by Lindsay Redifer

Every morning when I wake up, I hear the town’s single mitoto pounding cassava leaves and the roar of the waves on our beach. I always check the floor to see if it’s flooded, then I swing out of bed and put on my flip-flops. I like to wake up around five in the morning; by seven we’re all sweltering.

Nosy Faly, or Happy Island, used to be called Nosy Be, Big Island. I first saw it when I came to Madagascar as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2005. Back then, it was a huge tourist attraction for locals and Europeans, and one of the few places where they mixed easily. In most of the country, the pale-skinned foreigners had a tendency to squirrel themselves away in French cafes, but Nosy Be was different. Here, everyone sat down at the same table to giant plates of rice, salads of shredded carrots in vinegar, glasses of tamarind juice, and, of course, ravitoto.

It is every Malagasy person’s great joy to see a white foreigner eating their local food, but none more so than the strange, grassy-smelling  dish consisting of pounded cassava leaves, fatty pork, and coconut milk all cooked together in a big pot. It’s not an attractive dish; it’s basically green sludge with chunks floating in it spooned over rice. But the taste  is like nothing I’ve ever experienced: it’s wild and fresh like the country, smoky and complex; it’s salty, bitter, smooth, and even a little sweet.

When I first came here, I would wake up to a chorus of ravitoto sellers beating their cassava leaves in giant mortar and pestles, the sound shaking everyone out of their beds. These women had to stand while they worked so they had enough force to bring down their smooth, rounded logs into a nest of green, transforming the thick leaves into a pile of light, feathery pieces to be sold in the market. Now I just hear Larissa beating her own ravitoto all by herself. How much longer can she do this?

I go out and give Larissa a wave. She pauses for just a quick moment  to wave back, and I go back in to grab some money for breakfast. I like to get a coffee and some fried dough known as mofogasy before school starts, so I have to get in line.

Mama’an Tina (it means Tina’s mom and it’s the only name she uses) is serving coffee and little dough balls as fast as she can at the counter. All the locals are jostling for plastic seats in her small café, and many are just standing and chatting. Everyone looks at me for a moment, but then they all seem to recall that I live here now and they leave me to stand and wait. The coffee smells amazing—Mama’an Tina roasts and pounds her own coffee beans, and somehow her water has none of the bleached taste we’ve all grown accustomed to over the years. I actually drool when I think of how water used to taste.

“Manahoana!”

“Manahoana neneko. Café anak iray, tsoatra.” “Eny, eny.”

Mama’an Tina and I have this exact same conversation every morning.

I can speak more Malagasy than this simple exchange, but the country has been so inundated with different foreigners all speaking so many different languages that the locals have given up on trying to communicate with us. I don’t push it; I’m here if anyone wants to talk.

I stand outside and sip my coffee as I stare at the ocean. I wonder if my students have gone to visit the divers like I asked. They’re usually excited to hear a story that I imagine they probably did go, but I have some back- up stories in case they didn’t. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to see Jose, a high school student, smiling at me.

“Hello teacher,” he starts giggling right away. Poor Jose—the guy is just so gay. I’m sure the only reason his family hasn’t forced him into a marriage with a woman is because the island can’t possibly support any more babies. In the U.S., Jose would have swapped catty comments with other young, handsome men and worked in a highbrow café or art gallery. But here he was stuck with only his Imam and his fellow Muslim boys at the mosque for company, and they were far from catty.

“Good morning, Jose.” I slurp a little more coffee. It’s extremely hot and very good. “Did you get some breakfast?”

“Oh yes,” he giggles again and touches his head just above his ear as if he were drawing back a long tendril of hair. “I eat with my mother. You don’t eat breakfast at home?”

“No, I like to come to the café.” This makes Jose laugh even more and he looks around, checking to see if anyone else heard my hilarious comment. He calms down and claps his hands together, ending his laugh.

“Teacher.” His eyes dart around. “Today is the last day to buy ravitoto.”

“What?”

“It is the last day.” He smiles. Jose doesn’t eat the green, grassy dish, as it’s made with pork, but he knows I love it. “You should eat all of it. You will never have it again.”

I finish my coffee and take a moment to look at Jose. Could he be telling the truth? Jose was known for being a bit of an attention monger, but he also had a knack for being up on happenings around town before anyone else.

“Jose. Are you sure? Did Larissa say that to you?”

