Kategorie: Nuusbriewe uit Madagaskar

If anything, I learned one lesson this week; don’t let your bias of a culture cause you to become so suspicious that you don’t expect positive behaviour from people. Euphrasie and I were convinced on Thursday that the teachers at Ampamata school were sincere and totally innocent in this situation with the French man. Why he twisted the truth or embellished certain facts, I don’t know. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and put it down to ignorance. We are very thankful to him for the good quality stationery which he donated to the school and will save us a lot of money. I trust that there will be a way for us to work together, so I’ll keep you posted. Thank you for your prayers in this regard and all the encouraging messages.

Bake-off shows have cake week, tart week etc, but I can describe last week as meltdown week. I suppose of the kind where something goes wrong in a nuclear reactor and the fuel overheats and melts everything. Let me start with the worst one.

After two weeks of non-stop work, I can finally show evidence of the new roof. Only two classrooms so far, which means that we shall need another week to finish and therfore we are a week over the designated time. There is nothing to do about that. At least, following popular culture, we can put the blame on the fact that the owner probably measured and levelled nothing at the time of construction.

I have no pictures of a shiny roof to show you yet as the work is progressing really slow due to the bad state of the current walls. We are so thankful that PM lent us one of his workers, Zachary, who with the help of two extra guys are doing a proper job and they seem to never get tired.

So tomorrow it will be off with the old roof and on with a new one! I am saying this with a lot of gusto and positivity, simply because the vision of the shiny new roof will get us through the next two weeks. There are a lot of challenges; the existing walls are not straight at all, not the same height, built with different kinds of bricks and the wooden beams are rotten. So that means, not a straight forward job then. Not that that seems to deter Dries as nothing is ever just simple and “normal” here. What should have been a weekend of rest, was not to be as the Land Rover’s clutch broke and Dries had to search for parts, because without the Land Rover, there will be no new roof.