dancing in september

greetings and happy september to you all…i hope many of you are enjoying being back to school, etc. as much as i’m appreciating the gradual end of winter here on the plateau. the latest big news here in the alaotra mangoro region of madagascar (i have no idea if this is news in the u.s., especially less than two months before the election) is that jim carrey was in amparafaravola, my district town, about 50 km south of my town, a week or two ago? i’m not really sure when, but i heard about it on the radio last weekend…my first reaction was, “did they just say jim carrey?” then i heard, heavily accented but clearly discernible nonetheless, “ace ventura,” and i figured out they must be talking about THAT jim carrey. i didn’t meet him, although when i heard i have to admit i ever-so-briefly considered going down to amparafaravola and asking around to see if he was still there, just because how often do you get the chance to meet jim carrey in madagascar.

in other news, though, i’m here in ambato for the weekend, getting ready for a meeting with other volunteers tomorrow about our girls’ camp that we’re planning for the first week of november. i spent the morning doing a little bit of scoping out of hotels here in town for late december, when my parents and dan will be here, and was pretty excited about what i found, and i can’t believe how quickly december is approaching! november, too, of course…i fly out of tana two months from today for my trip home!

this past thursday i went to my first famadihana, an exhumation or “turning of the bones” ceremony that you might hear about if you do any kind of research into malagasy cultural traditions. they’re a pretty big deal, and there was one in vohitsara a couple of weeks ago but i couldn’t make it, so i was glad to be able to go to this one, even just for a few minutes. ancestors are pretty important here, and people put a lot of effort and money into building family graves and doing various cultural things involving funerals, exhumations, etc. because of the importance they place on ancestors. so i was excited to be able to see what this ceremony was like, and i went late thursday afternoon with some people who work at a little office next to my house. we arrived and went into a little room/tent area where it seemed one family, or part of a family was sitting, and some old pictures of family members who i presume had already died were around the room/tent. people gave a few little speeches, and the people i was with gave the family an envelope with some money in it that they had brought. i was a little too far away to hear very well what was being said the whole time, but after visiting that family i thought we might visit one or two others. i was wrong, it turns out, but it was nice to see a little bit of what went on anyway. i had been with friends in town before to visit families of people who had died, and up to this point things went pretty similarly to how that usually goes. after we went to see that one family, though, we spent a while standing around and somebody told me we were going to eat rice. it was getting close to dinnertime, and i wondered if people would leave to go home for dinner or what, but soon we were ushered, or shoved, into a sort of holding area for the rice-eating area. they tried to let a few people in to eat, the mayor and some other dignitaries, when suddenly the floodgates broke and everyone swarmed into the tent designated for eating rice. i got pushed into several people, separated from the people i was there with, and then found them once again, just in time to realize that people were squatting in two lines facing each other on either side of several long lines of alternating bowls of rice and broth. i found a spot, assisted by some helpful friends who seemed to be looking out for me in all the chaos, and squatted along with everybody, spoon in hand (everyone had been given a spoon), to realize these were communal bowls of rice and broth and that everyone else was digging in. before i could think too much about it, i dug in too, and there were people whose job seemed to be to walk around with huge bowls of rice and buckets of broth with a few pieces of meat or fat floating in the broth, refilling the communal bowls in front of us. we ate for a while, and the bowls continued to be replenished until we decided, one by one, that we were either too full or too tired of squatting to possibly eat one more bite. somebody brought around a plate full of little cups of ranonapango, the hot rice water that follows up most rice meals, for us to wash everything down. all in all, it was an interesting experience, and one in which i sort of felt like i and my fellow townspeople were all farm animals being fed from a trough, pushing and shoving for a space and eating ravenously, or something like that, but i’m glad i went and was able to experience something so unique, or at least so unique for someone who’s lived in the united states most of her life.