Church Building

Friday afternoon, August 7. Fort Dauphin

After our warm welcome at the airport, Rado drove us to our home for the next four nights.

The building at the top of this hill is owned by Air Madagascar. Their offices are located on the ground floor, and on the first floor there is a residence for the Représentant Fort-Dauphin, Hasinalinovona Ralaitsirofo and his wife Nantatiana. You can see two bedroom windows on the right-hand side of building, and the balcony behind the maroon posts. There is also a spacious living and dining room, and a kitchen, in addition to other bedrooms.

After lunch we went with a group of parishioners to look at land for the new church. We saw one piece of land shaped like a bowl, which might give protection from cyclonic winds, but might also flood too easily. A second piece of land had a breathtaking vista of a nearby mountains. The third possibilty held a breathtaking vista of Indian Ocean.

We then went to the school house where the parish is meeting until it has its own building. You can see a man standing by the door that leads into the room the church is renting. The two windows to the right of the door are matched by two more windows on the opposite side. At night a single low watt bulb provides some light (if the town's electricity is working).

Evangelist Tomboasy and Rado are in the foreground, with an unidentified man on the right.

Earlier, Todd addressed the gathering.

The poverty in Madagascar is evident in this classroom, with its old and simple wood benches and narrow tables. An old blackboard is the sole instance of education technology, and I was surprised to find this equation written on the blackboard in poor quality chalk: FeO + TiO₂ àFeTiO₃

At first I thought it might have been written for what we would call a junior or senior highschool class, but when I looked it up on line today I discovered that it is a formula for producing ilmenite, which is mined in Madagascar. If so, perhaps the formula had been written by some mining engineers, who, like the parish, had rented the schoolroom for a meeting.

The poster next to the window on the left is one of two UNICEF hygiene posters in the classroom. The standard latrine in Madagascar is a slit latrine, with a foot pad (sometimes of stone, usually of wood) on either side. This poster includes a drawing of a boy standing, and another of a girl squatting, over a slit latrine. A third drawing shows the boy and girl washing their hands, and, in the fourth and fifth drawings, getting water from a well and eating a meal with their family, bright smiles on their faces. 

The combined impact of the crudely furnished classroom and the posters with their matter-of-fact illustrations of Madagascar's primitive latrines and untreated water sources, the lot of most Malagasies, unsettled and distressed me. And yet. And yet with my eyes wide open to the hard reality I have just described, the joy and hope and pride in these Anglicans as they set about to organize and make descisions for their fledgling parish amazed and moved me. "Anglican" is no mere descriptive for these parishioners; it is an almost tangible identity. One man told us that he had prayed daily from his Malagasy Book of Common Prayer for over fifteen years, hoping for the day when there would be an Anglican Church in Fort Dauphin, and so excited that his prayers were being answered, and that the long-awaited day had come.

It was already dark when we filed from the schoolroom at about 5:30 or so. Using our penlights, we picked our way through the uneven dirt and gravel field to the cars and vans that would take us back to Air Madagascar's residence, dinner, and sleep.