I awoke before 5am on Friday, but not just because I was jetlagged. The rest of Fianar was starting to wake up, too. From our tiny, thin walled house (which is walled on a little plot with two other houses, three families) I could hear a rooster I hear everything that goes on outside with incredible clarity. Roosters crow – they roam unchecked through residential areas, and it’s not uncommon to come across a hen with little chicks cheeping as they hurry along behind. There’s an enormous turkey that lives in our yard, being fattened for Malagasy Independence day on June 26th; that first morning his “gobble-gobble” sounds kept catching me off-guard, but now they’re just part of the soundtrack of life here. Two calico cats live in the yard, too, and sometimes meow loudly. The family next door has a little furry white dog, but he’s pretty quiet. The father in one of the families is himself a taxi-brousse driver, so sometimes you’ll hear his van coming or going late at night or early in the morning. Just outside my window, between our house and one of the others, a woman starts a fire and boils water either for breakfast or for washing laundry (an all-day affair). If I spoke Malagasy, I would know a lot about our neighbors, because you can hear every word that anyone says outside!
So why is everyone up so early? Well, for one thing, the sun starts to rise around that time; we are, after all, in the Southern Hemisphere. It gets really dark early here, too; dusk begins around 4:30 and it’s quite dark by 5pm. So things quiet down here early, other than not infrequent dogfights that erupt in the middle of the night.
But Sunday night was an exception. Starting around midnight, I heard singing. At first I thought it was drunken singing (drunk in Fianar on a Sunday?), and it was sporadic enough that I was able to fall back to sleep. But by 2am it was relentless and unending singing of hymns – and badly, I might add. It was coming from the house just behind ours and it went on all night long! Cranking up the iPod didn’t even help. I lay awake for hours listening to untrained two-part harmony, the same song, over and over. It was a hellish, sleepless night.
The next morning I asked the office guard (one of the two office guards is always in the little shack in the office yard, every night) what that was all about, and (I think – his French isn’t the best) he said that there had been a death.
From my pre-trip research I knew that people in rural areas have very elaborate funeral rituals (including the exhumation of bodies by the family a year after to re-wrap dead relatives and to “tell” the corpses about recent family news and gossip; this is actually a celebratory event, not meant to be sad), but I guess that night I got a taste of how death is dealt with by Christian Malagasies in the cities.
Since we're talking about the rhythm of life in Madagascar, I should also talk about afternoons. Everyone in Fianar, businesses of all kinds, all have a two-hour lunch break from 12 to 2pm. Everyone goes home from the office, children come home from school, to cook and eat together. For Francesca and I, this makes shopping difficult. Produce and such are still sold on the street, but when it comes to little grocery stores, they are all closed during the only free time we have during the workday.
As I said in an earlier post, there is a different sense of time in Madagascar. A lunch break from 12 to 2 does not mean that everyone is back at their desks at 2pm on the dot, ready to work. Punctuality is flexible. Our afternoon English classes for the office staff are supposed to start at 4:30. People filter in one at a time between 4:45 and 5pm. It can be incredibly frustrating, but, as we were cautioned back at Princeton in the "Living and Working in the Developing World" meeting, it is something to to accept and get used to.
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