Arrival in Madagascar

        
 Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He spent the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He arrived in Uganda on September 15. From Uganda he traveled by car to Rwanda on September 28. After a week in Rwanda there was once more a return for more travel in Uganda. On October 11 he arrived in Tanzania and on October 26 traveled to Kenya. Asher grew up helping the Children's Rosary and participating in it. He now is helping to spread the Children's Rosary to more parishes and schools. He is also discerning a vocation to the priesthood and has applied to the seminary through the Archdiocese of Hartford. Please keep both his trip and his vocation in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip.  

          After saying goodbye to Fr. Cleophus, I continued on my way to the airport. Upon arriving and walking up to the terminal entrance, I found myself in a line of people standing parallel to the front windows of the building; we were told to put our bags on the ground in front of us, and then a soldier went by with a dog that sniffed each bag. This was preliminary to the first security check which one goes through before even checking in for the flight.

           When I went to check in, I was as usual worried about whether my checked luggage would be overweight because of the rosaries and other materials I was transporting. With the 23 kg limit in mind, I placed the first bag on the scale. 26.9 kilograms. The lady behind the desk began that I would need to move some things out of that bag to lighten it, but I already feared the worst for the other bag as well. My fear was well-founded. The next bag rang in at 24 kg. With a look somewhere between unbelief and consternation, the agent asked me to place my carry-on bag (which was supposed to weigh around 7 to 8 kg) on the scale. 12 kilograms, read out the machine pitilessly. Both of us were nearly on the point of laughter at the absurd situation. Kindly, the agent told me that she would accept the 24 kg bag without a fee but would need me to move some things into the heaviest bag from the carry-on bag so that I only needed to pay for one overweight bag. This I did, glad to escape from a worse eventuality.

            My flight was scheduled for very late in the day, falling unsatisfactorily between an evening flight and an overnight flight, too long for the former and too short for the latter. I touched down in Madagascar at around 2:25 a.m.

            I should say a few words about this country in which I currently find myself as it has some rather interesting history.

            The Malagasy (for so the inhabitants of this island are called) can be ethnically traced to a mixture of Bantu peoples (that is, those that inhabit Sub-saharan Africa) and Southeast Asian peoples. The present-day Malagasy are descended from both, making for a unique background. The island was colonized alternately by the French and the British in the nineteenth century, and in fact many of the first missionaries here were British Protestants. The queen ruling here in the mid-nineteenth century was not at all friendly to Christians, feeling threated by their new religion and increasing influence. She launched a full-scale persecution of Christians on the island. Her son, however, turned out to be a practicing Roman Catholic himself, having been influenced by some French missionaries when young. By the time his mother found out, it was too late to do other than punish those responsible for her son’s conversion, but her son himself she left living. Thus, upon her death a few years later, the island became open to further spread of Christianity. The British and French both continued their separate efforts for a few decades, but in the 1890s, the French launched a full-scale invasion, and the British, who would have supported the Malagasy resistance, agreed to hold back because of a three-way deal with France and Germany that gave them control over Zanzibar. Hence, present-day Madagascar is Francophone and mostly Catholic. It has retained, like many Francophone African countries, close economic ties to France. This dynamic leads to a rather complicated relationship between the two countries. On the one hand, France does provide aid for the island, but on the other hand, many people resent the feeling that their economic development has been stunted by France having too favorable a control over their goods.

        Thankfully, upon my arrival, the process of applying for and getting a 30-day visitor’s visa was painless, and since there was no other flight, the single baggage carousel posed no problem or delay. Further, the hotel near the airport that I had booked for the few hours left of the night had sent a shuttle for me and another passenger, so there was no headache of ordering and waiting for a rideshare driver.

        The hotel turned out quite comfortable and well-furnished. As soon as I walked in the door, a bellhop and the driver moved to help me with my bags. I warned the bellhop (who was reaching for the heaviest one) that he should be careful due to the weight; despite my warning, he immediately lifted it over his head with no hesitation. Upon hearing that I would be staying up two flights of stairs, the bellhop and driver both grimaced and laughed but would not let me carry the bags myself.

        The next day, I was so tired due to the loss of sleep that I even missed the breakfast service at the hotel, which was until 10:00am.

        Ernest, one of the Malagasy seminarians that I met at La Salette, came to pick me up at the hotel to take me to the community’s seminary not far away in Antananarivo. Ernest is now a deacon and will soon be a priest. He is a very nice man, open and friendly. He was someone I remember well from La Salette, so it was a pleasant surprise when he was the one who came to pick me up.

        I was to spend two nights at the seminary before heading off to the superior’s house in Antsirabe, about five hours south of Antananarivo.

