Electric Fence Zine: Mauritius

Original Post Date: February 16th 2007

Death anniversaries are truly a peculiar animal. However, for all the ways that they are uncomfortable and strange, they are also wonderful. Unlike the remainder of the calendar year, anniversaries can be a day set aside for reminiscing, a day for letting the past creep back into your conscious.

On February 16th 2006, I commemorated the 1st anniversary of my father’s passing by getting a small memorial tattoo. This year, however, I observed the 2nd anniversary of my father’s passing by participating in the island-wide walk to Ganga Talo.

My friends and I (all decidedly non-Hindu) began our journey at midnight, setting out on streets that were eerily vacant. Unlike the previous evening, food servers had vanished, tents had been stuck down, and the only other pedestrians on the road were persons returning from the lake.

Although we had not anticipated it, we were the final pilgrims of the year, and this heightened both my appreciation for the journey and my sense of quietude.

My friends completed the hilly 26 km/ 16 mile trip in just under five hours and arrived at Ganga Talo just in time to witness the sun rise behind a blanket of fog, bathing the lake in soft, somnolent light. There we also found several hundred Hindu families spread out along the lakeside, making offerings of incense, flowers and coconut and saying prayers.

Although the journey was long and fatiguing, it was one the most valuable experiences I’ve had since coming to Mauritius. The journey that many Mauritians make as a demonstration of faith became for me a demonstration of love. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to pause, reflect, and remember.

Photographs from the walk [slideshow]

Labels: february 16, religious festivals

Posted by east of madagascar at 1:31 PM | Permalink

Original Date: February 14, 2007

When you are a student living on an island where import taxes are so high that used cars run $10,000 dollars, where the people who do have cars drive so precariously that it's unsafe to walk on the sidewalk much less bike in the street, and where nothing is ever as close as you'd think, naturally you naturally spend a lot of time in buses.

However, on good days (i.e. when you’re not being harassed by the ticket collectors of said vehicles), riding the bus in Mauritius is fascinating, both on account of what you observe inside and what you see outside.

Take for instance the red bus line. Owned and operated by a Muslim family, the red line is the only direct bus service to Curepipe, meaning that it does not have to compete with other bus companies on many of its major routes. The red bus line does not misuse its relative monopoly, however. Compared to other companies, the red buses are modern and comfortable. Nonetheless, you can’t help but feel that it is a class action law suit waiting to happen… until recently, I never spotted a female or non-Muslim working the buses. However, late last week, I took a red bus that was staffed by a woman of either Hindu or Creole origin. Who knew?!? I guess the red bus company has good legal consul....

Then there are the blue buses, run by a government corporation. Like true bureaucrats, the blue bus people are so rule-adherent it’s painful. Yesterday, a bus refused to stop for me because I flagged it 5 feet in front of its appointed bus stop, rather than at the bus stop itself. Never mind that it was stopped at a red light!

Unlike Kenya’s glorious system of matatus that provides passengers with first class entertainment while keeping their wait-times down to 2 minutes, due to the sheer number of vehicles on the road, Mauritius’s own places environmental sustainability ahead of customer convenience. Quel dommage.. So after you miss one Express bus to Port Louis (you know, because you tried flagging it down 5 feet to the left of the bus stop sign, instead of at the bus stop itself), it’ll be another 30 minutes before you find one, and by then you’ve sweat through your work clothes standing in the sun and you’re late for all you meetings.

And then there are the small contractors, which undoubtedly have the most character. Buses are colorful, airbrushed with inspirational and pithy phrases.. my favorite being “God is love”. The small bus lines connect urban Mauritius to Rural Mauritius --- geographically speaking, the Central Plateau to the South and the East, ratcheting along less traveled paths and exposing the hidden-away parts of the island.

Due to a curious change of events, I took the longest longest longest bus ride home imaginable... 3.5 hours, which up until now, I hadn't realized was possible given the island’s size.

My journey began at a garment company in Riviere du Rempart, and took me through a labyrinth of rural roads and fields of sugarcane. Sugarcane is such a constant feature of the Mauritian landscape (partout partout partout) that you'd mistake if for grass if you weren't careful... you know, the tall grass you get when your lawnmower breaks down and you don't bother to fix it for the whole summer.

It's definitive: there isn't a square foot of arable land on the Island that isn't growing sugar cane. In fact, there is such much land under sugar cane cultivation I would be surprised if the Island had as much as one farm devoted to fruit and vegetable production. It makes me wonder how I manage to get fruit so cheap here ... i.e. 3 green apples for 30 cents, mangoes for 15 cents.. bananas and oranges for mere pennies.

During hour two of my trip (well, to be precise, hour 1.5 to hour 2.5), rural landscapes were replaced by urban cityscapes. Leaving the country, we ran smack dab into the Maha Shivaratree festival, at the height of its revelry.

