In the phone conversation on April 13, Rachel told me that her Malagasy, host-family sister’s baby (about a year old) said her first word today. They were sitting at the breakfast table and the baby was on her mother’s lap, banging a spoon on the table. Suddenly she turned to Rachel and said, loud and clear, *tsara*–her first word! Everyone at the table caught it and they were all quite excited to hear the baby begin to speak–but not as excited as Rachel was at having the baby’s first word be spoken to her!

*tsara*= good

Rachel’s Malagasy, host-family sister is about 18; she lives at home, presumably with her husband, though I am not sure of that. When I lived in Madagascar, it was often viewed as not a bad thing to have a child before you married–proof that you COULD have one. The Malagasy dote on children; they are passed from lap to lap and rarely left on their own. When you marry, the traditional wish is: “May you have 7 boys and 7 girls!” That was, of course, a good thing when infant mortality was about 50% or more. The Malagasy population has exploded–just about doubled since 1968, I believe–because infant mortality has fallen thanks to better hygiene, presumably, but families are still very big. This stretches the arable land to the breaking point and leads to the slash-and-burn agriculture that our Volunteers are there to help stop.

Rachel has learned about something called “the Hungry Season”, i.e., the period when the stored food from the last harvest is all gone and the new harvest is not yet ready. (People store rice and maybe some dried beans but not much else, as I remember. Most people outside the cities live on subsistence agriculture, i.e., have no money to buy food except occasionally. What money they have is saved for clothes, shoes, and school supplies/fees.)

Rachel says that people get thin and are bad-tempered from lack of food–if I remember correctly during “Hungry Season”. I don’t think that there was a “Hungry Season” when I lived in Madagascar. There have been droughts and such in the meantime, but in my opinion, the fact that there is now a Hungry Season reflects primarily the political and economic atmosphere of the Ratsiraka years, 1975-late 90s, I think. Hopefully our Volunteers will help the Malagasy to increase eco-tourism and improve land management so that “Hungry Season” will soon be a thing of the past.