But just then, Jose’s female friends run up to grab his arm and tell him some marvelous new joke. Soon, they’re all shrieking and laughing together, and I’ve been forgotten entirely. I take my tin coffee cup to the counter and wave goodbye to Mama’an Tina and then head out to school.

School is also a very different experience now. My first year of teaching in Madagascar, I had so many students in class that the benches they  sat on would literally give out from under them, sending six of them at a time to the ground with a loud thump. I never thought I would    miss those groaning, breaking seats. But my meager class would give anything to have a school so big we could put benches in it and so many friends as to break the seat.

My group of ten middle-schoolers is waiting for me at the house we  use for a school before I get there. A few of them run up to hug me as I arrive, and I make sure to give each one a good, long squeeze. They all have a smoky, sharp smell that comes from burning coal for their little stoves at home, and all of their uniforms are worn as thin as paper from being washed so many times. We go in and a few are already telling me about their trip to the divers’ houses.

“Teacher! Teacher! Hello, teacher!” Bienvenue, one of my tiniest students, is already jumping up and down on his bare feet with excitement. I adore him: he’s a terrible student, but he desperately wants to be an academic.  If only I could grade enthusiasm.

“Good morning, Bienvenue. Did you do your homework?”

His big head topped with messy, curly hair nods excitedly. “Yes! I go to the diver house. Oh, teacher, they have a big car!”

“A car?” I direct him over to his seat in the circle and the other students gather around in their chairs so each of us can face one another. Most of them are tall enough to sit comfortably, but a couple of them are so short that their feet swing in the air above the floor. “Bienvenue, tell us about the car you saw.”

He pauses, making sure he has everyone’s attention, then looks back at me to make sure I’m equally spellbound. I am.

“The diver lady, she find a big, big car. It was white before, but now it is green. Six people go to take it from the water. Inside, there is a seat and circle for your hands. There are numbers and letters in the front for the people to read. Before the sea came up, Madagascar had many cars. They went so fast—zoom! People could go many places. But now,” he pauses, suddenly struck by a thought. He looks over at me.

“Teacher.” His face screws up as he tries to puzzle out his thought. “Who will drive a car?”

“Do you mean, who can drive a car later, when all of you are older?”

He nods slowly. He seems to just now be realizing he probably won’t ever ride in a car, not unless he leaves the island, and that’s highly unlikely.

“Well, most people don’t drive cars anymore. After the waves came up, many cars went into the ocean. People in every country knew they would have to find another way to travel. Here on Nosy Faly, everyone walks and rides a bike. We don’t want the waves to come back, so we do those things to keep the water happy. A lot of people died in those days and we want to keep all of you safe, so now we just look at cars. We don’t drive them.”

The group is silent for a moment. Bienvenue looks at his feet and then up at me.

“It was beautiful, the car. I want they find another one. And then more.” I give him a smile and pat his hands.

“Maybe they will. Who else went to see the divers? Larisoa, did you go?”

Larisoa, one of my older and very adult-looking students, nods slowly. “I saw photos.”

“Oh? What did the photos look like?”

She waits a long moment and then looks at me. “Teacher,” she says, “you lived in Madagascar before? Before it was so small?”

“Yes. I lived in Maevatanana. Was that town in the photos?”

“I don’t know.” Larisoa looks down at her hands. “Maybe it was from there. I saw six women, all making ravitoto together. And I saw pictures of a market and many different kinds of food. The women selling food carried little babies in lambahoanis tied to their backs. And on the tables were big plates of ravitoto. Anybody could buy it.” She looks back up at me, a bit puzzled. “That cannot be from here, correct?”

Yes, I want to say, this island used to be covered in markets, not lines of people waiting for meager portions sent over by aid organizations. Those photos are of this place.

“It’s possible.” I shift in my seat as I speak carefully. “But they could be from somewhere else. It’s difficult to know unless someone writes on the picture where it was taken. There were markets here before and lots of ravitoto. Before, it was the cheapest thing a person could buy. This is why it is so important to take care of our home. When the waves came up, the soil changed. The trees got thin and small, the fruit and the vegetables died before anyone could eat them. We have new ways to grow things now, but change takes time, so we have to be patient.” I look around the circle and think of all the processed, high-in-nutrient powders and pastes these children will need to eat in their lifetimes. I miss mangoes. I miss bananas. “If we work hard and learn more about the ocean and the best ways to take care of the Earth, maybe we can have a market like that again.”