For those less conversant with Mauritian flavored Hinduism, Maha Shivaratree is an annual pilgrimage undertaken by Hindu devotees.. The Mauritius specific myth concerning Maha Shivaratree is that Lord Shiva was flying over the then-uninhabited island on a chariot of flowers when he accidentally tipped over a pitcher containing the Lord Ganga (of River Ganges fame), leaving a small lake in his wake. In an attempt to appease the angry aqueous god (sorry, I couldn’t resist alliteration). Lord Shiva declared lake Ganga Talo a holy site, and announced that Hindus would take up residence on the island and make annual offerings at its shores.

Every year more than 500,000 of the Island's 1.3 million citizens take part in the pilgrimage to Ganga Talo. Considering that Mauritius is just under 60% Hindu, there is almost a 90% participation rate within the community. Some Pilgrims come as far as the Eastern Coast of the Island, taking the better part of four days to make the round-trip journey to and from Ganga Talo. Others come from the Central Highlands, traveling anywhere from three to seven hours each way. Finally, children as young as five years old and persons as old as 60 also made the walk.

The Maha Shivaratree celebrations that unfurled before my window were both a visual and an aural spectacle. The roads were filled with thousands of Hindus of all ages and descriptions, wearing white and carrying floats adorned with brightly colored faux flowers and statues of Lord Shiva.

Accompanying the marching faithful were slow-moving cars with speakers mounted on their roofs and Shiva posters splayed out across their hoods, inching along as Hindi hymns boomed out of their sound systems. Also providing a soundtrack for the march was a Hindu marching band that played prayer songs and chants using a combination of Indian flutes, brass instruments and traditional Indian drums.

In addition to all of the bustle dans la rue, there was also a flutter of activity on the sidewalks and shoulders of the road... Voluntary societies flanked both sides of the street, serving food and refreshments to the pilgrims and offering them an opportunity to repose at tented resting areas, equipped with sleeping mats and red plastic chairs.

Upon reaching the Vacoas – Quatre Bornes road, snacks and beverages were being served in such plenty and abundance that the roadside was effectively transformed into a mobile buffet, with new assortments of delicacies available every few feet. Watching the passerbys delighting themselves on lassis, pakoras, bhajias, fruit and milk tea, I couldn’t help but recall the bedtime stories my dad told me during my childhood... grand grand tales where the tortoise, toujours the mischievous protagonist, gorged himself on a procession of food that suddenly materialized in the desert, a floating oasis, only to find himself stuck hand and foot to the emptied dishes, bopping along unwittingly to the Gods' dinner table.

No such calamities befell the voracious marchers, however, not even those who temporarily forgot the holy nature of their trip and discarded their spent cups and napkins on ever-heaping piles of litter. To the contrary, the voluntary societies were infected with such a spirit of gentilesse and generosity that even motorists and bus passengers left with little cups of lassi and fried goodies ...

The last hour of my never-ending trip home found me shifting from passenger to pedestrian. Stuck in Vacoas at the height of the sacred shuffle, I abandoned my bus and took to the road, walking against the Shiva floats, the marching bands, and the throngs wearing white. Yet and still, despite my blackness (or rather, non-Hinduness), my business casual and my decision to walk clear in the opposite direction of the sacred lake, I still had to refuse offers of food and beverage at least a dozen times.

My journey home from Riviere de Rempart finally ended at 6:30, 3.5 hours after it began. In the end, what I found most astounding was the fact that in spite of being comparable to Rhode Island in size, Mauritius still manages to fill me with wonder..

Alas, Om Na Maha Shivaratree...



post script:
this entry is dedicated to Salman Rushdie, for teaching me to revel in verbosity and take pride in the occasional run-on sentence...

Labels: religious festivals

Posted by east of madagascar at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

Labels: february 16

Posted by east of madagascar at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

Dear travelogues reader,

I know that I should blog for often.

however, that said, blogging is difficult when you're busy battling a never-ending onslaught of laptop woes... my exact situation. My computer problems are both chronic and terminal. My woes began in November 2006, when my laptop cord developed an electrical short and my comp stopped charging. Three months and Two creative but sort-lived patch-up jobs later, my computer stopped turning on at all, and I finally resigned myself to buying a brand new adapter. After a little searching, I was able to find a variable output adapter with swappable plugs for 1,300 rupees (40 USD).

Malheuresement, ça n'a rien fait. Said new adapter worked for exactly two weeks, if your definition of working allows for receiving mind-numbing electrical shocks when you brush up against your laptops metal components (i.e. the speakers that span its entire front end).

From here, I came up with the gloriously DIY solution of covering all trouble areas on my laptop with electrical tape (which acts as a sort of insulator), and running my computer at reduced wattage-- 15V instead of the 18.5V necessary to both run the computer and charge the battery.

This week, however, my PC stopped charging once more and when the battery died on Wednesday, I was completely out of luck. To my delight, I got the laptop running again this evening.. however, talk about a premature declaration of victory...

