I have half an hour to attempt to update you on everything that has happened in the past fortyeight! Where to even begin?
When we left off, our heroine was surveying the mechanical wonders of Dr. Rananasomethingmalagasyzana. (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I cannot remember Malagasy names, who also showed us his Sprigula growing farms and fed us some, to our delight. Then, we set up camp on property owned by our academic director, consisting of a shoreline of mangroves and beach, twisty dunes covered with scrub, and open huts where we set up our tents. It was beautiful, and filled with Madagascar kingfishers, paradise flycatchers, and some surprisingly ambitious crabs. Then it was off to tabletop mountain, long time dwelling place of two spirits. there we met the Ombiasa, a medicine man who instricted us in traditional healing herbs and pointed out such interesting things as goat horns left over from sacred healing rites and the sacred tree... complete with graffiti from Christian's who had cut "Jesosy" and a picture of a man on a cross into it in order to "send the tree's spirits into the church" They had also apparently built a statue of jesus on top of the mountain, which was promptly knocked down by other villagers. They then tried to fill in the sacred cave (the source of the mountains holiness, as it is where the spirits sleep) with rocks. And the other villagers dug it out again. They then went and built another cross and Jesus statue on the mountain across the way. This version of religious warfare is, I think, fairly typical of the Malagasy approach to everything. Very passive, with a lot of repetition. I suppose that could be seen as insulting, except that it is very true. Here, time is cyclical and exists only in three parts. Morning, Evening, and Night.
So, we all climbed this mountain just around sunset and sat around on top of a very self-imporant, very empty pedestal while my friend Lindsey and I peppered the Ombiasa with questions about all the creatures of Malagasy mythology. Then we all crowded around the sacred cave, while the Ombiasa and his assistant burnt incense and laid out cookies and spilled sugar and sprinked rum and said many things in Malagasy which amounted to greeting the two spirits of the cave and asking their blessing.
Ahh, I'm getting kicked out of the internet cafe!
Quick!
I suppose I can summarize the end of that particular ceremony with, and then we got to eat the cookies, and there was much rejoicing. There's a bit of back story about the nature of the two spirits, but it isn't terribly interesting. One's name means "Cold Water" (roughly) and he hides out in the cave full time, becasue he's apparently too chilly to leave. The other only lives in the cave after sundown. Some of us observed that it was then a bit odd that we were sacrificing to him during daylight, but the Ombiasa was really set on the idea that the cave was an answering machine, and that when the spirit would return he would appreciate the fact that we briefly placed cookies there and then scarfed them all ourselves, and respond by blessing us with great success in academics in the future. That night, I waited eagerly for spirits, but instead had a dream that they served us octopus for dinner, and we covered it with peanutbutter. Probably brought on by the fact that I have been eating octopus for dinner, in addition to snails, raw sea urchins, and grasshoppers. So in fact, the only supernatural part of the dream was the part where Skippy peanut butter somehow managed to find its way into the country of Madagascar. I'm still reflecting on the religious symbolism of this, I'll let you know when I figure it out. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, on a sacred mountain with an Ombiasa at sunset with a full moon rising in the sacred East. We made it back into no-spirits land with no incident, for which I was grateful, and on our way my friends Carly and Lindsay and I discovered that there are apparently mermaids (luludrano) living in the mangrove forests nearby. We know they're there, b/c our academic director believes in Madagascar's spirits and he told us that there was a man drowned by them a few years back. Well, we immediately made up our mind to go looking for them.
Yesterday was the full moon still, and the night of our sheep and goat sacrifice. A sidenote; when this trip began, about a third of us were vegetarian, and the rest almost universally said things like "I don't really eat meat". A few weeks into the program, we brought live chickens with us to eat, and it was a Big Traumatic Deal. Two days ago, Jim asked all the vegetarians to raise their hands, and was met with nothing but unanimous, meat-craving silence. And yesterday, Cassandra, a reformed vegetarian, had to shove people out of the way to get to be the one to slit our goats throat. And all the other former vegetarians spent its death throes muttering to themselves about "why can't we just eat it now? Do they really have to cook it first?"
That's how things go in Madagascar
and as usual, I love you all!
But I have to go!
LOVE