The stories go on. Mami saw a lemur skeleton and a book, Solo saw a special chair with wheels on it, Marie got to touch a washed-up keyboard and was allowed to keep the number 8. The students pass her little grey key around and ooh and ahh over the strange, bumpy texture of the plastic. I glance out the window and already I can see a huge line leading to Larissa’s house. I make a decision: I’m going to buy ravitoto for myself today, no matter  how small the portion.

After our morning storytelling, the students go home for the hottest part of the day. They’ll eat with their families and then sleep for a couple of hours. I know the rest of the town will be resting as well, so I’m going to visit Larissa.

I walk the little path to her house and immediately I see that at least fifteen other people have had the same idea. They’re all standing and sweating. The women hold lambahoanis over their heads to get some shade, but it doesn’t do much. I stand in line behind a young man who turns back to scowl at me.

Probably just frustrated by the heat, I tell myself. I’ll let that faux pas slide.

The moment I’ve decided to be forgiving, I realize the boy and the man in front of him are discussing me and they’re not happy. They switch to French to let me know I’m meant to overhear them.

“What a greedy French woman, buying the last of our wonderful food. Isn’t she rich enough to buy fruit and greens? I saw her in the café this morning drinking coffee like a politician’s wife.”

“The French want everything. You can’t show them a beautiful cloth or nice house without having it taken away from you. Even a married man isn’t safe from their claws.”

Okay, how do I respond to all of this? First of all, I’m not French and it’s the one thing I truly hate to be called. Apparently, my face, my nose in particular, has a certain je ne sais quoi to it, and I constantly have to explain that I’m American and that’s a very different place. Sometimes people listen; usually they just roll their eyes as they walk away.

The two keep talking, glaring at me in turns over their shoulders. My own shoulders are locking up with stress. Meanwhile the temperature is rising sharply, and I pray the sunblock I put on this morning is enough. Finally, the two guys want me to confirm all their anger, and one of them makes the mistake of grabbing my arm. I wrench it away and switch the conversation back to Malagasy.

“Don’t touch me! Where is your brain? You don’t know why I’m here— you don’t even know that I’m American. I teach your children, I buy coffee to help others make money. Larissa is my friend and you are a waste of my time.”

The two men stand shocked, and immediately the volume on the whole situation gets turned down. In their softest voices, the two whisper   their apologies and turn back to face forward. I’m shaking from the confrontation and I have to close my eyes for a moment and remind myself to breathe. Public arguments are more common now that the population of the country has all been squeezed into the small, dry space we have left, but they’re still considered a bad move. The locals hate confrontation, especially with a white woman who isn’t supposed to be speaking their language.

Slowly, everyone in line gets their tiny, tiny portion of ravitoto and then wanders away to cook their treasure for their families. I’m last and, when I stand in Larissa’s doorway, I can see just how hard she’s been working.

Everything is far too clean, which means she hasn’t cooked today. She sits on her little stool and smiles up at me with a weak expression on her face. I join her on the second stool and without asking she puts a bare foot on my lap so I can massage it for her. I oblige and dig in to her tense sole with my thumb and knuckles.

“Oh, my daughter, that is so sweet of you. Thank you.” She closes her eyes and her smile gets a little bigger. “Today was a hard day. Someone went around whispering about today being the last day to buy ravitoto. Do you know who it was?”

“You can talk to Jose about that. He went straight to the café to make sure everyone knew.”

“Huh.” She opens her eyes to look at me. “That boy must sit outside my window at night. He always knows my business.”

“Maybe the waves whisper to him.” We both laugh at this little joke. The thought of Jose being one of the fortune tellers who claims to know what the sea will do next after listening to the tides is truly hilarious. We can just picture him with his hair grown out in dreadlocks and seashells hanging from his wrists while he communes with the water.

“Oh, my darling,” Larissa sighs, “what am I going to do without my good friend, the American masseuse?”

“What?” I give her foot a tap and she puts it down so I can take the other one. “Where are you going?”

“To the coasts of Idaho.” She gets a sad look on her face when she says it. Madagascar is all she’s known. She grew up here back when it was Nosy Be and survived the horrible tsunamis that killed most of her friends and family. She watched the trees turn into gnarled sticks and the soil become hard and white. She learned how to grow cassava trees in large pots, but it nearly ruined her. All her money went to container farming until she had her first successful tree. Then she became famous as the only woman making ravitoto in the whole country. She’s had a long journey here. Could she ever feel at home in Idaho?