As of today: 6 keys on my keyboard are completely non-operational(!) Those being:
g
h
the quotation mark
backspace
the function button
the escape button

[Consequently, the only reason i was able to write this entry was grâce à the delete key and the venerable keyboard shortcuts Cltl+C & Cltl+V. Every instance of g & h in this post has been copied and pasted.]

In addition, my computer refuses to restart or go on standby.

Now, while rants like this one are ordinarily perfect opportunities for Mac users to gloat about the piteous state of PCs and the superiority of Apple products, here are two points for Apple dilettantes to consider:

A. My friend Chris's 8 month old Macbook has completely stopped charging. Since his arrival in Mauritius (i.e. turns off as soon as it gets unplugged from the wall outlet), and
B. My roommate Alyssa's ibook shocks the hell out of her, too.

Unfortunately, while the Mac-PC parity does wonders for my ego, it does nothing to rectify my sad sad situation. If circumstances do not improve, I may be forced to go old school and start writing my field notes, memos and transcripts by hand. In the meantime, be on the look out for posts that just graduated from drafts to proper entries (a few below, backdated to reflect the date of 1st draft).

Labels: blogkeeping

Posted by east of madagascar at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments

Have you ever been to a nightclub:

• that is so mind-numbingly boring you'd rather spend your Saturday evening having your teeth cleaned?
  
• where all the other patrons were anachronisms of various sorts? (i.e. yuppies, men with unbuttoned shirts that reveal their chest hair (circa 1972), men with pick up lines so played out they're practically endangered species?
  
• where people (pour les raisons qui sont dehors de ma compréhension) flock to the dance floor whenever the DJ starts playing monotonous techno songs? (not to be confused with peaches, MIA or gay boy techno).
  
• Or where, the music is such a bore that you have to down half a bottle of rum just in order to start dancing?... yet it takes 20 minute to place a drink order?
  

Well, if not, welcome to Kitsch. Situated in a shopping complex roughly 10 minutes drive from my rental house, Kitsch is the preferred club venue for wealthy Mauritians, European travelers, and people who'd rather shake their booty to techno than Shakira).

After making a biweekly pilgrimage to Kitsch during my first months on l'Ile, I finally laid down the law and swore off the place. in favor of Enigma.. a club that spins Sean Paul on the regular and is only a stones throw away from my house in Quatre Bornes (Enigma 2, Kitsch 0).

Nevertheless, two Saturdays ago when I returned to Kitsch for the first time in months, the club had a little "je ne sais quoi." Which is to say, for one night only, Kitsch transformed into a hopping gay bar. This was significant for several reasons. First off, it put me in touch with le Collectif Arc-en-Ciel, a human rights NGO that up until then I hadn't caught a glimpse of... no telephone listing, no email address, no nothing. And even more comically, whenever I tried asking Mauritians for info about the group, they usually feign non-comprehension wit statements such as "The rainbow collective? The organizers of the first -ever Mauritian gay pride march? Nope, sorry, never heard of em").

Secondly, the night offered an incontrovertible counter to the assertion that homosexuality doesn't exist in Africa, Asia, or say, any country besides the U.S. and Europe. Kitsch was packed.. 300 to 400 persons easily, with boys dancing with boys, girls dancing with girls, a splattering of boy/girl couples and people fanning outside of the club to get relief from the overcrowded dance floor.

Finally, the fact that 300+ Mauritians traversed the Ile to attend Kitsch's big gay party debunks the notion that homosexuality is something that you can wish away or that the Bible or the Vedas can cast out of you. (Does a certain U.S. minister -- cough cough, haggard-- come to mind?). Somethings are so obvious, you wonder why debates continue.

Alas, here are some conclusions from the night:
1) Big gay dance parties at Kitsch are infinitely more enjoyable than straight yuppie dance parties at Kitsch
2) Wearing jeans and sneakers to a party as a woman automatically makes you butch

As well as some unresolved questions.. namely, what happens to LGBTQ Mauritians every other day of the year?

Although I didn't take any photos from the night, there's nothing better than wrapping up a big gay post with a big gay video from comedian Margaret Cho. Enjoy!

Posted by east of madagascar at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments

On Monday, with the help of a friend, I returned to last week's factory and administered 20 more surveys. Happily, this time things went really really well. Not only was supervisor coaching notably absent this session, I collected (seemingly reliable) data and had a strong response rate.

Then, as icing on the cake, I had a great meeting with someone from the local branch of Amnesty International.

After my disastrous stint in the field last week, it looks as though my research-karma is finally coming up roses...

Alas, my next project objectives are to:

• Set up more key informant interviews
  
• Complete a creole version of survey tool
  
• Make appointments to administer more surveys to workers
  
• Schedule interviews with the directors of a new round of companies
  
• Review the Mauritian household budget survey and other quantitative studies for insights
  

Labels: research

Posted by east of madagascar at 9:53 PM | Permalink | Comments