Sylvia's Journal

I arrived late afternoon at the lovely boutique hotel ‘Tamboho’ in Antananarive, where I slept the first night of this trip. They gave me the same room and so there was a feeling of coming home. I purchased a new phone card, got myself some cash and purchased chocolate, vanilla and wild peppers for paying off some debts back home.

The restaurant’s menu had changed since I had tried all its offerings during my last trip. I had a delicious meal of curry&carrot soup, foie grass, toasted pineapple with ginger and a glass of red wine, my first in over a week. Back in my room I enjoyed the relatively stable internet connection and, while watching TV for the first time in a week, took care of some business related to assignments that are stacking up on the runway: a short workshop on advocacy this coming week, our week long senior leadership program in Lome the week after, and the Philippines a few weeks after that.

The internet connection allowed me to have a good Facetime chat with home where Faro, sitting on his turquoise toilet throne, announced proudly he had pooped in the right place. Everyone cheered.

This morning I slept in, had a nice breakfast while trying to listen in on a group of older American tourists who had just arrived last night. I am none the wiser but observed they are mostly women in the age category of ‘old but not that old.’ The hotel seems to cater to English speakers.

After breakfast I made an appointment for a late afternoon massage and had my toe nails done. Next to the massage and nail place is a small shop dedicated to ‘puericulture,’ which puts it, linguistically, at the same level as agriculture and viniculture. They sell baby and children’s clothes and paraphernalia, all dedicated to the ‘culture of kids.’ With a granddaughter slated to arrive in less than a month I couldn’t help myself. There is something about French baby clothes that is irresistible, they have a high cuteness factor. Against better judgment I bought some girlie things in pink and red.

As we drove to and from l’Île de la Vièrge on Thursday afternoon, on rutted tracks, I got a little taste of what my colleagues who work in this project are up against. Along the road smiling Malgaches waved at us as we covered them in dust. Toothless old men, pregnant young women, toddlers and school kids. Those are the sturdy ones, the ones who survived, sometimes against all odds. I wondered about the ones that did not, and who of the babes on their mothers’ backs would not make it to their fifth birthday.

The people came out of the tiny one- or two-storied, houses, the latter simply one small room on top of another. Here and there I saw an outhouse, a ‘latrine améliorée,’ recognizable by its vent pipe. I presume the kitchens are outside, running on charcoal. The charcoal sells by the handful, small bags nicely stacked on rickety tables, next to 1 inch pieces of sugar cane.

My colleagues were all dressed in their red project shirts and their red baseball caps.  On the back was written their the slogan “we deliver on our promises, on time and with quality” (in French of course). It felt like a school or camping trip; everyone was singing at the top of their lungs, old school songs, songs about togetherness, and songs with health messages. Most songs were in Malagasy but some were French songs I recognized. There was never a moment of silence on the 30 minute trip. I was told it was no different on the 3 hour trip from Tana. I was grateful for the privilege of riding on Monday morning with the project director in an air-conditioned SUV, without singing. The constant chatter and singing, including the recitation of several of La Fontaines fables in fast cadences had exhausted me already after 30 minutes.

I observed the games from a fair distance. My various orthopedic adventures made participation inadvisable; the shoulder doctor would not have approved and it seemed prudent to be standing on the sidelines.

After the afternoon program concluded we all had to practice a particular dance with our numbered groups. I was with group six which performed a dance that was a little challenging but I had a patient teacher. When we were called up I tried my best and we received generous applause for our efforts.

Our MC is a new staff member of the project who was also in our project some 20 years ago. An « animateur par excellence » if ever I saw one, a creative genius in getting people to have a fabulous time together and recognizing how lucky we were.

The evening program was funny, participative, creative and moving, ending with a song about being a family even when not by blood. Although I generally don’t like the family comparison for work groups, this one felt OK and some people were moved to tears. After that it was dance time.

