Day two in Madagascar

Tuesday 14^th September

Woke up after a good couple of hours sleep – no baby in bed kicking or hitting me etc and no other noises from children, an aircon cooling the room and no other hotel guests making a noise in the passage. This is what it feels like...

Spoke with Ruby on Skype this morning and she had a bad night at home. It seems Jesse slept ok but Ruby is now suffering with a head cold so didn’t sleep well at all. Life as a mother I suppose. Poor Ruby doesn’t get to go away like me every once in a while and must really get tired of having a house full of boys at all times. But then like all mothers Ruby will miss even one of the boys if they are gone for a night and are away from her, can’t live with them can’t live without them.... Hang in there Ruby, only another twenty odd years to go until they are all “growed up”.

Today I have one fixed appointment with a seller which will hopefully give us a site for our members in Ambohibao (one of the little towns / suburbs of the greater Antananarivo city area. Once this appointment is done, I will be travelling around with my Facilitator to see some other alternatives around the city – we are looking for three other pieces of land in this city and two outside (in other cities).

Wish me luck.

I have been waiting for Marcellin to arrive for 45 minutes now and am now half asleep in the reception area. I thought I had seen him drive past earlier but I must have been mistaken. Sitting in the reception area here I see all of the cars and bikes going past on the road and again I am reminded of the basic human thing of always wanting bigger and better. Most of these people have no transport and rely on their legs or taxis to get around (I suppose it is the same as in South Africa but seems a lot more general here). These people have nothing and yet when I speak with anybody or just watch, they all seem to be happy. On an aside, I was told that this is not rainy season yet as I thought it may be, that only starts in November. There is a chilly wind blowing outside but the sun is shining and the sky is clear blue without a patch of cloud or the gray / yellow of pollution in the air I am so used to seeing.

My appointment is in 20 minutes now and still no sign of Marcellin or Georges, it seems that time means something different here than what it does at home, but I suppose I did know that already. Just seen news headlines showing that Rafael Nadal has won the US Open making him a winner of the “grand slam”, only the seventh guy to accomplish it or something like that. I never liked him because I was a Roger Federer fan and this was the only guy who would stand in Rogers way at the French open – just like Ivan Lendl and Wimbledon, always someone there to beat him on that court. Seeing more and more of Nadal showed he is actually a decent guy (from what we are shown as the public) and that he is actually a worthy successor to the “Federer crown”.

I feel like I am typing here just to stay awake – like talking rubbish at 02:30 in the morning with a bunch of friends.

1pm Mada time and sitting in the office of our Facilities Management Group in ‘Tana sending emails to South Africa. I met with the sellers of the Ambohibao property and they are asking quite a steep price for their land. We negotiated a bit and eventually agreed that the price would depend on the valuations we get on the property. Time will tell if they actually will negotiate on price I suppose. I am now getting all of the documents for this property scanned in to send them off to Shawn in JHB.

The Mission President (Sean Donnelly) has invited myself and Marcellin to lunch to discuss work in the area, we are off. Lunch was interesting, a couple of pices of fish on a kebab / sosatie stick with a smoked fish sauce in a cup on the side. The taste was good but the little pieces of charcoal on the fish were not the best tasting... but like I said to President Donnelly, you eat the charcoal and it will absorb all of the nasties in the meal (wishful thinking?) and hopefully prevent any bugs getting a hold. After lunch I went back to the office with Marcellin for a while then back to the hotel room for a long evening.