(Don't forget to help with our field trip!)
Whenever I've been away from site for a week or two, I'm always on the lookout for developments around town since I left. The "spot the differences" game is actually one of the things I have to look forward to in an otherwise depressing ride away from Fianarantsoa. I keep my expectations low, but sometimes a new store will open (selling the same five products as the other 10 stores), or a house has been painted some garish color, electrical poles have been installed, and so on. I'd like a fully-stocked CVS or Ben and Jerry's, but I'll take what I can get.
I noticed right away that the section of my fence that collapsed last month, a results of the children who would climb on it trying to steal peaches from my trees, was once again on the ground. I picked it up (i.e. I had some students of mine pick it up) before I left and leaned it against the house, trying to unblock the much-traveled path it was obstructing, but with it in the way again, people simply made a new path through the bushes next to it.
What's new is that, as I noticed when I opened up the kitchen window, the entire fence enclosing my back yard has collapsed in on itself. Some say it was the wind (yet no other fence in the town fell), some say it was the drunks (yet I've never seen drunks, even on market day, messing with anyone's fence). My own far-fetched theory is that the horde of children who shake it, climb on, over, under, and through it might have something to do with it's instability. But who can say for sure?
As for now part of the fence covers up the 5-foot trash pit, and the children now play and jump on the rotted, jagged wood above this drop onto, among other things, broken bottles and other unpleasant fall-breakers that the town throws into it. (Aside from the place into which I throw banana peels, egg shells, and discarded pieces of vegetables, the townspeople use it as a sort of grab-box. What one person throws in there in the morning will be taken as something else by afternoon). Regardless, the parents of these children seem to encourage the playground, or at least don't discourage it.
But while Andriamanitra taketh away my fence, he also giveth me something new. Namely, the inability to sleep a peaceful 8 hours a night thanks to a infestation of rats the size of a small, rat-sized shoe box. I don't generally see them (just once, outside), they climb up to an opening in my wall that leads into the space between my ceiling and roof. All night one can hear them run around, fight, and somehow create noises that sound like stones falling onto metal. (I haven't yet figured this out). No one I've talked to about this seems to care, or even think it's a problem. Well, among other suggestions, I'd like to propose that the entire town will have a problem when my ceiling collapses from the weight of rat droppings and their English teacher is seen leaving town once and for all.
Meanwhile, the electricity poles, all hooked up to each other and with street lights on every other one, remain totally isolated from the houses down below. This part, connecting the houses, some people theorize might take months or years as people protest at how much the wire costs and wait it out. Also, the new English teacher I was promised to have start in January is unsurprisingly not here. I told them, again, I won't be replaced if there isn't one set to start next September, but that doesn't seem to put the fire to their feet and more than having one and a half years of two-thirds of their students not studying English. I'm not holding my breath