The Malgaches I encounter in international settings are usually reserved and timid, but here there was none of that. The dance talent was amazing, with people switching easily from hip hop to line dancing (the French version), twist (and shout) and jive. When they called on us, folks from ‘outre-mer’ (overseas), we were the quiet bunch, with two of us (Americans) entirely on the sidelines, and two occasionally throwing themselves into the dancing crowd, but mostly watching.

With some 60 people we have been working towards the creation of next year’s workplan; an annual ritual in my world of work. It’s a complex undertaking as not everyone is on the same level when it comes to the art of planning. This year ministry and NGO counterparts have been invited to participate, a good first step to ownership. I can’t think of any other way to move in that direction. They returned to Tana at the end of Wednesday. We hope they are doing the ‘restitution’ that is always required for people attending meetings or workshops, and that they transfer some of their excitement and enthusiasm to their bosses.

The activity planning was done first on the computer and then copied on color-coded cards that were laid out on a series of sheets, per ‘grande ligne,’ as the domain of intervention level is called here, and then per quarter. This allowed the various work groups to align and coordinate activities that are focused on the same target group as the bottom of the health pyramid. There is much that they are supposed to be doing, the local NGO staff who are the hyphen between our project and the community health volunteers.

It was hard work and took twice as long as I was led to believe but somehow all this didn’t seem to matter; we were all together in one spot, there was really no place to go and the days were thus quite elastic.

In the afternoon we were bussed to the very center of Madagascar (people checked this with their smartphones and confirmed this). It is called the island of the virgin, l’île des la vièrge, and there is a large structure that looks like a high diving platform with Mary on top. Everyone had their project T-shirt except me so I avoided being in the pictures so as not to mess up the red and white harmony.

I really had no role today (nor tomorrow). I am at work but it is a very light load, with the emphasis having shifted from work to fun. All day I followed the crowd, most of the time not really knowing what was going to happen next. As it turned out, after the visit to the virgin’s island, a sort of obstacle course and a series of team challenges was set up on the grounds of the hotel, right next to the lake. Teams competed under loud pumping music and cheers from their colleagues.

It was a lot of fun and it occurred to me that we could use something like this at HQ in order to have some fun together. We used to have this sort of fun but that was a long time ago.

For the last few days we have been in Ampefy, a three-hour drive south of Antananarivo. The road went up and down and zigzag across a wide landscape with small villages here and there. The houses are made mostly of mud brick. We passed many of the places where these bricks are (hand)made, and lie drying in the sun.

The houses are small, narrow and tall. They remind me of Raffi’s house in one of the Rey’s children’s books. The hills are dotted with groves of eucalyptus or pine trees. Sometimes the silhouettes of single trees interrupt the line of hills. These look like the ones in the books of Dr. Seuss, as if Madagascar had been his inspiration.

During the day it is warm but as soon as the sun goes down it becomes outright cold. I was not prepared for that, having brought only summer clothes, flip-flops and sandals. The Malgaches are better prepared with scarves, warm socks and fleece coats. Some brave souls swim in the morning in the hotel’s pool, unimaginable to me as shiver in my summer clothes.

We are lodged in comfortable two story bungalows next to a eucalyptus tree grove. It smells nice and drinks nice, as the local tea is a combination of ginger and eucalyptus.

Breakfast consist of rice and meat (rice is the staple, served with every meal). The morning rice is soupy with greens and spices. All leafy greens are called « brèdes » though individual greens have their own names as well. The soup is very tasty and very filling. The meal is served with small pieces of salty beef, except for this morning when we got small meatballs, not quite as exciting. The soup and the eucalyptus tea warm me up as I wait for the sun to climb its arch and heat the place up.

I left Lobster Cove in the rain. Tessa was having her annual birthday party with her friends. She is 30 now and some of her friends have babies and everyone is a lot more responsible with alcohol and fireworks than when they were in their early 20s.

The tent had been set up and this made the rain irrelevant. I took the rain with me to the airport and then it was over.

Tessa warned all the neighbors about the fireworks she had bought. The combination of alcohol and fireworks used to unnerve us a lot. Axel had to carry the nervousness by himself. I learned that the party went as planned and everyone had fun.

