This has been my first full day and night alone with our boys, and it was certainly eventful! I woke up to the sound of Matimu scolding David for raiding the banana stash before breakfast. Then one of the boys' favorite toys was stolen and we spent time searching for it. (One girl said a smaller boy took it and his mom was pretty upset about it; in the afternoon we found out the girl herself took it and her mom made her give it back.) Then, while trying to do Matimu's science project for the week (dyeing a piece of cloth with natural dyes) I accidentally knocked over a pot of boiling vinegar water and as I jumped away it splashed all over one of my legs. So now I've got second-degree burns over quite a bit of my leg. (But thankfully Matimu and David weren't in the room when it happened, because that could've been *bad*!) Unfortunately we couldn't finish the project because that was the last of our vinegar.

But we ended well. We boys ate a LOT of pancakes for dinner! Then we watched a couple fun shows together before I put them to bed. All's well that ends well!

Lora's gone because she took a quick overnight trip to Diego to go to the post office there. We'll all be happy to have her back tomorrow morning! (But please pray for my leg, that it would stay free from infection during the process of healing - that's the main concern with wide-area burns like that.) ... See MoreSee Less

1 day ago

Haha, this picture keeps making its rounds on Malagasy Facebook groups - this is probably the third or fourth time that we know of. This time it was on a page with about 75,000 followers, and this picture has nearly 3,000 responses! I don't know if that's enough to count as viral or not, haha!

This picture is from back in 2012 when we were working in the rural areas near Tamatave (east coast Madagascar). We were learning a process of rice transplanting called "manetsa" that many Malagasy people feel is a cultural practice at the core of their identity as Malagasy. Being our first time to learn, we weren't doing it perfectly and some Malagasy people can see that in the photo.

So the comments are often many and varied but follow a standard pattern: many are very happy to know that foreigners are trying to learn their ways; quite a few comment about how urban Malagasy no longer know the traditional ways but here are foreigners doing it and it should encourage their countrymen to take the lead in maintaining the traditional ways; but some just comment (probably with some ethnocentric pride) that clearly we're doing it the wrong way and tourists shouldn't bother; a few commenters even appear offended that we would take a picture of ourselves trying. Not that those commenters realize we're not tourists and this was just the beginning of many years spent adapting to Malagasy life and culture. It all makes for an interesting consideration of what our lives here (particularly the photos we take) look like through the eyes of the local people here - though of course, only through the eyes of that minority of the population that has access to Facebook!

Anyway, it seems that every year or two this picture pops up somewhere and one of our Malagasy friends sends us a message asking if we knew it was being posted (and we never do). It's funny to me how the comments about it always stay about the same. And it makes me wonder how many times this picture has been passed around and we didn't have a friend to tell us about it! Who knew that in coming to Madagascar Lora and Matimu would become a local viral sensation! ;-)Ataon ny vahiny indray... ... See MoreSee Less

6 days ago