Workshop Finale, and "Mystery Logs" Solved

I’ve been listening to Mormon Channel podcasts while getting ready, and found one of a couple who were service missionaries in Madagascar. In the midst of it the husband said something I hadn’t noticed: there are no stoplights in Madagascar. Once I heard that I started paying more attention as we drove around Tana, the capital and biggest city—the most likely candidate for a stoplight. Not only were stoplights missing, I didn’t even see a stop sign or street sign.

Our hotel is "downtown" but we're on the top of a hill (there's lots of those here) and the president's palace is just a few doors down. We're not allowed to take pictures up close, but I managed to snap one on our drive to the workshop.

The presidential palace, as seen from the car.

It might seem obvious, but I had to learn the hard way how to dress for workshops like this. Looking back at photos from past trips, I'd packed versatile "travel clothes" that didn't wrinkle and gave the freedom to go into the jungle at a moment's notice. Everyone else...dressed like they were at a professional event in an urban area. And then there was the "unintentionally cross-dressing with near-wardrobe-malfunction" episode in Tanzania back in 2009--that was hitting rock bottom. So it wasn’t hard to exceed past performance, but I think it actually went quite well this time. Success…and the most professional jungle wardrobe I’ve had yet. 

Today was the day I finally presented on behalf of my colleague, and while I’m far from an expert on Malagasy agriculture or mining, I think it went alright. The unfortunate part was that the maps, the crutch of my presentation, had the colors so distorted by the projectors that even I had a hard time seeing what was going on. But we tried to make it engaging by having the participants guess which five key crops we looked at—their guesses alone were insightful. In case you were wondering, vanilla wasn’t one of them. I was surprised too, but apparently between the recent political turmoil and too many instances of inferior quality (e.g. injecting the beans to increase the weight which renders them useless). They were: rice, sugarcane, maize, coffee, and clove. The last one also surprised me, but apparently it’s a fairly new thing that is becoming increasing important for internal use and export. By this point in the week, though, I was starting to understand the importance of rice in their cuisine, as it came with every meal. I later learned that the word “to eat” in Malagasy actually translates to eat rice, and that people in Madagascar consume more than three times the rice they eat in Japan.

Introducing a variation of Family Feud to the workshop.

the big presentation

Map chat

CI family photo

After the workshop, we had a celebratory dinner with a few of our CI-Madagascar colleagues and workshop participants at the restaurant in Hotel Radama. I decided to focus on Malagasy dishes, and ordered romazava (zebu with greens that made the mouth slightly numb).

I was able to sit next to one of the French students, Sebastian, who was so helpful in navigating the Malagasy dishes and finally solved our triangular log mystery! It’s actually a dessert called Koba, and is made with ground peanuts, sugar, and rice flour. The “bark” is the banana leaves it comes wrapped in. We also tried some of it, but was no match for the desserts of earlier this week.

Topping off the day: post-dinner spa time.