Thanks to NyQuil I slept most of the way to Paris, waking up as rested as one could be after a 4 hour sleep. The flight was not very full considering that it is summer in Europe and the Euro is down. This was not the case for the flight to Antananarivo (Tana for short). Luck had it that next to me was a mercurial 3 year old. He fell asleep just before take-off and I considered myself lucky, not knowing that his sleep would last about 10 minutes out of the 11 hour flight.

From that moment on he babbled to himself, sang to himself and tried out new sounds as loud as he could; everything in his loud screechy beginner’s voice.

He also wriggled and kicked and occasionally had a temper tantrum. I felt sorry for the person in the seat in front of him who had to endure all that kicking. The only thing that temporarily quieted him down was a large cookie filled with frosting. He would moan something like ‘cadeau,’ and then his (very young) mom would give him a large kind of oreo (un gateau choco prince). The cookie would temporarily quiet him down but as soon as it was gone he would rev up again. Filled with more sugar, he resumed his screeching and singing and wiggling and kicking. No cartoon or music video could calm him down. My luck!

The processing of our health status and immigration status was confusing, chaotic and took forever as we inched our way through this line and then that. But people were in great spirits, except people like me who had been on the road for 24 hours and had been sitting half the time next to a little devil. A driver from the office was waiting for me but I never saw him – the arrival hall is one large teeming mass with people holding placards; a forest of names and hotels and companies. I never saw MSH and took a taxi; later I found out he was there. I tumbled into bed at 2:30 Madagascar time which was exactly 24 hours after I left Lobster Cove

I removed the tables in the workshop and put people in a semi-circle with the tables at their back. In the evaluation at the end of the next day they said they didn’t like it. People are timid and like to sit behind a table, according to my Malagasy colleagues. But I don’t think it was only the set up. I also blame the terrible chairs, as uncomfortable as can be, and the horrendous acoustics of this weird French building dating back to 1967. I kept wondering what the architect was thinking and how the building committee could have approved the design.

As predicted, AF canceled my flight and left me wondering Wednesday night how I was going to get home in time for Kara and Matt’s wedding where Axel is officiating, reverend Axel, imagine that! But at 4 AM I woke up to find my new itinerary, via Kenya and Amsterdam.

And now I am sitting in the VIP lounge, drinking petits-cafes and preparing myself for the long trip home.

There is no improvement in my condition despite all the medicine. Neither the anti-inflammatory pills nor the antibiotics made any difference. It was as if I was not taking anything. Someone joked that if you have ‘la grippe’’ and you consult a doctor and take medicine it takes about 8 days to clear; if you don’t do anything it takes 7 days; but enough about all this. I am not suffering from a dangerous illness and I know I will wear the virus out at some point, before it wears me out.

This morning we sat around the table putting the finishing touches on a two day coaching workshop for my project colleagues. I am working with the project’s capacity building team. They are learning and facilitating, putting the rails in front of the moving train. It’s been a fun assignment for me because the people are very well seasoned adult educators and knowledgeable about things that are entirely new in most other places I work.  So this makes my life very easy.  All the emphasis is and should be in the design. If the design is solid, facilitation is easy; if it is a rickety affair, facilitation becomes very difficult. I have gotten in trouble a few times when questioning a rickety design in which I had a facilitation task that set me up to fail.

Having earned my own coaching credentials in a program that was spread out over 10 months and some 250 hours it is a challenge to design something practical in such a short time (2 days). It has to be a program that will increase people’s confidence in coaching enough to start practicing something resembling coaching after Wednesday. We tried to hone in on the most important elements of coaching: listening and asking good questions. They are also going to practice with silence. Tomorrow morning I will find out how much silence they can tolerate.

Exactly one week after I was miserable and sick in Tana, last Saturday, I was again miserable and sick in Tana this Saturday. I had been able to do my work all through the week, ins spite of constant coughing and blowing my nose. I thought I had recovered and looked forward to a productive weekend with some fun social diversions. The antibiotics appeared to have killed the bacteria but now I think it’s a virus that is responsible for my upper respiratory misery as the new course of antibiotics seems without effect.

