Am just unpacking fantastic (!) contents of my latest three packages from you and eating some of the ambazaha (manioc) I went with Riche, Nivo, Zilio, and a few other kids to collect on the mountain yesterday. My manioc is supplemented by an almond or piece of candy corn here and there. Makes for a fantastic snack.
Starting at 8:30 this morning the day became unbearably hot, especially inside my corrugated-tin roofed house. Yesterday was similarly stifling, a preview of what I have to look forward to this summer, through February or March. This afternoon I’ll bike to T/M, about 8 km from V, to visit the butterfly-rearing project and model farm there. The pig is supposed to give birth any day now and hopefully I’ll get to see babies soon. It’s Sunday so I get to spend my morning relaxing and writing you, to beat the heat.
Yesterday was exhaustingly wonderful. I left home at 7:30 to go harvest cloves in Mama ny Riche’s tanimboly [farmed plot] in the forest. Loved watching Riche climb high up in the trees like a lemur and hack branches down with his machete, as the other kids and I dodged the falling ones and immediately began collecting the clusters of flower buds. Your hands smell incredible after a while of working the stem oils into them, and it’s a feeling of accomplishment to watch the pink-yellow manta (raw) cloves pile up in our baskets.
Saw some lovely orchids and disturbed many Heterixalus madagascariensis from their perches on the clove branches as we worked. Those are my favorite little frogs; find them everywhere from in the rice paddies to the shade—coffee groves. They’re endemic but very common here, snow-white little frogs with widely spreading hands and feet and a yellow stripe near their eyes. What’s so neat about them is how quickly they can change their skin color for camouflage. In a few minutes they go from pure white to yellow-sided, to dappled in dark spots when there’s a perceived threat—such as me picking them up and positioning them on epiphytes to photograph them.
I bought a bunch of small fish on a grass rope on my way home from clove searching (we took the beach route back) and when M-I saw me return home with them, she said, “You’re not mahay about cleaning them, right?� Usually I resent being told I’m not good at it, and having tasks taken out of my hands for proper Malagasy-style execution, but when it comes to cleaning the guts out of fish, I’m more than happy to concede and testfy to my tsy mahay-ness. After fixing rice, I went and found M-I cleaning the fish out by the well, where she looked up at me and said, “You don’t like to eat the heads, do you?� She proceeded to chop off the upper third of each fish and put them on a dish, saying she’d cook them with ravimbazaha� (manioc leaves aka ravitoto) later. This was her motivation in volunteering to clean the fish, of course, and I was happy for her to take the heads off my hands. Would just (secretly) have been cat food.
Before the whole process began, I was of course asked, hotrino? (how much?), i.e., what I had paid for the fish. My reply that they had cost me 500 ariary met with her approval, which is a rare occurrence. Right now she’s sitting on the porch next to me (I moved outside where it’s cooler) and commenting on how fast a writer I am. She has no idea I’m writing home about her fish-cleaning yesterday. She just got up to spread around the browning cloves laid out on mats to dry in the sun in my front yard. [to be continued]