Hiking Andringitra’s mountains

[part two | part one ]

By the third day of our hike, this moving and merry-making was beginning to feel like what three hours of straight dancing actually sounds like. Our grunts and stomps and finger shakes were getting less energetic and I was beginning to pay more attention to my dirt-covered discomfort more than anything else. I could tell that Kylor felt the same way. Our villagers noticed and patted our shoulders - “Mafana be!” It’s hot! They led us by the writsts to the woven mat placed in the lee of their tiny house. Moonlight was so bright it actually seemed like the sun was just wearing some shades.

We all sat and stared at each other for awhile until a game of charades started - my friend and I the guessers. After some echos back and forth of body rubs and far out guesses we figured out that they were offering bath time! This was certainly not expected in the five day venture! Clorinated buckets of water came splattering our way and we were led by the wrists this time to the zebu pen. It was something else rinsing off the dirt from a morning in the fields, tired, sweaty, relieved, surrounded by cactus-fence and zebu poo, in the moonlight. There was also the happy fact that we had for the most part escaped our dancing duty for the night.

Now for dinner. Our white beans over rice, a flickering candle, a bench inside Sofaka’s tiny house. He’s sitting on the bed. We look over periodically and use the universal method of communication pertaining to happy stomach - grunting our satisfaction and our reaction to deliciousness. We play charades trying to understand each other a few more times until Sokafa’s trained ears hear something. We watch him until we hear it too. It’s another village on the move. Toward us. Drumbeats, whistles, chanting, singing, screaming. We duck ourselves out the three foot tall doorway (if I was four years old this house would be perfectly sized) and see twenty or so people dancing full speed toward us. Our village and theirs merge and there’s more hopping stomping dancing. The two American kids that belong to this village are swamped, like us, in circles of tugs and pushes and motion. We barely have space to look at each other over the general five foot tall population to scream “how are you’s” - the answers drown out anyway.

Twice now whole villages have visited ours. The way they hop away in the bright night light, the American students feet taller, blond and brown hair standing out, bobbing away with the rest. It’s something out of a movie - you watch them leave and then laugh at what you’re doing, where you are, who you’re with. Unbelievable!

This village merger though found me scratching people off, swatting hot dirty hands tugging me to turn and dance like this, pull, dance like that, dirty hands stay on my waist, now like this. I muttered a complaint which was smothered in the crowd of people. I looked up at the moon, then back over the fifty or so dancing Antandroy people. The situation suddenly cleared up for me. It was a hilarious jumble of timing and exaltations. An after dinner dance in the moonlight with not one but two African villages and their whistles. Something so different from anything I have ever and will ever experience again, I realized then that this night, the rest of my three days in Marobe, the rest of this study abroad was not my time. Tonight, dancing away under the direction of hot dirty hands, it became clear. This was not my time. It was their time. This, being here, living with them, was for them. The next thought: that even more than this being their time, it was God’s time. What a relieving glimpse for me! The hot hands became okay and before we knew it the village was hopping away down the dirt road. How it has helped me for the rest of this trip! Its one of the best reminders - I don’t even need to give myself enough credit to ever feel frustrated again - that it can all be given to God. This glimpse has helped me to cut out the petty part of being outside my comfort zone - cut out the parts that tend to discourage instead of uplift. God’s time is always a time for peace. Lesson learned on a typical day in Marobe, Madagascar.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Travel Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.