Larissa stands and goes over to her gas stove, and it clicks a few times until it lights. She and her husband also sell stores of an old fuel made from sugarcane. But very few people can afford the appliances that need the stuff, so they always have extra. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, but my students will be back soon.”

“Stay for some rice. I will go to the school with you and tell the children some stories.”

“You will?” I can’t count the number of times I’ve invited Larissa to come and tell stories at the school. She’s always waved me away and gone back to her work. But I suppose she’s retired now. “They would love to hear what you have to say. I know I would.”

“First, we eat.”

Larissa boils the huge portion of rice. The bag it comes from says Pakistan, in big letters. My stomach is rumbling already. She has a little pinch of fresh, green ravitoto hiding in one of the miniature pots I see everywhere. They were originally meant to help young children learn how to cook, holding only small portions, but now adults use them to cook   tiny portions of meat or the occasional vegetable. I open the miniscule lid and breathe in the fresh, cool grassy smell. It makes my head reel with memories of tall cassava trees, big, firm leaves over our heads, and birds, birds everywhere. I silently pray into the pot for a return to those days  and then place the lid on top before my words can slip out.

We eat, each taking infinitesimal bites of ravitoto. Even the few nibbles I get fortify me, bring back my positivity, and make me feel like I can take on the rest of the week. Larissa tells me that she and her husband Marc have been invited by environmental specialists to a site in Idaho where specialists are working with the new coastline and farmers are learning how to grow trees out of the soil.

“You know,” I say with a full mouth, “I’m from Idaho. I was there when the new coast formed.”

“Are you?” She’s not interested. Coincidences aren’t something that resonate with people here. “Is your family there?”

I shake my head no. We just look at one another for a moment and then change the subject.

“Finish your food. Your students are waiting.”

When we get to the school house, only half of my class has returned. Word must have gotten out that I yelled at the two men in the ravitoto line. It is so easy to lose one’s standing in this community. I once sat next to a single man in the café by mistake and my students avoided me for a week.

Bienvenue is one of those who returned, of course.

“Oh, teacher,” he wags his finger at me, but he’s smiling. “You are very masika. Very, very masika.”

“I’m spicy?”

“Yes!” He touches my skin and pretends it’s burning his hand. “Oh! Too hot! The teacher is too hot!” His joke sends him into a laughing fit and a couple of his friends join in the joke. I hold out my arms so everyone can feel how hot I am and they all run up quickly to touch them and then run away with their pretend injuries.

After they get a chance to play, I tell them Larissa has stories to share and they immediately gather around her. She’s familiar with all of them, so she gets even more hugs than I do. She asks about all of their relatives and for all the news, and then listens while they all recount their adventures at the diving school. It takes ages, but she’s glowing while they talk. Larissa never had any children. After the devastation of her country, she decided not to be a mother but to focus on making sure everyone got fed.

“Okay, class.” I raise my hands for their attention. “If we want to listen to Larissa, we have to sit in a circle and show her our listening ears.” The scramble to their seats, pulling their chairs close and then turning their heads from side to side so that we can see how clean and attentive their ears are. Larissa takes the ear inspection seriously.

“Do I see a seashell in your ear?” No, no shells! “Are you certain? I can hear the ocean coming from somewhere—I think it’s your ear.” This joke is an enormous hit and they all rock back and forth with laughter, some jumping up to check around the group and insisting they see a shell lodged in a classmate’s ear.

“Well, you know, we used to love seashells. We collected them and sold them to tourists when I was your age. Yes, people paid for things from the sea back then. We had restaurants that sold spicy fish with rice—my mother ran a beautiful one that everyone loved, especially the rich French people. She always made sure to give them a different menu   with higher prices. Even when they saw that they had been tricked, they didn’t care. Once they tasted my mother’s food, they were happy to pay whatever she asked.

“My job when I was twelve years old was to walk along the shore with my brother. My brother was small, much smaller than I, but he loved the sea. He loved to climb the big rocks on the west side of the island and watch the waves below. Every time I see a big one hit the shore and spray out, I think of him and how he would clap when he saw them like it was a special show.

“We took what we found back to my mother’s restaurant and walked around between the tables. Mother would pretend we were sad little orphans that she fed and taught us what to say if someone asked where we lived. We live under a tree, we would say. We haven’t seen our mother for a long time. Would you like a shell? Mother would cluck at us and shake her head. Isn’t it sad? They’re all alone. People couldn’t give us their money fast enough.