I had to cancel two social engagements: lunch with a friend of our neighbor from across Lobster Cove and the other a late afternoon barbecue at the house of our chief of party. Ughhh, I am so annoyed. I go from wanting to scream and breaking something to curling up in a ball and pitying myself.

I went out for lunch, a 40 meter walk outside the hotel. I was exhausted from the outing. I went back and took a nap and then got myself another massage in a different place, and a pedicure. Walking back I was exhausted from all the activity. I ate the remainder of my lunch, limp cold fries and the other half of an Italian Panini. I was too tired to go to the restaurant and eat there. Besides, I have now tried everything on the menu and it gets a bit boring. There are also some German guests, stuck because of the Air France strike> Once they discovered I was from Holland, they insisted on speaking German with me. This is a problem since I haven’t spoken German in decades. I can’t remember much of the complex grammar that one needs in order to make sentences.

The Air France strike, which I thought I’d miss, has now been extended to include my return date. I sent out an urgent message to our travel agent and hope she can re-route me. I am dreading the return trip but since I seem to be particularly allergic to Air France, the re-routing may be a blessing in disguise.

I have a long list of to-do’s on my hotel desk and had hoped to make a good dent in it. The priority is preparing next week, so we can finalize another workshop on Monday and be ready to pull it off Tuesday and Wednesday. Although I did make some progress, with difficulty, and am not as far along as I had hoped.  It is 7:30 PM and I am going to bed now, hoping that tomorrow I can take on the world again.

As soon as I had finished my course of antibiotics (5 days) I started to fall back health wise (coughing, sinuses) and so I decided to pay a visit to the doctor, this time going to her office in a part of town that included many ups and downs through narrows roads, jammed with people and cars and thus many traffic jams.

The taxi that the hotel had arranged for me is the typical Tana taxi, a Renault 4L. It could have been the even simpler Deux Chevaux (2CV) which we used to call ‘duck (eend)’ in Holland.  My first car was  4L, my second car too I believe, then a 4L camionette a car that is so ugly that I came to love it unconditionally.  It took me from Holland, through Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sicilie, Italy and back to Holland during one very long summer vacation sometime in the early 70s.

The entrance to the hotel is on top of a traditional mud brick wall with a drive going up and down very steeply. With my fused ankle walking it is a challenge but for the taxi it was a good thing because, as I later found out, he couldn’t start his car with his key so he always needed an incline or help from some strong men to push him for a few meters.

Along the way I saw nearly all the cars I grew up with, at least my dad’s cars since he loved everything French (wine, cheese, bread, and cars). Some of these old Peugeots I remember are still around here, but also Simca’s which I don’t think exist anymore (absorbed by Renault) and my old Renault 5 (called Le Car in the US), in addition to the most ubiquitous 4Ls and 2CVs. A trip down memory lane if ever there was one, maybe the same trippy car experiences Americans have in Cuba.

The doctor concluded that the infection had moved, as I suspected, into the upper respiratory tract but not down in the lungs, my fear. And so I returned to the Pharmacie du Roi with another list of medications, bringing my total healthcare bill here in Tana to about 150 dollars. I am awaiting the victory of modern medicine over traditional medicine such as ginger or lemon syrups and of course the endless cups of hot water with lime and honey I keep in drinking.

I rewarded myself with a massage in a small HomeoParma establishment across the street. I was told I could trust the brand.  I did not want not wander into some sketchy massage place. My concern came from the fact that in the hotel a massage cost 6 times as much.

HomeoPharma is a very homegrown enterprise that, in 25 years has captured the market and apparently not only here. It is now a chain for homeopathic and natural products with a good reputation. I see their signs everywhere. The founder and chief executive tells his story on the website where I found out that he learned his trade from his ancestors and many gurus, including an astrologer and tradition herbalists. His products cover only 10% of the 15000 or so different plants that, I am sure, are still used in the country side.