Sylvia's Journal

The part I like most about travelling in faraway places is the delight of seeing things out my ordinary. Like a fish shop that also doubles as a patisserie, or the primary school that is called ‘arc towards the future.’ This name resonates particularly with me because of the book I am reading, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, recommended by Sita. It is a collection of essays written by Nora Bateson, the daughter and granddaughter of, respectively, Gregory and William Bateson. All essays look at context from a variety of perspectives. And it is exactly context I am taking in here.

My laryngitis, which started nearly as soon as I stepped off the plane, just like during my visit some years ago, has been well managed with a corticoid pill which I put under my tongue every morning and evening. It was only on my first day of visits and interviews that I croaked. One of my colleagues told me that I night be allergic to the enormous amounts of Sulphur in the air. Since Saturday I have been in the healthy plein air of rural Madagascar where the only pollution that exists is of the psychological kind. There are no abandoned plastic bags, broken flipflops (nearly everyone is barefoot), derelict cars or empty water bottles littering the side of the roads. Everything is used until it disintegrates. Even the water with which the rice pan is cleaned is served as a kind of tea with our meals. It is called ranavola which means water money. I supposed because it is rich in vitamins and minerals.

The good and healthy part of being here is like the nostalgia to good old times that actually weren’t all that good. It masks the countless dangers people here face: there are the diseases (pest, leprosy, malaria, TB, diarrhea) that incapacitate and/or kill many of the babies and a good number of the adults. There are the caimans hidden in the rivers which, when overflowing their borders, come close to human habitation where small children toddling around are an easy target. There are the road accidents – we saw a few car wrecks where the driver surely could not have survived. And then there are the brush fires that one can see at night on the prairie and that can suddenly cut you off with nowhere to go. I used to use brush fires as a metaphor for starting change but here it is not a positive thing.

Everything requires an view of the context before judging – this is my big learning from this trip. I knew it in my head but now I also know it in my ‘tripes’ (=insides) as the French would say. The same tripes that got exposed to all these new foods and so shaken up along the road!

I learned from the Hidden Life of Trees that nature has its ways of survival. Reproduction happens through seeds, as we know, and nature is very good at seeing that seeds get seeded. Trees and flowers are dependent on animals, the wind, to make sure the seeds survive and get carried to places to sprout. I am thinking of the selfish gene – survival is the goal, survival of the species.

I had a very intimate encounter with this principle. During one of our ‘arret de petits besoins’ (=pit stops), I waded into the high grasses to do my business. When I walked back to the car I noticed that my pants were covered with what looked like pieces of straw. I was mistaken. They were arrows sent onto me from the high grass. The arrows included the bows that shot them at me, 1 inch pieces of grass with a sharp seed at the end. The seed was so sharp that it had woven itself instantly into the fabric of my loose rayon pants.

The grasses are looking for carriers of their seeds. I suppose these are usually animals – my dark pants must have been confused with a zebu. Little did they know this these seeds might have accidentally been carried to the US. Once the yellow straws were removed the dark seeds stayed in the fabric of my pants, hardly visibly.

My colleagues knelt down in front of me picking me clean. During the next few kilometers in the car I continued to remove the seeds. I cut myself on them, they were that sharp.

We completed 5 visits to teams that have participated in our leadership program in and around Tana. Each visit gave me more insight into what actually happened while I was studying words on paper sent to me via email about these teams. I now understand how incomplete and misleading those words were. Words on paper have no context. And this is what I was now getting. There is no shortcut or alternative to ‘seeing (and listening) for oneself. The words on paper had led to judgements, and thoughts about mediocrity, no good value for money and a sense of futility.

The transformations that my, now ex-, colleague, and her two consultants had brought about were quite amazing, giving the very imperfect preparation and support they got from me. I was astonished how people had taken the ideas and integrated them, not just in their work life, passed them on to colleagues, but also took them home. I was to see much more of that in the remote rural areas we traveled later, where work and home life are not that separated.

The night before my departure, with two other colleagues, we celebrated the 29^th anniversary of a young colleague who made her first trip to Madagascar, at a new stylish restaurant (the Urban hotel) in the upper city. We had cider sangria cocktails, I had my first foie gras (in spite of all my ecological and health objections to the stuff), we finished a nice wine and so helped her enter her 30^th year.

The next morning I woke at 5:30, was ready to be picked up at 6:15, was picked up at 6:45 and then went all over Tana to pick up the rest of the team. Everyone but me is in a training outfit – fleece tops and bottoms with speed stripes, though speed is one thing we will not have. Our planned departure from the city limits didn’t happen until 2 hours later because of a small ‘contretemps’ as the French call something gone awry. A driver of the rental car company had run the car assigned to us over a rock and so the wheels had to be re-aligned. This is called ‘paralellisme.’ For the longest time I had no idea what they were talking about. I thought another car would drive parallel to us and we would exchange cars.

While waiting for the paralellisme to happen we were invited to sit on a terrace above the garage noise and spray from the power cleaning which brought into focus all that is awful about city living: noisy, grease, dirt and mechanical friction.

I am in Madagascar now. My former colleague and now consultant gave me an overview of the current political situation which reads like a soap opera. The sad thing is that it does little good for the country. The hand grenades that were thrown into the stadium when I was here last, and billed as a terrorist attack, have turned out to be something quite different. The wife of the president organized the attack in the hope of killing her husband’s mistress, an artist who was performing at the stadium. The mistress escaped.

A story that parallels and the converges is about a person linked to the president (allegedly having introduced the mistress to her friend the president, while also being a friend of the first lady, but obviously no longer), had managed to profit in a big way from procurements that were routed through her bank  account. It is a sordid tale of greed and hubris. The story is to juice and too long to recount here. Suffice to say that the culprit is on the lam and the money probably stashed away someplace where ordinary Malgaches cannot touch it. Sometimes I feel all of us doing supposedly good work are only aiding, abetting and enabling the elite to keep stealing from their people.

[Postscript  on 4/25: the lady is back in the hospital in Madagascar. We are all curious what will happen next.]