        The seminary turned out to be a very nice complex with views of the city and a library filled with old theology books of just the sort I found very interesting.

              The next morning, on Sunday, I went to the 6:00 a.m. Mass at the parish next door, where Ernest was serving as deacon. One difference I have noticed here in Africa from the Masses back home in North America is that on Sundays the earliest Masses are the longest. The 6:00 a.m. Sunday Mass (which does not even exist back home) here is around two hours long, whereas the 10:00 a.m. Mass is about an hour long. Back home, the early Mass lasts around forty or forty-five minutes, while the 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. Mass is the longest.

              The Mass had very nice music, though I of course did not understand a word that was spoken since the Mass was celebrated in Malagasy. Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic Rite of the Mass being what it is, I had little trouble in following what was happening.

            Afterwards, I had breakfast and, after finishing some work, went for a walk around the city up to the Universite Catholique de Madagascar with another of the seminarians. It struck me just how much Madagascar reminded me of France as I walked through the streets. The roads are narrow and often paved with cobblestones. Further, the cars are often of French make, with a plenitude of Peugeots, Renaults, and Citroens. This was quite different from Uganda or Kenya, where the roads were wide and most of the cars were Japanese.

              The city was hilly, making for some very nice pictures of the multicolored houses stacked up on the slope. Another thing that occurred to me as noteworthy, though the same was true in Kenya, Tanzania, or Uganda, is that rural and city life collide here in ways I never see in the U.S. For instance, here, it is not so strange to find someone raising copious amounts of chickens in coops not far from downtown. To stumble across a goat or cow walking through the streets is far from unthinkable as well. For me, it seems like a collision of worlds, whereas here it is hardly noticed.

              On Monday, after Mass, Ernest escorted me down to the bus station in a local Antananarivo taxi. Being in this taxi was an experience all on its own. To begin with, on the exterior, the car looked like the kind of taxi one might have hailed in Manhattan back in 1995. It must have been at least twenty-five years old and looked every bit as careworn as that. On the interior, it had no seatbelts in the back seats, and the leather coverings on the doors, formerly gray, were now a deep brown from contact with many years of passengers. The seams of this leather covering were splitting badly, and on the ceiling, the plastic was worn away down to the foam underneath in one place. The dashboard looked like someone had taken it apart and replaced it with just a few basic buttons. On the driver’s side, the mirror was messily cracked and partly missing. On the other side, there was no mirror. Finally, the doors proved to be nearly impossible to open such that I finally gave up and just let the driver open mine for me, to which Ernest joked that the driver was an “expert” whose “specialty” was in getting the doors open.

              Upon emerging from this remarkable little vehicle, I found myself at a bus stand with buses lined up to load passengers, each one roughly the size of a Ford Transit vehicle.

              Upon seeing my bags, the bus operators decided to load them onto the roof rack and strap them down with a tarpaulin. Hardly had they finished this task (no easy one, when one remembers the weight of my bags), when they realized I wished to descend before the normal bus stop to be nearer to the La Salette house where I would be picked up.

              “They’re taking down the bags,” one of the passengers remarked to me as we stood there, but right after this unsettling bit of information was conveyed, the conductor began calling names to board the bus, and I got on. The result was that I spent the five-hour ride wondering on and off whether my bags had really been re-loaded or taken down and then forgotten in the departure process. I had been warned to take care of my safety when riding these vehicles, and I could not help but envision my bags still sitting at the bus stand in Antananarivo while I sped far away to Antsirabe.

              When we finally reached Antsirabe and I got out to meet Fr. Bertrand, the La Salette superior here in Madagascar, the driver opened the back of the van, and, to my relief, there were my bags.

              Fr. Bertrand is a very cordial man, very unassuming down-to-earth. In speaking to him, one would not know that he is the nationwide superior of the La Salette community in Madagascar. Instead, he instantly made me feel at ease and welcome and drove me to the community where I now have been staying for a few days.

              It is a bit outside of town in a quiet, secluded place full of pine trees and shaded paths. There is here Fr. Gerard, in charge of the church, two religious brothers studying at the nearby seminary, and other visiting clergy now and again. There is a church where we have Mass every day at 4:00 p.m., followed by the Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet, and Evening prayer, all of which occur in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

              Furthermore, there is a school run by the La Salette order down the street, and it is here that I have been invited to start a Children’s Rosary group. I have been going down for a couple of days now, and each time, I meet with a few classes, and I help them to hold their first meeting and become familiar with the prayers. I am glad to have this opportunity to be with this school for such a prolonged period of time because this way I feel confident that they will really become a strong group.

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE