You Can Kill A Lot of Time If You Really Want to Put Your Mind to It

(Written 17 March 2010)
Just another day in the life…
Things started out pretty well, even productive – relatively. I had a gardening class at the primary school, and while for the second straight class we did not finish our fence (a prerequisite to actual planting, thanks to the merciless roaming chickens), we made visible progress. After a rainy lunch break, I added a gate before the kids’ afternoon class. Then I had a program with an agricultural extension worker to plant some tree seeds (Grevillea, a leguminous tree) on an eroding hillside.
Now, our program was supposed to be yesterday, but road outages meant Dadah, the extension worker, was a day late arriving from Ambatondrazaka. So we rescheduled for today at 3. At 2:30 I saw him, reconfirmed, and went to fetch my bike. I told him I would leave now, which was about 2:50, and he would meet up with me. He had a motorcycle, so this seemed logical as he could quickly catch up with me.
I west ahead a ways before turning off the road to a side lane. The road was a dirt road full of holes, mud puddles and bumps. This is normal. The side lane was far worse. Merely a foot path up the hillside, it was overgrown with prairie grasses and weeds. These were very stubborn, surviving numerous cattle treks to still crowd out the math to no wider than my bike tires. After a bit of this, I began a descent so steep and slippery that I had to walk, yet still used my bike’s brakes.
At the bottom of the hill, my path seemed blocked by rice paddies. In reality, the path continued on a narrow precipice at the edge of one paddy, where the water poured down to a lower paddy, then it climbed again up another hill. So I carried my bike and trudged ankle deep through particularly murky rice paddies. Not the first time I’ve done this, but my balance has not improved, and it was a struggle to stay upright. Now muddy up to my knees, I emerged from the Dagobah-like swampiness and began another hill climb.
I use the term “hill” because they are grassy- and not rocky-looking. But these are some large, mountainous hills. I ascended another eroded and slippery mountain/hill, and as I reached the top, a thought struck me: How was Dadah going to get up here on a motorcycle? Uh oh… was this the right spot? I looked around for signs of life, but aside from a few groups of cattle grazing in the distance, there was no one around for miles. Sigh… something is not right. It is now 4:15… I had better retrace my steps and look for Dadah. I descended again…
At the rice paddies, a farmer appeared, obviously concerned that a large white man was continuously crossing his rice fields with a bike, about to topple over any minute. After the usual pleasantries that every conversation must start with, he basically said, “What the heck!?” After my explanation, he said no one else had been around, certainly not on a motorcycle. This information was repeated by everyone I ran into, as I spent another hour or so looking for Dadah.
At about 5:30, I returned to town, bruised and sweaty, muddy and tired. There in the market, right where I left him, was Dadah. Apparently, something was lost in translation… he thought he was waiting for me in town! This happened surprisingly often, and I am patient enough by now to not get angry or exasperated. Instead, we scheduled for another day, and I returned to my house. I fetched a bucket of water for a bucket shower, and just as I stripped down and began to wash up in my roofless outdoor shower, it started to rain again. Of course it did.
But I was tired enough and sweaty enough that it just felt good. And it was still a pretty good day. I accomplished “something” in the morning, got some exercise and had a shower: a fine day! Life moves slowly here, and progress is not measured by tangible results only. And if my “work progress” can more often be seen in complex handshake/fistbump combinations with children than in measurable yields, that is just fine by me!