I spent quite a bit of time with the guard's family today, despite the fact I was unable to communicate with them due to the language barrier. They invited me into their home and taught me how to clean rice. Unlike in the States, you have to pick out rocks and chaff before cooking your rice. It's quite time consuming, but thankfully the sack of rice Marc and Stacy have is fairly clean already. Such a task is fun to do while having fellowship with neighbors. In African nations the women have so many time-consuming tasks to do, but because many of their houses/huts are so close by to one another, they can do these tasks together. In the U.S. we're so closed off to everybody around us and we rarely even see our neighbors let alone spend time with each other.
Later, we all walked to the garden together. This was my third time outside the gate since my arrival. Betroky is very beautiful, as it is surrounded by mountains. In the garden I witnessed the loss of many crops due to thieves. It is very common for Malagasy to steal without remorse. It's really too bad. Most the crops stolen had hardly begun to bloom. The sweet potatoes collected by us today were tiny; I can hardly imagine how small the stolen sweet potatoes must have been...
On our way home we saw hundreds of cattle being led from the south to Tana. With one man leading 10+ cows, they hike for weeks, bringing these cows to the capital to be sold as meat. All year long this takes place and there seems to be a never-ending supply of cattle! We saw many of them as we traveled by taxibousse to Betroka. It's just absolutely amazing to me that these men would put themselves through that repeatedly. They sleep on the hard ground without shelter through the night, eat whatever they come across on their journey, carry hardly anything with them... I could never do it. And all I can think is: what about their wives? Do they have wives and children?
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