Goodbye (Finally)

seated in a horrid wheelchair, begging for a living,
with the odds against her, yet full of life and joy
... and a great sense of humour.

A place called home

Sitting in the Jo’burg to Tana airplane I try to process the loss of one of my dearest and Maddest friends, and his request of a final blog post … How can I write a final Madder-in-Mada post, and “lose” a friend without oozing sentimental junk?! This post is doomed from the start!

You have read some of my stories, seen some of the kids in my life, and posted sweet and hilarious comments via Rob’s blog – thanks. So, for the final scribble, a bit more about my home …

Sitting in the plane I find myself recognising the mud-brown rivers and the red contours of the land, and a passage from The Poisonwood Bible comes to mind: Africa is a disease. Once it enters your bloodstream you will never be free from it. It lives and breathes in you, has its hold on you, and you will be both one with it and apart from it and unable to completely separate yourself from it. This is Madagascar to me! 

I arrive home to the potholed streets and cacophony of karaoke, trucks and chatter filling the polluted air; to white puffy clouds that colour a blue sky – backdrop to the city of a thousand church steeples. I am greeted with foreign phrases in a musically-pitched language, and the recipient of cheerful grins from kids wearing threadbare hand-me-downs and mud marks on their faces. I avoid the roadside food stalls, following advice from Rob and the Midgleys in trying to avoid yet another tropical disease, but order pizza-of-a-different-kind from the only reliable fast-food delivery company. 

Then I sit back and sigh – the pleasant type of sigh that goes right into your gut and fills your heart with a fuzzy feeling of well-being. Who would have thought that this land would become home – a place with its own bitter-sweet joy … and its own hold on my heart? Yet, it is exactly that … a place that I wish I could share with the world.

So long then, dear Madder in Mada. And thank you for sharing my home with everyone who took the time to read about it.

The city with more church steeples than liquor stores ...

Two children and a mielie (sitting in a narrow alley-way between two houses)

Bad hairday

Now that's scary: Fresh Taste. Trendy Girls

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Don't forget, in future I will be blogging from Rambling with a Cantankerous Old Mule. Come on over, sign up, leave comments... I would love to hear from you!

Goodbye (part 2)

Esther, from laughwithusblog

I can't believe that I only really got blogging in earnest in September last year - it seems like a lifetime. Not only has it helped me to improve my photography, but I also found myself looking for the humour in situations more than I used to. Clearly the world is a serious-enough place to still blog about weighty issues, and (noticeably) my most-read posts were the light-hearted, humorous ones. 

Somewhere along the way I came across Esther, a fellow blogger at laughwithusblog. I stumbled across her site and ended up visiting most days to chuckle and live vicariously through her accounts of her numerous blunders in etiquette and family goings-on; she wandered across to mine and has become a faithful commenter and encourager.

Here she shares once again but for a change not in the comments section:

"I'm not sure how I happened on Madderinmada, but it has been a favorite.  The first thing that got me hooked was the humor.  What can I say?  I love to laugh!  I have enjoyed the funny quotes from the Midgley family of boys as well as the hilarity that came from Robin's students at times.  His friend and guest-poster Anri also kept me in stitches with her wild stories.

I also loved the real, true-to-life posts about Madagascar, the joys and hardships all viewed though a soul wanting to please God with all of his heart.  I have enjoyed the beautiful photos that capture so much in both people and country.  It appears that not only Mada will miss Robin, but all of his faithful readers around the world too. 

Get well, but please do keep writing!

A mad house in Texas"

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Be sure to check back tomorrow for the last of the guest posts from Anri-Louise ...

Goodbye (Part 1)

Reece Midgley shortly after I arrived in Madagascar in 2009

There's a time for beginnings and there is a time for endings. 

I started this blog "Madder in Mada" back in 2009 when I moved to Madagascar to be with my friends the Midgleys, to help out in a local church and to teach at Vision Valley School in Tana. My main reason for the blog was to keep my friends and family updated with happenings, and to share some photos from the world around me.

I wasn't a very proficient blogger to start off with - I wasn't sure if I had much anyone would want to read and I never had much self belief in my photography. But then in the middle of 2010 I tackled it with gusto, got a few loyal followers and no-one has been able to shut me up since.

But now it's time to end it all (the blog, that is). I returned to South Africa around three weeks ago to see doctors after I fell ill in January this year, struggling to breathe, and just didn't recover. It turns out that all of the problems with my lungs were caused by allergies - allergies to mould, spores, mites, grasses, grains, dairy - even to coffee, my favourite drink. My regular doctor (the card that he is) joked that I'm allergic to life but should have at least a month to live.

All three doctors I have seen have been in agreement that I cannot return to Madagascar until I am completely healed, and have been free of symptoms for several months. It seems as if the allergies can clear up, the asthmatic symptoms can disappear, and I can return to breathing again normally (which is a good thing, all in all) but that if I return to Madagascar now I risk damaging my lungs permanently.

And so I have decided to stay in South Africa for the foreseeable future. Madder in Mada is, therefore, being put on the shelf (for now, anyway). But do not despair, do not fret, I'll keep blogging at a new site (Justin Midgley back in Madagascar suggested "Sadder in SA" but I've gone with): 

Rambling with a cantankerous old mule

Come on over. "Follow me" and I'll try to have more pictures, more funny stories and more about this "sad state of affairs" I find myself in back in South Africa... 

Tomorrow I'll finish off with part two of the farewell.

Zoë Life

The lively one

By now many of my regular readers will be well-acquainted with the Midgley family in Madagascar, and their kids in particular. The eldest, and most outspoken of them is Andrew, who was born way back (for him anyway) in 1999. In the same year some mutual friends, the Deans, who now reside in a tiny backwoods, backward place called Springs, in South Africa, had a little girl by the name of Zoë, which apparently means "Life" in Greek... She suffers from verbal diarrhoea (she even talks in her sleep) but has nevertheless brought much vitality into everyone's lives that she has touched. 

She's always been "different" to the norm, but then, the whole family is. Here are some of the things that make her so bizarre, so not-so-sane-in-Springs...

She says she's "biwingual" - she speaks English and Afrikaans.  A few weeks ago she bought a packet of fizz-pops candy with two flavours in one packet. "Hey, it's a biwingual packet of candy!" she said. She calls feathers "bird leaves"; only found out last year that she lives in South Africa, and not the USA; thinks that all meat is chicken and calls her fringe (bangs) her sideburns.

But the most delightful thing about Zoë is that for years she has told me that if I never manage to find a wife that she'll marry me one day "if she has to". Her older sister, the one with a black cat attached to her shoulder like a character from "the Addams Family", told me today that it is looking increasingly probable, despite their every attempt to "set me up".