 |
| Jeammot hews a traditional guitar out of a log. |
Fort Dauphin
John Reddy, the Peace Corps Madagascar Country Director, stopped by last week on his tour of the south. He arrived in a Peace Corps 4x4 with his wife Portia, both of them worn out from traversing the sand tracks to the west. Until you get to Ambovombe, there are no roads worthy of that description.
You know what Madagascar needs? Madagascar needs to get invaded by the Romans. Just drop four or five legions and a sizable engineer corps into the countryside around Fort Dauphin and see what happens. By the time the dust cleared, WE’D HAVE SOME DECENT ROADS. Y’all government officials are mataotsy about neo-colonialism? How about retro-colonialism, does that work for you?
Ugh, do not get me talking about the roads here.
The Reddys and I had a nice talk out on my porch. I told John about the troubles I’d had the week before, even my thoughts about Early Terminating. He sympathized; he was every bit as warm and understanding as you’d expect, but there was a hint of steel underneath his words.
So you had four bad days in a row. That’s really very ordinary for Peace Corps. Keep it together, man, and save the melodrama for your Third Goal presentations.
And he’s absolutely right.
The next day, I was buying bananas on the road when Clotilde, an orange seller, called me over. I didn’t get all of what she said, but I knew she was asking me to assist with harvesting some rice. And I thought, why not? We agreed I’d meet her on Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday I bought a sickle in the market. The sickles here are smaller than Western ones. They’re also serrated, the better to rip through rice stalks quickly. During my internship with Club du Vieux Manoir in Briançon, France, we used sickles to clear the grass from the courtyards in the mountain forts. The rough-cut lawns lent authenticity to the forts’ eighteenth-century atmosphere.
Learning how to use a sickle in the first place is the hardest part of wielding one, so I was really thankful for that previous experience. In the movies you always seem to see workers swinging their sickles like machetes-- you do that, you’re liable to lose fingers. It’s actually a very controlled motion of gripping the plants with your left hand, then pulling the sickle towards your body with your right, with just enough force to cut through the stems. And even then it takes practice. I would have sliced up my left hand pretty good if I hadn’t been wearing gloves.
I met Clotilde at her stall and she took me to her brother Desiré’s house. He was the farmer Clotilde had been talking about; even though we hadn’t spoken before, it seemed like he’d been waiting for an opportunity to introduce himself to me.
“Do you already know how to cut rice?” he inquired as we headed down the road to the rice paddy. Everyone else who’d seen me walking with a sickle had just assumed I wouldn’t.
“I’ve cut grass with one before,” I said.
“That’s good. It should be the same,” he replied pacifically.
We joined Dez’s three brothers and his nephew, already making inroads on the field. I had been expecting the rice to either be planted in the traditional way, thickly in calf-deep water, or the modern way in rows in shallow mud. Dez’s field was in between the two systems, with the plants rooted in inch-deep mud, but also placed closer together than those in an industrial paddy. The workers cut paths through the greenery without a specific pattern in mind, like moles in topsoil. Dez walked ahead of them, stopping every twenty feet or so to consecrate the rice with a dribble of toaka gasy. I placed my sandals with theirs and set to work.
The sickles made a ripping sound just like the cows do when they graze. I squatted in the mud to reach all the rice in a certain radius, then straightened up and moved. The sun blazed, but cool breezes comforted us. Taxi brousses passed by on the road; sometimes the passengers were hushed with disbelief at the sight of a vazaha harvesting rice. Other times they howled in mock outrage to see me stand tall and raise my sickle in salute.
Gasior quae gasiae, as the Romans would say.
Four hours later, we looked around with relief at the finished field. Sheaves of rice lay piled like soldiers after some Great War slaughter. My back ached, but it was little compared to the pain in my lower body. I felt like I’d just wrestled a grizzly using only my legs. Evidently rice-cutting is a lower body workout like no other. I was pleased to see that I wasn’t any more worn out than the other workers. Wasn’t even sunburned.
We washed the mud off in a drainage pool and adjourned to Dez’s house for lunch. He must be a pretty prosperous farmer, because he served soup with beef in it; most farmers can only get meat on feast days. The toaka gasy came out again and within minutes-- the moonshine is near on 200 proof-- they were all thoroughly in their cups. I politely told them that strong liquor is taboo for me. And it’s true: I forbid myself from drinking toaka gasy as a matter of logic. That stuff is Evil in liquid form.
As I left Dez plied me with oranges and bananas and lavish praise. He even promised me a basketful of the rice, once it’s threshed. He’s harvesting another field next week, and insh’Allah I’ll be out there with him. Only next time, I will bring my camera!
