only home most of the villagers have (see picture).  Many of them are a half hour or hour walk away from the village, along narrow footpaths that hug mountainsides and traverse waterways of varying dispositions.

So where, you might be asking, was Benjamin while all this work overseeing and leading worship was going on for Doug those first few days? He was one of the “daily life tasks” crew, meaning he helped with collecting water from the river in jerry cans, pouring it in the water filter, transferring filtered water into the “clean water jerry can” marked with a painted red line, washing dishes in plastic basins, and other assorted “odds and ends” jobs. But more importantly, he was the “bringer of the one and only soccer ball in Manakana.” So Ben spent hours on end playing soccer with the village kids in the big open field with two huge wooden posts marking the goal on one end. It might not have been the best soccer practice for Ben since none of the kids wanted to challenge this one “vazaha” who had brought the ball.  But it made for a lot of fun for him since this unguarded position allowed him the opportunity to score more goals in those few days than all the rest of his soccer days combined. It made for nice bonding with a lot of the village kids as well, who could be heard repeating his name (with the typical French accent) like he was some famous movie star they had just had the amazing good fortune to meet.

For Ben it was also a wonderful adventure with Dad, and for Ben, life doesn’t get much better than that. In fact, he wasn’t really relishing the thought of sharing this adventure with his little brother when the time came for us to join them. Jeremiah had missed his big brother terribly but Ben couldn’t say it was reciprocal. Yet when Jeremiah and I arrived five days into their stay, Ben whisked Jeremiah away immediately to give him the “grand tour” of all that Ben had come to love in Manakana.

By that time, I was really missing Doug and Ben so was very ready to get out there to join them. I was also eager to get started on what looked to be an exciting adventure. Fortunately though, we didn’t have to report to the airport at 7 am like originally planned since the helicopter was to come up from the South that morning. A 9:00 take-off suited me much better, but just as Jeremiah and I were grabbing some croissants at the gas station bakery to eat for breakfast on the way there, we got a call that it would be delayed again until 10. I became a bit concerned that the trip might not happen considering the number of clouds in the sky, but remained optimistic, even while driving back home to do a few more things before heading out once again for the airport.

We still arrived at least 20 minutes early, which meant we were able to watch the helicopter being unloaded from its early morning trip, get refueled, and pushed back out to the landing strip on its removable wheels. Actually Jeremiah got to help with that pushing part, much to his delight! We also got to watch a “Tiko” plane, owned by President Ravalomanana being loaded with the Tiko brand products he’s famous for; yogurt, boxed milk, sodas, etc. We heard he had bought that new plane for his election campaigning but with that over and his presidency firmly in place for another term, it looked like he was now using the plane to deliver products around the country.

I had never flown in a helicopter before so was absolutely thrilled to be “forced” to use this form of transportation to get to Manakana. The only other means of transport into that village is by foot which requires one two days of time (although some claimed they could do it in a day and a half) and a great deal of energy since that path includes major up and down hiking through forest-covered mountains. We were told that once upon a time there had been a road that came within two hours of the village but a bridge had been destroyed along that road which made the road impassable now. I marvel at the thought of trudging up and down mountains for two days straight just to get to the nearest road. Then to think that people make that trek carrying all kinds of interesting STUFF too and it goes beyond imagining. One such “stuff” for example, that we heard about was a refrigerator that had been carried in by 6 men on that path and landed in Manakana not long before the fire. It was headed for another village even farther down the path where they either had a generator or some form of electricity to run the thing. Unfortunately it never made it there though because it was still in Manakana on the day of the fire and was destroyed along with all the other precious possessions people had acquired over the years.

Big, puffy clouds covered much of the sky as we prepared for take-off that morning of December 23rd. I felt comfortable that our German pilot, Markus, was both competent and wise so would not put us in jeopardy. We also had with us a Southern Baptist missionary, Taisir, who had taken on major administrative responsibilities for the Manakana rebuilding and his daughter, Jasmine. They were only going out for the morning so would return with Markus after dropping us off. A last minute decision was also made that Markus’ pregnant wife, Esther, would “go along for the ride” after all passengers and baggage had been weighed and came in significantly under the 450 kilo limit.

All of us had to wear protective earphones to block the noise of the helicopter. Only the passenger in front had a microphone which allowed that person to communicate with the pilot. The rest of us had to communicate through hand signals as we really couldn’t hear each other speak. Lifting off in a helicopter was as different from a plane takeoff as pulling a cart uphill is from jumping on a trampoline. It felt so effortless and weightless when we just pulled up off the ground, like not having to contend with gravity at all. Very quickly we were high enough to see for miles. But then we stayed there, right at that altitude where you can really see the layout of the land, the houses and traffic, the rivers and forests. We never went up above the clouds like one does in an airplane, or so high that it ceases to be interesting to look down. While flying over Tana, it was interesting to see the jumbled mazes of buildings, like patches plopped on the landscape, with wide open spaces of green in between them (see picture). I’ve seen those big spaces of rice paddies right within the city limits from a car, but it was interesting to see that from the aerial perspective. It was also amazing to see how abruptly the scenery changed from city to country, and not just a semi-developed country, but a downright no-roads, no-nothing, country with barren hills dotted only occasionally by a solitary house nestled among some rice patties. I was reminded of a statistic I had recently found about the amount of aerable land in Madagascar (only 5.03%) and I could see why it was so low. But then soon we’d fly over an area where the ground below was filled with amazingly straight-lined intricate geometric shapes, each having a different shade of green for the rice field it contained. Some greens seeming effervescent, some rich in the promise of a bountiful crop, all of them together making a demonstration of the progression of ripening rice.

We flew over a train on one of the two tracks that actually work in Madagascar. This particular train was on its way from Tana to the East Coast city of Tamatave, where all ships transporting containers heading for Tana must port. We flew over several villages of mud or brick houses with thatched roofs. Some houses were the traditional highlands’ two-story houses, some a simpler and much smaller structure. A little more than half way into the 50 minute flight, we met up with some of the diminishing number of Malagasy hills still bearing rain forests. It was glorious to see; hill after hill coated with green and an occasional purple from a tree that only blooms this time of year. By this time fog had rolled in over the hills and Markus was using caution to stay in clear areas. It seemed he hugged the tops of hills, the sides of mountains. I felt I was in an Omnimax Theater, getting a close-up look as the trees whooshed past. Several times I looked up at Markus to make sure he was awake when it seemed we were heading straight for the side of a mountain. But he knew what he was doing and would veer around it just in time. One thing was for certain, I was thankful I had taken a quarter tablet of Dramamine as my stomach was not appreciating this adventurous ride. The rest of me thoroughly enjoyed it and while my stomach was thankful when we spotted Manakana ahead, the rest of me was a bit disappointed it was coming to a close so soon.

One ride almost over, one huge adventure and return ride to come. I was excited to see Doug and Ben, hear about their week, and try to learn about and from these hardy folks who had lost so much. Little did I know what mystery, suspense, awe, and lack of sleep were awaiting me in the days to come!!