“So, we always had food to eat and beds to sleep in. My father played the guitar and would sing for us in the evenings. I can hardly talk about it without crying now; he sang so beautifully. I will never forget the day his guitar was smashed to bits in a storm—it was the last thing I had from him, and when I lost it I sobbed. Everyone scolded me for being so silly over a musical instrument, but they didn’t understand. That guitar was my father. It meant the world to me.

“Watching my country wash away was like that. Everything I knew changed. The mangoes we always had were suddenly gone. Even the trees had none. We heard news that the other parts of the country were underwater and at first we didn’t believe it. How was it possible?

Madagascar is so big and Nosy Faly, which we called Nosy Be back then, is only a small part. But, we believed it when people started rowing over in boats, desperate for help and begging for a place to live.

“We took in as many people as we could, but soon we had to start refusing. I don’t know what happened to the ones we couldn’t help; they turned and rowed away. Africa was a long boat ride from here even before the waves came, and surely it’s much further now. It’s possible they were swallowed up by the sea.

“Everyone had to give up everything. We lost all of our electricity, so no one could watch TV or listen to the radio, something we used to do every day. We had no way of knowing what was happening in other parts of the country or around the world. We couldn’t even use generators, as petrol had been declared illegal. I missed my TV shows so much. I know it’s a silly thing, but I truly loved the programs I used to watch. The people in them were fun and interesting, and I missed them when they left.”

The children listen to her with their heads to the side and their eyebrows knitted together. They try hard to picture things like guitars and televisions, but the only way they could see these things was at the scrap yard at the diving school—junky relics from the water.

Larisoa raises her hand and Larissa motions to her. “Larissa,” she asks, “how is it that you have so many trees?”

“Oh, I can tell you. After I lost everything, I had nothing to do. There  was no restaurant, no tourists to buy shells. So, I was wandering around

being sad and imagining I heard my family just behind me or around the corner. It was a terrible time. Then, some farmers who had come over on  a boat were walking on the street behind me and talking about a new way of growing plants. I listened to them because it gave me a break from my sadness, and then I kept listening because what they were saying was very fascinating. They had a way to grow a tree without the ground. I had never seen this and I thought they must be lying, but I was too curious not to  find out, and my curiosity led me out the door the next day.

“I found two of the farmers and told them I wanted to learn how to grow trees. They weren’t too keen on teaching me—they thought my family would object. But I explained I had no family and they agreed to teach me. They showed me how to use old, rotted food to make food for plants and soil and how to put holes in a pot so that the tree roots can drain and breathe. It was very interesting. We worked together for several months and my first few trees died, which crushed me. But they told me not worry, to keep trying. The world needs people who can grow things, they told me. This is important.

“And now,” she says, looking around at all the sweet faces, “I am anxious to find some students to teach about farming. I need to make sure the island still has cassava even after I go.”

The news floors them.

“You’re leaving? No! Don’t go! What will we do? How can you leave? It’s a bad time to travel. You should stay here with us.”

“To show Larissa how much we’ll miss her,” I interject, “why don’t we let her show us how she grows trees? I bet some of you would be wonderful growers.”

The students all look down, embarrassed and shy. “Teacher,” Bienvenue says, “we don’t know anything about plants.”

“And that’s why you need a teacher.” Larissa stands and looks around the group. “Tomorrow you are all coming to my house to learn how to grow a tree from a tiny little seed. And you are going to see that you do know something about growing. It is in your blood. You are Malagasy.”

When we go out, the sun has set and the full moon is out. The silver light is so bright that everyone is outside of their homes telling stories. Larissa and I hug the children goodbye and watch them leave.

“When will you go?”

“In two weeks. I have to make sure I leave some experienced farmers behind me.” She turns her weathered face to me. “You will have to be one of them.”

The thought of a tree in front of my house makes my heart race. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I am thrilled that she trusts me. I nod and we hug each other so tightly that it hurts my arms. I don’t let go, I just hug her tighter and she does the same. We stay like that for as long as we can, listening to the rising ocean lap closer and closer to our feet, desperately trying to hold on to that ground beneath our feet.

 

Lindsay Redifer is a ghostwriter and aspiring science fiction writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. She is currently teaching creative writing to high school students and writing as a freelancer. She is from Nampa, Idaho and is an avid reader of science fiction, which she maintains is the only genre worth reading.