Merry Xmas from Owen!

We've put some photos of Owen up on our Flickr account from this morning. He's anxiously awaiting Santa's arrival to Fianar.

Merry Christmas,
K, D, O

Baby steps into the 21st Century

Our internet experience at home just got a bit nicer. Just so readers back in the US can measure how much nicer, consider where we’re coming from. Dial-up (groan); 28.4 Kbps connection speed (kill me). The worst part is that there’s never enough bandwidth and the connection spins its wheels for 80% of the time. I spend most of the time online looking at a command prompt so I can ping the server to see when we’re actually connected. Of course, this was only when the access number being dialed got patched through by TELMA, the state telecom.

Well, in the time since we’ve been gone TELMA has introduced a wireless phone base station. Most folks are using them on the street as a pay-phone, but they have another use that is more relevant to us—the internet. Our neighbors got a unit and couldn’t stop talking about how fast their connection was using the wireless base station. Well, seeing is believing. So, I went out and bought a unit yesterday, and friends, I’m here to tell you that I’m surfing the net at the blistering speed of 231.8 Kbps. Hot Damn! Bring on those fat attachments...oh, wait a second; I’m still a bit lightheaded from the excitement. I should sit down. I’ll let you know when to send the fat attachments.

Return to Fianar

Under grey skies we made the drive from Tana to Fianar. The rains have come to Madagascar

finally and have produced a flurry of activity in the rice paddies as farmers prepare for another growing season. On the central plateau—where both Tana and Fianar are situated—most paddies are terraced on hillsides with surprising precision in order to control water for irrigation. Fields have their own personalities and are unique in almost every way: size, shape, and fertility. The result is a mosaic landscape of shifting colors and textures as parcels move through the growing process.

Understanding their fields’ personalities, farmers let the paddies set the pace of the various tasks required to bring a crop of rice to harvest. In early fields, we saw men with long-handled spades drive their blades into heavy-textured soil to aerate and incorporate last year’s crop residue into the soil. Medium fields had men driving teams of omby (cattle) harnessed behind harrows through inundated paddies to break up clods and prepare a seed bed. From my roadside vantage point, it was hard at times to discern whether the farmers of the omby were calling the shots. Some parcels were electric green with closely planted rice seedlings. And, in other parcels, women placed these seedlings into inundated ground, using a piece of string pulled tight between two sticks as a guide for the rows. In a few more weeks, rice plants will be tall and setting seed and soon people’s spirits (and bellies) will grow.

Monique and the Mango Rains

Last week Granville hosted a series of talks by author Kris Holloway, who spoke about her recent book, Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali. A Granville native, Kris spent two years in Mali as a Peace Corps volunteer living and working in a small rural village in southern Mali. The book is about her experience there, and particularly centers around her friendship with Monique (the village’s midwife) that spanned a decade, and was cut short by her death, ironically, during childbirth.

Kristen and I heard Kris speak last Thursday night. She read passages to the audience about her time in Mali that were virtually identical to what we experienced as volunteers in Niger, another landlocked, Sahelian country. I think the book would be appealing to a wide audience - returned Peace Corps volunteers or not. The book is getting great reviews, and from every purchase 3 dollars will be donated to Clinque Monique, a rural health center in Mali that was created in Monique’s memory.

Kristen shares a personal connection to Kris: when Kristen was in high school, Kris, her husband John, and Monique came to talk to her French class. Their visit intrigued Kristen and was the inspiration for her to join the Peace Corps after college graduation. Kristen might never have gone to Niger (and met me) if the Peace Corps bug had not been planted by Kris, John, and Monique many years ago.

You can read more about the book, and about the author at her website: http://www.moniquemangorains.com/

Owen's Album

Here are some pictures of Owen and family from the hospital.

Owen's Album