Sunday, May 4, 2008

Visitation in a Malagasy Home and Learning How to Convert English Measures to Metric Measures

Monday, April 7

Ja wanted to visit a lady that had come to the church a few times. He always takes one of the preacher boys with him for 2 reasons. First, to use them as interpreters and second, to train them for when they start a church. We took Rado with us.

So Ja, Rado, Walter and I piled into the car and drove over to her home. I hadn't yet been inside any of the homes of the poorer people so it was quite eye opening. The size of the home was maybe 10 feet long and about 6 feet wide. That's the whole house from front to back! And we here in America complain about having only 1000 square feet (for example). I think they have maybe 100 square feet.

Bernard and Madame Cecille were both home and they welcomed us with open arms and big, bright smiles. They got out their chairs for us and gave us their beds to sit on and Madame Cecille sat on a child's bed. Ja spoke and Rado interpreted.

Rado reading from a Malagasy Bible to Bernard and Madame Cecille

Madame Cecille sitting on a child's bed so we could have the "good" seats.

Bernard is in the background. Ja and Rado talking to him. By the way, we were sitting on bunkbeds.

Talking to the Malagasy people about salvation is completely different than here in America. The Malagasy have been taught by other religions about heaven. So if you ask them if they know for sure they're going to heaven they say yes. If you ask them if they know Jesus they say yes. They know all about heaven. But the one thing they don't know about is Hell. They've not been taught that they are sinners and are on their way to Hell. So that's where Ja starts out talking to them. He takes them all the way back to Adam and Eve and the story of the Garden of Eden and works forward to the Ten Commandments and then on to the story of our Saviour and why Christ died on the cross for us. He usually takes about an hour with each visit he makes just so that the people understand what the Bible says about salvation and why we need a saviour.

Also, the people are very gracious. They will gladly welcome you into their home. They will listen to you. They don't slam the door in your face like here in America. The people are very open to the Gospel.

So we were there for quite a while. It was a wonderful experience to watch Bernard and Madame Cecille as they came to an understanding of salvation. Just to watch the expressions on their faces change and you could see that they wanted to accept Christ as their Saviour was priceless! They both accepted Christ and were even more thankful we had stopped by.

Bernard and Madame Cecille gladly let us take pictures with them.

I think those children are their grandchildren.

Notice how much taller we are than Bernard and Madame Cecille!

Visitation went like that the whole time we were there in Antsirabe. Walter told me time and time again as he went with Bro. Pritchard and the preacher boys that people were getting saved. Getting them into church is a bit harder because the crime is pretty high. Not against the foreigners, but Malagasy against Malagasy. Families always leave 1 person home so that their belongings don't get stolen. There's a family in the church where the husband stays home so their only cow doesn't get stolen!

As we were leaving, we saw these children playing Zebu (cow) pulling a cart full of bricks. One boy was the herder with a whip and another boy was the Zebu. What was so funny to us is the boy playing the Zebu didn't realize that his bricks were falling off one by one as he continued down the path!



After we were done at Bernard's we stopped by the market to buy some potatoes. I needed 10 pounds of potatoes because I was going to teach the church ladies how to make potato pancakes and good old-fashioned pancakes. I was to do a trial run of cooking on the charcoal burner that the Malagasy use. I needed to experiment with that as well as get used to having Sophie interpret for me.

So we get to the market and Ja tells the woman running the vegetable market that we need potatoes. He converts pounds to kilos and the woman comes back with a very large bag of potatoes. Ja tells her it's too much but he can't remember the exact conversion. Walter and I told the woman it was fine. We ended up buying 17 kilos of potatoes. We could tell the bag was way more than we wanted but we figured we'd use them up quickly anyway. We only paid $7.50 for all those potatoes. When we got home, Rachel told us that we ended up buying 34 pounds of potatoes!

This is a little shop on the side of the road that sells the charcoal cookers.

The black stuff in the middle basket is charcoal that they make themselves to cook with.

1 comment:

Shari said...

Rhonda: I have read every one of your posts and have been so interested and intrigued. I am sorry for not commenting. All I can say is, "WOW!" We have it so easy here in the US and people still complain. I also realized I didnt' have your web address on my website so I added it. Now I don't have to go to Knouf's site and click from there anymore. Thank you for praying for us and sharing your journey to Madagascar.